Leadership and wholeness
“I suppose I’ve created an atmosphere here where I’m a friend first, boss second. Probably an entertainer third.” David Brent, The Office
Mark’s last post, Corporate Bodies or Corporate Souls, asked whether it was possible to “bring your whole self to work”, and if so under what conditions. He mentioned that people in leadership positions “might find that they are more often having to act as an avatar for the legal person for the organisation … to be the corporate body”. That can mean that showing up as their whole, authentic, vulnerable selves might be quite fraught with challenge when colleagues, partners and clients are looking for reassurance about the stability and strength of the organisation.
So, can you really bring your whole self to work and still be an effective leader? Especially if you aren’t looking to build a company culture around your personality (there are are only so many Elon Musks the world can cope with!), how can people show up as themselves but still inhabit and represent the corporate body?
This all comes down partly to what it means to lead, and what we mean by leadership.
McKinsey & Co (to start with some of the folk most embedded in the current system), say that leadership is “a set of mindsets and behaviors that aligns people in a collective direction, enables them to work together and accomplish shared goals, and helps them adjust to changing environments”, and (more evocatively?) that “leadership is enabling others to accomplish something they couldn’t do on their own.”
Traditionally, leadership (and indeed much thinking about company structure) was modelled on the command and control style of a military leader, passing orders down a clearly defined structure1. That is outmoded now, even for the McKinseys of the world, and you’re more likely to see people talking about “servant” or “service” leadership where leaders see their role as being in service of the people in their organisation, asking themselves “How do I make my team members’ lives easier—physically, cognitively, and emotionally?”
It feels hard to imagine either a command and control style boss or a servant-style one being able to show up as their whole, human self. There’s little room for vulnerability or anxiety in the military-style operation, and what happens when a servant leader’s needs and desires for an easier life are in tension with those of her team?
Maybe the problem is with traditional conceptions of leadership and the idea leadership is something one person does, with the rest following. Many in the “new ways of working” space talk about creating “leaderful” organisations (Shared Assets certainly does!). We should be striving for organisations that “act as communities where everyone participates in leading, not serially but concurrently and collectively”.
Models such as Sociocracy or Holacracy provide frameworks for this different style of working, where power and leadership are decentralised across an organisation. Frederic Laloux’s seminal “Reinventing Organisations” book outlines this movement for leaderful organising in detail. But for all the success stories there seem to be lots of challenges and outright failures - indeed a number of the case studies in Laloux’s book reverted to more traditional management and leadership styles after the initiating leaders left.
I’ve been enjoying Tom Nixon’s work recently. Drawing on Peter Koenig’s research, he says that all of this ignores the idea of “source”, that every creative endeavour has an individual initiator - its source - and that their particular role in setting an achieving a vision is vital to acknowledge. Lack of clarity about who the source is (or a reluctance on the part of the source to take responsibility for their initiative) can lead to stagnation and failed change efforts. He says that a source needs other people to help bring their vision to life, and therefore, I guess, the source must bring at least a version of their whole selves to work. He sees that this “creative authorship” of a vision by an individual person is something that is often missed in the desire for more collective ways of working - we shy away from the idea that individual leaders are vital even in a collective setting.
Is this a way of thinking about leadership that is neither dominating of, or subservient to, the needs of an organisation and its people? Nixon stresses the idea that “sources” need to really focus on their own personal development, and that is echoed in this classic article about the challenges of self management systems - “The real work comes when we have to relearn how to relate on personal and interpersonal levels and look at the project of self-governance in the context of our full human lives.”
All of this - especially in the realm of self management and disrupting traditional organisational patterns - requires a large dollop of self awareness. If we aren’t aware of (and working on) our own vulnerabilities, triggers and default reactions, then bringing our whole selves to work risks dumping a whole lot of unprocessed stuff on our colleagues. If we struggle with productive conflict in our personal lives, we will certainly shy away from it at work. This brings to mind something that comes up in lots of parenting literature - that we need to cultivate the ability to “respond, not react”. Maybe we can be our whole selves as leaders but we need to hone the skill of pausing and considering before sharing.
What do you think? Can leaders bring their whole selves to work? Let us know in the comments below or by using our voicenote feature!
We’ll definitely be covering some of this in our “Patron Saints of Organisational Weirdness” occasional series!