Caledon business guru shares the CASTLE principles

August 9, 2018 · 0 Comments

Written By CONSTANCE SCRAFIELD

Lance Secretan, long-time Caledon resident, has spent the last many years encouraging businesses of every type to dump their usual methods of managing their staff and begin again doing things completely differently. Quite the opposite, in fact.

He wants you to love your employees and them to love you. He wants you to inspire, not motivate your employees. In exchange, he promises you a better work place, happier, hence more productive employees, an increase in how well your business performs.

It all begins by throwing out the stale, “boring” mission statement and bringing in a dream. We all love to dream about what our lives could and should be if only . . . However, Mr. Secretan insists we must have that dream and work to make it a reality. More than that, we should involve every member of our staff in the same dream, making it their dream in a way that they can all benefit.

The shift is away from our own intense interests and looking to serve others in the way our business is run and our own attitudes toward those helping us run it.

The point is to accept that we are each one entity – a Whole Human(R), as he says it, made up of 11 aspects or elements or levels of being: some are “personal growth and renewal, body and health, physical environment, [domestic situation], career fulfilment.”

These and the rest are shown in his new book , the Bellwether Effect, as interlinked cogs. When one moves, they all do. His point is that, for example, if there is trouble at home, that trouble is going to come to the office.

With the understanding that the office is staffed by whole human beings, it begs the question of where to go next with this admission. Mr. Secretan has a formula he calls the CASTLE Principles.

He describes its development this way: there was a research done about “what people found uninspiring about their work and their bosses…The responses were very clear. They detested : a) Cowards, b) Phony people, c) Self-serving and selfish people, d) Liars, e) Those who ruled with fear and f) Idiots – incompetent people.

“So, we took that information,” said Mr Secretan, “and we looked for the opposite, creating the CASTLE Principles.”

These are: “people who exhibited a) Courage, b) Authenticity, c) Service, d) Truthfulness, e) Love and f) Effectiveness, CASTLE being the acronym for these six principles.”

He went on to record: “Additionally, as we completed due diligence on the validity of these values, we found they were not just yearned for . . . admired, loved at work but across every aspect of people’s lives.”

In general, it might not come as a surprise that anyone would prefer to be dealt with in a genuine, truthful, loving manner over an approach of deceit, dishonesty, and fear mongering.

Yet, as Mr. Secretan shows, the “detested” failings are how “bosses” rule their companies. He offers alternatives and proves better health on every level from the individuals within the firm to the company itself.

Basically, what he is saying is, “All you need is love.”

Unravelling the “broken” methods used for generations in business, he dismantled the idea of the annual or bi-annual engagement surveys, those mini-instruments of emotional torture with their long winded assessing, for the more consistent and caring questioning, deserting the pointless database of wide based answers to mediocre questions.

Here, within Mr. Secretan’s system, the questions deal with relationships and their value to the individual employee.

How do each of them feel about their employer, work, environment and themselves within this business structure? Going further, Mr Secretan maintained this be an on going discourse, a “deep questioning,” looking to the well being of the individuals along the way.

He attacked the motivation concept, another use of fear right across society’s board: “pass this exam or fail;” “take this prescription or be sick;” “don’t do [that] or you’ll be punished.”

In this matter, he noted that, commonly, motivation and inspiration are wrongly used interchangeably, when, in fact, they are opposites.

He offered their definitions, most powerful of which is: “Motivation is based on fear; inspiration is based on love.”

This means changing from a push, based on reward or punishment, to a pull, based on appealing to the essential self of any person; to present an opportunity to excel, to realize one’s full potential.

To enlarge one’s understanding of these theories, Mr. Secretan demonstrated the effective difference between “separateness and oneness.”

Using scientific and philosophical methods over the time of their development, he described both within the terms of our history: in very ancient times, we understood that everything around us was a whole, connected to everything else and ourselves. This and the concept of time as circular, not linear, was (and is) held by the ancient people still amongst us around the world: the North American Indigenous people; the Maoris of Australia and New Zealand, the Inuit of the Arctic, the Bantu of Southern Africa and others. In spite of the vast distances separating those cultures, they shared this very basic knowledge.

With the rise of philosophers and, over the centuries, scientists, taking the world apart to exam all its bits became the way of study until it was entrenched as the way we see everything – separate departments, occupations, skills, knowledge, skin colour, personal inclinations; once again, not only in business but across the societal board, what was true, still is.

Separation is an illusion; at the very base, oneness is still the truth.

Once this idea is accepted, suddenly our attitudes change toward our families, friends, our colleagues and everything in between.

The idea that a little action can have far reaching consequences – so far as to be hard to imagine – is no longer new and is widely accepted. It is the problem of putting that understanding into the way we do business.

As Mr. Secretan quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Adopt the pace of Nature; her secret is patience.”

Mr. Secretan elaborated: “There are no separate waves, just one ocean; ..knowing that there are no actions without reactions. Life is energy…whenever we experience pain or sadness, it is because we have become separated from what, or whom, we love…whenever we are inspired and joyful, it is because we are one with that, or whom, we love. All human challenges and successes can be explained through this awareness.”

So might the whole world take note and the global population learn these lessons.

Lance Secretan’s new book on this subject, The Bellwether Effect, which, naturally, delves deeper than space allows here is now available through his website: www.secretan.com or on Amazon.