Empowering Diverse Workers through Conscious Leader Sunita Singh Sengupta & Payal Kumar

The changed global scenario because of COVID -19 has put challenges before business leaders. The pandemic taught us the importance of wellbeing of the employees and the great resignation movement has also put the workers in the front as lots of people are leaving jobs because they want more fulfillment in life and they are looking for different personal and career directions. Conscious Leadership is based on higher human possibilities and creates an environment of work that is ‘inclusive’ and ‘worker-centric.’ The Conscious Leader is an integral leader who is ethically and spiritually mature…able to understand inherent interconnections with others, awareness of the unity in all living things resulting in the care and concern for all. (Pappas, 2010; Singh Sengupta, 2021). For decades literature has placed the leader at the centre of the model of leadership, be it trait theory, charismatic theory, or transformational leadership. Only recently the ‘other’ actor - namely the follower or the worker - has become a focus of scholarly work (Baker, 2007; Bligh, 2011), and yet even then the follower is seen as a recipient of a leader’s influence rather than an organizational agent in his own right (Uhl-Bien, Riggio, Lowe, & Carsten, 2014). Even the word ‘follower’ subservience and passivity, rather than free agency. After decades of leadership-centric research, there appears to be more and more interest in worker-centric literature, for example, the 5 volumes produced in the series Palgrave Studies in Leadership and Followership (Kumar, 2017) had 95,000 chapter downloads. Increasingly, studies acknowledged that the worker identity is not necessarily static and is more multifaceted than was earlier presumed (Collinson, 2006). Furthermore, one aspect that leader-centric literature perhaps does not consider is that there is an interrelation between the leader and the worker in which both can and do impact each other: it is not only the leader that influences the worker but there is an upward influence also at play in organizations, in which there is sense-making at different levels of the hierarchy. “Clearly, it is difficult to separate the roles of authentic follower and authentic leader from the processes whereby individuals who occupy these roles.” (Gardner, W. L. 2017). The workers are no longer silent recipients of orders, they want to be a partner. The facilitative uses of power enable to the creation of a worker-centric organizational culture. Marry Parker Follett's management theory (Fox 1968) talks about Power With, i.e., instead of establishing a strict hierarchy and delegating power to specific individuals over others, Follett believed that workers should practice co-active power. Powering with their team is better than power over them; this way, each member feels just as valued as the next. When leaders and workers operate from a deep awareness of their consciousness – they naturally behave responsibly beyond what appears to be their own self-interest (Singh Sengupta, 2001; 2007, p. 11). The high-performing organization is reported to have high people alignment and high people engagement. Organizations today need to create a culture of love and truth for wellness and happiness at the workplace so that people flourish together by helping and nurturing each other. The question arises how can we have a HUMAN framework of leadership in the workplace that binds all irrespective of what their personal beliefs and perceptions are? How can we align and engage each and every employee to work towards a common goal with the same enthusiasm and effort? How can we dig deep into human consciousness and find the common meaning and purpose that puts that human advancement and mutual growth at the forefront? The challenge is to focus on pure human consciousness and find the elements that make us human and bring us together as a collective force. Therefore, the purpose of this Panel Symposium is to engage a group of panelists in a formal, moderated, interactive discussion of (1) the context of empowering a diverse workforce and the role of conscious leadership; (2) the panelists’ interpretation of them; (3) the relationships among them; (4) the implications of their use in a culturally diverse work environment; and (5) how they can be measured.