There are at least four reasons why leadership has become problematic: the im- possibility of interpreting the sphere of work as meaningful, the fragmentation of conscience, the lack of interior life and the manipulation of the soul.
The Impoverishment of Language
When we describe leadership as the capacity to motivate people by way of opening new worlds of meaning and to shape possibilities for the emergence of new insights and practices, the problem becomes immediately clear: the capacity to give meaning to what we do, or our capacity to interpret the world as meaningful, has become weakened by an impoverishment of language.
Humans are not only economic actors, rational beings or political animals, but also and mainly language animals. We ascribe meaning to what we do and expe- rience through language. There is no experience apart from language and interpre- tation. The richer our language, the more meaning we find, the more attenuated our language, the more one sided and functional our vocabulary becomes, the less we will be able to experience the world within us and around us as meaningful.
Hannah Arendt once referred in this regard to the dominance of stereotyped phrases, whereby we try to protect our place in the system, but instead of guaranteeing life in the fullest sense of the term, we ultimately place it under a sort of “anaesthe- sia”. The original and life-giving word is drowning in a sea of bureaucratic, man- agerial or control-freak words, which no longer do justice to the complexity and richness of human action. Likewise, management theories do not offer a solution;
on the contrary, they intensify the problem, since the meaning of life and work is often impoverished by a human resources discourse, which still represents in some way a mechanistic interpretation of life. We use words and metaphors such as
“Re-engineering the Corporation” (the enterprise as engine!), human resources (as if the human person is a material reserve), workforce (why not “co-workers”?), down- sizing or rightsizing (instead of laying-off people) not to mention the ubiquitous language of control. This impoverished language has not only invaded business, but has colonised every aspect of life, e.g., academic life. Its meaning is impoverished by a utility-oriented economic language that equates universities with business or- ganisations where managers decide, students become clients and scholars compete for research funds in a highly competitive market. Already more than fifty years ago, Josef Pieper warned against it, by articulating it in terms of a proletarisation of the intellectual.10 The academic is no longer a thinker with a rich culture and
134 J. Verstraeten literary formation, who both takes the time (and the leisure!) to think beyond the utility of his or her research and tries to raise fundamental questions. Instead he or she has become a knowledge worker who has to perform useful labour; a worker who has to meet his/her production quotas as determined by bureaucracy or eco- nomic goals. The intrinsic significance of intellectual labour, the semantic richness of one’s ideas no longer has a role to play and is often subjected to extrinsic criteria, such as observable and verifiable “output” and “impact”, quantity of publications or, preferably, the acquisition of large amounts of research funding. The entire language game betrays the fact that the economic utility of what we do exhausts its meaning.
The diagnosis of Pieper must not be limited merely to academic work, since the problem of the narrowing of our hermeneutical horizon is extended to all spheres of life and is, moreover, not new. It was already suggested in a metaphorical way in the allegory of the cave dwellers in Plato’s Politeia. These prisoners have no other option than to observe the shadows and they believe that their very limited perception of reality coincides with reality as such. The cave of Plato symbolises the limited hermeneutical horizon in which managers and business ethicists operate.
Like the dwellers in the cave, they are not capable of seeing that there is more be- yond the misleading virtual reality projected on the wall. Plato even suggests that the prisoners would put to death somebody who leaves the cavern and sees reality in a new and richer light. They are obstinate to the safety of their limited interpretations.
They refuse to be interrupted or disturbed by a perspective different from that of the cave and its illusions. They even refuse to acknowledge the possibility of another perspective. When people stick to their narrow interpretation of reality, leadership becomes impossible.
A Second Inhibitory Factor with Respect to Leadership is the So-Called Disconnection Syndrome
Disconnection is not only an external phenomenon. It is also innate to human beings.
MacIntyre once compared the post-modern person to an actor who is obliged to play a variety of roles, who dashes from one stage to the other, performing each time in a different drama, unable to see the connection between the one and the other.
There is no cohesion between all these different scenes and each one is open to experimentation. People are often unwilling or unable to opt for the integration of roles which, in spite of its limiting effects, nevertheless calls a degree of cohesion into existence.
An aspect of the problem is the fragmentation of conscience. When people stick to their differentiated professional role morality, when they try to do things right, they often fail to do the right thing. An example of such disconnected “role moral- ity” can be found in the story of IBM engineers and technicians who assisted in the design and maintenance of “nothing more than an extremely innovative punch card system”, likewise those who worked in the service of the Nazis, but who argued that
Responsible Leadership beyond Managerial Rationality 135 they bore no responsibility for the optimisation of the registration and systematic killing of the Jews. This albeit extreme example points to a very real problem, namely the neglect of the difference between role integrity (living according to the specific responsibilities of a professional role) and integral integrity.11 In the latter instance one accounts for the global context and the broader consequences of one’s professional choices and in so doing one acquires the capacity to integrate the variety of role responsibilities in a coherent life, but this presupposes that a person is capable of a narrative configuration of life as a whole. The manager, who is not capable of acting beyond role integrity, will never be a leader. However, the problem is that the narrative configuration of life as a necessary condition for leadership has become utterly problematic, since the “self” as the subject of this narrative configu- ration is in crisis, as I will point out in the next point.
Alienation from the Deeper Self
We are indeed confronted with one of the paradoxes of the history of the self after modernity: in spite of the promise (and pretence) of greater autonomy, the human being has become more and more alienated from his or her deepest interior self.
Louis Dupr´e has shown that pre-modern men and women, like Augustine in his Confessions, had the capacity to enter into the most profound layers of interiority as a space in which to encounter God.
The modern self, however, has become an “empty” subject, only able to enter into contact with itself by mediation (and thus no longer in the “immediate” sense).
The modern self (and in equal measure the post-modern self) no longer enjoys an anchor point in himself or herself. It has been reduced to objective achieve- ments, to property and conquest.12 The human being that no longer maintains a direct bond with his or her deepest and most essential core has become an empty subject. Instead of courageously confronting the emptiness, however, we endeav- our to fill it as much as we can with work and activity for fear of nothingness.
And filling emptiness with activity easily leads to workaholism. Diane Fassel, who has followed the problem at close quarters for some time, describes her encounters with people everywhere as encounters with people “who are killing themselves with work, are constantly busy, always on the move, overburdened with worries, trying to rescue themselves. The addiction to work is a modern epidemic that is spreading at lightning speed.”13 In contrast to other addictions, workaholism is socially ac- cepted and often establishes the illusion of success. On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that it does little more than reinforce our alienation from the deeper self.
Leadership, however, requires taking distance and enjoying leisure. The capac- ity to enjoy free time is one of the most important strengths of the human soul.
It allows the human being to connect once again with the sources of life. It is not the person who is able to enjoy his or her free time who suffers from the empti- ness and dispiritedness of apathy or acedia but rather, the hyperactive individual
136 J. Verstraeten who has internalised the ethos of “I work therefore I am”. The latter refuses to become himself or herself and abandons himself or herself to the inertia that “re- fuses to undertake new things” (Thomas Aquinas). This refusal is the opposite of leadership.
A Fourth and Last Obstacle to Leadership is the Manipulation of the Soul
In the past, manipulation on the shop floor tended to be limited to physical manipula- tion, whereby the capacity to work was measured in an effort to make labour as pro- ductive as possible. Taylor’s labour analysis and Chaplin’s matchless symbolisation of the instrumentalisation of the body in the film Modern Times are symptomatic of such an attitude. Today, however, we are not so much confronted with the body as the object of manipulation in service of economical goals but rather the manipulation of the soul, to which even senior management is subjected. Nicole Aubert even goes so far as to speak of the “manipulation of the heart”.
Human resource policies are concerned in the first instance with the psychical and even spiritual dimensions of individuals. An endeavour is made to manipulate their desires, fears and imagination. In a culture in which established frames of meaning and “plausibility structures” have all but disappeared, in which fragmen- tation is both exterior and interior, people still search for a firm footing, self devel- opment and confirmation. In order to fulfil these desires, however, men and women have become more and more dependent on the confirmation and slap on the back they receive in the work arena. As a consequence, they are likely to attune their own behaviour to what they think they have to do in order to satisfy the other, the com- pany, the professional organisation for which they work. They develop a mimetic or imitative life and become all the more dependent on the persons and institutions that deal out the confirming back slaps. The latter is doled out in the form of promotion or an increase in salary and is paid for by harder work. To satisfy their need for confirmation, many are prepared to do virtually anything, even sacrifice quality of life and good health. They ultimately find themselves drawn into a vicious circle that reinforces the relationship of dependence on the company, limits their freedom to negotiate and impoverishes them existentially.
According to Nicole Aubert, companies (and professional organisations) not only try to make use of the labour and intelligence of their employees and managers but also their “being”. They endeavour to persuade others to place “being in the service of production”, which simultaneously provides the members of such organisations with the illusion that the narcissistic projections with which they sought to escape existential emptiness can be realised in the discovery of a false transcendence in their professional environment or in the company for which they work.
Disguised as the pursuit of “excellence”, such submission to the organisation bears witness to an alienating “thirst for the absolute”, as Louis Aragon once de- scribed in his Aur´elien: a dreadful sickness, a consuming passion “that “devours”
Responsible Leadership beyond Managerial Rationality 137 those who submit themselves to it and imprisons those who succumb to it.”14 A striking combination can be detected in this process, a combination of absolute de- pendence and the endeavour to elevate the self to heroic proportions. By submitting oneself to a company or a professional organisation one acquires the illusion that one is a hero, but instead of finding oneself in the process, one is condemned to cherish nothing more than a false image. The absolute is no longer present in this context in authentic transcendence but rather, in the insistence on total self-realisation in which one is likely to drown with just as much pleasure as Narcissus did in his own reflection.
This narcissism is further reinforced by the company or organisation via a sys- tem of “creed, code and cult”, the company credo, its moral code and the rites it employs to underline its values. Such companies and organisations behave like pseudo-religions and in some instances do not even hesitate to manipulate the de- sire for immortality. On other occasions, they behave like secularised churches that offer a sort of ersatz immortality. The individual who longs for eternity (can be both the employer and the client!) are given the illusion that they belong to a sort of
“mystical” community that transcends the limits of their mortality. Burkard Sievers even goes so far as to argue:
In former times, the Church was the predominant organisational representation of our col- lective western belief in immortality [and this was expressed, to some extent, in the ecclesial hierarchy of the living and the dead as well as in various forms of worship. Nowadays, our companies have, to a degree, taken over the spiritual and cultural function of confirming belief in immortality.15
Such quasi-religious pretensions are also evident in the titles of some best-sellers for managers such as “Built to Last”16and “Corporate Cults. The Insidious Lure of the All-Consuming Organization.”17
According to Aubert, companies and professional environments often function under the illusion that they are divine and all-powerful institutions and that they are at liberty to ignore time and death. At the same time, they behave like “all- encompassing, all-devouring mothers” and like “benevolent and nourishing moth- ers, oriented towards the possession of the totality of the individual’s psychic space, who cannot imagine any possible alternative pattern of behaviour.”18This ultimately leads to the destruction of the person and to existential meaninglessness. Instead of being a source of life, therefore, human labour becomes a source of emptiness and death.
I fear that some forms of company spirituality serve to do nothing more than reinforce the endeavour to instrumentalise the human heart and soul.
The relationship of dependence established in the work environment emerges in particular in crisis situations, when companies or organisations decide to re- structure or “downsize” (a technique referred to by some as “corporate anorexia nervosa” whereby an exaggerated number of employees is sacked in order to cut costs and thereby increase profit margins and please shareholders). When people are bound to their company because of a relationship of dependence, being sacked not only results in loss of employment and income, but also the loss of an illusory
138 J. Verstraeten all-embracing system of meaning. Such individuals are inclined to fall into an exis- tential black hole that increases in size in accordance with the depth of their binding commitment to the company.19 For some this can lead to complete despair. The suicide of an airline pilot after the bankruptcy of the Belgian national airline Sabena is a textbook example. Such employees have given everything to the company, even their soul, and the company in turn has taken everything from them. As Dilbert cynically states: “We’ve squeezed your benefits. We have taken all your power and soul. We’ve taken the best years of your life. We made you sit in a cardboard box.
We drove you crazy. And now you can’t stay.”
Even those who “survive” such crises are inclined to depressive episodes, having come to realise in the process that the company had become an “idol”, an empty shell, which was only after their labour. They tend, in addition, to develop a cynical approach to the ethics and spirituality of the company and try to survive by working harder.
Against such a background, the challenge confronting leadership becomes all the more significant: how can people acquire sufficient authentic autonomy to escape from the process of manipulation of the soul?