Leadership and the ethics of care – a philosophical analysis (4A)

This two-part post continues the series of posts on caring leadership by focusing on a paper by Tomkins and Simpson titled “Caring Leadership: A Heideggerian Perspective.” A philosophical perspective requires leadership studies to examine what happens “when there is no functionalist blueprint, no clear sense to be made, no comfort in transparency.”

The authors suggest that caring leadership is largely practiced in one or the other of two modes of intervention. One mode is a “leaping-in” intervention and the other is “leaping-ahead” intervention. Overall, the authors posit that much of the care ethics literature provides “too tempting a recipe to follow.”

The first part of this post discusses the paper. The second part, coming later, tries to apply this caring perspective to the Trump presidency.

Caring through leaping-in

Leaping-in occurs when the carer (leader) intervenes to take responsibility for a particular situation and attempts to solve the problem. The carer demonstrates or evidences a sense of certainty and direct action. The authors use the term “carer” rather than leader because they focus on leadership, noting that various people in an organization can intervene in a problem by leaping-in. They see this mode of intervention as substitutive because the carer takes control of the situation in lieu of the care recipients. It is mostly concerned with the present and the immediate. Leaping-in relates to the leadership literature associated with control.

Care recipients, or followers in this situation, see the carer as a strong leader who knows how to manage the challenge. They can welcome the relief the carer provides in a difficult time or crisis; followers can step back and let someone else take over. Thomkins and Simpson say this can be constructive when the care recipients understand the need for help and view the carer as having the authority or expertise needed to solve the problem. But because leaping-in is a dominating kind of care it can also cause followers to develop a sense of vulnerability, irrelevance, or dependency. Tomkins and Simpson note a fine line may exist between the care receivers feeling relief and their feeling resentment regarding the intervention.

Importantly, Heidegger believes the present is not distinct from the past or the future. Therefore, the carer who leaps-in must be aware of the past and the future when the leaping-in occurs. As the authors state, the carer must “acknowledge and encompass what has been and what might be whilst being grounded in what is.” This implies that the care recipients need a way back into the situation once the need for the carer’s leaping-in is over. Thus, an effective caring leader balances the immediacy of need with concern for the future. In this sense, a caring leader not only rescues the care recipients but also helps reestablish their agency once the problem is solved.

According to Heidegger, care recipients experience this intervention as care only if the intervention “moves beyond displacement and substitution and into reinstatement or restoration, that is, if it balances immediacy of need with concern for the future.”

Leaping-in suggests immersion in matters that present themselves. Leaders who leap-in are absorbed in the current context. The danger in this, according to Heidegger, is that such leaders may go with the crowd, abstaining from critical reflection.

This going with the crowd becomes a central point. “If we are absorbed too fully or too easily, we lose the sense that there are other facets of existence, specifically for this analysis, other modes of knowing (and not-knowing) and other temporal concerns.”

The risk of ‘leaping-in’ is that we become insensitive to uncertainty and that our focus on the immediate blinds us “to a broader temporality, in which life is grasped in its entirety, as concerned with the past and the future even whilst it is accessible – experience-able – only from the present. If we lose or ignore these other aspects, our actions become automatic, because they are guided by what seems ‘normal’ or ‘natural’. We become disconnected from multiplicity and complexity, and unable to be, think, or operate on our own terms.”

When one is too absorbed in the present one risks falling prey to what Heidegger calls “‘the They’.” This “They” is perhaps best described as the prevailing concepts and representations of leadership, or more generally as the prevailing discourses of how things are supposed to be.  Tomkins and Simpson suggest that the core of this generally dominant discourse can be referred to as best practices in the leadership and organizational literature.

Tomkins and Simpson are making the point that much leadership scholarship pays significant attention to control, although that notion is increasingly challenged through complexity and relational approaches to leadership. They fully agree with Heidegger’s position that control is not too difficult, or too exhausting, or will not work. On the contrary, Heidegger warns about the opposite: “control is problematic because it is too easy, not exhausting enough, and all too likely to ‘work’ – at least in our current historical and cultural context.”

In other words, leaping-in immerses us in our everyday present. This makes it too easy to go with the crowd, to follow rules without reflection, to avoid considering what could be otherwise. This absorption with the present interferes with both temporality and knowing. Our actions too easily become automatic, become guided by what we see as normal or natural. “We become disconnected from multiplicity and complexity, and unable to think or operate on our own terms.”

The authors conclude their discussion of leaping-in by saying, “care is realized – and ‘leaping-in’ is counterbalanced – through a wariness of the obvious and the automatic; and a rich sense of temporal context, in which history, track record, and restitution and recovery all feature in one’s ‘management’ of the present. Without such offsetting, leadership intervention loses touch with intimation and moves into the realm of instruction, interpreting every challenge as a call for decisiveness over flexibility, certainty over ambiguity, control over complexity.”

Caring through leaping-ahead

In leaping-ahead the carer illustrates a range of future options that encourages the care recipients to connect in their own way to these various possibilities. This mode of intervention suggests, enables, and facilitates. It does not attempt to achieve a specific action or solution. Rather, it provides options that care recipients can consider.

This mode of intervention leans toward empowerment, while the leaping-in mode is oriented toward control. More specifically, Tomkins and Simpson suggest leaping-in somewhat maps with transactional leadership, while leaping ahead somewhat maps with transformational leadership. They admit, however, that such comparisons are not perfect.

Tomkins and Simpson see leaping-ahead as embracing three elements: anticipation, autonomy, and advocacy. The carer anticipates by considering the future, trying to predict and prevent problems. The carer gives care receivers the autonomy, the space and opportunity, to work things out for themselves. The carer stands up for the options and possibilities available. The authors believe these three elements can be crystallized into a single expression of empowerment.

Just as with leaping-in, leaping-ahead risks overshadowing other ways of leading. Because it focuses on a bigger picture, it may miss important grounded details and reality. It can overly focus on an aspirational future over a concrete present and see success as non-resolution, not solving problems. It may give care recipients too little or too much space. At its worst, it evidences a withdrawal of leadership. Leaping-ahead may succeed because it engages a bigger but less distinct picture, increasing care recipients’ desires for an unattainable future. Tomkins and Simpson suggest leaping-ahead potentially can mimic the worst aspects of heroic or charismatic leadership.

Beyond leaping: an ontological note

With no note of irony, Tomkins and Simpson say connecting Heidegger’s ontology of care to leadership is difficult. Being engaged solely in our daily absorption of life in the present obstructs our view of the past and compromises our ability to question and choose our own path toward the future. They analogize that we live as a bobbing cork in the waves of existence rather than being a figure that is swimming or diving. Such living is inauthentic because we simply mirror the possibilities in the world around us.

The authors muse that it may be “futile to model a Heideggerian caring leader because all kinds of ‘leaping’ are condemned to inauthenticity” and anything beyond this seems out of our reach. Nonetheless, they believe the multiplicities of temporality and knowing are illuminating because they are “reflected in the leadership practices of ‘leaping’.”

According to a Heideggerian analysis, a too-successful caring leadership will lead to insufficient discomfort because it will discourage us from an authentic engagement with care. This implies that many key concepts in the leadership literature must be approached carefully because they are clearer and more appealing than they seem. Tomkins and Simpson almost wonder whether a philosophically-informed leadership can be taught.

An overly casual view of caring leadership generates the idea that a caring leader is sympathetic, kind, and nice. But Tomkins and Sampson say that the Heideggerian caring leader “cannot be nice (or at least, not always), since niceness would be a denial of complexity and multiplicity – a dumbing down of ‘the They.’ In a Heideggerian world, compassion, kindness and niceness are neither necessary nor sufficient for care.”

Heideggerian caring leadership acknowledges the limitations of the known and the knowable. It embraces the possibility “there is ‘something more’ in which we may or may not be able to fathom.” As a practice, caring leadership tolerates ambivalence and resists closure. Although it focuses on action it also appreciates the range of possibilities and tolerates the anxiety generated by this range. Heideggerian analysis suggests that asking things what they are must be joined by contrasting what we know with absence. We must acknowledge “the limitations of the known and the knowable” and embrace “the possibility that there is ‘something more’ which we may or may not be able to fathom.”

Caring leadership provokes us “to be open to ways of knowing that are not mental or intellectual, including aesthetics and embodiment. Leadership is something we feel as much as know, particularly in relation to managing the anxieties of intervention/non-intervention. . .. It is thus fundamental to our engagement with, and construction of, the world through the medium of our bodies. If we loosen the stranglehold of the intellect to attend to what emerges in the disruption to sense-making, in the gaps in-between sense, we might find that other aspects of our lived experiences speak to us instead.”

Heideggerian caring emerges when we try to understand how our latent past and our future may indicate for us what matters most to us. In doing this we open up other aspects of our existence within which care emerges.

Concluding point

Tomkins and Sampson draw this concluding point: The most significant leadership question is how we approach the issue of control over ourselves. “Caring leadership seems first and foremost an organization of self rather than an organization of others, and this is how we view agency.” Quoting Joanne Ciulla’s reading of Heidegger, they say “care is ‘attention to one’s own presence in “the world’.”

Relative to organizations, the authors believe the agency of caring leadership is experienced by all in everyday encounters; it does not belong to a few people. Thus the agency of caring ranges from small instances of intervention to grander and more public interventions.

Comment

When I first read this paper, I found it difficult to make good connections with the leadership literature as well as the care ethics literature. Some reflection modified my position. This comment section largely focuses on the literature on leadership and care ethics and related topics such as mindfulness and agency.

Leadership literature

Much of what leaders do concerns (1) determining whether and when to intervene and, if intervention is deemed appropriate, deciding whether to (2) leap-in or (3) leap-ahead. While simple and short, this phrasing identifies a significant core of what it means to lead.

The analogy Tomkins and Simpson make relating leaping-in to transactional leadership and leaping-ahead to transformational leader seems weak. To me, transactional leadership is a series of one-offs relatively unconnected in intent one from the other. But the authors say Heidegger’s leaping-in must “acknowledge and encompass what has been and what might be whilst being grounded in what is.”

Similarly, if one believes, as do most scholars, that charisma is a necessary component of transformational leadership, then one must be wary of leaping-ahead becoming overwhelmingly aspirational with followers committing themselves to follow the leader without voicing opposition or even being concerned if the leader goes off track. In other words, the danger of leaping-ahead may be more that of a dysfunctional heroic or charismatic leader than that of a withdrawal of leadership.

The authors are on safer ground as they connect Heidegger’s caring leadership with models or theories of leadership such as complexity leadership, relational leadership, processual leadership, and distributive leadership.

My own sense is that the leadership scholar that most approaches the work in this paper is Donna Ladkin, especially her book, Rethinking Leadership. I am also reminded of Ann Cunliffe and Amanda Sinclair.

Ethics of care literature

The Heideggerian notion of caring leadership seems to be out of the mainstream regarding caring leadership. Tomkins and Simpson remark that in a “Heideggerian world, compassion, kindness, and niceness are neither necessary nor sufficient for care.” But concepts such as compassion, empathy, and sympathy carry across much of the care ethics literature. The care ethics literature often at least implicitly notes the importance of caring for the most vulnerable, although a wide range of vulnerability exists among people.

So, what takes the place of compassion et al. in Heideggerian caring? The best that I can come up with is “concern” and “engagement.” Concern for others motivates the Heideggerian caring leader to engage in practices that either take responsibility for encouraging or enabling others to solve problems. The leader takes responsibility for the intervention’s outcome while realizing the intervention’s impact may be uncertain.

Thus, Heideggerian caring leadership shares the ethics of caring’s focus on relationships and the avoidance of abstract rules and principles. Tomkins and Simpson declare that there can never be such a measurement instrument for caring leadership as there is for authentic leadership (the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire) and for many other leadership models. This comports with a principle in the ethics of care literature that principles are more problematic than deliberation.

Caring leadership is fragile – attempting to develop clear leadership concepts and programs must be approached with caution. The authors suggest that caring leadership perhaps cannot be taught, that perhaps it cannot be fully grasped because it involves “patternings – the multiplicities of temporality and knowing.”

The cautions raised by Tomkins and Simpson regarding the difficulties of both leaping-in and leaping-ahead relate somewhat to the importance of caring attitudes and caring actions in the ethics of care literature. This concerns the moral intentions of the carer relative to the care receivers. Care givers must always be wary of overpowering the care receivers since aspects of unequal skills, experience, stature, or capabilities always exist. Similarly, asymmetries between the carer and the care receivers often mark both leaping-in and leaping-ahead. The carer must be aware of these asymmetries.

On the other hand, there seems to be a significant weakness relative to caring attitudes and Heideggerian care. While caring attitudes are nice, care ethics posits that these attitudes must be morally valuable. To be morally valuable means stepping outside the instrumental means to some further end. The carer must have the intention of fulfilling the interest of moral persons. The carer must act within the context of moral wisdom.

In sum, perhaps the Heideggerian caring leader meets the minimal requirements of care ethics in a limited way. But it is more than doubtful whether such a leader would always well address the spirit or perhaps even the intent of care ethics in a central way.

Care ethics is fairly new and still being developed. From my vantage point, what it means to be a caring leader is even more so in the earliest stages of development. The caring leadership literature comes at the ethics of care from a variety of vantage points, generating widely varying perspectives that may hit various aspects of care ethics but not yet in a sound, central way.

Mindfulness

Tomkins and Simpson seem to take an ambivalent stance presence or mindfulness. In most instances, the leadership literature sees mindfulness as fully positive. Being mindful means living life in the present moment. Being mindful can be defined as present-moment awareness without judgment.

Christopher Reina*, for example, states that by cultivating mindfulness we can fully face that reality that we are living in. If we are not mindful, we can easily become prey to focusing on the past or the future, especially when we are constantly faced with a news environment filled with negativity and fear. When we are not mindful, not fully facing the present, we can be unconsciously overtaken fears and anxieties rooted in the past or the future. We can go through life reacting by default to the stimuli we are experiencing. If we are mindful, we can take the time to identify our core set of principles and spend time intentionally researching issues and understanding the various sides of issues to go beyond status-quo thinking.

But Tomkins and Simson say leaping- in risks making us insensitive to uncertainty. Focusing on the immediate “can blind us to a broader temporality, in which life is grasped in its entirety, as concerned with the past and the future even whilst it is accessible – experience-able – only from the present. If we lose or ignore those other aspects, our actions become automatic, because they are guided by what seems normal or natural. We become disconnected from multiplicity and complexity, and unable to be, to think, or operate on our own terms.”

In other words, our focus on the immediate and the present lets the prevailing discourses, narratives of how things are supposed to be, fully absorb us. We end up paying little attention to “what has been handed down to us from the past.” We “compromise our ability to question and choose our own path toward the future.” In their pithy statement, “to ask of things what they are is only half an inquiry.”

The authors state that “what is left out by the continuous reorientation onto what is happening at the moment is our latent past and future which indicates what matters to us: our ends, hopes, fears. This is very similar to our sense of caring leadership; it is the opening up of these other aspects of human existence that care emerges.”

Agency

The authors’ statement that the prevailing leadership models have a deficit of agency initially surprised me. But they see agency as self-control. Care requires the cultivation of the self. The authors see the agency of caring leadership as “something experienced by all organizational members in everyday organizational encounters, not something which signifies leadership as belonging to a few key people. The agency we are invoking is that involved in small instances of intervention with which those in leadership positions are more publicly engaged. To the extent, therefore, our view of care takes us towards the concept of distributed leadership.”

This reminds me of Margaret Wheatley’s notion of islands of sanity – what is required is distributed leadership in the sense that multiple people possess and exercise agency in various places within an organization.

The second part of this post will attempt to apply Tomkins and Simpson’s Heideggerian version of caring leadership to former President Trump’s leadership.