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).

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 and improved performance, including Google which developed a meditation training program, “Search Inside Yourself”, that has evolved into a Leadership Institute. Yet over recent years, Google, along with other major household names, such as Amazon, Apple and Starbucks, has paid tax bills that are a fraction of what would be expected given the size of their revenues.⁹ In Google’s case, it is heavily ironic in that apart from the meditation program, its “founders—bright eyed and fiercely intelligent maths PhDs—were inspired by the force for good their algorithm could become. And so it has. Perhaps more than any other company, Google has changed the way that humanity engages with information”.¹⁰ This paradox should not then lead us to be wholly condemning of the hypocrisy because we have to recognize that global corporations are complex organizations that cannot guarantee to speak with one voice. Nonetheless, the place of meditation in business has increasingly become a focus of attention and academics have scrutinized its effects on, for example, ethics, stress management and performance. And long may such scrutiny continue since we should not be either for or against meditation but just always watchful of its dangers because everything is dangerous no matter how “good” or “bad” it may appear.¹¹

Second, although not always apparent, such practices are associated with particular theories and discourses. So there is a range of approaches informed by a rainbow of disciplines (from economics to theology, from Greek philosophy to organizational behavior, from anthropology to neuro-science) which seek to discern the moral roots of effective leadership. Two observations may be made about this level. Because our favored discourses feel as natural as the air we breathe, we often take them for granted, assume others “share the same air” and rarely question their validity. This leads to a second facet: dialogue with those not disposed towards our pet theories and preferred discourse is tricky. Consider for a moment:

• Why do businesspeople often think that academics ask the wrong questions and over-complicate their answers?
• Why do academics routinely find businesspeople preoccupied with technical, pragmatic or profit directed solutions?

But beneath this there is a third level, because our attachment to certain discourses and theories does not happen in a vacuum or by chance; it arises from our view of the world, our belief system and our historical and biographical experiences. Again, this may or not be conscious and well-articulated, but each of us inhabits a world-view which guides our life, our deep (sometimes unuttered) choices, shapes our values and is the bedrock of our relationships. It is our contention therefore, that if we are to unpack the notion of leadership—particularly its ethical basis—we need to dive down to this level and not paddle exclusively in the arena of contemporary practices and discourses, important though they are.

Guiding Assumptions of This Book

At this point, it might be helpful to set out some guiding assumptions for the book. In the spirit of what we have just said, these will inevitably reflect the world-views of the authors, but hopefully they will be inclusive enough to bring most readers along with us, if only to sample what is on offer.

• We live in a work-world of individual economic self-interest and instrumental rationality and a kind of mindless materialism (which is actually profoundly disrespectful of the material world¹²). This is destructive and ‘thin’ in terms of understanding individual, organizational and institutional life on a global scale. Of course, there are examples of leaders and organizations treading more noble paths, but there is sufficient dissatisfaction with the waywardness and ineffectiveness of current corporate leadership to fuel a search for more fundamental remedies than those generally on offer.
• Leading with integrity. This involves individual and collective efforts, organizational initiatives and the nurturing of culture and creativity such as those propounded by Positive Organizational Scholarship¹³ or affective and embodied leadership.¹⁴ For too long, we have relied upon leadership development programs which engage the mind but not the soul, and upon external codes of conduct, which at best, are blunt instruments for generating ethical practice.
• We can all ask the question about depth and value in life. We all have some worthwhile non-instrumental commitments and values, regardless of whether we have anything to do with the world of the “spiritual” and “religious”. The problem is that most of us are so absorbed in a vortex of ever-improved performance we don’t have the time, energy or space to ask these questions. As it happens, to address the perceived moral vacuum in leadership studies, scholars are increasingly drawing upon philosophical (existentialist, humanist, post or neo-humanist and secularist) approaches, or faith-based approaches to leadership (for example, Judeo-Christian and Buddhist).¹⁵ The problem here is that these approaches are untested in terms of their application to the workplace.
• As resources to make this quest towards leading with integrity, it is helpful to venture beyond our own own favored discipline: in other words, to facilitate a dialogue, we will usually forestall by closed minds and bodies, ignorance or, sometimes, prejudice. For example, for many social scientists invoking spirituality involves a retreat from rational thinking. Below an apparently innocuous commentary belies a fundamental misconception that reason and spirituality are mutually incompatible (see Box 1.2).¹⁶
• By giving attention to the formation of our own subjectivity (our cultural norms, our upbringing, our personal psychology, our deeply held beliefs, including those about leadership), it may be possible to engage with an ethics of practice through attention to theories of moral imagination, diverse approaches to ethics and values-based management. We recognize that this is personal territory, not usually discussed or disclosed in leadership circles; however, we believe the gains in terms of arriving at your own, thought-out approach to leadership integrity are immense.

  Box 1.2 Enlightened Thinking?

  So-called post-Enlightenment thinking has left us with the unquestioned norm that reason and spirituality are mutually incompatible. This is exemplified in the social sciences by this quotation from a sociology text in the early 1970s: “it is not of great sciological significance to inquire into the factors effecting changes in systems of belief and value which are super-empirical or transcendental in their reference: since nobody could conceivably deny that significant proportions of the individuals in contemporary industrial societies have either given up or come seriously to doubt the validity of such orientations”. The arrogance of this pronouncement is as breath-taking as it has been influential on a generation of students. If we subscribe to the view that the sacred realm—comprising personal morality, worship and religion—is inherently private and separate from the public realm where science and reason is played out, then we enter a moral minefield. As a more recent scholar notes: “modernism and the resulting sacred/secular divide simply changed our views regarding knowledge, truth and morality. Although scientific reason held out the promise of being able to explain everything, it could not resolve moral issues nor address fundamental existential questions”.

• Though modernists like to see themselves as rational, guided by scientific reason alone, we all in fact arrive at—and inhabit—our worldview, whether of a spiritual or philosophical persuasion, by faith. None of us can point to incontrovertible evidence to factually confirm our world-view as correct and universal. The point being that these beliefs constitute our identity, no matter how precarious and in flux these may be at a particular point in time. It is in our everyday organizational work, that our ethics will be tested, pummeled and sifted as we reflexively bump against others with their own take on such matters; this is all part of the ongoing negotiation of power and identity in leader-follower exchange.

In short, this book offers a radical re-appraisal and way forward by exploring what is meant by a return to ethics, philosophy and “spirituality” around the theory and practice of leadership. This leads us to three USPs for this book. First, many have gone before us advocating their own particular brand of philosophy or spirituality for improving our workplace experience (witness the voluminous “self-help” industry); here, we seek to be more inclusive by corralling a variety of approaches. The common ground is that, in order to better explore the ethical dimensions of leadership, all authors advocate—in their different ways—moving beyond tools and techniques (which tend to have a limited shelf-life), beyond the cognitive (neither jettisoning or inflating reason) and beyond the intellectual (where it is too easy to play academic mind-games without real commitment)… to the philosophical, to the embodied, to the spiritual, to the corporeal, to the emotional, to the intuitive. We recognize that these are not equitable domains, but nevertheless what they share is a post-rationalist and possibly post-humanist¹⁷ exploratory space; each author is saying something distinctive about—and inviting you into—that space of what it means to be involved with leadership ethically and not just instrumentally.

Second, we have made real efforts to access and appreciate these different understandings between ourselves. This book is, in large part, an outcome of a Seminar Series funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK.¹⁸ During the course of nine Seminars over a period of three years, a myriad of keynote international speakers, debates, small group discussions and conversations have taken place in which we have each wrestled with practices, discourses, philosophies and spiritualties which are both familiar and unfamiliar, mainstream and marginal. This has led to a measure of unusual trust and respect between us, not something for which autonomous academics are renowned. This is not to say each of us wholly endorses the beliefs, the views, or even the chapter texts of each other, but what we can say is that this book is a collective offering, where each chapter is the result of “iron sharpening iron”, not a series of disconnected contributions.

Third, each author includes reference to why their topic or theme is important to them personally and how the seminar series has affected their lives and whether this means feeling, thinking and doing things ‘differently’. In other words, rather than staying at the hypothetical level of theory and recommendation, we are seeking to close the gap between what we say and do. We each reflect on the whole experience of working together including the discomforts, the challenges and the excitement, by stating how our personal view of leading with integrity has been affected by participating in this collaborative research endeavor. Again, this degree of personal disclosure takes some bravery because it is not encouraged in conventional scholarly work,¹⁹ but we felt it to be not just helpful but utterly consistent with a project of this nature.

Outline of the Book

The reason for the title of this book: Leadership Matters? is not simply to delineate the terrain we cover; it also pertains to two further levels. First and most obviously, leadership matters as a significant element of our daily lives: without effective and ethical leadership we suffer personally, socially, economically, ecologically. It matters for us also in so far as we are all affected by leadership not just in the simple way depicted in followership studies but in the more substantive manner in which leadership is about energizing practices of transformation that can only be enacted through collective embodied engagement. Second, much of the thrust of this book concerns the return to materiality in social science, the realization that we do not just bring our brains to work; that knowledge is not simply a commodity to be traded; that our relationships with co-workers are not simply transactions. What moves our heads is our bodies and the material contexts of their intra-action, and what moves our bodies is our souls and our relationships to the world around us. So, literally, matter does matter. Another interesting feature on this notion of what matters is Latour’s²⁰ distinction between matters of “fact” and matters of “concern”, for he felt that the latter moral dimension was frequently being chased out by the so-called factual as a result of epistemologies and methods grounded in the logical and positive sciences. In matters of leadership, the shift between “facts” and “concerns” is historical and forever in transition. Yet the question mark in our title suggests that we are not unreflective about each of these meanings and do not wish to impose them on readers but merely to offer them as points for debate, dispute, and even dismissal.

VOICE. The sub-title is also important and the three sections of the book broadly follow the substantial though rarely articulated concerns of many of us enmeshed in contemporary organizations. Although recognizing that most of us have, and continue, to work out of economic necessity, we ought to leave space to consider the value of our labor that goes beyond mere material or even symbolic accumulation,²¹ how do we resist the ready-made and often vacuous “solutions” and technologies of power and leadership with which we are confronted on a daily basis? In short, how do we find our moral bearings, our unique voices? With a particular focus upon mindfulness, this is the subject of the first section.

The second deals with CONNECTION. For too long, the workplace has neglected the viscerality of our emotions, airbrushed-out diversity and difference, relegated family and non-work attachments, idolized the heroic at the expense of the here-and-now. Despite the everyday palpability of our bodies and all the signals they convey, we continue to pursue leadership in a largely dis-embodied manner, neglecting how “the mind is simply the idea of the body”.²² In doing so, the body often returns to haunt us and no more so than in our masculine driven world of winning regardless of the consequences to one’s own and others bodies. In the blurring of boundaries between work and non-work, it is attention to the latter (and all the care and commitments this carries) that gets sacrificed. Also, despite the constant babble about “leadership” in the media, in sport, in corporations, in politics, the Englishness of this narrative (with all the mono-linguistic imposition and limitation that this implies) goes unquestioned. Furthermore, in the pre-occupation with fantasized ideals of heroic leadership, this mythology massively underestimates the mundane, the everyday expression of leadership in ordinary acts.

The third section deals with MEANING. In the raging waters of work-place expectations, business targets and career goals, it is easy to lose our moorings. In moments of honesty and places of trust, we all—as leaders—ask of ourselves: how do I deal with the persistence of ego, reduce the credibility gap between what I say and what I do, determine what is really important, retain integrity, have fun and stay resolute to my life goals? And in relation to leading with others, we ask: how can we find a moral compass so that we lead responsibly together; how can we confront dubious practices which cause us unease; how can we empower ourselves to do what is important, not just what is urgent and how do we play our part in changing the world and leaving a meaningful legacy? Whether we use the language of philosophy, soul or spirituality, the common territory here is not just the desire to invest our workspace with meaning but also to recognize its presence without such investments. And finding this voice, connection and meaning will surely bring an ethical edge to the way we think, speak and behave as followers and leaders.