Caring Leadership 3A

This is the first of several posts on caring leaders. It follows the previous post that centered on caring management. The literature on caring leaders seems more limited than the even relatively small literature on caring management. At the same time, the literature on caring leaders seems broader, less focused than that of caring management.

I have divided the post into two parts. Part A deals with caring leadership as expressed by Yiannis Gabriel. Part B covers my attempt to use Gabriel’s paper to determine how Trump’s followers may view him as a caring leader.

Care and leaders

To an extent, the issue of a caring leader connects with the issue of a moral leader. Can a leader who is morally flawed be an effective/successful leader? Are leaders judged by their morality or by the consequences of their actions? Or by their motives, Or by their overall character?

Yiannis Gabriel argues followers judge their leaders largely through a set of fantasies or myths as well as their early life experiences. In doing so, he distinguishes between managers/management and leaders/leadership. People view managers as treating ends as given, concerned only with effectiveness. Whether people see managers as legitimate depends on the managers’ techniques and the successes of those techniques. It does not depend on measures related to ends, morality, or politics. Managers become legitimate if their technique is successful. Managers, he says, “are neither moral illiterates nor immoral robots, but fallible and at times confused agents seeking to accommodate diverse demands made upon them.”

But leaders are different. Followers, according to Yannis, expect leaders to have courage and moral values. He says, “We expect our leaders to care – not just in an impersonal manner ‘about’ a project or ‘about’ the bottom line, but ‘for’ the organization and its people, indeed for each and every follower. … we expect leaders to care not as professionals, but as leaders.”

Because the moral failure of leaders can lead to organizational and group failures, followers judge leaders by stricter moral standards than they would others. Followers tend not to be very nuanced in their judging of leaders.

Gabriel identifies four clusters of fantasies against which followers judge leaders. Each cluster has a positive and a negative pole, with leaders generally placed towards one pole or the other. These fantasies, according to Gabriel, can be found in many organizational narratives as well as in religious and mythical narratives.

The heroic and non-heroic fantasy

First Fantasy: Positive First Fantasy: Negative The leader is omnipotent, unafraid, and capable of performing miracles The leader is weak, externally driven, afraid, and fallible Second Fantasy: Positive Second Fantasy; Negative The leader has a legitimate claim to power The leader is an imposter, someone who has usurped power and whose claims are fraudulent

In the first two fantasies, Gabriel generalizes that a leader’s power must be deployed to protect her followers and to overwhelm their collective foes. Followers see leaders who only enhance their own careers or enrich themselves as morally flawed. Followers see leaders as legitimate if these leaders continually demonstrate that they are authentic and promote collective ends. The moral expectations that arise from these first two fantasies are consistent with the idea of heroic leadership. Notwithstanding the increasing unpopularity of the heroic leadership model in leadership scholarship, Gabriel posits that this leadership model still dominates public discussion. The public often sees the heroic leader as the panacea for various organizational and social ills.

The caring and non-caring fantasy

A dominant theme in narratives of caring leaders refers to leaders doing good deeds for their followers, “frequently going beyond the call of duty.” Gabriel believes the metaphor of the good shepherd represents the caring leader archetype. “The caring leader is compassionate, giving and concerned for the well-being of his or her charges, willing to go the extra mile to meet their needs and ensure that they flourish. If power is the dominant feature of the heroic leader, love is the sine qua none of the caring leader. He or she is bound to the followers with a bond that reaches beyond expedience and mutual benefit.” A caring leader connects with his followers through powerful feelings of empathy, compassion, and solidarity.

Importantly to Gabriel, a caring leader must be accessible and visible to followers, especially when followers are experiencing stress and crisis. “A leader who is absent or triggers fantasies of abandonment betrayal, and desertion, reinforcing the feeling that he or she does not genuinely care for his or her followers.”

Gabriel goes on to say that a “leader who is experienced as not caring can hardly be viewed as a true leader or as a moral agent. In fact, I would go as far to say that caring outweighs any other consideration regarding the moral obligation of leaders in the eyes of their followers – a leader may be strong, legitimate, may be competent but, if she is seen as ‘not caring,’ she is likely to be viewed as a failing leader. Thus, not every leader is caring, but nearly every leader, I would argue, would lose his legitimacy if they were perceived as ‘uncaring’ . . .. at the level of the archetype all leaders are expected to display some degree of caring.”

Care ethics

Gabriel reviews the essentials of care ethics. He particularly notes that care ethics “involves communities and networks and not autonomous individual agents. People are always embedded in various social connections, dependent on others…” In a quote that may provide the kernel of his own thinking about care and leadership, Gabriel quotes Virginia Held, who says “Those who consciously care for others are not seeking primarily to further their own individual interests; their interests are intertwined with the persons they care for. Neither are they acting for the sake of all others or humanity in general; they seek instead to preserve or promote an actual human relation between themselves and particular others.”

The ethics of care vs. an ethic of care

As with many others, Gabriel accepts that many societies undervalue care activities noting that care workers tend to be underpaid and often marginalized and racialized like domestic labor. He agrees that over time “the notion of dependence has been increasingly determined to be the result of individual behavior – standing in stark contrast to the assumed independence and autonomous male wage earner. Both the caregiver and the care receiver have become brushed with this association with dependence.”

Notwithstanding the association with dependency, Gabriel believes “a caring orientation to work and to others retains elements of being a valued quality, even in our highly narcissistic and individual culture. A ‘caring person’ may not be the commonest self-description seen in today’s inflated resumes but remains the description of a valued and valuable person.” These caring qualities essential for leaders.

To make his argument more specific, Gabriel says it is important to distinguish between “the ethics (plural) of care as a philosophical body of argument which is as yet underdeveloped in connection with political theory and an ethic (singular) of care as a set of values and orientations that may guide social and political action.” He sees an ethic of care “as a set of principles and values that inform and guide judgments and actions, as well as providing an important vantage point against which the actions of leaders are judged by their followers.”

Judging a leader from the perspective of an ethic of care

Gabriel identifies several qualities of a caring leader. Caring leaders must:

• Be visible, give generously of their time, and demonstrate they are genuinely concerned for the realization of a mission or a project.
• Treat their followers with consideration and respect and not as means to their own personal end.
• Display a constant watchfulness over changing needs and aspirations and not merely respect their followers’ desires; and be alert to varying emotional needs, offering recognition and validation.
• Be empathetic by offering constructive but objective feedback and acting as toxic sponges protecting their followers from excess anxieties.
• Be in relation to their followers but also remain separate from their followers to be able to listen to voices other than their own while not prejudging these other voices.
• Fight to defend those for whom they care and not opt for easy and convenient compromises.
• Take responsibilities for others and be prepared to take personal risks in discharging the above responsibilities, and this includes not always seeking to please followers if doing so would risk their well-being.

In sum, Gabriel states that the two most persistent requirements of the ethic of care for leaders are that “their relations to their followers are personal and that they should be seen to go ‘beyond the call of duty’ in discharging their responsibilities. An ethic of care, therefore, eschews the principle of equality in the most blatant manner. . .. In every instance she will discriminate in favor of her followers over the interests of abstract justice or those of anonymous others.”

Later, however, Gabriel reinforces the importance of a leader being visible (being seen around the place) and that the major failure of leadership may be absence (failing to be present).

Gabriel’s caveats

The fundamental expectations that followers possess towards a caring leader are personalized attention and a willingness to go beyond the call of duty – essential elements of the good shepherd archetype. But Gabriel tempers his embrace of the caring leader.

• An ethic of care can neither be the sole compass guiding leaders nor a compass without ambiguities and contradictions. By themselves, empathy, watchfulness, sensitivity to the needs of the followers can lead to seriously flawed decisions and leadership failures. He points out that the heroic virtues, like courage, justice, prudence, and magnanimity, can also lead to poor decisions and failures of leadership.
• One should not idealize the caring leader. As much as heroic leaders, caring leaders when idealized by their followers can have a paralyzing effect. Excessive caring can seriously inhibit the autonomy of followers and bring about dependence and inertia. Thus, a caring leader must strike a balance in handling subordinates. A caring leader containing their anxiety without eliminating it to the point where they lapse into dependence and inaction.
• It is not easy for leaders to live and act consistently within an ethic of care because they will encounter several constraints. One constraint focuses on instrumentality. Leading under an ethic of care is costly in time, energy, and effort; the rapid events and changes often require leaders to make quick decisions, especially in times of crisis.
• An ethic of justice can create countervailing tensions with an ethic of care. A justice ethic requires equal treatment for all while an ethic of care fairly implies privileged treatment for those who need it and those who are close to the leader. At times a caring leader may face no safe moral options. An ethic of care can generate internally conflict courses of action.
• Finally, an ethic of care is at odds with the fundamental impersonality, individualism, and insecurity of our times, which places great importance on consumer choice in market environments. If freedom, choice, and independence become the most important moral values, they can minimize if not totally overpower an ethic of care that values relations, commitments, dedication, gentleness, humility, and duty.

Nonetheless, Gabriel believes that leaders who consistently fail to demonstrate that they care for their followers, no matter how successful they may be in the short run are unlikely to be viewed as moral leaders or command their trust, affection, and respect.

Discussion

Gabriel’s paper is one of the few leadership papers that focus on caring but does so in an ambiguous way. I identify what I think are some of the ambiguities that weaken the paper.

Like the prior post on caring management that centered primarily on employees, Gabriel’s view of caring leadership centers on followers. Gabriel asserts that leaders “will always be judged by their followers against their ability to demonstrate that they care.” [italics in original] Gabriel does not provide any empirical evidence for this claim, which is based on a study of archetypes (see, for example, Kociatkiewicz and Kostera). This claim can be empirically tested but Gabriel relies partly on Parry and Kempster’s article that focuses on charismatic leaders and followers. Gabriel’s specific examples of caring leadership focus on employees and patients within a hospital setting.

Although Gabriel seems to recognize the breadth and depth of the ethics of care, he cuts away portions of this ethic to make his focus on followers and leadership at least a bit more practical in his mind. He does this by distinguishing an ethics of care from an ethic of care – I am unaware that others make such a distinction.

He seems to want it both ways: he says, “love is the sine qua non of the caring leader.” He makes the point that the caring leader is compassionate and giving and goes “beyond the call of duty.” But he also says that “not every leader is caring, but nearly every leader, I would argue, would lose his legitimacy if they were perceived as ‘uncaring’ and that all leaders are expected to display some degree of caring.” I interpret this as saying there are caring leaders, uncaring leaders, and still other leaders that are between caring and uncaring.

Love can be interpreted in many ways. Love can mean the strong direction provided by a patriarchal leader in which caring can be more implied and distant than what occurs in day to day caring behavior. In fact, the Parry and Kempster article points out that this kind of love can evoke negative feelings, especially anger, among followers. Some followers experienced both positive and negative emotions. This kind of love seems much different than the love evoked by the good shepherd archetype.

The specific qualities of a caring leader that Gabriel identifies seem relatively generic to me, qualities that could be found in many descriptions of good leaders. On the other hand, the qualities identify two central aspects of care ethics. One is the need to be attentive – one cannot care of one is inattentive to the needs of others, suggesting the need to be visible and relational. The other is the importance of emotions, such as consideration, respect, and empathy. These qualities importantly inhere in most discussions of care ethics.

Maybe it is idiosyncratic on my part, but Gabriel’s triggers in my mind the work of Ronald Heifetz, especially his Leadership on the Line and Leadership without Easy Answers.