Can literature lessons promote leaders# ethical awareness?

Citation

Leavy, B. (2007), "Can literature lessons promote leaders# ethical awareness?", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 35 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2007.26135bae.001

Can literature lessons promote leaders# ethical awareness?

Can literature lessons promote leaders’ ethical awareness?

Brian Leavy is AIB Professor of Strategic Management at Dublin City University Business School (brian.leavy@dcu.ie) and a Contributing Editor of Strategy & Leadership.

Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership through Literature

Joseph L. Badaracco, JrHarvard Business Schol Press, 2006, 198 pp.

Thank you, Enron and Arthur Andersen. The depth of your misconduct shocked the world and awakened us to the reality that the business world was on the wrong track, worshiping the wrong idols, and headed for self-destruction (Bill George in Authentic Leadership).

The corporate misconduct that surfaced in the early years of the new millennium has been a wake-up call for western business. Something is clearly wrong with the way that we have been educating our most promising leadership talent and preparing them intellectually, emotionally and morally, for their responsibilities. We now know, for example, that Enron did not lack for smart people in its highest ranks, or for the latest in specialized management knowledge and techniques. Nonetheless, the leadership fostered a culture of creative criminality. Other examples of leadership gone wrong are plentiful. So what was missing in the ethical development process of our leaders and followers and where can now we go to find it?

Over half a century ago, a number of articles explored the role that the liberal arts might play in the education of business leaders and the views of John Paul Getty were reflective of their tenor. In How to be a Successful Executive, he argued that too many young professionals were “devoting an inordinately large portion of their academic lives to the study of ‘useful disciplines,’ while ignoring those subjects that aid the individual in developing into a multidimensional human being.” He concluded that his “studies in the humanities” were those of “the greatest value” to him.

In their recent analysis of how our business schools have been losing their way, leadership gurus Warren Bennis and James O’Toole expressed strong doubts that their topic “can be understood properly without a solid grounding in the humanities.” The question remains of how best to bring the humanistic perspective back into the education of our business leaders. This is where Joseph Badaracco’s Questions of Character seeks to contribute, and the author, the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School, seems well prepared to address this challenge. In two of his previous books, Defining Moments and Leading Quietly, he had already established himself as an authority on the role of values in leadership effectiveness, and in Questions of Character he extends this interest further with an examination of the part that the study of literature can play in this important area of leadership development. His latest book is based on ten years of experience in using literature as an alternative to more traditional business cases in teaching leadership on both MBA and executive education programs, and it aims to bring some of the benefits of this approach to a wider audience.

The tutorial that he has developed for us here is built around eight “questions of character” for any aspiring leader:

1. 1.

   Do I have a good dream?

2. 2.

   How flexible is my moral code?

3. 3.

   Are my role models unsettling?

4. 4.

   Do I really care?

5. 5.

   Am I ready to take responsibility?

6. 6.

   Can I resist the flow of success?

7. 7.

   How well do I combine principles and pragmatism?

8. 8.

   What is sound reflection?

The first four are particularly pertinent in the early stages of a career, the fifth focuses on a key “turning point” for leaders as they ready themselves to take the reins, and the last three tend to arise with “particular acuity” later in a leader’s development. The idea for this work came directly out of insights picked up in researching the two earlier books, where he learned that “the hardest tests for leaders challenge their characters as much as their skills” and that the “difference between success and failure” in a leadership position often comes down to “clarity about who one is.” This kind of self-knowledge usually comes from meeting again and again the tests of character that leaders repeatedly face over the course of their careers, and their capacity to learn from them.

How much of this can be simulated in a classroom or book, and how much must be left to the school of hard knocks? The author is quick to acknowledge that the best way to learn about leadership is usually through experience, but the lessons can often be “costly,” “narrow and skewed” and “learned too late,” so the classroom route seems also worth a try. The aim of his ten-year endeavor has been “to find stories and questions about stories that cast a strong light on the recurring tests of character faced by men and women in positions of responsibility” that will enable aspiring leaders to “examine and test their own characters – by looking at themselves in the mirror of compelling fictional characters.”

To see how well it works, let’s take a closer look at some of these questions and also at the stories that the author has chosen to help explore their implications. A good dream “is a crucial resource for a leader because great businesses, great ideas and great accomplishments usually originate in an individual’s deepest aspirations.” So what are our deepest aspirations and are they right for us?

Badaracco selects Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman to help us probe more deeply into this issue. It is a story that has touched the hearts of millions the world over and has rarely failed to make its mark. So where are the lessons for leaders? According to Badaracco, the story of Willy Loman puts two propositions to us, one “thought-provoking” and the other “deeply disturbing.” The first illustrates in a compelling way how much our dreams can drive us, the second how far our lives can be “poisoned” by pursuit of the wrong dreams. Miller’s great play is often interpreted as the dark side of the American dream, as what can happen when people define their success in life mainly in terms of money, power and status. However, Badaracco sees the play as more concerned about the human condition, and what can happen to anyone stuck in the pursuit of the wrong dreams or in trying to live their dreams through others. In this respect, Willy is really not that much different than the rest of us, which is why the play makes such an impact. The following observation by actor Brian Dennehy, who played Willy on Broadway, brings this home: “I see extremely sophisticated, very successful New Yorkers with absolutely no questions about who they are, how far they’ve come, and how right their lives are” break down in “tears, their shoulders shaking, just ready to go home.” Badaracco shows us how deeper insights can be gleaned using Death of a Salesman by asking ourselves such related questions as how conscious are we of our most potent aspirations, which dreams are we prepared to abandon, and which of our dreams are really our own? According to Badaracco:

Willy’s story suggests that, from time to time, leaders need to look carefully, even critically, at their deepest hopes and aspirations. The hard question for them is whether their dreams are healthy or not – for themselves and for those who depend on their leadership and judgment.

Badaracco explores three early career stage questions in a similar way. The tragic story of African tribal leader Okonkwo, in Chinua Achebe’s book, Things Fall Apart, provides challenging questions about the nature a leader’s moral code. “On some occasions, the clearest sign of a good moral code” can be “flexibility rather than firmness,” says Badaracco. To examine the nature of the most effective role models for up-and-coming leaders he draws upon the novella, Blessed Assurance, by Allan Gurganus. Good role models, he says, “do far more than provide clear, inspiring examples. They also work in complex psychological and emotional ways – to unsettle leaders, create permanent tensions in their lives, impel them forward, and make them struggle.” In a similar vein, Badaracco uses the story of Hollywood mogul Monroe Stahr, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon, to question how leaders find real meaning in their work, what it means to really care about what they do, the price they are often willing to pay, psychologically and emotionally, to make a difference in the world, and why they find the toughest challenges so irresistible.

Badaracco skillfully mines a number of other stories for relevant insights. The hazards posed to leaders well into their careers by the “flow of success” and the pressure of expectations are examined through the tale of Tony Lowder in I Come as a Thief by Louis Auchincloss. For leaders trying to find the right balance between principle and pragmatism Badaracco explores playwright Robert Bolt’s portrayal of Sir Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons. And using Antigone by Sophocles, Badaracco urges readers to contemplate what can happen when two leaders, each guided by deeply-held values that appear to be in conflict, find themselves at odds, with tragic consequences, and how this might have been avoided.

All in all, Questions of Character clearly demonstrates the kind of benefits that the study of good literature can add to leadership education and to the ongoing process of self-development. The astute questions for leaders posed by Badaracco also shows us why these benefits are unlikely to flow from just sending our MBA or executive students off to English Literature 101 classes.

Literature has the potential to move us emotionally and sub-consciously in ways beyond the intellectual, heightening our awareness and self-knowledge, making us look afresh at the patterns of our everyday existence, stimulating our imagination and deepening our empathy with our fellow man; all potentially valuable payoffs for leaders and aspiring leaders with the inclination and patience to give it a try. As the great short-story writer, Flannery O’Connor, once explained, many “have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.” It is this experiential quality, enhanced by the guidance of a skilled ethicist, that makes the exploration of literature in Questions of Character uniquely valuable to leaders.

Exploring Conrad’s The Secret Sharer

To highlight a key turning point for aspiring leaders, that of taking up the reins for the first time, Badaracco considers Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer. It is the story of a young un-named sea captain who unexpectedly finds himself in charge of his first vessel on the homeward leg of a return voyage, and is a stranger to both his ship and his crew. Early in the voyage he allows on board a stowaway, who convinces him that he has been wrongly accused of murdering a fellow mariner on another vessel. The captain hides him away in his own cabin, where he becomes his “secret sharer.” For an executive audience the story works on a number of levels. The most obvious is the moral issue of whether or not the captain was right to offer this man sanctuary, and having done so, not to take the crew into his confidence. This brings out the challenge of multiple, often seemingly contradictory obligations, and how they might be resolved. It also illustrates what it means to be ready to take real responsibility the first time beyond just stepping into the customary duties of a higher role. At a deeper level, the secret sharer also works as a literary device for bringing out the new captain’s own secret self, his insecurities about his readiness for leadership, and his concern to keep these hidden, as the experienced crew that he inherits tries to take his measure and read his every move.