Ethical Leadership: Is it the real life, is it just fantasy?

The Leader as Gardener. An Essay on Horticultural Leadership

The Argonauts’ Thinktank — led by Christoph Quarch, initiator of the Third Platonic Academy — publishes here its first essay on how courageous leaders can gain a new, more ethical perspective on managing their organizations by thinking of themselves less as masters of a machine and more as tenders of a growing garden.

Some laud ethical leadership as an advanced art-form. Others denigrate the pursuit of ethics in leadership as impractical and meaningless in reality. In truth, this whole dispute is infertile. Both perspectives are based on an outmoded, intellectually dubious paradigm. They interpret leadership as a technical process, not as something holistic and sustainable. This technocratic mindset dates from the 18th century and is no longer well-suited to current knowledge or today’s leadership challenges. Holistic and sustainable leadership should take into account the realities of human life and develop from them an ethos of entrepreneurial action which stands the test of time and cultivates a new way of thinking that more effectively facilitates long-term growth. Achieving this requires a paradigm shift in which managers see themselves less as engineers and more as gardeners.

Introductory remarks

Anyone who holds a management position must know where to go. Without an idea of where others are going to go, no one will be able to do justice to this task. The challenge is that there is always more than one possible direction to follow. Otherwise no one would need guidance! Leadership is always faced with the question of which direction to choose or, more precisely: which trend-setting path a manager should take to fulfill his leadership role. This inevitably brings ethical questions into play, because ethics claims to determine what is decisive and trend-setting for human action — or, at least, what should be. Every manager cannot avoid dealing with ethics. Leadership which lives up to its name is therefore always ethical leadership.

But this raises the critical question all the more urgently: What is truly decisive? Are these ethical norms or commandments? Or is it the fickle market which should shape decisions? Or is it life itself: To borrow from Freddy Mercury: Is this the real life? Or is this just fantasy?

Thinking

First of all, we need to be clear about one thing: Nothing we do goes without saying. Everything we do is based on the way we think. The way we think is the product of a long and intricate history of the human mind. Or, to be clear, not the human mind but a specific human mind: one’s own. It is obvious that people at different times and in different cultures thought differently than people of Western Late Modernism. They had a different view of the world, they had a different view of people, they had a different understanding of business and what a company or other organization of human beings really signifies. It is hardly possible to judge whether one view of the world or of humanity is better than another. The only thing that is certain is that they are often very, very different.

Our way of thinking can be considered as something like the matrix of our actions. Or — if you prefer a more contemporary metaphor — it is something like the operating system of our brain. This means that our way of thinking predates our entire behavior towards the world, mostly without us even being aware of it. In fact, we rarely ask ourselves how we think or, for that matter, how we follow our routines and habits. These in turn usually follow the traditional ways of thinking of others, or what one does as a matter of course. One does not usually think about thinking — at least not as long as one gets along with it in the world. This will be the case if the world thinks like you do. In this case, you will be in concord with the world.

But wait. Because we don’t usually reflect on our operating system — our way of thinking — we rarely ask ourselves the fundamental questions. Such as: Does our thinking correspond to reality? Or does our mind-set obscure reality? Does it possibly disfigure reality? Are we actually thinking correctly? In fact, we have every reason to believe or worry that the latter might not be the case. At the beginning of the 21st century, humanity is faced with a series of gigantic challenges, all of which are the consequences of our common thinking:

• the threatening ecological disaster with the possible extinction of species, global warming and pollution of the oceans;
• a disruptive information technology that offers us more opportunities and challenges than we can possibility digest or accommodate, mentally and morally;
• a global economy that staggers from one crisis to the next, generating enormous social distortions.

Indeed, we have ample reason to believe or worry that our way of thinking distorts the planet, endangers our social coexistence and ultimately damages our economy. Instead of living in harmony with reality, our planets, and our fellow humans, our way of thinking distances us further and further from real life. In fact, it often drives us into dead ends from which we can no longer navigate or, for that matter, emerge.

In such a situation, it is of little help to formulate abstract norms and values in codes of ethics or codes of conduct that are intended to orient our actions. Nothing will help as long as the basic matrix of our thinking, the fundamentals of our operating systems, are not called into question. Ethical leadership can therefore not be content with merely formulating new rules of conduct for companies. Rather, there is no getting around looking at the matrix of one’s own thinking and asking ourselves whether it allows us to open up the world in which we live in such a way that, by our actions, we no longer endanger ourselves, our fellow humans, and our planet..

Let us therefore ask:

What is the matrix of our thinking? How can it be described? What does our thinking really measure or express?

to be continued

Dr. phil. Christoph Quarch is Chief Philosophy Officer of The Argonauts, a community for courageous leaders and their organizations. He applies ancient insights that are increasingly relevant today, providing wisdom and answers to key questions such as how to discover our true selves and what it means to be fully alive. Christoph is the author of the bestseller ‘Plato’s Metaphysics of Soul’ and is regarded as Europe’s most down-to-earth philosopher.