From Blame to Praise in Policing: Implications for Strategy, Culture, Process and Well-being

A learning culture is fostered where there is a positive association between learning and well-being. We express this heuristically as: learning enables well-being (‘learn enough to be well’) and, in reverse, well-being enables learning (‘be well enough to learn’). A sense of emotional and political/institutional security and well-being is needed for people to overcome defensiveness and be open to learning, especially within the context of learning from failure. Defensiveness is very understandable, because learning involves admitting to the need to learn; the idea that one could have done things better; and the anxieties of imperfection. Defensiveness makes particular sense in organizational environments where things happen quickly and unpredictably, and where the stakes are high, both individually and institutionally - in other words, an environment like MPS. Well-being at MPS is, therefore, not just an appealing objective in its own right; we argue that it helps to underpin a successful culture of learning. This means that efforts to enhance well-being are one of the ways to strengthen and improve OL. We have developed a model of five different reasons for failure, which depicts three types of failure: Preventable; Tolerable; and Intelligent. We are using it to help frame the challenges for MPS officers and staff to feel that it is safe to learn. Receptiveness to learning involves feeling reasonably secure in the belief that one will not be unjustifiably blamed for things that are not one’s personal fault. For instance, where task complexity or unpredictability is the main reason for failure, the institutional response should not default to deviation

‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!’: Radicalising hermeneutics with Kafka’s <i>The Castle</i>

This paper explores the politics of interpretation from the perspective of hermeneutic theory. It presents a reading of Kafka’s novel The Castle focused on critique of the business of interpretation, where suspicion unfolds in distorted, possibly fraudulent, sense-making between protagonist, narrator and reader. The protagonist’s mission is neither heroic nor a call to resistance to bureaucratic absurdity, but instead, the result of hubris, hoax, or even a slip of the pen, and it becomes impossible to unpick the perils of bureaucracy from the perils of interpretation, or to distinguish between error and insight. In mining discrepancies between justification, effort and reward of interpretation, Kafka punctures the mythology of understanding, rupturing the near-sacrosanct hermeneutic connection between interpretation and meaning. His work undermines both objective and subjective understandings, leaving us distrustful of both expert and experiential perspectives. In a post-truth era with its ‘alternative facts’, The Castle feels startlingly fresh and relevant

Lost in Translation, Recovered in Conversation? Leadership and Social Media

‘Twitter is not a technology, it’s a conversation. And it’s happening with or without you.’ As Leadership takes its first steps into the realm of social media, we should think about why we are doing this and what we might hope to achieve. Far from being merely a decision about which platforms and tools to use to advertise our work, the establishment of a social media presence is a spur to reflect on the qualities of our relationships both within and beyond our community of authors, readers, reviewers and editors. In this essay, I link our approach to social media to broader concerns about the state of our discipline, our alienation from practice, and our responsibilities as both scholars and practitioners of leadership. Although framed in relation to social media, I hope these reflections have resonance for our involvement in social, political and institutional commentary more generally, even amongst those who have no interest in Twitter per se

Caring Leadership as Nietzschean Slave Morality

In this paper I respond to calls for more critical reflection on the power dynamics of caring leadership. I consider how a combination of care and impotence might unfold as Nietzsche’s ‘slave morality’, crystallised in the phenomenon of ressentiment. At the heart of slave morality is an inversion of values in which everything represented by the Other is denigrated so that the slave can find meaning and solace in his own place in the world. The Nietzschean inversion transforms impotence, inferiority and submission into virtue, identity and accomplishment. In contrast to recent elaborations of ressentiment in followers, I argue that slave morality is something to which leaders, especially caring leaders, are also vulnerable. When caring leadership awakens or exposes the slave-within, we are unable to take charge of - or responsibility for - ourselves, because we have ceded control of the self to forces beyond the self. This is the risk of ‘care ethics’ as a systemic inversion of values which constructs an ideology out of letting others define who and what we are. It creates a breeding ground for ressentiment, feeding off unspoken and unspeakable grievances about the injustices of one’s lot, especially those involving a clash between the rhetoric of empowerment and the experience of impotence. The Nietzschean warning is: Be wary of leadership models which might look and even feel nice, but which turn self-sacrifice into virtue and silence into necessity

Leadership, care and (in)justice

In this chapter, I deepen the exploration of care and caring leadership as relationships of power. Connecting with care ethicists’ discussions of the interplay between care and justice, I probe some of the ways in which care can involve and inscribe injustice. This provides some scene-setting for the book as a whole, because many of the chapters engage both explicitly and implicitly with the risk and/or reality of injustice, and how the dynamics of care can bring about advantage and disadvantage for both leaders and followers

From Blame to Praise in Policing: Implications for Leadership and the Public Conversation

Leaders play a crucial role in fostering (or inhibiting) cultures of learning. Their influence relates both to their own attitudes towards learning and to the ways in which they do (or do not) encourage learning for other people – both within their own teams and across functional and organizational boundaries. Being open to learning involves feeling that the challenges of one’s role are recognised by others, especially those who have authority or sway over our careers. Recognition of the real difficulties and paradoxes that MPS leaders face might, therefore, help to encourage organizational learning which is constructive and rewarding for both individuals and the organization. However, securing such recognition is not straightforward in a policing context, where scrutiny is intense, risk is high, failure is inevitable, attributions of fault are often individualised, and even ‘damage limitation’ takes considerable leadership skill, effort and care. Some of these leadership challenges can be crystallised as various forms of asymmetry, or things being off-kilter or out of balance. These are significant for individual leaders and their organizations, because they can reflect and/or reinforce various forms of behavioural and cognitive bias and dissonance. The specific instances of asymmetry explored in this paper are: Agency Having more responsibility for, than control over, events Response Receiving and/or expecting more blame than praise Reason Experiencing and/or expecting interpretations of failure based more on individual fault than on task or situational complexit

Where is Boris Johnson? When and Why it Matters that Leaders Show Up in a Crisis

“Now, more than at any time in our recent history, we will be judged by our capacity for compassion.” Rishi Sunak, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, 20th March 2020. In this piece for the journal’s ‘Leading Questions’, I draw on an ethics of care and compassion to address a question that has been asked almost daily in UK politics over the past weeks and months, namely: Where is Boris Johnson? Johnson is a leader with a long-standing reputation for being selective about whether and when he shows up. On 16th March 2020, as the severity of the coronavirus finally seemed to register, Johnson agreed to start holding daily press briefings, bringing his previous track-record and apparent instinct for no-shows into sharp relief. Through the prism of the psychoanalytic caring leader, I reflect on some of the explanations for, and implications of, his absences, arguing that they do not always have the same function or effect. Some absences may be politically astute, as a way of promoting an anti-establishment message and/or reassuring his constituents of their own competence and efficacy. Other absences are decidedly risky, because they send a message that he does not care. In times of crisis, the scales of separation versus proximity - absence versus presence - tip differently to normal, and leaders who appear not to care risk triggering especially powerful anxieties about betrayal and abandonment. When it is impossible for us to be carefree, leaders must avoid being perceived or experienced as careless

Hermeneutics: Interpretation, Understanding and Sense-making

Gadamer (1989: xxxiii) describes hermeneutics as ‘a theory of the real experience that thinking is’. In this chapter, we explore two main aspects of this experience of thinking - interpretation and understanding. We draw on the work of Schleiermacher (1768-1834) to review the origins of modern hermeneutics as an activity of interpretation, and on Heidegger (1889-1976) and Gadamer (1900-2002) for hermeneutics as a philosophy of understanding. We consider the ways in which Ricoeur (1913-2005) and Habermas (1929-) move hermeneutics towards critical theory, challenging the trustworthiness of text and the possibility of understanding, and urging reflection on their ideological construction and motivation. We use the most famous idea in the hermeneutic canon, the hermeneutic circle, as a leit-motif for the chapter. This illuminates a range of mutually constitutive relationships between context and text, whole and parts, general and particular, anticipation and encounter, familiarity and strangeness, presence and absence, and sense and non-sense. We discuss how hermeneutics has influenced contemporary organization and management research, inspiring an array of interpretive methods and inviting critical reflection on personal and organizational sense-making

An Ethic of Care: Reconnecting the Private and the Public

This chapter draws on the authors’ own personal and professional experiences more than most conventional leadership text-books. We interweave ideas about familial care and organisational leadership based on our own first-hand experiences of both. We are amongst the growing number of people who juggle full-time professional careers with extensive duties of care for a family member. We have an intimate understanding of how difficult it can be when a relative’s needs take our attention away from work abruptly and unpredictably, and of the stigma of unreliability in the workplace that accompanies this. Whenever we talk to students, colleagues and friends who similarly juggle work and care, we are struck by the way that carers’ anxieties are moulded by a powerful sense that work and life are two separate domains, whose boundaries must be managed to avoid the unreliability of domestic care spilling over into the reliable world of work. This chapter is therefore born from a desire to expose and critique this binary thinking, because it stops us seeing the similarities and complementarities between relationships of care and relationships of leadership. In our own lives, we are discovering that reflecting on our relationships of care can help us to understand the dynamics of our relationships with colleagues and subordinates; and vice versa, that reflecting on how we interact with others in the workplace can shed light on our instincts and interactions within the family. Since one of the most notoriously difficult challenges for leaders is to build and sustain effective interpersonal relationships, we believe that experiences of care can be an invaluable source of insight for leadership