Leadership As Relation: The Art and Science of Heart-Led Leadership

By Martin W Kettelhut

"In the midst of chaos caused by misleading claims about the most fundamental domains of our existence-health, justice, economics, truth-this book is a must-read. Dr Kettelhut grounds the leadership we are so wanting in the empiricism and collaborative community which is the scientific method. Pass this one on to your congressperson, and your ch

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manuscripts LLC
• Release date: Jun 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889260752

Book preview

Leadership as Relation

Leadership as Relation

The Art and Science of Heart-Led Leadership

Martin W. Kettelhut, PhD

Copyright © 2024 Martin W. Kettelhut, PhD

All rights reserved.

Leadership as Relation

The Art and Science of Heart-Led Leadership

ISBN

979-8-88926-075-2 Ebook

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I. How We Got Here: Leadership and Listening

Chapter 1. What Has Informed Our Views of Leadership

Chapter 2. What Has Informed Our View of Listening

Part II. Foundations of the Relational Science of Leadership

Chapter 3. The One and the Many

Chapter 4. Nominalism in Name Only

Chapter 5. Fixing In on True Leadership

Chapter 6. The Scientific Method

Chapter 7. Essentials of the Science of Leadership

Chapter 8. Causal Power in the Leadership Triangle

Part III. Leadership Dialogues

Chapter 9. Selfish and Selfless

Chapter 10. Love, Leadership, and Money

Chapter 11. Faith, Leadership, and the Internet: Dialogue with Erick de Moura

Chapter 12. Hope, Leadership, and Nature

Part IV. Participate! (A Workbook)

Chapter 13. Purpose: Introduction

Chapter 14. Purpose: Listen for Your Place in the Natural Order

Chapter 15. Presence: Listening Can Shift Your Greatest Challenge

Chapter 16. Power: Accomplishment in Time

Chapter 17. Passion: Listen for Fulfillment

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

To my brothers, David and Jonathan.

Introduction

Fail to honor people, they fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will all say, ‘We did this ourselves.’

—Lao Tzu

In spring 1996, I sat at the desk in my ninth-floor apartment in Philadelphia smoking cigarette after cigarette, chewing my nails to the quick. I didn’t know what to do with myself. This went on for weeks. I had almost finished writing my dissertation but hit a wall. I could not motivate myself to finish.

Over the last sixteen years, I’d gotten a taste for the academic life: researching, submitting papers for publication, and competing for teaching positions. The future—were I to stay the course—entailed spending most of my time alone grading papers, reading, writing, and striving to become the sole expert on some topic and hence tenurable. I also faced the abysmal question of what difference a career in philosophy would make in the end, real-world issues and academic philosophy rarely rubbing elbows. I felt a bit like Hesse’s Josef Knecht. I doubted if others would even care to corroborate the exquisite abstractions of my glass bead games.¹

When my friend Mark asked me what I might do with my life if not stay in academia, I reflected long and hard, trying to find hope. It had become a genuine question, not just a hypothetical one. The more I thought about it, the more I felt I wanted to keep doing what I was doing but in a different context.

I want to be a philosopher of the marketplace, I thought, like Socrates was. I want to think critically about real-world challenges and converse with society’s movers and shakers about actual policy, real strategy, and better outcomes.

Without having the slightest clue as to what life as a philosopher of the marketplace would look like in the twenty-first century, I aligned with my heart of hearts: I love philosophy, and I want to make a measurable impact working closely with other people. In that moment, I committed to a life from which I have not wavered since.

My choice led me to coaching, and my view of leadership has developed from observing what actually works for leaders at home, in business, and in the community over the last quarter-century. What Lao Tzu knew 2,600 years ago, and what will be the cornerstone of this study, is leadership is not about the leader. It’s about empowering others. Stephen Covey’s habit number five of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People echoes this same wisdom:

Seek first to understand and then to be understood.

²

This is the foundation of leadership upon which we must build if we are to empower good leadership within, to follow good leadership, and to lead our lives toward a future that works well for everyone.

My client George serves as a good example to introduce our approach here. George comes to his coaching session very discouraged because, although he’s been hired to improve the operations of his mortgage company, he can’t get the key players to show up to meetings. Those same players haven’t implemented changes he’s asked them to, so he feels ineffective. He doubts he has what it takes to succeed in effecting the improvements needed to increase company profitability.

Suddenly, he interrupts the coaching session because he’s got to get to his son’s soccer practice. I ask if I can meet him there so we can continue talking about his leadership while we watch the game. Okay, he says, but I’ll need to keep my attention on my son.

I understand, I say, noting how he leads.

As we’re observing the scrimmage, the fullback pivots his body to show George’s son, Jay (who’s playing outside-right), an opening in the defense where he intends to kick the ball so that Jay can shoot the goal. Maybe, I say to George, inspired by the game, instead of making this about you (telling them what to do, figuring out what to say, doubting yourself), you’ll effect the changes needed if you focus on empowering those key players at the office to win at their games.

What if, instead of making leadership about the individual, we saw that leadership is whoever and whenever we listen for community and for the future, like the fullback did when he pivoted and lobbed the ball into position for Jay to shoot the goal?

Or think of how Abraham Lincoln listened to his team of rivals cabinet for unifying policies.³ Three of his cabinet members had previously run against Lincoln in the 1860 election: Attorney General Edward Bates, Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and Secretary of State William H. Seward. Listening to their disparate perspectives helped Lincoln fashion the most symbiotic way forward.

Similarly, Nelson Mandela used part of his time in jail to learn the languages of his oppressors and invited his rivals onto his cabinet once he was released and became president.⁴ Mandela’s cabinet included not only Frederik Willem de Klerk and his white party, but also Mandela’s main Black rival, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, whose Zulu Inkatha party had waged bloody battles with the African National Congress, leaving thousands dead.⁵

My coaching clients (CEOs, entrepreneurs, managers, partners, and parents) often ask me for guidance on how to lead their companies, teams, or families. Generally, they want clarity on these issues:

• What needs to change;

• What actions to take;

• How to communicate effectively; and

• Answering, Do I even belong in the position of leader?

Notice the assumptions entailed here:

• I’m supposed to know what to do.

• I need to do something.

• Nothing I say will make this happen.

• I shouldn’t even be in this position; I’m an imposter.

In the coaching relationship, my clients lead me to these, the questions at the source of what hamstrings their businesses, so I can then lead them out of the woods to success. Neither of us (coach nor client) is always the leader. We share leadership.

Perhaps the reason anyone in the position to lead gets confounded is because they’ve been taught they’re supposed to possess certain characteristics or exhibit special behaviors that make an individual a good leader. Yet none of the models of leadership they see in their own superiors feels authentic or shows evidence of being effective in the long run.

• Authoritarians lead with their own personal agenda.

• Democratic processes take forever and overlook minority needs.

• Laissez-fair is just another word for chaos.

Today’s leaders are experiencing a leadership identity crisis.

⁶

Leaders today face new challenges due to the speed of technological, social, and economic change. Do these new challenges call for a new breed of leaders?

⁷

We can measure the current leadership crisis in business results. Rasmus Hougaard observes, A 2016 Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of managers demonstrate a high level of talent for managing others—meaning a shocking 82 percent of managers aren’t very good at leading people. Gallup estimated that this lack of leadership capability costs US corporations up to $550 billion annually.⁸

In my experience, wherever we observe an absence of leadership at home, work, or in the community, it is because there is no real relationship between leadership and team.

What if leadership isn’t about knowing the answers oneself, solving the problem alone, communicating differently from the others, or separating oneself in any way?

An admin knows he’s in the presence of leadership when management asks what will make it easier for him to do his job well. We know leadership is alive when friends and relatives intervene in an addict’s life. A child feels her mother’s leadership when her mom moves from simply saying, No, get away from the oven! to teach her daughter how to bake a pie.

Leadership isn’t about the individual. It’s about empowering others. Leadership lives in relationship.

The person in the corporation who moves messages between middle management and the C-suite, between the mailroom and the corner office, is a leader, making connections crucial for the best decision-making.⁹ As is the teacher who puts aside the paper she needs to write in order to get tenured and instead stays late to help students pass their exams and get well placed in the work world.

These are examples of leadership that make a sustained difference in our lives.

The Future of Leadership Is Relational

In this book, we will trace the roots of our traditional concept of leadership as a set of traits (like boldness, intelligence, detachment, likeability, and others) possessed by an individual. These roots go back to the days when princes and bishops—those born into it with the most power, money, or knowledge—were recognized as leaders. But we’ve changed.

First part of my hypothesis: Leadership is relational. These examples show that leadership isn’t fixed in one person but is naturally shared. In fact, not only does the type of leadership shift with our need, but furthermore, true leadership also shifts from one person to the other.

Second part of my hypothesis: The leadership relation is guided by the future we’ve mutually agreed to, meaning the leadership relation is three-fold—leader, follower, future. Consider: If it’s either you or me who’s going to have to get us up at 5:00 a.m. for swim practice, then one of us is forced to be the master and the other the slave, and neither is inspired. But if we’ve united on a plan for the team to win gold at the upcoming meet, then it’s that future that gets us both out of bed and organizes our actions.

Third part of my hypothesis: Leadership is a public good. Not unlike the sun, it is an infinite resource, available to everyone. If you build a solar panel over my house and try to sell the power back to me, you exploit me and monopolize a public good, the sun. Similarly, if you gerrymander me out of having a say in the matter, then tell me which books my children can read, that’s not leadership.

In part 3, we will listen closely to three different mediums in which we currently live—money, the internet, and our natural resources—for the ways we are stuck in our leadership relationship due to individualism. Then we’ll explore openings for the future of each of these mediums. Chapters 11 and 12, especially, show a shift in orientation to leadership is already afoot, to which I hope the foundational considerations in this book will have contributed.

Fourth part of my hypothesis regarding leadership: What we want to listen for in our homes, our workplaces, our governing bodies—when we’re listening for leadership, which we so desperately are at this point in history—is that famous trio of love, faith, and hope; three Divine sentiments. These are the real sources of leadership’s causal power, its ability to effect change.

It’s not about following the individual who’s loving, faithful, and hopeful. It’s about hearing those three sentiments in our relationship, leader-follower-future: love (or simply, a genuinely charitable interest in those around us), faith that sharing outcomes brings out the truth, and hope that our relationship is sustainable. Part 4 will give us a chance to practice implementing the relational model of leadership in our lives.

I promise to tell the story later of how I came to see 1) that these three sentiments are what to listen for when looking for the best leadership; and 2) that love, faith, and hope are real public goods and have been since before Abraham. It was the archangel of the scientific method, Charles Sanders Peirce, whose Collected Papers on the scientific method and probability say this way of inquiring into life, into what’s really true, requires of our thinking that we have:

• A genuine interest in the community (charity/love);

• Faith that comparing our experiences supports discovering the truth; and

• Hope that our inquiries will continue indefinitely (beyond this or that community and time).

This book is for two main groups of people. This book is for you if you want to discover how to lead your own life or other people in an effective and fulfilling way, i.e., in a way that improves life for everyone. And this book is for you if you want to choose the best leader for your organization, your company, or your country. This book is not about who’s number one. It’s about how we all win.

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1 Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York City, New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1969).

2 Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic. Rev ed. (New York City, New York: Free Press, 2004).

3 Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (New York City, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005).

4 John Sadowsky, How Nelson Mandela Used Language to Build a Nation, John’s Reflections, Leadership, November 13, 2014, http://www.johnsadowsky.com/on-nelson-mandela-language-forgiveness-and-building-a-nation/#.

Learning the Language of the Enemy: 1962 to 1985, Nelson Mandela Foundation: Living the Legacy, Accessed November 18, 2023, https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/learning-the-language-of-the-enemy-1962-to-1985.

5 Robert D. McFadden, Mangosuthu Buthelezi Dies at 95; Zulu Nationalist and a Mandela Rival, New York Times, September 9, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/09/world/africa/mangosuthu-buthelezi-dead.html.

6 Robin Pou, Leadership Identity Crisis: What Value Do You Bring? (#92), The Confident Leader, May 15, 2022, https://robinpou.com/leadership-identity-crisis-what-value-do-you-bring/.

7 Jeff Schwartz, Maren Hauptmann, Indranil Roy, Yves Van Durme, and Brad Denny, Leadership for the 21st Century: The Intersection of the Traditional and the New, Deloitte Insights, April 11, 2019, https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/human-capital-trends/2019/21st-century-leadership-challenges-and-development.html.

8 Rasmus Hougaard, The Real Crisis in Leadership, Forbes, September 9, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/rasmushougaard/2018/09/09/the-real-crisis-in-leadership/?sh=4de80b693ee4.

Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter, The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, 2018).

9 Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York City, New York: Doubleday, 1990).

Part I

How We Got Here: Leadership and Listening

Chapter 1

What Has Informed Our Views of Leadership

In January 2018, President Donald Trump started setting tariff and other trade barriers on China. The goal was to resume domination where the US had been working at a trade deficit since the 1970s. It seemed like the president was doing what a leader should do: get tough on China, take the lead, strengthen our economy.

Looks aren’t everything. For one thing, a trade deficit is not an indication of economic weakness. In fact, the president’s own trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, said, A rising trade deficit may be consistent with a stronger economy.¹⁰

Being out front, making the biggest promise, having the most money or swagger—admittedly, traits we’ve been taught to think a leader should possess—can defeat the very purpose of leadership if it is at the expense of everyone else.

Sanctioning didn’t work, and it didn’t work because the leadership was self-serving and didn’t consider underlying issues with running a trade deficit, let alone address them. The leader in this instance was merely concerned with being in control and showing it.

The US economy experienced profound negative impacts.¹¹ Since China naturally cut way back on its purchasing of American wheat and soybeans, American farmers were divided along the lines of those who received government subsidies (large corporate agriculture), and those who were overlooked and undervalued (small family farms).¹²

This was leadership at its presumed best, though, the way we’ve grown to desire it: authoritarian. As a business coach, I find many executives reluctant to lead precisely because of the exposure, the high stakes, the concomitant divisions it seems a leader can’t help but create among direct reports, and the sheer intimacy which leaders are required to share with their followers. In that demanding opportunity that leadership provides, a great many potential leaders cave. They are corrupted by those very relationships, they create division among their ranks, and it all happens in an environment of it’s-you-or-me, winner-take-all, dog-eat-dog individualism.

I’ve started with an extreme case because the extreme cases give us guardrails. They tell us what’s too far, so we rise to a better understanding of how to get our needs met—in this case, our need for true leadership. First and foremost, we see here that leadership has got to empower us. Granted, leadership itself must be empowered first, but if the results are everyone’s welfare goes down, then that isn’t leadership.

Note first that although the trade deficit with China improved for