Are You a Caring Leader? (1)

Are you a caring leader? If so, do you care about? Or do you care for? Or do you care with? Can a caring leader be an effective leader? Is the idea of a caring leader incompatible with leading formal organizations, especially businesses? Is an ethic of care viable in our current society and polity?

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted me to examine the nature of caring leadership. Unlike other adjectives, like heroic, or authentic, or transactional, or transformational, one seldom sees the adjective caring modifying the noun leadership. Even the adjective relational, as in relational leadership, does not approach the nature of caring leadership although relationships are very important to caring.

This initial post in this series on caring leadership sets the foundation by exploring the ethic of care. The second post will focus on a discussion of care ethics in the context of business and management. The third and fourth posts will turn to a focus on leaders and the ethics of care. The final post will set a broader context for the ethics of care and leadership.

Introduction

To me, the idea of caring leadership intertwines with the ethics of care. The concept of the ethic of care, probably initiated by Carol Gilligan in the early ’80s, has developed into a significant discussion within moral ethics and ethics more generally, and then more recently into political theory and our understanding of democracy. As will be demonstrated in this and later posts on this topic, I believe one must try to understand the ethic of care and how this ethic relates to our society more generally. Such a discussion seems one of the most important discussions of our current times.

Caring implies a female gender: mothers care. Caring does not usually connote muscularity or the male gender. People may see caring as inherent in families, but not in organizations or institutions. Generally, when one thinks of care one thinks about nurturing and helping people who are unable to care for themselves.

Similarly, the concept of “caring leadership” often stimulates thinking about nurses – doctors cure, nurses care. Until recently medicine has been male-dominated and nursing, female-dominated. In fact, most of the caring leadership literature rests in healthcare, especially nursing.

A good example is the McDowell-Williams Caring Leadership Model.
This model combines the five practices in Kouzes and Posner’s leadership theory (model the way; inspire a shared vision; challenge the process; enable others to act; and encourage the heart) with Jean Watson’s theory of human caring. Watson’s theory contains 10 “caritas processes.” For example, one such process is “practice loving-kindness and equanimity within the context of caring consciousness.” Another is “being authentically present and sustaining the deep belief system and subjective life world of self and one-being cared for.”

For a description of this model and how it is applied in teaching the core values on caring leadership see McDowell et al.

The ethics of care

The beginnings

Many leadership studies students know about Lawrence Kohlberg, an American psychologist, and his theory of moral development. Very briefly, Kohlberg in 1958 posited a six-stage theory of moral development in which each new stage replaced the moral reason typical in the prior stage. These six stages included (1) obedience and punishment orientation, (2) individualism and exchange (level 1 – preconventional morality); (3) good interpersonal relationships, (4) maintaining the social order (level 2 – conventional morality); (5) social contract and individual rights, and (6) universal principles (level 3 – post-conventional morality).

For Kohlberg, the endpoint of moral development focuses on abstract principles and rules that apply equally and impersonally to all people. For proponents of Kohlberg’s thesis moral ethics becomes best reflected in the ethics of justice: justice requires the use of abstract principles and universal and absolute judgments of right and wrong. Carol Gilligan took umbrage to this position because she believed a different but equal view of morality centers on ongoing relationships and not abstract ethical principles.

Gilligan worked as Kohlberg’s research assistant. By the late ’70s, she became disenchanted with Kohlberg’s theory. She believed that its basis in an all-male sample reflected a male definition of morality which seemed not to agree with how females made moral decisions. She also believed that those working within the context of Kohlberg’s theory all saw women as deficient in moral development.

Gilligan’s 1982 book, In a Different Voice, developed stages of female moral development. She argued that the masculine voice is logical and individualistic, leading to moral decisions that protected the rights of people with the aim of ensuring justice. The female voice on the other hand emphasizes protecting interpersonal relationships and taking care of others. A feminine ethics of care uses both reason and emotion and places a central focus on relationships. She saw the ethics of justice as incompatible with the ethics of care.

The next phase in the ethics of care occurred later in the ’80s when Nel Noddings, an American philosopher, saw the ethics of care as more fundamental than and preferable to the ethics of justice. She defined care as attending to the particular needs, opinions, expectations of others. Noddings saw three requirements for caring. The one caring must exhibit both what Noddings termed (1) engrossment and (2) motivational displacement. Engrossment refers to the thinking that must occur about someone to understand that someone. Motivational displacement means that one’s caring behavior is determined by the needs of the person being cared for. Third, the one being cared for must recognize that the one doing the caring is indeed doing the caring.

Noddings’ perspective saw care as necessarily attending to a particular and situational morality. To Noddings, caring requires personal contact and varies according to individuals and situations. At this point in time, Noddings argued that because of caring’s personal and specific character caring could not be taken as a framework for moral relations generally. But after her initial work, the ethics of care blossomed into a full-blown ethical theory. Noddings herself moved away from her early personal, intimate notion of caring.

Although feminists still make a significant contribution both genders more fully developed the ethics of care. Additionally, the earlier emphasis on psychology was joined by other disciplines including political science and philosophy.

A definition of care

While there may be no single specific definition of care that all care ethicists agree upon, the definition I will use in these posts comes from Joan Tronto. Tronto defines care “as a species of activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”

I take this definition, which is often used today, because it moves us away from the early emphasis on family and close friendships to a more generally applicable definition of care. It is a definition that is especially useful as we focus on leadership, organizations, and societies.

The central tenets of the ethics of care

While not all care ethicists agree on the details of a care ethic all generally agree that three components comprise an ethic of care. These include the significance of relationships and of emotion and the basic elements of what it means to care.

Relationships

One of the persons in Gilligan’s initial study identifies the importance of relationships when she says she sees the world as a narrative of relationships that extend over time in a world that coheres through human connection rather than through a system of rules. [Italics supplied.]

Personal relationships are the starting point of an ethics of care. Personal relationships have a shared history and/or the expectation of a shared future. Such relationships possess a non-instrumental value. Over time most care ethicists came to believe that an ethics of care does not apply only to personal relationships. In other words, we should try to evoke the same attitudes to all people that we have with our close personal relationships although these attitudes may be less intense. People can care for other people at a distance. The individuals in the relationship determine its value, whether that relationship is personal or nonpersonal.

More generally care ethics emphasizes the inherently social nature of persons. As the theory of care ethics has moved beyond its early focus almost exclusively on personal relationships, it has recognized that human beings are political animals; each one of us depends on a community of others for our own development and well-being. The importance of community does not rest on an abstract ideal but on the practicalities of giving and receiving care from others. We depend on care from others throughout our entire lives. Because this dependency on others is inevitable care becomes necessary for survival and flourishing.

Without care we would not be who we are. As Daniel Engster says, “we are capable of using reason and language, making moral judgments, and interacting peaceably with others because we have enjoyed and continue to enjoy the care and cooperation of others, and being who we are, we cannot help but to regard the basic practices of caring as good.”

Engster sums this up by concluding “we all require community with others for our development and well-being; our ability to engage with others – as well as the very existence of community – depends on the practices of caring; and the practices of caring demand that we respect and foster the basic goods of others.”

Importance of emotions/skepticism about principles

Skepticism about principles occurs in part as a companion of the significance of relationships. Moral decisions or moral obligations downplay principles because of the varying nature of relationships and the context within which those relationships affect decision making. Care ethicists believe an ethical act relates to specific circumstances. Abstract principles are usually insufficient for ethical deliberation because they generalize too much.

Principles, suggests Virginia Held, too often “miss the importance of emotions for understanding what we ought to do, and for motivating our morally recommended actions.” Emotions such as empathy, responsibility, concern, sympathy, and sensitivity play an important role in the ethics of care. Many care ethicists particularly highlight the singular and necessary role played by empathy in moral decision making.

Michael Slote believes that “all, or almost all, the moral decisions we intuitively or commonsensically want to make can be understood in terms of, or at least correlated with, distinctions of empathy.” Consequently, he believes that empathetic caring is criterial for morality across a wide range of individual and political issues. Stephanie Collins makes the point that one needs empathy to meet another’s needs in a way morality requires and that without feelings of concern one may not take responsibility for responding to those in need.

Tronto highlights responsibility. She distinguishes between obligation-based ethics and responsibility-based ethics. She claims that traditional approaches to ethics are obligation-based as in utilitarianism or deontology where “the decision maker works out what obligations, if any, they might have to respond to a situation and then responds accordingly. An ontology of the person underpins this position: it sees persons as typically separate, independently living, autonomous beings defined in terms of their own autonomously chosen moral precepts.”

In responsibility-based ethics, the relational involvement with others is the starting point. Thus, the corresponding moral presupposition becomes responsibility for others. We don’t ask what obligation I have to help a specific person, but we ask how we can help. We ask this because we are already involved with the person, not separate from them. We have no need to determine whether we are justified in helping another.

An obligation-based approach contains a two-step process. First, we become aware of the plight of another person and, second, we then deliberate over the extent we have any obligation to help. In a responsibility-based ethic, the two steps become one as we combine both awareness and disposition to care. Tronto says “The moral question an ethic of care takes as central is not – What if anything do I (we) owe to others? But rather – How can I (we) best meet my (our) caring responsibilities.”

All this is not to say that the ethic of care ignores abstract principles and universal rules, but it questions the priority of these in ethics. Emotions like empathy, sympathy, and compassion should take precedence over principles but not necessarily to the exclusion of principles. It sees ethics as less a matter of rational recognition and more as taking responsibility for persons in need. It does recognize the value of some principles, especially in providing information when a potential caregiver is pulled in different directions.

What does it mean to care?

At a minimum, most care ethicists see caring as involving both attitude/motivation and action/practice. To care about something means that that something matters to you. It somehow connects with you. If one does not care about something one is indifferent to it. But we can care about many things. For example, I can care about my neighbor’s cat and feed it when my neighbor is away. But caring attitudes/motivations must be morally valuable.

Four phases of caring

Tronto believes an ethics of care involves practice, interrelated thoughts, and action. She posits that care is about meeting needs and it is always relational. She identifies four phases of caring.

1. caring about – this refers to noting the existence of a need and making an assessment that this need should be met. While some needs are obvious, discerning a need can be a complicated task.
2. caring for – someone must accept responsibility for caring, realizing that something has to be done and determining how to respond to the need.
3. caregiving – This is the actual task of caregiving, the hands-on work of responding to people’s needs. She makes the point that the people who recognize the need are not necessarily the same ones who take responsibility for fixing it. Similarly, those who respond to the need are not necessarily the ones who do the actual caregiving.
4. care receiving – this phase occurs after the care is done. if caregiving does not prompt a response we cannot know if the caregiving was successful. Because care is not complete until the need is met, we may need again to look at the situation and the resources assigned to improve it. As this occurs, one may recognize new needs, and the process repeats. She says that needs never meet until we die. Care is always present, often not visible, and always requires something from us.

Four ethical elements in caring

Tronto perceives caring as a practice that involves moral and value commitments. She sees that the moral precept of responsiveness to care consists of four ethical elements. Each of these elements must be integrated into caring acts.

• Attentiveness – this means recognizing the existence of a need – there is a need to be cared about. Without attentiveness cares are neglected. She suggests that insufficient attentiveness can be a moral failing.
• Responsibility – this means being responsible for caring. The responsibility to care may relate to something we did or did not do. Responsibility to care can rest on several factors.
• Competence – incompetent care is a failure of care. Care involves both an affective state and action. Tronto opines that “in large bureaucracies, this type of taking care of with no concern about the outcome or end result seems pervasive. Consequently, managers’ responsibilities are not fulfilled if staffing levels and other needed resources inhibit if not prohibit competent care.”
• Responsiveness – the care receiver must be responsive to the care given. Here, Tronto focuses on the care receiver’s vulnerability. She believes caregivers must “remain alert to the possibilities for abuse that arise with vulnerability.”

We generally become better the more we do something. Thus, Tronto says the practice of care deepens certain moral skills. She believes that caring about makes us more attentive. When we have to be on the lookout for unmet needs, we begin to notice needs more. Caring for makes us more responsible. Taking on responsibilities trains our eyes to notice when responsibilities have and have not been taken on by others. Caregiving makes us competent, which for most people is a measure of excellence. Finally, care-receiving makes us responsive because care receivers often articulate new needs to be met.

Tronto is trying to develop an ethics of care for society and its polity generally. The point she is trying to make, I think, is that we are, or at least have become, a nation that does not care. We may still believe that caring is significant to some institutions and the family, but not to society more broadly. One may argue that an ethics of caring is important for leaders of institutions that focus on caring. But how realistic is an ethics of caring for other organizations? For Tronto, sliding an ethic of caring in the context of a responsibility ethos into discrete and relatively small segments of society harms democracy.

Discussion

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic with its health and economic consequences prompted me to think and read about caring leadership and subsequently the ethics of care. As I began to write notes and draft posts, the issue of racial justice/police violence also became prominent. Overall, the health, economic, and social justice crises put caring leadership front and center. Here I make several personal observations about the United States as a caring society. I comment, first, on the two crises currently prominent in our country, and then move to a broader consideration of caring in our society.

Racial Justice/police violence and the pandemic

It seems clear to me that Trump is an uncaring leader, a person with no or minimal empathy, whose key to his own internal peace is the continued use of the three infamous words, “not my problem.” An earlier post explored an assessment of Trump’s personality that helps explain why he behaves the way he does. Beyond that, his emphasis on division and anger makes it near impossible for him to evoke caring in a meaningful way. However, the ethics of care necessitates looking beyond the words and actions of the president to our society and democracy more generally – and to the organizations, institutions, and people that comprise our society. Here, the caring picture appears fractured at best.

In looking at the racial justice/police violence issue, the relatively peaceful protests – including their size, the broad range of participating people relative to gender, age, and ethnicity/race, and the geographical breadth of the protests- gives one a picture of people caring about and also caring for others, with many of those others different from those doing the caring.

I lived through the protests of the ’60s and early ’70s. Our current protests seem much different, more caring for, than did those protests, and our current protests appear to be much broader than those earlier protests and much less violent. A question that remains, however, is whether the caring about and caring for evidenced by the protests carry over into caring actions.

Looking at the COVID-19 picture gives me a different understanding. The president and his administration were largely absent without leave, so much so as to be in my mind a dereliction of duty. But relative to actions on the ground, so to speak, the early story appeared different, at least in the northeast. I was struck how well northeastern communities and residents implemented sheltering-in-place, including the wearing of masks and social/physical distancing, putting up well with a relatively closed economy. Seeing the pictures of an empty New York City, especially Manhattan, week after week was quite amazing.

The pandemic cost to the region was enormous both in human lives and in economic terms. Yet, the pandemic curve was successfully flattened and then lowered largely through the cooperation and sense of community among its residents and the heroic efforts of many essential workers. Probably the only really dark spot covers were the early responses, or lack thereof, to and by elder-care facilities. The northeast opened slowly and after a long lock-down. Time will tell whether the region can be as successful if a spike or second wave occurs.

But then we saw the tragedy of opening too quickly and/or too broadly. Nearly all of this occurred in “red” states with Republican governors easily and rapidly following Trump’s lead – a lead that significantly contravened the guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control. Having come decades ago to Daytona Beach from Syracuse University with a bunch of my fraternity brothers to experience the week-long spring break, I was shocked to see Florida’s beaches open for this year’s spring break given the pandemic.

Then came the rapid opening in most southern and western states where public health and safety became a matter of personal responsibility. Governments, especially at the state level, walked away from trying to effectively deal with the pandemic. Production, profits, and perhaps employment became much more important than public health and well-being.

But it is difficult to lay all the blame on governors or some local elected officials. A loud but very small segment of the population, sometimes armed, pushed, prodded, and praised opening the economy and minimizing health safety. As I write this in early July, the COVID-19 numbers are very bad and becoming worse.

A caring society?

From this broader perspective, those for whom the ethics of care resonate may find the outlook rather bleak. I say this because the ethics of care seems to be a minor if not marginal part of our society. I introduce this notion here but will develop it later posts.

An earlier post discussed the importance of meta-narratives and their influence on the behavior of individuals, organizations, and institutions. A dictionary definition of a meta-narrative is “an overarching account or interpretation of events and circumstances that provides a pattern or structure for people’s beliefs and gives meaning to their experiences.” Although there are contending meta-narratives, such as social justice, multiculturalism, global sustainability, pluralism, my view is that the dominant meta-narrative today is the evangelical-plutocratic narrative.

Although all meta-narratives contain some tension. I believe that the two most significant sub-narratives in the evangelical-plutocratic meta-narrative are (1) individual autonomy/the autonomous individual and (2) minimum government/minimal governance. These sub-narratives involve, for example, beliefs and actions dealing with libertarianism, prosperity gospel, unfettered markets, and personal responsibility/responsibilization.

These seem contrary to the fundamentals of an ethics of care. It may be that the only way an ethic of care can advance within our institutions and organizations, and perhaps our society more generally, is if individuals informally with others with whom the ethics of care resonate create” islands of sanity” to use Margaret Wheatly’s phraseology. In other words, putting an ethics of care into practice in relatively small-scale ways, perhaps as metaphorical islands of care, beachheads, that can further spread such an ethic.
Leadership at all levels may be necessary to create mini-cultures of an ethics of caring. A good starting point to begin to think about and enact an ethics of care is using Tronto’s four ethical caring elements: to what extent are we and others (1) attentive to the needs of others, (2) committed to being responsible in some way for caring, (3) competent in caring once we begin to think and enact caring, and (4) understanding how those cared for are responsive to our acts of caring.

I will try to address these issues in later posts, especially in the last post in this series on caring leadership.

References Noted

Gilligan, Carol. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard Unversity Press.

Held, Virginia. (2007). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. New York: Oxford University Press.

Slote, Michael. (2007). The Ethics of Care and Empathy. New York: Routledge.

Stevenson, Angus, (ed.). (2010). New Oxford American Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tronto, Joan. (2005). Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York: New York University Press.

Tronto, Joan. (2015). Who Cares?: How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.