What philosophy can teach the modern leader in 2020?

To date management practices and conventions have evolved through the application of two impressive bodies of knowledge, economics and psychology. Economics asks the question how can we use scarce resources efficiently? Psychology asks the question what makes people tick and how can I motivate them to do what I want them to do? Both economics and psychology have been used to great effect to improve the quality of life for many around the world. But neither asks the question, what is the right thing to do, what is good?

Can philosophy teach the modern leader in 2020?

Economics and psychology can both be used in pursuit of good or bad, either consciously or accidentally. It is as if we are running our organisations based on a two-legged stool. The third leg is philosophy, the third leg asks the question, what is good?

Pursuing this idea and bringing the thinking of the great philosophers to bear on contemporary management practice, we question much established wisdom. What is the point of corporate values? Can you really empower other people? Does cascade communication lead to greater understanding?

There is much talk, management time and resources tied up in pursuing actions to inculcate corporate values, to empower staff to take the initiative, and to communicate top down to make ensure everyone knows what they need to do. When we look through a philosophical lens we see that in each case much of our current thinking and practice is flawed. Take corporate values for example.

These days most organisations have a set of corporate values. Occasionally there’s an organisation that does not. And amazingly the organisation functions, individuals behave in honourable and conscientious ways.

Where organisations do have sets of corporate values most people are aware that they exist but unable to recite them. Yet again, amazingly their organisations function and individuals behave honourably and conscientiously. A quick look at most corporate values will reveal surprising unanimity. Minor variations on: integrity, customer first, pursuit of excellence, teamwork and other such moral truisms. No one has the values: lie every day; put customers last; pursue mediocrity, and never co-operate. You get the point. Values statements contain no new information. It is not as if I did not know that it was a good thing to act with integrity and so on.

Corporations do not have values, people do. And 99% of people have excellent values, they are good people. They were brought up by good parents, they had good friends, they had good siblings, they had good teachers, and by the time we meet them in organisations their values are set and for the 1% of unfortunate people who did not have a values driven upbringing, trying to shift them through a set of reductive motherhood and apple pie statements is not going to help.

But even more pertinent is the erroneous pursuit of developing corporate values and printing them in the annual statement, producing mouse mats and T-shirts emblazoned with them, etc.  These activities demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding: values do not solve problems they create them. They create moral dilemmas.

Take the moral dilemma we are all familiar with, the need to be honest and the need to be sensitive. This simple dilemma has given rise to the concept of the white lie. Here’s another, the need to be transparent and the need to protect confidentiality. How do we square that circle? There is no formulaic answer, there are no set of rules. It is a moral dilemma. It has to be addressed in each instance in dialogue and conversation, it requires judgement, an answer to the question, how do I decide between two competing goods? This is the job of leadership.

A decision between a good and an evil is not a decision, it is what’s known as a no-brainer. A decision between two goods, a decision you have to live with, to argue for, to justify in terms of your moral framework – that is a leadership decision.  To make decisions and collaborate within a morally pluralistic world, to engage with others whose values may be different, not better or worse, but different – this is the job of leadership.

Leaders in every walk of life are frequently confronted with decisions that raise challenging moral and ethical issues, by bringing a philosophical perspective to sit alongside the economic and psychological they are better equipped to answer the leadership question, what is right, what is good and why are we doing what we do?

By David Lewis, who is Programme Director for Executive Education at London Business School and co-author of What Philosophy Can Teach You About Being a Better Leader, published by Kogan Page, priced £14.99.

See our review of the book here.

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