Review for Ministers-at-Work by Adrian Holdstock October 2006

Intrigued by the title? Is this just another way of introducing a foolproof formula for succeeding as a leader? Or is there something original here that speaks both to the heart and science of leadership? I found it was that and more. Indeed, any business book that describes the importance of the word “love” in business has got my attention. Moreover, Kevin Cashman is writing from the perspective of coaching rather than training. Although his clients all appear to have been pretty high-flying executives, his coaching philosophy – and for that matter his leadership philosophy – attunes with my own. We both agree that change starts with the self and leading others starts with knowing and leading oneself.

Kevin Cashman is founder, chief executive coach and CEO of “LeaderSource” a Minneapolis based outfit that describes itself as “passionate about the transformative growth of leaders, teams, and organizations.” Based on over 20 years of improving leadership for individual executives and across whole businesses, Mr Cashman opens his book by reminding us that: “our ability to grow as a leader is based on our ability to grow as a person”. He suggests the reader doesn’t hurry or anticipate completing the book, but takes time to reflect and absorb the thoughts and ideas it promotes. And if we “feel like taking a short walk” through the book we can nibble on the feast of quotes that are liberally scattered throughout its pages. Example quotes include: Socrates - “Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and inward man be one” Epictetus - “No man is free who is not a master of himself” and Tao Te Ching - “Whatever is flexible and flowing will tend to grow; whatever is rigid and blocked will wither and die.” Kevin Cashman’s own wisdom is also much in evidence and here are three examples: “Leadership is authentic self-expression that creates value”; “Every belief we have transforms our life in either a life-enriching or life-limiting way”; and “We rarely see the world as it is; we principally see the world through the lens of who we are. As a result, if we want to become more effective in relationships, we need to become more aware of how we are interpreting these interactions”.

The author gives us plenty to think about. But how is his book organised? A usefully extended introduction sets the scene as a journey of discovery along “seven pathways to the mastery of leadership from within.” These are not sequential pathways but a complementary set. In fact they are portrayed on a seven-spoked wheel around a hub declaring Leadership from the Inside Out. Now the cynics will recall the management fad for good things coming in sevens. Why, perhaps, were there not nine pathways or just five or six? After all, there seems to be much overlap between them. For example, amongst other descriptions, Personal Mastery is described as “appreciating the rich mixture of our life experiences and how they dynamically form our unique existence” whilst Being Mastery “is the awareness of the eternally present moment at the basis of our experience”. Vice versa works quite well! Nevertheless, I found the book absorbing, entertaining with anecdotes from the author’s own coaching experiences, and instructive about the essence of leadership.

My reader is likely to ask what are the seven masteries. So here they all are, each backed by one of many Kevin Cashman descriptions of its nature. Personal Mastery “is about growth towards wholeness”; Purpose Mastery “Leading by expressing our gifts to create value”; Change Mastery is about “mastering our ability to adapt to change”; Interpersonal Mastery “is leading through synergy”; Being Mastery “is learning to live in the eye of the hurricane of life”; Balance Mastery “is a dynamic reconciliation of extremes”; and Action Mastery is “leading as a whole person”.

As a life coach with an interest in developing an executive coaching practice, I thoroughly recommend this book for its insights into the executive mind and its desire to help executives attain leadership success through authentic being rather than following the prescribed methods. As a priest and theologian I am encouraged to find the book’s implicit acknowledgement of both a spiritual dimension to business life (e.g. the references to love in business life) and a focus on the wholeness of human beings if we are to truly lead our fellow life travellers. A final quote inserted by Cashman illustrates this last point: Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”