Introduction

This chapter examines the new paradigm of Eco-leadership and the paradox that arises for many leaders when trying to implement it. Eco-leadership refers to an emergent leadership discourse found within organizations at the beginning of the 21st century. Eco-leaders conceptualize organizations as “eco-systems within eco-systems,” departing from the organizational machine metaphors of the 21st century. They focus on distributed and networked forms of leadership within organizational eco-systems in order to ensure the inter-dependent parts of the whole are connected (Western, 2008/2013; Western, 2010).

Eco-leaders also take an ethical stance on the environment and social issues, both within and beyond their organizations. “Eco-systems within eco-systems” highlights how organizations function like an eco-system internally, but are not closed systems and are impacted by external eco-systems, which are economic, political, technological, social, and environmental. Meta- and micro-structures and diverse cultures are constantly interacting and co-creating what we imagine to be an organization. Organizations like eco-systems have interconnected parts, systems, and sub-systems and have living networks consisting of people, technology, and nature. An organization is a fluid and changing entity rather than a fixed object. Some organizations are more stable than others, but in today’s networked society, however stable they appear, each is vulnerable to disruption from other parts of the eco-system, hence the need for Eco-leadership. The Arab Spring revolutions, 2008 financial meltdown, and recent political and business shocks signify the levels of disruption in today’s increasingly networked and interconnected society.

Organizations have a cultural climate across the whole, with micro-climates in different parts. The cultural climate is made up of dynamic human and non-human interactions within organizational architectures and nature itself (Latour, 2005). Imagine a small family carpet business high in the Himalayas, or a large factory in the suburbs of a huge polluted mega-city. Both of these organizations consist of human and non-human actors, relying on technologies and people working together, both consist of architectures where “form ever follows function” (Sullivan, 1896) designed to fit the local and specific production requirements, and both are connected and impacted by local and global natural environmental issues including water supplies, air quality impacting on worker health and well-being, climate change, etc.

Together these conditions create cultures; the organization as a body has a holistic cultural climate that is pervasive but not completely dominant, because within organizations micro-climates also exist and the whole can be impacted by micro-climates changing quickly. Something happens in one part of the organization and emotions can go viral – they are contagious. Conscious and unconscious dynamics are inspired by hope, fear, disillusionment, and melancholy (Western, 2013, pp. 107–119). Collective states of mind emerge from illusions and disillusions, from customers, clients, service users, suppliers, downstream workforces, or middle managers. If senior leaders at the center do not have distributed leaders everywhere, picking up nuances and changes, the contagious and viral impacts of disruptive changes take hold before adaptive leadership can act. This is why Eco-leadership is a meta-discourse for our times, not replacing other discourses, but embracing them and utilizing them in a generative way while taking a strategic overview of the whole. Eco-leadership means a radical re-imagining of how organizations function. It requires a rethinking of purpose and of how value is measured. A belief in “emancipatory ethics” (Western, 2013, pp. 11–13) feeds the organizational libido, which becomes the drive that ignites and sustains this reimagining.

Eco-Leadership in Context

Eco-leadership is the most recent of four dominant leadership discourses.¹ This conceptual model emerged from doctoral research that focused on a critical discourse analysis of leadership in the West over the past century (Western, 2005). This research has been widely cited and informs the present volume (see the Introduction). The four dominant discourses that I identified are set out in Figure 3.1 and Box 3.1 below.

Eco-Leadership as a Meta-Discourse

The four discourses of leadership are all still present in both individual leaders and in organizational life. They do not operate in isolation, but in practice they bump into each other all the time in ad hoc ways. They can contradict or complement each other, integrating or clashing, being in creative tension, or splitting into factions and chaos. However, this ad hoc scenario changes when Eco-leadership is the dominant discourse because then a more conscious and thoughtful process is embedded into the organization. The Eco-leadership discourse acts like a Meta-Discourse influencing and shaping how the four discourses work together in organizations. Eco-leaders identify the appropriate leadership approaches within different functions and departments and within the whole organization. A balanced approach is sought to keep the organization in dynamic and creative tension. For example, all organizations need some Controller leadership to run processes and systems efficiently, focus on task, organize work, and control resources and risk (finances and stock for example).

The skills and sensitivities of the Therapist leadership are also necessary to lead the people side of the organization: without a focus on motivation, well-being, and the emotional side of work, any organization will fail. On the one hand, Messiah leadership can be a disruptive force when it’s too dominant. Yet all organizations require vision and purpose, and also a “good enough” alignment of a common culture, and employee engagement is required for an organization to function successfully and in a holistic way. The first task of Eco-leadership is to take a meta-position looking inwardly at the organization, to balance the diverse requirements of the parts and the whole, ensuring, for example, enough Controller leadership is in the health and safety and finance functions, while Therapist leadership thrives in team situations. The second task is to look externally at the disruptions in the social, technological, and natural worlds, to be able to adapt quickly to disruptions, either to take advantages of opportunities, or to guard against dangers.

Figure 3.2 (below) shows how Eco-leadership acts as a meta-discourse balancing the other discourse needs within the organizational eco-system, whilst also paying attention to the external eco-systems.

The dotted lines indicate how the boundaries between an organization and the wider eco-systems are more open, fluid, and blurred than our “normative” constructs of organizations allow for. This “structural coupling” (Maturana & Varela, 1987; see also Satterwhite, 2010) between organizations and the wider environment is often marginalized in organizational and management literature that studies organizations as if they were closed systems. The Harvard Business School’s famous case study methodology that gets MBAs to study organizations as if they are decision makers in the organization highlights this point, as it leaves very little room for thinking about the fast-changing environment and opportunities and challenges that exist on the outside of the organization.

Overcoming the Ideology² of “Individualism-More”

When a leadership team or individual CEO realizes that their organization requires renewal in line with the Eco-leadership four principles, this is nothing short of engaging with a new ideology. I call this an ideology because it is not just another leadership approach, rather it undoes the existing rationale and deeply-set, unconsciously embedded ideology that underpins how organizations and leadership currently functions. The three discourses of Controller, Therapist, and Messiah all reflect the existing ideology, which is underpinned by the pairing of the two Master Signifiers, Individualism-More:

Master Signifiers unleash a chain of signifiers. When people talk about leadership success, the discussions are limited and contained within the ideological parameters Individual and More. For example, people refer to individual CEOs such as Steve Jobs and speak of “visionary leadership.” We measure their success by more, e.g., economic growth, share price increase, or productivity and output increases.³ All three leadership discourses – Controller, Therapist, Messiah – rely on the idea of an individual leader with agency to deliver more. This individual will take up aspects of all three discourses depending on their personality, social background and the work context. There is no outside to the Individualism-More ideology – it doesn’t exist. There is no space for other possibilities other than individual leaders and growth.

The radicalism of Eco-leadership is to disrupt this underlying ideology of Individualism-More and replace it with a new ideology underpinned by the Master-Signifier pairing of Network-Ethics, connoting interdependency, connectivity, distributed leadership, meaning, purpose, value, social and environmental responsibility, lateral power, and networked-leadership. Taking up Eco-leadership is therefore a radical change, rather than an incremental one, that requires an ideological shift. When leaders try to take up Eco-leadership they face the ideological challenges this exposes, often without being aware of it.

The Paradox

On the journey to achieve Eco-leadership, there is often a holding onto, or a return to, the ideology of Individualism-More, which creates a paradoxical situation. This happens as people backslide to what is known when they meet resistances, or they simply return to what is familiar as they attempt to change. Returning to the ideology of Individualism-More can also be a ploy to engage key stakeholders to support the desired transition to Eco-leadership. For if stakeholders have confidence in a charismatic individual, a visionary Messiah leader, and if they are promised increased profit or more success as an outcome, they are more likely to support the radical changes required. There are two clear forms of this paradox that I encounter frequently when working on these challenging transitions within organizations.

Paradox One: Messiah Leadership a PreRequisite for Eco-Leadership?

The common wisdom is that to transform an organization requires an individual leader with the vision to see beyond what is known and familiar, and to create a culture of loyalty and commitment that will deliver this change; i.e., what is needed is Messiah leadership. I meet many leaders in diverse organizational settings who are interested in Eco-leadership and how organizations can be run differently in the networked age. Yet, while there is a conscious understanding of Eco-leadership, a gap exists between the conscious desire for the ideology of Network-Ethics, and the unconscious attachments to Individual-More. For example, many leaders reference Laloux’s popular book, Reinventing Organizations (2014). What struck me when reading this book is how it is completely immersed in the Messiah leadership ideology (Individualism-More) while at the same time championing the new Eco-leadership ideology (Network-Ethics). The paradox and the tensions this produces are glossed over in this book, which offers a romanticized view of the delights of deconstructing hierarchies and replacing them with new forms of self-managing “Teal” organizations.

Herein lies the paradox: Eco-leadership and Messiah Leadership are at odds with each other, at two ends of a spectrum, underpinned by contrasting ideologies. An Eco-leadership-led organization is more akin to a radical social movement with Autonomist leadership everywhere (Western, 2014) than to a traditional organization whose Messiah CEO strives to “engineer culture” (Kunda, 2006) so that employees are loyal and committed to their personal vision.

Paradox Two: Eco-Leadership Driven by Controller Leader

When an organization moves toward embracing Eco-leadership, a second paradox emerges. The Eco-leaders who are most engaged and driving change are often drawn unconsciously into becoming Controller leaders to deliver their longer-term strategic aims. They passionately believe in the new ideology of Network-Ethics, but lose sight of this as they attempt to push through change. Controller leaders utilize scientific rationalism, utilitarianism, and functionalism to deliver on specific targets and goals. The Eco-leader can be drawn into taking up a Controller leadership stance when they face resistance or short-term pressures to deliver results (e.g., from the board of directors, shareholders, etc.).

Controller leadership easily becomes a default position when the Eco-leader is under pressure. The Controller discourse is very familiar and deeply embedded in our psyches. If we feel out of control, we reach out for a leader to take control (Controller), or a leader to save us (Messiah). To give away control and power to others, to distribute authority, to democratize strategy, is counterintuitive to the dominant narratives we grow up with and that dominate organizations. The Individual Leader pushes for More change by applying Controller leadership approaches and techniques.

Eco-leaders who aspire to new ways of distributing leadership can quickly revert back to old ways of leadership. What you then get is a split occurring whereby a leader says one thing and acts in another way, creating confusion and anger and undermining the trust needed to go through a difficult transition. Eco-leadership and sustainable and ethical futures are then put in jeopardy and undermined.

What Is to Be Done?

1. Changing mindsets. First, by changing mindsets and transcending the Westernized idea that paradoxes need to be solved, changes the way we approach these challenges. Drawing on Eastern cultures that embrace paradox as ways-of-being that do not need resolution or solution, we move from problem–solution binaries to working-with-differences complexities. For example, the Chinese have “the ability … to hold different propositions simultaneously without distress” (Cotterell, 2002, p. 30; cited in Klein et al., 2018). This latter way is precisely how Eco-leaders view the challenges they face. They don’t go for quick solutions but look at the holistic picture; they realize that a quick solution in one part creates new problems in other parts and new dynamics in the whole. Allowing Eco-leadership and Messiah or Controller leadership to coexist, as does capitalism and communism in China for example, the task is then how to leverage the best outcome within this paradox, rather than trying to attain the purist goal of eliminating one or the other sides that creates the paradox. This Eco-leadership approach therefore works by beginning with the insight that paradoxes are always part of organizational dynamics, and need to be embraced and worked with, rather than “solved.” Eco-leadership is about looking outside of the situation for something new in the wider eco-systems. Learning from Asian leadership cultures how to work with paradox is an Eco-leadership approach.

2. The Eco-leadership formation process. The first option helps manage the paradox; this second option offers a way to develop Eco-leadership itself that supports the first position. As set out above, the Eco-leadership response to the paradox of having Messiah and Controller leadership is to think integratively at one level, and to be able to hold contradictory positions simultaneously when integration is not possible. It is utopian to focus always on integrative solutions, as this sometimes is not possible or desirable. Developing Eco-leaders over time means that a critical mass within an organization can emerge that is able to reduce a knee-jerk reaction to take up Messiah or Controller leadership at times of pressure.

Eco-leadership formation gives individuals, teams and organizations a shared understanding of the journey to embrace the ideology of Network-Ethics. It begins deep within each individual, works through relationships, through to how Eco-leaders influence wider networks, and how they form strategies to deliver change. If we are to address environmental issues and take up an ethical leadership in organizations in radical new ways, we have to develop networks of change agents to foster this change.

Leadership by and large reflects the production methods, functionality, and culture of the organization, alongside the wider societal culture. Some would argue that the leader creates the organization, but I think that by and large the leader internalizes the culture, function, and practices of the organization, and leads from a position of embodying and articulating these. Thus, the industrial factory with its production lines controlled workers without autonomy, set within a “society of prohibition” (McGowan, 2003), produced the Controller leadership discourse. Global corporations, virtual teams, flattened hierarchies set in hyper-consumerist societies and neo-liberal free-market capitalism that increased the wealth of powerful elites, produced Messiah leadership discourse. And now mobile technologies, cloud organizing, technological disruption, and adaptation set in the growing network society, alongside global concerns for social breakdown, digital unemployment and environmental crisis, produce its mirror image, Eco-leadership.

3. No personal development without organizational development. There are two key foci in the development of Eco-leadership. The first is to develop individual Eco-leaders who can see that leadership extends beyond the individual. In spite of some critical theorists denying the agency of the individual actor, I am firmly of the belief that the individual leader and follower are essential to understanding leadership. Working with individuals to enhance their personal capacity to take up Eco-leadership is a key part of any strategy to overcome the potential negative impacts of the paradox, and to influence change in their networks. The second focus is to take an organizational development approach and create formal and informal spaces for Eco-leadership and active followership to flourish everywhere. The task is to work in parallel with both individual leaders and organizational development.

Eco-leadership formation takes place in formal and informal settings. Informal approaches cannot be taught from top-down positions of hierarchy, but senior leaders can support, encourage, and influence informal leadership development, such as learning from peers, learning from practice, informal mentoring coaching, and informal communities of practice forming. As for a more formal approach, I will now set out a formal leadership development process that takes an individual through a coaching system that holistically connects different parts of what it takes for an individual to embrace Eco-leadership, termed Analytic-Network Coaching (see Figure 3.3 below).

The Analytic-Coaching System^TM provides a framework for developing Eco-leadership. It is a simple yet profound approach that I have used internationally, and we train coaches how to work with leaders using this approach. We now have a network of international coaches who are working with this system. It has five frames (Box 3.2 below), and we take each leader through them, so that as they learn about Eco-leadership through this process, they also internalize the system and use it as a framework to deliver Eco-leadership to others, without reverting back to the ideology of Individualism-More.

The Analytic-Network Coaching System takes individuals through a process and on a journey from deep within to engaging with the widest networks that need to be addressed if Eco-leadership is to be embraced. Drawing on psychoanalytic approaches, we pay attention to the unconscious, the patterns that inhibit us, and the dormant creativity that lies within us. Psychoanalysis provides a method to work between the coach and coachee, where the latter can learn to interpret their own processes and patterns in relation to the coach. This approach recognizes that the unconscious is not only a dynamic deep within our own minds, it is also a dynamic between pairs, groups, organizations, and societies. Analytic-Network Coaching is thus a psycho-social approach to coaching, not simply focused on the internal life of the individual. It gets beyond the coach “fixing” the coachee with expert tools by offering the coachee a way of interpreting themselves, others, and the social, in order to become dynamic change agents. (For more, see Western, 2012).

Conclusion

Eco-Leadership embraces a new ideology departing from the 20th century ideology of Individualism-More that entraps leadership thinking in an individual’s personal attributes, enacted through the three dominant leadership discourses Controller, Therapist, and Messiah leadership. Eco-leadership embraces the Master-Signifiers Network-Ethics that change the way organizations and leadership are conceptualized. No longer is leadership just the property of the individual and no longer is the outcome only about “more.” Individual leaders are one part of an array of actors that comprise a distributed leadership approach within the networks of activity made up of human and non-humans, i.e., technology, society, and nature together.

This eco-system requires a completely new approach to leadership, challenging the top-down hegemony and moving from vertical to lateral axes of power. Conceptualizing organizations as “eco-systems within eco-systems” opens up the potential for organizations to be part of the networks of life, and not imagined as closed systems that are separate. These false walls we have built have done untold damage to the environment and social well-being and this is where the new ideology of Network-Ethics comes into play. Twentieth-century organizational leadership must embrace a holistic, networked, and ethical approach if we are to retreat from environmental catastrophes and social imbalances that will cause untold suffering and wars.

The challenges to delivering this approach are discussed in the Paradox section above. There is no utopian way forward whereby leadership and organizations suddenly become egalitarian networks filled with distributed leadership. Distributed leadership demands distributed power, authority, resources, and ethics; this is truly challenging and is the cause of paradoxes whereby leaders can call for Eco-leadership and truly believe in it, while enacting Messiah and Controller leadership at both conscious and unconscious levels. The answer is not a puritanical drive to dismiss these other forms of leadership, but to find ways of embracing their usefulness under an umbrella of the meta-leadership approach of Eco-leadership. This approach also calls on leaders to embrace other cultural approaches whereby paradoxes are not problems to be solved, but part of the solution because they will always exist and have to be worked with.

This chapter goes beyond the call for new leadership ethics and offers a theoretical approach and the beginning of a methodology to develop new forms of Eco-leadership fit for purpose in the networked society. Furthermore, this approach is getting traction in practice. It has been used in hospices, hospitals, and family construction businesses and is currently being used as a concept in a leading global technology company. There is a thirst and a realization by leaders, both from a pragmatic and an ethical perspective, that Eco-leadership is needed, as the old ways are not delivering success anymore.

Notes

1    “A discourse is a linguistic and cultural set of normative assumptions, an institutional way of thinking … A discourse defines what we take for granted and how we think about something. … Critical theory attempts to identify normative discourses, so that once revealed they can be critiqued” (Western, 2010, p. 37).

2    Critical theorists/Marxists use the term ideology to describe “false consciousness.” By this they mean false ideas that are purposefully spread by political institutions and power elites to dupe the masses, in order to reproduce social, cultural, and material power imbalances that keep these elites in power. However, this no longer works because our diminished trust in authority and institutions means that we don’t believe any ideology that is overtly used. Some claim this takes us into a post-ideological era. Žižek (2009) and others claim that a new form of ideology is with us that operates in subtler ways. Ideology today presents itself in non-political yet pervasive everyday ways. Master Signifiers are produced that entrap us in certain ways-of-being, and even though we have a conscious awareness of this ideology, it still entraps us. For example, the onslaught of advertising we constantly experience unleashes the Master Signifiers of “consume” and “be happy” on us. These signifiers repetitively push the social injunctions to buy products and services that will make us happier. While we are aware of being manipulated to consume more, we cannot easily escape our fate to buy, or to feel the “happiness imperative” weigh heavily upon us. This is an example of a non-political ideology, where we experience ourselves as being autonomous individuals, free from ideology and social coercion, and following our own desire to consume. Žižek claims that this new form of ideology is even more powerful as it does not come from an external “big Other” (such as the Communist Party, or establishment elite) but from a “small other” within ourselves. Ideology functions today through our unconscious attachments and investments in our chosen Master Signifiers, which entrap and reproduce the power matrices of late capitalism.

3    This is a particularly westernized view that I explore in a forthcoming book, tentatively titled Global Leadership Perspectives, Insights and Analysis (Klein et al., 2018), where new forms of leadership are being unearthed.

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