Leadership Forum

1

In a highly original way, taking Critical
Theory as a point of departure, Dr. Western
helps us to obtain greater insight into the
enigma of leadership. Manfred Kets de
Vries Director INSEAD Global Leadership
Center   Leadership A Critical Text is an
outstanding addition to the Leadership
literature. This is an excellent text which takes
the field to new heights in the first decade of
the 21st Century". Professor Cary L. Cooper,
CBE, Professor of Organizational Psychology and
Health at Lancaster University The book
provides a unique and much needed 'voice' to the
field of leadership studies, and will have a
significant impact worldwide. Professor
Jonathan Gosling, Director of the Leadership
Centre Exeter University
2

• Chapter Outline
• Chapter 1. Why A Critical Theory Approach To
  Leadership?
• Chapter 2. What is Leadership?
• Chapter 3. Leadership, Power and Authority
• Chapter 4 Leadership and Diversity
• Chapter 5. Asymmetric Leadership
• Chapter 6 The Discourses of Leadership
• Chapter 7. The Leader as Controller
• Chapter 8. The Leader as Therapist
• Chapter 9. The Leader as Messiah
• Chapter 10. Religious Fundamentalism
• Chapter 11. Christian Fundamentalist Leadership
  and Corporate America
• Chapter 12. An Overview of The Leadership
  Discourses
• Chapter 13. Emergent Leadership The Eco-Leader
  Discourse
• Chapter 14. Reflections Leadership Formation

3
Critical Theory

• Emancipation
• Looking Awry
• Systemic-Praxis
• Depth Analysis

4

• What is Leadership?
• She was a courageous leader
• The company board showed great leadership
• Scandinavia takes a lead on social welfare
• An innovative leadership culture flourished in
  the company
• These statements show that leadership is
  not just the property of an individual figure.
• Leadership is much more.

5

Heroic leadership is not always led from the top
down by a charismatic figure, its just that this
is the way the story of history is most often
told. Therefore we continually make sense of
change through the discourse of the leader as
Messiah. Individuals are imbued with heroic
leadership even though networks of activity
involving many people, are usually behind
achievements attributed to individual leaders.
However, it is not an either/or question of
individuals versus collective leadership. Both
exist and there is even more to leadership!
6

• Asymmetrical Leadership
• Chapter five demonstrates how leadership is
  asymmetrical rather than a neat symmetrical and
  linear
• process. An analysis of a few pages of writing by
  Leon Trotsky on Lenins leadership of the Russian
• revolution gives a clear example of how, in any
  given situation, leadership manifests in many
• different forms. Each of these is discussed in
  depth in the chapter.
• Intellectual leadership - thought leadership
• Unconscious Leadership- projective identification
• Corporate leadership- The party
• Dispersed leadership- Cadres- the party activists
• Individual leadership -Lenin was vital to the
  revolution
• Social Movement leadership - the collective
  leadership of a social movement

7

Leadership Discourses Assumptions about
Leadership
Over the past century, four key discourses have
emerged that dominate leadership thinking. A
discourse in this sense is an underlying set of
assumptions that becomes accepted as the norm. It
affects our views about something. So for
many people leadership means a heroic charismatic
figure, but there have been other discourses of
leadership. These have determined how
leadership is enacted but are not always
explicitly known to us. The book deals with the
four discourses outlined here in depth,
discussing how they became powerful, how they
demised, and how they impact on leadership
thinking today. It is important to identify which
discourse dominates your thinking, or the
thinking in your organization/culture. Only when
you become aware to the discourse/s pervasive
to your organization can new forms of leadership
emerge.
8

9

• Leader as Controller Discourse
• The assumption the Controller Discourse is that
  the leadership will focus on maximizing
  efficiency
• and control to increase output. Employees are
  treated in a functional way as replaceable human
• resources, cogs in the wheel of the efficient
  machine. This leadership assumption gained
• credence from the cultural belief in modernism
  and scientific rationalism highlighted by
  Taylorism in
• the management field. The Controller Discourse
  remains with us particularly in manufacturing.
• Recent attempts to modernise the public sector
  in the UK have seen a reversion to Controller
• leadership, focusing on targets to achieve
  greater outputs.

10

• Leader as Therapist Discourse
• The basic assumption is that the leadership task
  is to work on human relations. The idea
• being that happy workers are more productive
  workers. Emerging from the post-war culture
• and 1960s ideas of personal growth and the rise
  in individualism. Leaders encourage workers to
• self-actualize through work, so that people
  come to work to work on themselves (N. Rose).
  This discourse
• embraces therapeutic culture and focuses on
  engaging workers in order to increase motivation
  and
• commitment. Personnel departments were
  established to achieve this. This discourse is
  very popular in
• education and the public and voluntary sector and
  other people focused organizations. Leadership
• development is dominated by the therapist
  discourse often focusing on developing the
  self e.g. using
• psychometrics, 360s and coaching to attempt to
  offer personal insight and modify behavior.

11

Leader as Messiah Discourse The messiah
discourse arose in the 1980s following an
economic slump in the USA. A newcovenantal
leadership emerged. The aim was to create strong
and dynamic cultures under the vision of a
transformational leader. Loyalty and commitment
within teams, and linking personal success to
company success was a key goal. Control is
achieved via peer and self surveillance, rather
hierarchical power or coercion. This book links
the Messiah discourse to the rise of Christian
Fundamentalism in the USA, claiming that
corporate leadership wanted to mimic the
unusual new organizational forms, created by a
highly successful transformational church
leaders. These prophetic leaders managed to
create entrepreneurial and dynamic yet highly
conformist cultures. However the long-term
results can create totalizing and fundamentalist
mindsets, that resist critical reflection and
difference.

12
Leader as Messiah Discourse

Isolated elements swimming in the same direction
for the purpose of understanding. Damien Hirst
(1991)

13
Leader as Messiah Discourse


14


Eco-leadership Discourse
Leadership Spirit
Ethics
Connectivity This
new emerging discourse has become powerful since
2000. The ecology of leadership focuses on
leadership spirit, ethics and connectivity-
creating distributed leadership at local levels.
The leadership works to create and sustain an
eco-system that includes stakeholders and
competitors building coalitions, networks and
collaborative relationships. Seeing the need to
address in the present the issues of the
future e.g finite resources, climate change
and social responsibility. This new
leadership assumption until recently is was a
marginalized voice. Now progressive business
and political leaders are finally embracing
this discourse. It is not just about the
environment but dealing with the internal
ecology as well.

15

The Eco-Leader faces both ways Internally and
Externally
Organizational eco-system
External environment

• Eco-leadership faces both ways, focusing on
  internal organizational ecosystem such as
  building
• networks, preventing the formation of silos,
  creating an organizational architecture that
  allows
• a distributed leadership at local levels, thus
  creating an adaptive organization.
• Eco-leaders also focus on the external
  environment i.e.stakeholders, competitors,
  political and environmental trends, to ensure
  that they address how their organization
  functions as an ecosystem within a wider
  eco-system. This is no-longer considered an
  altruistic act, but vital for sustainable
  success.

16

• Leadership Formation
• Beyond Leadership Development

In the final reflections the book looks forward
to how to develop a leadership fit for the 21st
century. Contemporary leadership development
sits largely within the leader as Therapist
Discourse, i.e. HR departments identify
hi-potential individuals, and a process of
psychometrics and leadership development
programmes are used to increase an individuals
leadership skills. Yet leadership is not a
technique to be learnt. Leaders are formed
through multiple experiences, and it is an
organizations task to create this formation
process specific to its organizational needs.

17

• 
  Leadership Formation
• 
  

Leadership Formation challenges contemporary
leadership development because it focuses on
leaders rather than leadership. Training
individuals in leadership skills ignores the
bigger picture, like how to enable leadership to
flourish, how to work across complex
boundaries, how to influence culture change, how
to engage multiple stakeholders. Drawing on
orthodoxy in order to find a radical solution
(G.K.Chesterton) this book draws lessons from
thousands of years of monastic history. A monk
is not trained in monk skills but undergoes a
spiritual formation. They are formed by
their context, the liturgy, the prayer cycle,
silent reflection, a spiritual Director or guru
in the east, and the life of the community.
Leaders also cannot be trained and also go
through a process of formation. Their
work/life experience, mentors, the
organizational culture and role models all form
them. However unlike in a monastery where
formation is carefully planned for each monk and
for new monks collectively, in the workplace
this an informal and ad hoc process.
Successful organizations will be those that
create Leadership Formation processes and
contexts for leaders and leadership to
flourish, developing the next generation of
Eco-leaders.
18

• Leadership Formation
• Leadership Formation is to create an
  organizational architecture that places
  leadership at its centre.
• Organizational spaces are created to enable
  formation to occur. Leadership Formation means
  developing people
• through learning from the rituals and daily
  performance of work. Leadership Formation takes
  place
• within individuals, teams and the whole
  organization. It is both a local and global
  approach to leadership, each
• person-team-organization develops a formation
  process tailored to their specific needs. The
  organization sets out
• overarching principles, values and an
  architecture that enables learning and formation
  to take place. Teams and
• individuals then identify specific and
  particular needs pending on their work context,
  history, place and purpose.
• Mentoring and coaching should mirror the role of
  spiritual directors in the monastic setting.
  This is both formal

19

• Leadership Formation
• Beyond Leadership Development

In the final reflections the book looks forward
to how to develop a leadership fit for the 21st
century. Contemporary leadership development
sits largely within the leader as Therapist
Discourse, i.e. HR departments identify
hi-potential individuals, and a process of
psychometrics and leadership development
programmes are used to increase an individuals
leadership skills. Yet leadership is not a
technique to be learnt. Leaders are formed
through multiple experiences, and it is an
organizations task to create this formation
process specific to its organizational needs.

20
Dependency Leadership