Leadership Matters

Finding Voice, Connection and Meaning in the 21st Century

Chris Mabey, David Knights, Chris Mabey, David Knights

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351263627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In recent years we have seen what could be described as a moral meltdown in the corporate corridors of power. Few sectors have escaped high profile scandals, with public officials and leaders guilty of malpractice, duplicity, fraud and corporate malfeasance. Conventional leadership theories appear to be inadequate to equip those with power to act ethically and responsibly. At a more macro level, many of the social and environmental problems we face in the 21st century could in fact, be described as spiritual in nature, rooted in a flawed human condition.

Leadership Matters brings together an eclectic mix of authors of different faith traditions, to explore what this spiritual and cultural transformation might look like. For too long we have relied on external codes of conduct, which are, at best, blunt instruments for creating ethical practice. So, chapter by chapter, this book examines our interior lives from the perspective of mind, body and soul.

The unashamed premise of this book is that true and influential leadership comes from the inside with each chapter presenting what it means to lead respectfully, critically, responsibly and humbly in the gritty reality of the twenty first century workplace. This volume will be of keen interest to academics and practitioners in the field of leadership and the related disciplines.

1
Introduction

“Leadership Matters?”

David Knights and Chris Mabey

Key Questions

What is the moral compass in your life that guides the way you lead?

Where do you turn for inspiration as a leader?

How much attention do you give to the nurturing of your spirit?

What do you relate to in your life that is in some way “bigger than you”?

In recent years, there has been something of a moral meltdown in the corporate corridors of power. Few sectors have escaped high profile scandals, with public officials and business leaders guilty of malpractice, duplicity, fraud and corporate malfeasance. There are clearly important leadership matters surrounding these moral crises and we can see that leadership therefore matters to us all. Conventional leadership theories appear to be inadequate to equip those with power to act ethically and responsibly. According to the 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer—a survey conducted across 27 countries with more than 33,000 respondents—overall trust has significantly declined across countries and sectors around the world, with CEOs ranking second lowest at 43% and government officials the lowest at 36% as credible spokespeople. It seems that in the eyes of a majority of the population, business is eroding rather than building trust, thereby threatening to undermine the very idea of leadership.

This breakdown in trust not only damages relations between leaders and those they seek to lead as well as other important stakeholder relationships (e.g., customers, suppliers, regulators and the communities/societies in which they are located), but also stands in the way of the risky but necessary innovations that could contribute to solving the problem of sustainable and equitable social and economic development. A number of business leaders, scholars and other observers have suggested that one response to this crisis is to move towards a world in which business is “purpose driven” beyond the goals of profit. For example, initiatives like A Blueprint for Better Business¹ are drawing on insights from the “great faith” and philosophical traditions to argue that both our society and the firms within it are more likely to flourish if we can reframe business to reflect important deeply held social values, moral purpose and broader responsibilities to society.

As authors of this introduction and as editors of the book we need to say something about our collaboration. In terms of some of the issues this book encompasses, it could be argued that the two of us are at opposite ends of a spectrum that runs from philosophically grounded ethics, at the one extreme, todeep Christian convictions, at the other. This book represents only one of our responses to the ethical problematic in leadership—we, with two other colleagues, have also edited a special issue of an international ethics journal which focuses more specifically on philosophical treatments of the topic.² It was partly for this reason that we came together to edit this book because we wanted to allow multiple and often-contentious voices to mingle if not merge. In the process of contributing to and editing the book, we believe that the continuum can be seen more like a globe where on many issues we coincide, even though we may start from distant positions and may channel our end thoughts in diverse directions. This is perhaps the opposite of what is tending to occur through social media where we live in self-contained and self-reinforcing bubbles in which our ideas are forever confirmed and reconfirmed rather than subjected to some level of challenge. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: while traditionally ethics has been treated as an outlier or an additional issue to contemplate almost as an after-thought in the study of leadership, we first consider developing an integrative idea of ethical leadership where moral matters are embedded in leadership, which, in turn, is an embodiment of ethical practice. Second, this theme of holistic and integrated thinking is applied to the popular notion of leading with integrity. Third, we provide the reader with a summary of the guiding assumptions of the book, and these are not just a vehicle for helping the reader to navigate the different chapters but essentially have provided us as authors with a sense of moral purpose in writing our separate contributions. Fifth and finally, we outline the book through a summary of the rationales behind each of the three sections: Voice, Connection and Meaning, although we leave a synopsis of the separate chapters and the invited vignettes to the Introduction within each section.

Developing Ethical Leadership

What is the response? Scholarship on business ethics is extensive, and there is a growing recognition by business schools that this is an important topic, yet frequently, it is treated merely as an optional module tagged on to the end of the syllabus. Given the corporate and finance scandals outlined above, is it not somewhat scandalous that ethical matters are seen as peripheral or viewed as less than essential within business education? Equally problematic, however, is the limited way in which writing and teaching about business ethics falls short in a number of ways: it draws upon a very limited philosophical base, usually restricting itself to rule-based or utilitarian understandings of ethics; it is inclined to focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR), which usually means demonstrating how business ethics is “good for business” and profits to the exclusion of it being a good in itself; it tends to propound a universal, one-size-fits-all approach, which is unrealistic given the situational ethics of international business; and it focuses upon specific issues like bribery, human rights and legal requirements rather than surfacing the ethical threads in everyday thought and action. It is no surprise that there are questions as to whether leadership can be a reflection and development of, rather than merely marginally constrained by, ethical values?

In responding to crises such as that of global finance in 2008, government and policy makers tend to resort to the law and regulatory rules as a way of curbing misdemeanors or ethical shortcomings despite similar regulatory frameworks failing to address the recalcitrant ethos, which led to malpractice in the first place. This partly reflects how regulatory agencies, accreditation schemes and audit bodies become institutionalized and readily are transformed into self-generating industries that claim a monopoly over their domain, thus providing steady remuneration for consultants and advisers (see Box 1.1).

Box 1.1 Scandals

Despite the global chaos created by the 2008 financial crisis, it was concluded by an International Monetary Fund review several years later by, that the financial reform agenda is still only half-baked at best (Claessens and Kodres, “The Regulatory Responses to the Global Financial Crisis: Some Uncomfortable Questions”, IMF Working Paper, March 2014).

In the UK National Health Service, two public inquiries into the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal (where it was estimated that between 400 and 1,200 people died unnecessarily in a four-year period) carried out by Robert Francis QC, identified a range of performance management problems that persisted. He concluded that a focus on achieving externally set targets had largely left a culture of bullying and secrecy untouched.

In 2017, global shares in British Telecom tumbled 20%, in part due to fraud among senior leadership at BT Italy, with reported collusion by the highly respected auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Despite the global chaos created by the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), it was concluded by an International Monetary Fund review several years later, that the financial reform agenda is still only half-baked.³ Moreover, after a decade of austerity instigated by the major economies in large part to recover their finances from the devastating effects of the crisis, it is surprising how so little leadership imagination and innovation there has been to try and prevent a repetition of the problems. This again can be attributed to the failure of ethics to be integral not only to business education but also to the very idea of leadership that is the most frequent port of call when things go wrong in organizations or society more broadly⁴

As has been observed, the idea that morality is merely about being obedient to a set of rules has long been discredited.⁵ The emphasis now is upon the kind of person each of us has a capacity to become, and the aesthetical and ethical leadership that this evokes, rather than complying with rules, the universality of which preclude any personal moral engagement. These are inescapably important matters for the theory and practice of leadership whether in the private, public or civil society sectors; from financial services to education and IT; from multinational to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs); and from local catastrophes to global terrorism.

Given that few countries have escaped their own leadership scandals, it is timely to question the reliance on regulatory responses to poor leadership ethics since practitioners are invariably one step ahead and thus readily able to avoid the intentions of the regulators.⁶ It also prompts us to ask: why are business schools frequently failing in their original mission to be capitalism’s conscience, to ask questions other institutions are afraid to ask, to promote multi-disciplinary dialogue and to use their educational skills to provoke deeper self- and other-awareness? One possibility is that our business schools are locked into a collusive cycle with other stakeholders where few appear to be prepared to confront this stultifying inertia. At its most cynical, it could be argued that performance-driven, parents, schools, employers and the media encourage students to concentrate almost exclusively on the instrumental goals of academic grades, a phenomenon that becomes self-fulfilling as academics seek to please in order to secure good student evaluations. This is reinforced further when students encounter career-minded academics that are driven, albeit often reluctantly, by elitist accreditation and ranking; the result is overprescribed, risk-free research and uncontentious teaching, that is unlikely to generate the innovative thinking essential to a modern economy. And so the collusive cycle continues. It seems each of the players in this cycle is unable or unwilling to break rank to challenge the consequences, but there may be ways to unlock the stalemate for business schools.⁷ For example:

• To engage in more adventurous theorizing, breaking the unholy silence between competing discourses and disciplines in search of effective and ethical leadership; an example is a growing rapprochement between philosophy, theology (hitherto often entrenched in universalist and foundationalist thought), and organization studies (typically naturalist and empiricist with little time for the classics or “outdated” religion).
• To recover their moral authority, not by pushing a particular brand of ideology or spirituality, but by creating dialogue between disparate belief systems and world-views; by decreasing a reliance upon tired methodologies and models and exploring more human as well as post-or neo-humanist qualities such as embodied engagement, affect, celebrating difference and not just diversity, judgment, wisdom and ethics. Given the multi-ethnicity of most student groups, the opportunity to do this is readily available.

We hope this book will start to do these things.

Leading With Integrity

The Future of Work unit at ESADE, Spain, recently reported on ten trends resulting from the powerful, parallel forces of globalization, digitalization/virtualization and knowledge creation-innovation.⁸ The authors characterize the contemporary work space as being: “a continual search for quick fixes and lives that are distanced—while causing us to give up the ‘high-touch’ aspects of life that give our lives meaning, hope, fear and longing, love, forgiveness, nature and spirituality”. Given the technological focus of the paper, it is noteworthy that many of the questions of leaders in the future have an ethical dimension:

• How will I develop whole-person relationships with people and teams with the heavy reliance on technology-based relationships?
• Is my own mix of daily activities contributing to effective accomplishment of my tasks as an executive? Is my work providing me with job, career and life satisfaction?
• How am I building values, ethics and relational/emotional intelligence skills into my human resources and organizational culture, given the prevalence of portfolio employment?
• How can our employees learn and operate with and from values of compassion, trust and care—bridging technology-based relationships with human-based interactions?
• How is my company using the full potential of our physical spaces to flexibly adapt to specific and changing work environments?
• Do jobs create meaning and allow workers and employees to realize their full potential in creating something they care about?
• Are staff able to pursue their passions and allowed the space to make a social impact?

It is no coincidence, then, that those researching and writing in the area of leadership are expressing a growing interest in how to promote ethical approaches to leadership. Three levels of analysis can be discerned. First, at an organizational practice level there is increasing pre-occupation with ensuring that corporate credentials are morally and environmentally defensible. But given the ineffectiveness of regulation and compliance (see Box 1.1), there is a marked growth of workplace interest in mindfulness, meditation, emotional intelligence, ethics and the like. For example, many organizations across the world now incorporate meditation as a means for promoting health...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• 1 Introduction: “Leadership Matters?”
• PART I Voice: Is Leadership All in the Mind?
• PART II Connection: Where Is Leadership in the Mundane?
• PART III Meaning: Has Leadership Lost Its Soul?
• Index