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Ethical Leadership
Moral Decision-making under Pressure
Aidan McQuade
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eBook - ePub
Ethical Leadership
Moral Decision-making under Pressure
Aidan McQuade
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About This Book
Ethical leadership does not simply emerge from a code of conduct, a good school, or a host of good intentions. It is an individual choice, or rather a series of choices that emerges from the complex interaction of personal values with social imperatives. This book explores how and why some people become ethical leaders in morally challenging and complex social environments.
In Ethical Leadership, Aidan McQuade provides insight into the concept of human agency â the individual's choice of a course of action in response to the options posed by that individual's engagement with the social world. He puts forth a new model of human agency â the "cruciform of agency" â which recognises that the potential range of individual action emerges from the nature of the resonance that social options strike with personal thoughts. Every action adds to the individual's personal biography in ways that influence subsequent choices by confirming or changing personal values and hopes, hence influencing the way the individual subsequently thinks about the world.
In explaining the potential and limits of human agency for ethical leadership, the book establishes a basis for executives, policy makers and academics to conceptualise and develop more robust and realistic approaches for the mitigation of some of the most pressing moral issues facing humanity today. These include the inter-related challenges of modern slavery and global warming, which pose such critical threats to the Earth itself.
In this book McQuade not only sets an agenda for action but empowers individual leaders to find the moral courage to better advance human rights and preserve the environment even when such action requires unpopular choices.
Events around the book
Link to a De Gruyter Online Event in which the author and independent human rights consultant Aidan McQuade together with Bernd Vogel, Director of the Henley Centre for Leadership at Henley Business School, Joanne Murphy, Director of Research & Co-Director of the Centre for Leadership, Ethics & Organisation at Queen's Management School; Ambassador Luis C. deBaca, Professor from Practice, University of Michigan Law School discuss topics such as: what potentially deters leaders from making ethical decisions; what can they draw upon both internally and externally to do the right thing when doing so may be unpopular; how, in the light of fake news, can leaders communicate ethically; and much more:
https://youtu.be/EYAAGiCX4cI
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Chapter 1 Introduction
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a [hu]man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, [they send] forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.â Robert Francis Kennedy
In which ⊠the author explains the origins of this book in his experiences as a leader in a humanitarian crisis, and the importance of ethical leadership â the effort to optimise life-affirming choices that seek to protect human rights and advance environmental restoration â no matter how inhospitable the political, social or professional environment: the future of the planet depends upon it ⊠and an outline of what is in the rest of the book.
A resumption of war
In January 1999 I hitched a ride with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the first civilian aid flight to the city of Kuito in central Angola since the resumption of the war the previous month.
The city had been the scene of intense fighting over the previous weeks. UNITA1 forces, attacking the city in one of their last major offensives of the civil war, had advanced to within a few kilometres of the city centre before being turned back amid much bloodshed. When I arrived, there was still a great deal of tension following the battle, and the city, already devastated by previous rounds of fighting, was choking with people from other parts of the central highlands who had fled from UNITAâs advance.
I had been concerned about getting back into the city as soon as the news of UNITAâs defeat was learned. I had Angolan colleagues there who I, as director of Oxfam GBâs Angola programme, had failed to evacuate at the beginning of the battle. I knew the influx of displaced people would also mean an urgent demand on the water and sanitation resources of the city. The provision of these was my organisationâs raison dâetre in Angola and in their absence a public health crisis threatened.
I recall the bombed-out basketball court in the city. It had become home to some of the new arrivals, luckier than others in that at least they had some shelter. In the midst of that I remember the look of complete exhaustion on the faces of some of the old people sitting uncomplaining in the ruins.
This sort of aftermath was common across Angola until the end of the war in 2002. It was only one of a number that I encountered during the time I worked there. The tide of misery ebbed and flowed across the country in direct relationship to the movement of the armies. So, a central part of my job was to identify where humanitarian operations should be placed to alleviate some of the misery of the civilian population and to manage operations in a way that minimised the risk of death or injury to my subordinates.
The early stages of the war in Angola were driven by ancient interethnic disputes exacerbated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This had pitched the peoples of the coastal regions against those of the interior who they had captured to be trafficked to the plantations of the Americas. These bitter divisions lived on into the anticolonial era when they were further exacerbated by the politics of the Cold War. The USSR backed the governing MPLA,2 which had most support on the coast, while the United States backed UNITA, a movement that had grown up amongst the people of the interior.
With the end of the Cold War and emergent peace processes in Namibia and South Africa the geopolitical logic of the war dissipated. Yet the war in Angola continued in large part due to the megalomania of Jonas Savimbi, the UNITA leader,3 and because the means to fight were facilitated by international trade. Oil (Global Witness, 1999) and diamonds (Global Witness, 1998) funded the war machines of the two opposing factions and enriched the elites of the country.
The causes of the war and humanitarian catastrophe that it brought are matters that came to dominate my mind in the years that I worked in Angola. The question of how to mitigate the consequences of all of this became my principle professional objective. Continually reminded of various aspects of the war from simply living in the country, I found the matter came to pervade all my thinking.
During those couple of days in Kuito I met an older English man, an engineer working on a short contract for another nongovernmental organisation (NGO). He reckoned that given the increased war-displaced population of the city, there was no way it would be possible to develop enough sealed wells to provide safe water for everyone before the rains. This was the approach towards water supply that we had been using up to that point. However, this engineer thought, no matter how durable and appropriate this technology was in normal times it simply could not be deployed rapidly enough in the current situation. That meant a considerable risk of disease for the whole city.
Instead, he thought, if enough hand-dug, open wells were excavated in the makeshift camps and treated with chlorine on a regular basis, it would be possible to increase a relatively safe water supply to a level sufficient to stave off a surge in water-borne disease amongst the war-displaced. As I was from Oxfam, with a greater specialism in water and sanitation than his own organisation, he reckoned this should be our job.
Over the course of an afternoon, we scribbled together plans and, over the next couple of weeks, my team organised the money and personnel to implement them. There was some scepticism amongst my team whether this would have the necessary impact. But it was not as if we had many other ways to cast the die. So, we put the plans into effect.
It is not uncommon, I have found, for people who have never worked in humanitarian response to think it a rewarding job. I have rarely found it so. Rather it is typically one of the most extreme experiences of managing insufficient resources to meet extraordinary levels of need under the constant threat of violence. No matter how well you do your job it is never enough. The work is meaningful, but it can also be bleak.
Nevertheless, as the weeks passed, and the inventory of wells across Kuito began to swell, the records kept by colleagues in health-focussed NGOs indicated that the Englishmanâs prediction was coming true. Cases of water-borne and water washed diseases were not rising.
Sitting at my desk one afternoon towards the end of the rainy season I realised that the feared public health crisis would not materialise because of the work of my Angolan and international colleagues in the city.
It was the single moment of pure professional satisfaction I had in the five years I worked in Angola.
Learning from Archie on his work experience
Years later, when I was director of Anti-Slavery International, I spent an afternoon with a young man called Archie.
Archie had come from his school to do work experience for a week in our office. He spent that week with enormous good humour doing all sorts of the more boring and routine sort of office work, from photocopying to filing. Towards the end of the week Susan, the office manager who had been supervising him, thought it might be a bit more interesting for him if I brought him along to a meeting that I had to attend to talk about law and policy on the issue of contemporary slavery.
As we chatted on the underground journey into the city Archie asked me an arresting question: Who was the most inspiring person I had ever met?
I had to think about that for a minute.
I have had the occasional conversation with undoubted giants of Irish and African history. But it was not anything they said or did that kept me going during the proverbial dark nights of the soul that have cropped up occasionally in my life and career, such as in those grindingly exhausting years in Angola.
Archieâs question made me reflect, rather, that it was family, friends, and colleagues who inspired my choices and sustained my endurance in those trying times. The sort of people who knew my weaknesses and flaws but who still stuck around to say at key âmoments of truthâ â when my hopes and values were challenged by the difficulties of the situations I faced â âKeep at itâ, or, âWe expect better of youâ, or, âDonât let the bastards grind you downâ.
Archieâs question also made me remember that English engineer again, a stranger to me then and someone, to my regret, whose name I cannot recall. Perhaps I was merely a convenient person onto whom he could shift the responsibility for a problem he didnât want for himself. But I donât think so. In any event he inspired me to see a way through what was up to that point probably the biggest professional challenge of my career. He did this by using his experience and imagination to empower me with new choices and an idea for a path through a looming crisis with which I could lead my colleagues. In doing so he helped stave off death and illness for thousands.
What this collective of friends and colleagues demonstrated was an expectation that when responsibilities fell towards me, irrespective of the circumstances, that I would make the necessary choices that would aim for the better, that would, in some extreme instances, save their lives or those of others, and that if, sometimes, I failed or made a mistake that I would try to learn enough to do better the next time.
Simply put, they were the people who expected and encouraged me to lead ethically.
Lighting a candle rather than cursing the dark
Martin Luther King thought that âthe arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justiceâ (Ellis, 2011). But, if we are to consider the current historical trajectory of humanity, we appear to be skewing towards environmental crisis, and the millions of children, women and men currently exploited in different parts of the international supply chain, must still be wondering when justice will present itself in their lives.
It is important to remember that if this is the way of the world, it is not the result of impersonal forces. It is the result of numberless human choices through history and across the planet deciding on unsustainable and exploitative courses of action. Often these choices will be made because the decision-maker thinks that it is simply not their problem. Sometimes they will be made because they promise profits irrespective of which laws they contravene or who they hurt. Sometimes it will be made because the decision-maker simply has not thought about it enough to consider an alternative.
Anyone who works as a leader knows that their choices matter. They matter in relation to the lives of their subordinates and in relation to the lives of those that their organisation impacts. Leaders who act to optimise the positive impact of their decisions on human life and environmental sustainability are ethical leaders. It is because, at all levels of society, not enough leaders make life-affirming decisions that the planet is in such peril environmentally, and why so many individuals are in abject poverty and exploitation.
By logical extension, if more leaders strived to act more ethically and make life-affirming choices in the face of prevailing injustices, then there may be a better prospect of retilting Kingâs âmoral arcâ towards justice and environmental sustainability.
Given the scale of the crisis, this is a worldwide leadership challenge of some urgency.
Purpose of the book
This book aims to equip professionals to lead more ethically when they face their own âmoments of truthâ that test who they are and what they truly believe. It seeks to do this by deepening the readerâs understanding of how decisions are made in a Cruciform of Agency: the process by which an individual contemplates choices posed by the social world, such as a professional environment, in relation to personal moral values and hopes. The Cruciform of Agency helps explain how some leaders have succeeded in making moral choices in challenging environments. Drawing on examples of such ethical leadership the book outlines elements of an explicit moral code for leaders, and elucidates some of the key moral challenges facing our planet that cry out for ethical leadership by citizens and professionals alike.
Not all work environments are as personally testing or morally complex as managing humanitarian operations in a war. But most leaders know the challenges posed by situations when they need to make decisions without sufficient information. Leaders also know about having to make choices between comparably deserving demands because there are not enough resources to satisfy all stakeholders. Furthermore, leaders know that their decisions matter: the lives and livelihoods of others often depend upon them. So, understanding how they can make better decisions, and how these decisions can make a difference in the social world also matters.
Many volumes have been written on diverse perspectives of what is âgoodâ leadership. This book grows out of reflections on the moral obligations of leadership, originating during the Angolan civil war. It asserts the possibility of ethical â life-affirming â leadership in the complex and sometimes morally ambiguous contemporary world.
Moral decision-making in complex multi-stakeholder environments may always be difficult. But some leaders manage to do the ârightâ thing despite such circumstances. If the world is to survive, more will need to urgently do so.
Outline of the book
Chapter 2 is a survey of the existing terrain of the predominant thinking on leadersâ ethical responsibilities in relation to the contemporary political economy. These form a significant part of the intellectual environments within which leadersâ ethical choices will be made. It is important for leaders to be aware of the diverse perspectives on the ethical challenges that they will face and so be better equipped to meet them.
As noted, constructing a framework of moral responsibilities for individual leaders is a central purpose of this book. However, as various moral philosophers have observed over the centuries, this depends on human beings being capable of making some degree of free choice in the first place. Chapter 3 will consider, briefly, the question of âfree willâ â the capacity of individuals to make their own choices â versus âdeterminismâ â the extent to which any notion of individual choice is illusory and instead influenced by external pressures such as so...