Academics have spent decades debating not only the ethical component of leadership but the moral one. Robert Greenleaf, among others, coined the term “servant leadership”, which has given rise to a whole school of thought on the subject; and Warren Bennis, one of the twentieth century’s intellectual reference points on leadership, published a book called precisely Moral Leadership — a line of thinking another great teacher, James MacGregor Burns, also took up.
One can argue about whether leadership has a moral component in and of itself. But if the debate centres on the person of the leader, then the person as such certainly does carry that moral element, so it would be reasonable to conclude from the outset that leadership contains that moral perspective within it.
Perhaps that is why the figure of Adolf Hitler has provoked so much reflection among writers and academics. Nobody doubts that Hitler dragged, or pushed, an entire country towards his “cause” — I use “drag” and “push” rather than “inspire” or “draw in” to make plain the dark side of the charismatic leadership Hitler represented, just as I use the word “cause” and not “vision”, since it is vision that great leaders embody.
In any event, if the academic debate on leadership establishes anything, it is the importance of the who — of the leader as a person. When Daniel Goleman popularised his brilliant article What Makes a Leader, what he actually unravelled was not the what but the interior of the who, because it is the who of leadership, the being of the leader, that represents the paradigm of leadership like nothing else.
It is no surprise, then, that Goleman opens his article with self-awareness and self-knowledge: the inner knowledge the subject has of that who. In short, the being of the leader — or, put another way, the leader’s self-determination. On which note, recent weeks brought the success of the golfer Jon Rahm, who won the US Open at the age of 26.
Nobody on the tour doubted Rahm’s quality or talent, but he always understood that his leadership began on the inside, with his person, with the who, and that he would therefore only stay in the fight if he was true to himself, to his deepest self. In 2018 he put it like this: “I’m still me, the same, Jon Rahm, from Barrika. And that’s how I have to be, with the way I react to what happens to me, with the good and the bad, with my flare-ups. That’s part of me. And I haven’t changed. […] It’s who I am. And if it weren’t, I wouldn’t have got where I’ve got. I’m very clear about that, I’m not going to forget it and I’m not going to forget who I am. I can’t hold back what I feel, and I don’t want to. You have to feel things out on the course.”
Rahm’s words — perhaps a premonition of the sweetness of success — not only return us to Goleman’s self-knowledge and self-awareness but point directly at that who of leadership, at the person of the leader as the subject of leadership.
Aristotle, of course, held that the human being is by nature a political and social animal (zoon politikon), and we can certainly speak of people in similar terms when we turn to ethics and morals: ethical and moral by nature. Those two elements, ethics and morals, are inseparable from the person, from the who, who as the subject of leadership carries them across into leadership when exercising it and making it happen — Goleman’s “do” as much as his “make”.
In the age of conscious capitalism, and of conscious leadership, Goleman’s arguments about (self-)awareness would therefore appear to play a central part. Which means that at the root of conscious capitalism lies nothing other than the person — the leader — aware of themselves in human, and therefore ethical and moral, terms. Perhaps for that reason Goleman’s question, What Makes a Leader, ought to be recast as Who Is the Leader?, since the leader is the who, and the what is merely the consequence of their being a leader.
The question becomes critical when carried over into fields such as sustainability, because “the sustainable” refers to the what and not to the who — not to the person at the heart of sustainability. Responsible, sustainable leadership is in the end the consequence of something much deeper: self-leadership, the leadership of one’s own being, which is leadership for the simple reason that it rests on that being, on the who.
Seen in this light, the ethical and moral component of leadership is more than obvious, because it points not only at leadership but, above all, at the person — at the who. For it is not leadership that matters but the who of leadership, which is in the end its what: the who, the subject.
Dr Juan Manuel Roca Rodríguez, Director of the management and business school consultancy LeaderactiON. Lecturer at CMI Business School.
