Below is a talk prepared for a management course at the University of
Toronto in 2005. As such, it represents a summary of ideas I am working
on
rather than a full development of them. Comments welcome. Please do not
use without permission. Amy Lavender Harris may be
contacted at amy.harris@utoronto.ca
Amy Lavender Harris, B.A. (Hons.), M.PL.
Centre for Industrial Relations
University of Toronto
March 2005
Being a Lodestar: Navigating the Moral Terrain
of Organizational Leadership
1. Introduction
A lodestar is a beacon, a star that guides. It is
the old name for Polaris, the north star, around which the
constellations appear to revolve, the reliable point of reference for
navigation over land and sea. A person or principle serving as a model
or guiding principle is sometimes described as a lodestar. Today I wish
to talk about how a leader may be a lodestar.
But first I wish to speak into a rupture. I wish to
step into a slippage I think exists in contemporary business education
and practice, a disconnect in the ways we theorize, practice, and
evaluate leadership. I wish to talk us across a chasm created by a
series of confusions. In doing so, I will describe a territory rent and
ripped, a region where the landscape heaves and changes, a terrain
requiring a lodestar if we are to navigate across it. The poet Yeats
said "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold … the best lack all
conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." His
lines are a good description of contemporary organizations, of
contemporary leadership.
I will deliver this talk in two sections. First, I
wish to show how our conceptions of leadership amount to a kind of
wishful thinking, a naive version of a hoped-for reality that does not
mesh at all well with our experiences. We train business
graduates who are ill-equipped to deal with the realities of
organizations and the complexities of leadership. In my view, the
problem is not a matter of teaching ‘right-minded' business rules and
best practices. I think business schools do too much of this already.
Nor does the problem arise from a vacuum of leadership, as is sometimes
claimed. We have too many business-school leaders – not too few – and
too many
leadership conferences. We need different kinds of leaders, leaders who
are able to navigate. We need a lodestar.
The second thing I will seek to do in this talk is
describe the tumbled moral terrain of contemporary organizations. I
will map the topographies most typically ignored, the areas most
affected by seismic slippages. These areas are difficult to map, not
only because they are rumpled and riddled with caverns and faults, but
because they change. They shift. And when we send our inadequately
practised or self-proclaimed leaders to survey this terrain, too often
they claim it for themselves, or return with maps poorly and
indistinctly marked. In this territory we trade in the current currency
of business: the recent, belated, and almost certainly temporary
rediscovery of the value of morality. We do so without reference to any
lodestar.
At its worst, the current rush to define ethical
business practices and to hold the leaders of organizations to moral
standards is a cynical distraction, a generalized expression of
contempt or temporary contrition in the face of recent exposures and
convictions, a nefarious seizing of moral territory for avaricious
purposes. At best, good intentions are derailed by the nearly
interchangeable use of concepts. We declaim the need for ethical
leadership, integrity, and trust without a clear sense of whether these
concepts may actually be deployed in practice – or whether they can
mean anything at all.
It seems to me that when we attempt to exert and
deploy conceptions of ethical leadership across the muddled moral
terrain of contemporary organizations, the concepts themselves rupture
across the landscape. Two kinds of rupturing are readily apparent. In
the first, we encounter manifest organizational crises measured by
scandalous revelations of wrongdoing, indictments of executive officers
and accountants, and bleeding bottom lines. In these situations, it is
too late to apply moral standards, except perhaps in judgement. In the
second kind of rupturing, we encounter moral failures so ordinary but
so widespread and persistent that they erode the very notion of
organizational sustainability and ethical leadership. These are the
daily abuses that engender cynicism: the subtle and overt denigration
of colleagues and subordinates, predation, the theft of ideas,
misrepresentation, negligent disclosure, the displacement of blame,
failures in reciprocity and empathy, and the resolute putting of the
self first – expressions of the generalized megalomania that attracts
many people to business.
Amid these and other ruptures, business writers,
public and private agencies and think tanks, dubiously qualified
researchers, consultants, and the media have sought to improve the
moral climate of organizations – or at least capitalize upon the
current Zeitgeist. In doing so, they have produced a whole industry of
integrity products and services overly closely allied with the
businesses and institutions they purport to criticise or correct. And
in doing so, they have managed to cheapen both leadership and
integrity. They have done nothing to ease what the Ivey Business
Journal calls a "crisis of trust" (2004: 1) and what an article
published in the Academy of Management Review nearly thirty years ago
described as "moral abhorrence" and "general condemnation" of business
(1977: 360). That these two comments were published decades apart says
something else about current efforts: they fail to acknowledge that the
problems are not even new. They merely cloak old reports and
recommendations in the fashionable language, and sell them at the
current rates. In doing so, they have perpetuated a series of
confusions, constructing a recursive hall of mirrors. I would like to
cut through these confusions, and propose a path.
2. Ungrounded
Idealism: the Problem of Leadership
I do not think it is easy to be a leader. In my
experience it is both immensely difficult and immensely costly. Indeed,
I think a willingness to bear costs is an essential prerequisite for
leadership. Moreover, I find there is a paradox in leadership:
leadership is directed outward, in service to an idea or organization,
but at the same time leadership is embodied in the individual self.
Hence the cult of leaders. Hence the tension between leaders and the
organizations they serve. Hence the tendency to study and teach
leadership first through the examination of traits and behaviours of
individuals and only secondarily by evaluating their service to
organizational goals.
I would like to sum up the standard business school
approach to ethical leadership. If I oversimplify, I do so in keeping
with the textbooks business schools use to teach organizational
behaviour and human resources management. Once I have oversimplified
sufficiently, I would like to make things more complex. My purpose for
doing so is not to undermine what business schools teach about
leadership, but to argue that what they teach is of little use as long
as they fail to acknowledge the inherent tension between leaders and
the organizations they serve, and as long as they gloss over the ways
leadership is tested in times of rupture and crisis, the very times
when the need for ethical leadership is most urgent.
A well known and widely used organizational
behaviour textbook defines leadership as "the influence that particular
individuals exert on the goal achievement of others in an
organizational context." (Johns and Saks, 2005: 274) In a separate
chapter, the same textbook defines "power" as "the capacity to
influence others who are in a state of dependence." (ibid: 377) In
linking leadership with individual power, the text invokes the work of
psychologist David McClelland, who found (perhaps self-evidently) that
the need for power expresses itself as a "need to have strong influence
over others." (ibid: 142; 385)
McClelland describes three kinds of leaders in
organizations: institutional managers (who use their power for the good
of organizations); personal power managers (who use their power for
personal gain); and affiliative managers (who are "more concerned with
being liked than with exercising power.") On first reading, the
division seems so neat; the ethical choice of leadership style almost
obvious. And indeed, McClelland's research has found institutional
managers to be the most effective at "giving subordinates a sense of
responsibility, clarifying organizational priorities, and instilling
team spirit." (ibid: 385) This research is broadened in the 2001
Voice of the Leader study conducted by the Washington-based Corporate
Executive Board. This study found that ‘tomorrow's leaders' will
require people management skills (the ability to communicate
expectations, inspire others, hold people accountable, develop staff,
value diversity, and persuade and encourage others); strategic
management skills (the ability to adapt to change, articulate long-term
vision and hold a global perspective, understand customers, and manage
relationships); personal characteristics (honesty and integrity,
adaptability, passion, the capacity to accept responsibility for both
success and failure, openness to new ideas, and challenge the status
quo); and process management skills (ability to manage innovation,
allocate resources, translate and implement a vision, solve problems,
measure results). These competencies seem to make a great deal of
sense; indeed, they seem the very embodiment of a good leader. In these
terms, a good leader does something more than merely manage: a good
leader shapes and embodies organizational culture; exerts influence in
the choice and pursuit of organizational goals; empowers and coaches
colleagues and subordinates to share in and implement those goals; and
serves as the bellwether of the moral standards of an organization. But
at the same time, they seem quaintly idealistic; a description of what
good leaders should be rather than what many actual leaders are like,
and a depiction of an organizational climate where the pace of change
is manageable, the moral dilemmas easily resolved, and the tension
between ego and organization a trivial matter.
And when leadership engages – as it must – with
questions of ethics and morality, the gap between reality and the
hoped-for ideal becomes even more striking. The same organizational
behaviour textbook I mentioned earlier presents "seven themes" defining
managers' moral standards for decision-making: honest communication;
fair treatment; special consideration under special circumstances
(generosity); fair competition; responsibility to organization;
corporate social responsibility; and respect for laws (Johns and Saks,
2005: 395-396). Simple enough, even formulaic. Moral questions are
reduced, in this lexicon, to "ethical dilemmas". But at the same time,
the text quotes a Journal of Business Ethics report that "a large
majority" of managers surveyed agree that unethical practices occur in
business, and between 40 and 90% (depending on the study) "report that
they have been pressured to compromise their own ethical standards when
making organizational decisions." (ibid: 394; and see endnotes to
chapter). In even more significant contrast, the text lists "ethical
issues" identified by executives (ibid: 395). What struck me in
reviewing this list were the things many or most executives did not
consider to be ethical issues for business, including executive
salaries (which 63% did not consider ethical issues); plant closures
and downsizing (which 45% did not consider ethical issues); financial
and cash management procedures (which 45% did not consider ethical
issues); government contract issues (which 41% did not consider ethical
issues); corporate due process (which 27% did not consider ethical
issues); product safety standards (which 26% did not consider ethical
issues); and security of company records (which 24% did not consider
ethical issues).
Far from indicating concern for ethical issues,
these results show that many or most business leaders fail to grasp the
moral complexities attached to the full range of their business
activities. Despite all the efforts of corporate consultants, oversight
agencies, legislation, and ethics codes and training, this invites a
conclusion that a widespread pathology of selfishness and oblivion
impairs both business leaders and corporate culture. And consider one
of the latest revelations: that hundreds of applicants to American
business schools illicitly gained access to their application status by
following instructions posted to an on-line message board. While
Harvard Business School, Carnegie-Mellon, and MIT are reportedly
rejecting applicants found to have accessed their information (likening
it to "using the keys to the admissions office to enter at night"),
several applicants who acknowledged accessing the information
told media that they do not consider their actions wrong. In contrast,
the Dean of MIT's business school commented, "It seemed to us you would
have to have pretty bad judgment or pretty bad ethics not to know you
were doing something wrong. ... If you don't realize you shouldn't do
that, something's off." ("Would-be MBAs learn that, yes, ethics do
count", Toronto Star, March 10 2005) It seems to me that the
applicants engaged in the same kind of rationalization that pervades
the business world they hope to enter: that it was their information to
access, that nobody was harmed by their actions, that curiosity is
simply human nature. But their activities were unethical. And if a
report published on an MIT professor's technology weblog
(http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2005/03/08
) is accurate, the
security hole which applicants exploited to gain the illicit
information resulted from a monumental carelessness on the part of the
designers and negligence on the part of the universities who contracted
out the technical services, meaning that the moral failure rests with
the applicants, the purveyors of the application software, and the
business schools themselves.
And where does this leave us? Perhaps we are mired
in a moral quagmire. Perhaps even if we can see the lodestar, we cannot
hope to follow it because of the obstacles in our way. Perhaps they are
too great to overcome. Perhaps we are doomed by human nature, by
curiosity, temptation, competition, denial, and the lust for personal
gain. Perhaps we cannot successfully navigate between the short- and
long-term consequences of our actions and the gains to ourselves and
the costs to others. Perhaps we are blinded by our own desires. Perhaps
we lack empathy. Perhaps we are doomed by the business culture we are
responsible for having created.
3. Seeking the
Lodestar: Navigating the Moral
Terrain of Organizations
Now that I have pointed out some of the naive and
wishful thinking that characterizes conventional conceptions of ethical
leadership, I would like to turn more directly to the problem of
navigation. If our leaders lack a moral compass, how might they
discover one? If they can discover one, how might they be encouraged to
use it?
As I have already indicated, currently there is a
great surge of interest in business ethics and corporate integrity.
Much of this interest fixates on the notion that despite their long
records of dereliction and malfeasance, organizational leaders might
become beacons of integrity. In preparing for this talk, I researched
how business schools and the business literature conceive of ethical
leadership. I also read some of the foundational philosophical
literature on ethics and integrity, and noted some interesting gaps.
And in doing so, I have identified three areas of failure which may
help account for the willfully naive approach to ethical leadership and
our resultant surprise and outrage when business leaders act in selfish
and damaging ways. Although I think these failures seriously undermine
business education and leadership, a full exploration of them is part
of my longer-term research agenda and today I will describe them only
briefly before turning to my current thoughts on ways it might be
possible to lead with integrity.
(a) The Naive
appeal to economics. The first failure
in conceiving of the possibility of business and leadership integrity
lies in a naive appeal to economics. In essence, this arises from an
argument that corporations will become more responsible over time
because in the long run it simply does not pay to be unethical. This
claim has an interesting persistence. Interestingly enough, I
encountered it first in an article titled "Is Commercial Integrity
Increasing?" published in the International Journal of Ethics in 1900.
The author argued that "the standard of commercial honesty and business
integrity of the man of mercantile affairs of to-day is far higher than
before", and opposed regulation of business on the ground that
anti-trust laws "hamper trade in various ways". He argued that
competition and centralization of business are "the working out of an
economic law", and asserted that business growth and profitability "is
only possible by inspiring confidence" and added that "confidence
cannot be maintained excepting by universally upright dealings."
(Morton, 1900). The sole piece of evidence provided for this
extraordinary claim is that amid historically intense competition,
wages remained constant while working hours were reduced and buying
power increased.
History, of course, has judged this era somewhat
more harshly for its reliance on child labour, appalling working
conditions, and environmental spoliation. Nonetheless, similar claims
still find voice. A very recent article published in The Economist
objects to corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs on the
grounds that "they are based on a faulty – and dangerously faulty –
analysis of the capitalist system". Describing CSR as "tainted
charity", the article asserts that in making profits for shareholders,
a well-run company "without even trying, is doing good works. ... the
selfish pursuit of profit serves a social purpose ... The standard of
living people in the West today enjoy is due to little else but the
selfish pursuit of profit." Never mind the costs to the developing
world, which in too many cases is consigned to the same bleak
conditions Mr. Morton glossed over a century ago. Never mind the
stunned ex-employees of firms bankrupted by their lying executives. And
never mind the public's growing reluctance to wait any longer for
corporations and business leaders to start demonstrating a serious
commitment to fairness and honesty. The article does acknowledge that
the "good works" companies may achieve through the selfish pursuit of
profit require that a firm "behaves honestly and obeys the law" – two
conditions demonstrably absent in too many circumstances for the
argument to remain credible.
In my view, simplistic claims that corporate leaders
will do the right thing because doing so makes the best economic sense
for firms ignores two realities. First, it isn't happening. The
evidence shows that corporate responsibility -- to employees, to
shareholders, to the environment -- improves only when companies are
bitten by legislative teeth. The reality appears that many companies –
and their leaders – will get away with as much as they can. And second,
corporate leaders do not invariably -- or perhaps even reliably -- put
corporate interests ahead of their own. And so, in my view we need to
reject naive appeals to economics as a pathway to ethical leadership.
(b) The uneasy
partnership of ego and organization.
The second failure in efforts to adequately characterize ethical
leadership stems from naive optimism about the alignment of personal
and organizational interests and objectives. As Edwin Boling writes in
"The Management Ethics "Crisis": An Organizational Perspective",
"somewhere between organizational dependence upon individual standards
set by indoctrination and the dependence of individuals upon
organizational guidance, ethical behaviour slips to scandalous
dimensions." (1978: 361) Despite efforts to integrate leadership trait
analysis with organizational culture, organizational behaviouralists
gloss over tensions between the two realms. As Boling points out,
"personal integrity" is prioritized in research: "ethical practices are
supposed to arise out of individual character shaped by commitment to
religious, social, and philosophical beliefs." Boling proposes
"cooperative ethical contracts" in which this order is reversed:
organizations establish ethical premises, individual moral judgements
reflect social norms, and moral action becomes a matter of cooperative
social relations. Boling, however, fails to account for the reality
that moral failures appear to occur in both individuals and
organizations. Ethical leadership is eroded not only by individual
malfeasance, but by organizational norms that reward dishonesty and
selfishness directly or by failing to prosecute it -- norms that seem
prevalent in current business climates. Further, organizations are
hardly monolithic entities within which common moral standards might
easily be defined and agreed upon. And further still, research
(e.g., Elangovan and Shapiro, 1998) focusing on betrayal of trust in
organizations as an individual phenomenon distinct from deviance and
antisocial behaviour risks oversimplifying the nature of social
relationships and the impacts of individual behaviour on organizational
culture. If, as the authors of this research acknowledge, "betrayal ...
is the shadow of trust and loyalty" (1998: 547), then so too are
individuals the shadows of the organizations they move in and
construct. We cannot choose to focus on organizational norms or
individual behaviours: we must identify the messy and convoluted
relationships between them. And in doing so, we must admit that
defining the source of both ethical failures and strengths is a
difficult thing.
(c) The vagueness
of the concepts. The third failure
in efforts to define and encourage ethical leadership arises from the
vagueness of the terms and concepts we use. I will focus on two terms
in particular: "trust" and "integrity", terms which have become debased
from misuse and abuse, and which require salvaging if we are to
continue to use them at all.
Trust: A
recent article in the Ivey Business Journal
defines trust as "beautiful in its simplicity ... the unquestioned
belief that the other person has your best interests at heart."
(Beslin, 2004) The article acknowledges that trust must be built, and
suggests a four-step approach: (1) communicate; (2) build loyalty and
credibility; (3) implement interactive communications pathways; and (4)
evaluate and measure progress. The article comments that "leaders are
judged on what they do to win trust, and the sincerity and consistency
of their effort to retain it." True enough, but easier said than done.
In contrast to the article's naive depiction of trust, I will counter
that trust is beautiful in its complexity. There is nothing simple
about it. Nor is there anything common about it, if public opinion
surveys are any indication. The 2002 Golin/Harris Trust Survey, for
example, found that 69% of American respondents said that they "don't
know who to trust anymore", and depicted what it called a "crisis of
trust" in corporate America. The Golin/Harris survey also came up with
much more specific things CEOs might do to earn trust, underscoring the
reality that corporate leaders must do more than appear to communicate.
The criteria: assume personal responsibility and accountability;
personally and visibly show care and concern for customers; stick to a
code of business ethics no matter what; communicate openly and
frequently with stakeholders; and handle crises better, more openly and
more directly. These findings are echoed by business writer Carol
Stephenson, who observes that organizational leaders must not only talk
about but live their ethical values all the time.
And so, what we have here is a bifurcation between
fuzzy romanticized notions of trust as something beautiful and simple
and the harsher reality that trust takes hard work and a commitment to
principles beyond self-interest. Add to that the dangerous
vulnerability that trust entails: the placing of one's own interests in
the hands of another. Trust is dangerous and risky. It is not something
we should speak lightly of. And unless we can find some way to replace
the shaky infrastructure with something more solid, we might as well
abandon the concept entirely.
Integrity:
Integrity is another concept undermined
not only by profligate and varied misuse but by equally fuzzy
definition. In a 2003 press release, Microsoft suggests the following
definition: "Business integrity means that not only do people have to
trust a company's products; they need to also trust its businesses
practices. At Microsoft, we understand that acting responsibly with
customers involves being transparent in all business dealings, hiring
and promoting according to core values of integrity, leadership and
passion, and carefully and respectfully addressing problems with
products or services." A slippage is evident here, given that
‘integrity' is defined by reference to other fuzzy and elastic concepts
like ‘trust', which are in turn defined by reference to ‘integrity'.
Quoting an observation that integrity "remains vague
and ill-defined after more than 50 years of research", business
professor Thomas Becker comments in The Academy of Management Review
(1998) that the association of ‘integrity' with ‘conscientiousness' and
‘honesty' "may result in trading in one poorly understood concept for
another." On the association of integrity with trust, truthfulness, and
honesty, he comments, "honesty and integrity, although related in some
ways, are conceptually distinct." Becker proposes that integrity be
composed as follows: "(1) I value (reason, purpose, and self-esteem);
(2) I am (rational, honest, independent, just, productive, and proud);
(3) my values, goals, and behaviour are congruent; and (4) I am willing
to do whatever is necessary to live according to my most cherished
values." (1998: 159) While Becker's objectivist approach has been
roundly (and in my view justly) criticized (see Barry and Stephens,
1998, for example) for its reliance on rational egoism and its
underestimation of the role of social power, he does accomplish two
things. First, his acknowledgement of the insufficiency of extant
conceptions of integrity is a valuable insight. Second, his claim that
business integrity should be grounded in the virtue of selfishness is
revealing in being remarkably reminiscent of the naive appeals to
economics I have already discussed as one failure in contemporary
efforts to account for leadership and integrity in organizations. And
third, despite its limitations, Becker's conception of integrity does
stretch toward a definition of integrity that might become plausible
with amendment. What might this be?
In my research for this talk, I noticed a rather
striking disconnect in how integrity is conceptualized in the business
and philosophical literatures. Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
(10th edition) defines integrity as follows: (1) firm adherence to a
code of especially moral or artistic values: incorruptibility; (2) an
unimpaired condition: soundness; and (3) the quality or state of being
complete or undivided: completeness. In this context, incorruptibility,
soundness, and completeness might be seen as three ‘tests' of
integrity. For their part, business writers focus almost exclusively on
the first test in espousing a reliance on defining, implementing, and
(re)enforcing rules and codes of ethics. Rules are a useful test, as
far as they go, but they are inadequate in a number of ways. They give
rise to questions: Who creates the codes? How might they be modified?
How do they account for exceptional circumstances? How are conflicts
dealt with? I question the ability of codes of ethics, on their own, to
help us define a pathway toward ethical leadership. But if we think
more broadly and more philosophically about integrity, we might find
the lodestar.
One pathway is suggested by philosopher Cheshire
Calhoun. Calhoun begins with "three pictures" of integrity: "the
integrated-self, identity, and clean-hands pictures of integrity"
(1995: 235) Calhoun's objection to these approaches is twofold. First,
he comments that "each ultimately reduces integrity to something else
with which it is not equivalent – to the conditions of unified agency,
to the conditions for continuing as the same self, and to the
conditions for having a reason to refuse cooperating with some evils."
And second, in these accounts, integrity is seen as a personal virtue
and not as a social virtue. In short, Calhoun objects to the notion of
integrity as reducing to the circumstantial self. Calhoun suggests that
"standing for something" is the prime social virtue. He asks: "what is
worth doing? ... What evils, if any, ought one morally to refuse doing
no matter the consequences?" He suggests that we must ultimately be
co-deliberators: "Her standing for something is not just something she
does for herself. She takes a stand for, and before, all deliberators
who share the goal of determining what is worth doing." (ibid: 257)
In my view, Calhoun's proposed pathway is enormously
rich. It moves beyond naive appeals. It places the territory of what is
being determined beyond only the self. It does not appeal to vague and
fuzzy notions. Rather, it underscores the difficulty of determining
what is worth doing, the hard work of trying to act with integrity.
Calhoun also acknowledges the possibility of rupture: he says, "when
what is worth doing is under dispute, concern to act with integrity
must pull us both ways. Integrity calls us simultaneously to stand
behind our convictions and to take seriously others' doubts about
them." How might this represent a pathway? In concluding and reframing
the matter which has motivated this talk – how a leader may be a
lodestar – I think we must now enter the ruptured moral landscape of
organizations.
4. Reframing: Is
there a Lodestar in sight?
In this talk today I have poked holes in
conventional understandings of ethical leadership, which I have termed
naively idealistic and inadequate to account for the realities of
unethical leadership and organizational pathology that we so often
enter in our personal and professional lives. In doing so, I hope I
have not seemed
too much of a cynic. And in identifying what I see as failures in our
efforts to navigate the moral terrain of organizations – our naive
appeals to economics, our conflation of individuals with organizations
(and vice versa),
and our reliance on fuzzily-defined conceptions of ‘trust' and
‘integrity' – I do not mean to suggest that we should abandon our
idealism. To the contrary: I think we need to be more idealistic. But
we do need to move beyond naive idealism and gullible expectations
about the pervasiveness and persistence of ethical leadership. We must
expect more, and we must judge more harshly. We should not be
perennially surprised.
To begin with, we must acknowledge that tensions
exist between leaders and the organizations they are expected to serve.
The drive to power and privileged access to resources are too often
irresistible temptations. Organizational leaders are hardly immune from
failures in empathy; indeed, research suggests that they are uniquely
prone to selfish megalomania. We must also discard our fuzzy and
oversimplified ideas about ethics, trust, and integrity, and instead
understand and employ them in ways that are meaningful and practicable.
We should also
abandon our naive appeals to classical economic theory, and the idea
that we don't need to worry about organizational ethics because
unethical practices are simply not profitable in the long run. We
simply cannot
wait for classical economics to tell us when the long run is up. We
require a different measure. And so we look to the lodestar.
How might a leader be a lodestar? If a leader is to
be a beacon and a guiding principle, she must be able to navigate
through turbulent and shifting landscapes. She must be reliable. She
must be resolute. A leader must be prepared to stand for something, to
sustain a commitment to the good of something beyond herself, to
harness herself to an outward-facing set of priorities and principles.
But these are just starting points. She must be able to confront the
difficulties, the messiness, the rupture of organizational leadership.
She must be able to navigate. If she cannot define answers, at least
she must be able to identify some of the right questions. And in
seeking to do
so, perhaps the greatest mark of leadership is the acknowledgement that
this is a tremendously difficult thing to accomplish.
Postscript: Personal Views on
Leadership and Integrity
Carol Stephenson writes in the Ivey
Business Journal that leaders are forged in a "crucible of
leadership". She cites research by Warren Bennis of the Leadership
Institute and Robert J. Thomas of the Accenture Institute for Strategic
Change, which found the following:
Each leader they interviewed shared
a love of learning and strong sense of values. Each one was "full
of energy, curiosity and confidence that the world is a place of
wonders" waiting to be discovered. And each one was "able to point to
intense, often traumatic, always unplanned experiences that transformed
them and became the source of their distinctive leadership abilities."
Although in my own life I have valued personal independence over
organizational leadership, recurringly I take public positions and hold
leadership roles when not doing so would mean failing to stand for
something. I have done so at great personal cost. But in acknowledging
this I will point to John Ralston Saul's assertion that "ethics is the
least romantic of human qualities; the one with the hardest edge; the
most demanding." (Saul, 2001: 97). And I will refer further to
philosopher Cheshire Calhoun's averrence that
looking at integrity not as the
personal virtue of keeping oneself intact but as the social virtue of
standing for something before fellow deliberators helps explain why we
care that persons have the courage of their convictions. The courageous
provide spectacular displays of integrity by withstanding social
incredulity, ostracism, contempt, and physical assault when most of us
would be inclined to give in, compromise, or retreat into silence.
Social circumstances that erect powerful deterrents to speaking and
acting on one's own best judgment undermine the possibilities for
deliberating about what is worth doing. We thus have good reason to be
thankful when persons of integrity refuse to be cowed. (1995: 259)
I do not describe myself as a person of integrity. I do not consider
'integrity' a mantle one may don for oneself. In my view, integrity is
not
something one can have or possess: it is not a commodity. But integrity
is a quality one may exemplify and strive toward. As Calhoun puts it,
integrity may be a "master virtue", something that "presses into
service a host of other virtues". These virtues include courage,
honesty, loyalty, humility, civility, and respect. Hard virtues, all of
them. And also good descriptors of ethical leadership.
Speaker Profile
Amy Lavender Harris is a Master of Industrial Relations candidate at
the Centre for Industrial Relations, University of Toronto. She has
served in a variety of public positions, including as President and
Chief Negotiator for Local 3903 of the Canadian Union of Public
Employees (CUPE) and as an elected member of the York University
Senate. Amy's commitment to public service has extended to her
professional work as an urban planner and journalist and her voluntary
work as a civilian instructor. Beyond her interests in public
sector labour relations, Amy teaches at York University as a contract
faculty member and conducts research in environmental philosophy.
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;
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