Harnessing the Power of Martial Arts for leadership

Harnessing the power of martial arts for better application of leadership can be a great way to build strong and successful teams. It is a skill that can be developed and refined, and can be used to create an environment of trust, respect and support

Could be that leadership is a concept that has been around since the beginning of time. It is a skill that has been highly sought after and valued by many, from the military, kings to the corporate world. However, how can martial arts be used to develop this valuable skill?

Believe it or not, but martial arts provide an excellent way to develop the skills required to become an exceptional leader. In martial arts, the focus is on self-discipline and control. This means that practitioners must learn to control their thoughts, emotions, and physical movements. This self-control requires an excellent level of focus and concentration. When a person can control their own actions and thoughts, they are better able to fight or work as well as to lead and motivate others. It also teaches them to be patient and persistent when dealing with difficult situations.

Martial arts also teaches practitioners how to effectively communicate with their peers. Practitioners learn to be assertive and persuasive in their communication. During the practice, they learn to express themselves in a clear and concise manner and to listen to others with respect. This skill is essential for successful leadership, as it allows leaders to effectively communicate their vision and through it motivate their team.

Leadership, as opposed to management, requires the ability to think strategically and plan far ahead. Martial arts provides an ideal platform to develop these skills. In martial arts, practitioners must think ahead and anticipate their opponent’s moves and actions. This practice can teach leaders to anticipate the needs of their team and develop strategies to meet those needs.

Martial arts also teaches practitioners to be decisive as practitioners must make split-second decisions that can affect the outcome of a drill or a match. This instils them to make quick decisions and stand by them. This skill is essential for leadership, as it allows leaders to make decisions quickly and confidently.

Finally, martial arts teaches practitioners to accept failure and learn from it. Practitioners must accept that failure and use it as a learning opportunity when practicing the art otherwise one cannot see the drawbacks or advantages one has. As well, ups and downs are an inevitable part of life. The same goes with leaders, they have to accept failure, learn from it, and use it as a learning opportunity instead of a setback.

Therefore, martial arts provides an excellent platform to develop the skills required to become an outstanding leader

The “Leadership by Virtue” book is packed with information, techniques, and strategies that can be used to increase leadership capabilities, while also giving readers an in-depth look at the history, philosophy, and teachings of martial arts.

Tai chi in the leadership world – 2

In the previous post (Tai chi in the leadership world – 1) I've written about basics and fundamentals of the wide and profound wisdom of Tai Chi. By the end I have indicated some ways to use it in leadership. In this post I would like to expose some essentials of Tai Chi that may be an advantage also in leadership.

To empirically learn so-called internal martial art aspects of Tai Chi one begins with Tui shou or pushing hands (see post: Pushing hands and Virtue). Pushing hands is a distinctive Tai Chi practice very similar to Chi shou (sticking hands) used in Wing Chun (see post: Wing Chun basics and Wing Chun and leadership). The latter is more combative while pushing hands is less aggressive and more oriented to using opponent’s energy. With pushing hands the endurance needed in a contest is developed. The method softens stances, movements, and stiffness of a whole body. You need to be perceptive of your partner. Pushing hands diminish your natural instinct of resisting force with force enabling to correctly respond to the external stimuli: your body simply yields to force and redirects it. It is a Yin and Yang or strong and soft principle that governs pushing hands. With age we tend to become inflexible and our reactions jerky, as often obvious when (if) we slip and plunge to the floor. Kids are still much more natural in the same situations just collapse softly or roll, like usually lucky drunk person.

Pushing hands method is extremely good for a person with a big ego too (see post: Ego and Leadership) as it covers our senses and therefore conceals our reactions. A person should be very relaxed, stable in the proper stance that allows moving back and front, left and right, up and down. All thoughts should be wiped and nothing expected. When opponent’s action comes, you react naturally.

Learning Leadership from Martial Arts - III

Let me continue this blog miniseries with a leadership methodology.

In one of my previous posts - “The Way” of Leadership I compared two fundamental Chinese philosophies Daoism and Confucianism, the Yin and Yang of Chinese culture. They are well routed in Chinese everyday life, culture, politics and as well in martial arts of which two Wing chun (blog Wing Chun basics 4 Leadership) and Tai Chi (blog Tai Chi Quan Leadership)  I already explained. These philosophies are used as a background to describe ideas on how to use old martial arts wisdom, explained more in previous blog (Learning Leadership from Martial Arts – II), and are now transformed in a leadership.

• Control: We said that only when relaxed a person may possess a self-control. A wise leader, for that matter, creates an atmosphere of clarity, of purpose and a sense of unity. Leader works selflessly and simply allows the team to do what needs be done. Through self-control a leader can influence (control) the outcome and not directly the people.

• Trust: The saying we used in martial arts was about trust in practice. A good leader understands the processes in the team and the fact that leadership does not require the application of force or pressure. There is no room for mistrust either. A remarkable leader trusts his/her people and is consequentially trusted by them. A well led team is not a battlefield of egos, as in teamwork there is no place for individual ‘victories’ or ‘defeats’.
• Stability: Being ‘on the ground’ (well grounded) reflects our terms and our values -- those that a leader expects from subordinates. A respectable leader is focused, firmly and confidently on the ground with his/her decisions and with clear aim in the mind. He does not flip-flop his decisions.
• Adjustment: if you drive yourself too much, this does not produce fruit, if you try to rush into things, this does not lead anywhere. The same is true for leading a team. If the leader is too aggressive, subordinates ‘are suppressed.’ If a manager is too soft, he is not taken seriously. A virtuous leader adjusts correctly to the circumstances and leads by example.

Learning Leadership from Martial Arts - II

 The principles I’m sharing today are not rules or steps that most of the times are offered and used separately instead of integrally in Western leadership teaching methodology. The Eastern principle has it usually all interlinked. Therefore, bellow you will see elementary pieces of a whole personality of a martial artist. They are refined and presented separately only for the purpose of a more straightforward understanding:

• Control: The martial arts teach self-control of the body and the mind (ego). Martial art practice starts with hard training, where a student (e.g.: karate, kick boxing, tai chi chuan, wing chun, savate, escrima, aikido, sambo etc.) normally has to endure the threshold of pain from received and given punches. Only when relaxed, one is in control of oneself and of pain, consequently of others too.
• Trust: There is a saying in martial arts: “Trust your friends to beat you so that your enemies cannot!” A martial artist has firstly to trust in himself not to injure others – only then others trust him not to be injured by him.
• Stability: A person cannot fight successfully and master the opponent without stability and balance in place. It means that we should properly adjust our stance: how we ‘shape’ our body to ‘adjust’ our bones that have to support the muscles in a relaxed way. With our stance, gaze and movements we communicate our mental, physical and emotional state to those that are able to read it. Should or not we show what our thoughts are?
• Adjustment: Not only a Chinese proverb says “The grass abates in the direction from which the wind blows!” A martial artist has to keep adjusting to the surrounding and to the opponent. Any hesitance on his part will result in time lost and thusly giving to the opponent an opportunity and the advantage to attack.

Leadership “style”

What kind of style a good leadership reflects? Can it be defined uniformly? Is it in fact a style or is it personality? Both or something else?

Questions that fire up discussions, writings, blogs, books …

Alexander the Great, Mao Zedong, Mandela, Hitler, Gandhi, Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, all were leaders. Some of them were charismatic, all of them influential, some fierce and some inspirational. What attracted people to follow them? Was it their leadership quality that attracted masses, or their actions made them the leaders? They were definitely heroes or anti-heroes. They all failed many times, yet they were remembered for their greatness. Failures are soon forgotten, greatness will always be remembered.

Most western books describe and define leadership process with explanation of the way the leader exercises and manifests his leadership process. Thusly, they try to combine them into the most common leadership styles: laissez-faire, democratic or participative, charismatic, bureaucratic, and autocratic. We all know that nobody complies in full with only one style, but the prevailing one is then assigned to that leader. Due to this, the researchers identify subtypes to those five main leadership styles, such as strategic leadership, team leadership, facilitating leadership. Even further distinct divisions about leadership are made based on influence styles, such as cross-cultural leadership and coaching. Some authors characterize leadership as people-oriented or relations-oriented, for instance, servant, task oriented, transactional or transformational leadership. Others classify leadership characterized by situation, such as emergent leadership style, innovative, visionary, command and control, and again also transformational leadership. There is a plethora of definitions of styles and how leaders exercise the leadership process over subordinates. But does this really explain what a leader is and what his style is?

Mission and vision

Is the mission in a company a driving force for actions? Does a mission provide overall goal, a path, and is it a guide for decision-making?

And a vision? Is it an aspiration for a company? Does it focus on the potential essentials in the company's mid-term or long-term future, or what company intends to be?

Most of mission and vision statements are generic, therefore awfully deficient. A result of long-drawn meetings where in the end everyone is so tired and approves any nonsense just to bring it to the conclusion. They are full of phrases like ‘market-leader’, ‘best-in-region’,  ‘most successful’, ‘best customer/owner value’, ‘leading in this and that'. Fluffy words that mean nothing. They just repulse a reader and make skip the text!

Steering and leadership

In live situations, and similarly in martial arts, we learn by repetition and mileage, repeating the task again and again. Try to recall how difficult the first attempt to ride a bicycle was. 

More than a decade ago I was introduced to Tai Chi. How difficult it was to understand the concepts that are so far away from our (Western) ones. On top of it my body coordination ability was proving difficult, remembering the sequences was even harder. Grasping the idea took some time, and so on. But, just like the process of learning to drive a car, where at the beginning simultaneously completing the tasks seems so difficult, patience is the key. The improvement is gradual and within time the steps are deeply ingrained in you. With no effort you drive a car, ride a bike or perform Tai Chi with calm and relaxed mind.

The beginner of one of five major styles of Tai Chi, the Yang style, was Yang Lu Chan (end of the 18th century - 1872). In his youth he had learned another Tai Chi style still in use today from the Chen family. At those times, the knowledge of the art was kept in the families not to be revealed to others and carefully transferred only within family. Yang was an outside apprentice, for which he was treated unfairly. But, being persistent he stayed and persevered in his practice. A story tells that one night, he was awakened by the sounds of hen and ha in the distance. He got up and traced the sound to an ancient house. Peeking through the broken wall, he saw his master Chen teaching the techniques of grasp, control, and emitting jīng to his sons in coordination with the sounds hen and ha. This knowledge gave young Yang a new perspective to control and to steer the opponent with great success.