Jean 0:11
This week Jean interviews Rod McCowan, whose work focuses on preparing principled leaders who will make a difference in the world. Rod holds a PhD and is an associate professor of organization and management at Emory University. He also has his own coaching and consulting firm.
Preparing principled leaders
Jean 1:12
Asks what is a principled leader?
Rod 2:07
Defines principled leadership as applying the moral dimension to leadership. Need for more leaders who commit to evolving their moral compass so that they can lead through complex moral dilemmas in a more sophisticated and effective manner.
Jean 3:36
Asks for an example of any dilemma – where a leader has a moral choice
Rod 3:53
Responds: it affects other human beings, there's a right way to affect them, there's a wrong way to affect them.
Jean 4:57
Discusses David Brooks’ article in the Atlantic: “Why Have Americans Gotten So Mean?” His argument was that we live in a time now where morals are not being taught, civics are not being taught, the institutions that used to provide morals for young people are no longer there or are breaking apart.
How does a person determine what is the moral thing to do? How do they even make a moral choice?
What is moral?
Rod 6:46
Talks about a client, Mike, given a mandate by the board to turn around the company’s economic performance. Part of the problem was that the company was making profits, but costs were reducing their profitability.
Three things have to happen. One, he has to reduce costs. But he recognizes that he has extraordinary talent in that group of human beings, and that if motivated correctly, they can do amazing things.
He realizes the company has been successful in the past, and the company was such a good corporate citizen in terms of contributing to good social causes and things like that. Yet, the employees were over-investing in contributing to good social causes, like trying to be more green. Employees were treating company as though its primary purpose was as a quasi social-oriented organization rather than as a for-profit enterprise.
Jean 10:33
Summarizes Rod’s point: If it's a business, and it exists for profit, then if it gets too oriented towards charity, towards the community, towards giving, that can be a problem.
Three sectors
Rod 11:08
We have three sectors of society: We need for-profit enterprises that are bringing innovative products into the world.
We need public sector organizations that are trying to govern people more fairly, more effectively, and provide for the common defense, provide for the common welfare.
And we need nonprofit organizations that go in and take on social issues that the public sector and the private sector organizations aren't equipped to address.
Rod 17:09
Question for Mike to answer: Do I have a culture and core values already fit for purpose to do what we need to do what we need to do next?
What Mike – and team – realized pretty quickly, is that over time, the values that the organization had drifted to were only in part fit for purpose for the new strategy it had to execute. Company values had drifted toward commitment to community taking precedence over winning at the marketplace.
Capitalism
Jean 21:16
You're making argument for capitalism, in the most refined way that I can remember hearing.
Rod 21:25
When we say capitalism, when we say investors – the bogeyman of capitalism, investors – there's retired teachers on pension funds, whose funds, whose livelihood, whose ability to take care of themselves in their retirement years depend on the companies that make up the fund that their pension is invested in performing well.
Mike has got to remind them who they are as an organization. They have an implicit contract with investors, including those retired teachers, who expect them to make profits.
And then we have similar contracts with government, with community, with – so it's not to say that that thing that you all feel that pride you feel in the role that we play in society is not important. It is absolutely important.
It’s that the company has made an implicit contract with its investors that they should invest in it and it will make them profits. As a profit-making institution, it is pledging to providing investors with superior returns.
Rod 28:21
Going back to one of your original questions, why principled leadership?
Since the culture had developed a social purpose orientation, and Mike wanted them to focus on return to investors, he would be ill equipped to navigate through this dilemma sufficiently to convince employees that changes are necessary if he doesn’t have moral principles to fall back on. He was going to have to convince them based on moral argument, not based on economic or practical argument.
Yet what would be the foundation of a moral argument? In a global organization, chasing truth with a capital T, or morality with a capital M, is probably not a wise investment of time and energy.
Who’s to say that the Western, Judeo Christian ideology is going to be superior to the Eastern Confucian based or Buddhist based or the Middle Eastern Muslim or Islam?
I make a lesser argument: Given we all believe so many different things, your particular spiritual or religious framework is not what we use to decide. Rather, we look at the different frameworks and truths from different religious and spiritual traditions, and choose which of them work best for us for a particular dilemma.
I provide the leaders with short, condensed summaries of the five major ethical theories that will be most useful in applying to any dilemma.
Social justice theories
Jean 38:53
You help leaders develop strategy and figure out actions by helping them, training them in how to solve moral dilemmas and how to examine problems through moral dilemmas. And you do this by taking them through the major social justice theories.
Rod 41:13
Rod discusses being born in poverty, his wasted youth, years spent as a “thug,” and the impact on him of having a baby as a teenager, and suddenly realizing he had nothing to offer his newborn. He talks about his determination to make the world the best possible for his son. He was determined that he would no longer waste his life, and everything would make him stronger, and he was always going to grow and try to make the world a better place.
He realized that the greatest gift he could give to the world was to help leaders become more effective, and to do that by helping leaders develop the requisite moral instinct or orientation toward doing right in the world, so he didn’t weaponize bad actors.
His approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion is through viewing how a diverse group of people resolve moral choices.
“For me, what works most powerfully is the moral dimension: I don't care what particular prison of demography or circumstance we each were born into... In all of those choices, the choices of how I interact and the choices of how I make those decisions, I can either do moral good, or I can do moral bad.”
Rod 54:35
Discusses the case where a google engineer was fired for stating misogynistic views, and how it could have been better handled. By firing him, they missed the opportunity to surface the complexity of the issue and cut off the possibility of increasing the organization’s capacity to become more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, and to engage in adaptive work.
Jean 1:13:49
Jean summarizes the conversation, quoting Nelson Mandela, who was incarcerated for nearly three decades, and after release was elected president of his country. One of Mandela's favorite quotes: “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.1
Thanks for listening. I'm Jean Latting. Check out our website at leadingconsciously.com.”
