Thanks so much James. Well, thank you so much for sticking
around today and hopefully it ll be worth your while in at least.
If not what you learn, then the people
you've been with as well, those the few who have persevered right to the end.
So today I want to come at this with
having a real kind of a trial log, a seeing of how ethics and theology and
ethical leadership which we're going to unpack all kind of focus together and part
me for doing some very rudimentary work as we go along.
But I want us to have a shared vocabulary as we're going along.
Because ethical leadership, as we're going
to see ethical doesn't just act as the adjective for leadership.
At times, it all acts as a noun when we get into a theory of it.
And I wanted you to see how that came to
be and as a result, why theology can help in that.
So like I said, rudimentary very simply,
ethics can be a principled or preferred behavioral choice can be considered as a
set of moral principles or a system to inquire into these choices behaviors, the
good itself or a general consideration of value.
Generally speaking, you can think of ethics in one of two ways.
One is deontology, which is the ethic or
the right thing to do is based in a rule or in teleology.
The right thing to do is based on what you
want to produce or the outcome that you want to see come to be.
So rudimentary.
We have ethics in our mind, the good,
the good, what's good and valuable or what's right and looking at this in terms
of either rules to follow or in terms of ends to achieve.
So then very simply, what is leadership?
A couple of images I pulled off Google, if you look it up is this leadership?
Is this leadership?
The one bright person in all the dull bulbs?
We have a number of definitions of
leadership and you can see at the bottom there are many definitions of leadership
as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept.
That's kind of a maximum now in leadership studies about 30 years old.
But we have a number of definitions that come at it.
Leadership is about personality or is about persuasion.
We have leadership as a position itself,
leadership as a kind of structural implementation where organizations might
get structured accidentally or intentionally.
And you can think about leadership that way.
You can think about leadership practically as simply obtaining followers or getting
people to do what you want them to do or a combination of all of the above.
Let me give you three definitions and you
can kind of see how there's a progression to them and a connection to them as well.
So number one you've got from Peter Northhouse, this is from a classic
leadership textbook leadership is the process.
So notice it's not in personality, it's in process things that are done whereby an
individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.
So you might see the repetition of the word individual.
This is a focus on leadership as something
one person does with a bunch of other one persons.
It's kind of not considering maybe group oriented leadership.
From Gary Yukel leadership is the process of influencing others to and here these
are my italics understand and agree about what needs to be done and notice this how
it can be done effectively, and the process of facilitating individual and
collective efforts to accomplish the shared objectives.
So you're starting to see this initial definition start to get broadened out.
And we're seeing an inclusion of groups.
You're seeing an inclusion of people
agreeing what needs to be done, not just simply acting together, but
agreeing that this is what we should do together.
And you're seeing this aspect of it being done or an item being done effectively.
Mendoka and Kanungo defining leadership as a set of role behaviors performed by an
individual when there is a need to influence and coordinate the activities of
a group or organizational members toward the achievement of a common goal.
Again, we're seeing a shift from this is not just about influencing individuals,
this is about influencing perhaps a group or an organization.
Notice again the italics mind when there is a need.
Think back to our definition of ethics
where there might be a determination of what is right or what is good.
And here you're starting to see this creep into a definition of leadership.
And of course, this is a book actually on ethical leadership, so you can see why
they're skewing the definition in this way.
Really three big ideas that you want to get then from for leadership.
Are you're dealing with an interaction of relationships and processes and goals and
all those things kind of intertwining together in whatever way you want to
emphasize it or whatever aspect of those three things you want to focus on.
All those are kind of interplaying in what
leadership is from three different definitions.
So what's the connection between leadership and ethics?
Or.
What does Athens have to do with Bay Street?
The principal's office, trump Tower and 24 Sussex Drive.
How do we put these things together?
One way that they're put together is that leadership and ethics are connected by the
community or the follower, or to use Levinacian language, the other.
So two leadership scholars, Knights and
O'Leary, write the other's very existence makes us morally responsible, a
responsibility which is limitless and undeniable.
This can be a production of righteous or
virtuous, community or utilitarianism for the benefit of the community.
So the other creates an ethical standard simply by being who they are.
And you can treat it in how well you want them to be treated or what effect you want
their community to experience or who you want the community to become
the other themselves creates the ethical impetus, the ethical foundation for the
leader to do something, to do what would be the right thing.
It creates the rationale for what the right thing is.
Another way to look at leadership and
ethics is that leadership and ethics are connected in the person of the leader.
Two ways you can look at number one, you can say there should be integrity.
That leadership.
Ethics is about the leader doing what the
leader says they will do, and there's a kind of integrity.
Or you can also look at it in an egoistic
way, that the connection between leadership and ethics is between the
leader doing what they think is right or what is right for themselves.
Another way to consider the connection between leadership and ethics our
leadership and ethics are a combination of person and practices.
Or you can think about it as a moral person and a moral manager.
There's a connection.
Good leadership is both moral leadership and technically efficient leadership.
So good leadership is not just doing the right thing.
It's about getting the right things done
and those things being put together both philosophical and pragmatic.
Definition from Joanne Cula some critical questions you might bring to
those connections then are which community?
If leadership is good to achieve certain ends for one community, they might not be
the same actions that would achieve good ends for another community.
In which community are you going to benefit?
If we're going to have good leadership in
political realms, some policies are going to favor certain people instead of others.
Which community creates the definition of what's good leadership or whose virtue?
There's a huge study called the Globe
Study that considers different leadership behaviors across all kinds of cultures.
And there's a lot of connection that different cultures will affirm.
Altruism and leadership, integrity and communication, different practices.
But not all cultures consider a virtuous
person the same, or not all cultures value certain things as equal virtues, right?
Those are different. So who is virtue?
If we're going to have virtue be a ground
of leadership, which virtue are we talking about?
Or the foundation and coherence of integrity?
Is a leader who promises to do bad things a good leader?
In some ways, yes.
They're doing what they said they would
do, in some ways, no, because they are simply doing bad things.
So can that break down?
Can we ground it in the individual?
In some ways, all these questions are roiling underneath the surface for
leadership studies, and you kind of get what I call this phenomenon of skipping
the problem because we've got problems to solve and things to get done.
So in light of these kind of underlying turmoil, you have Brown, Trevino and
Harrison who just kind of forge ahead and create an ethical leadership scale.
All right, that's what they call it, the ethical leadership scale.
This is the first line of their article on ethical leadership.
Recent ethical scandals in business have
raised important questions about the role of leadership in shaping ethical conduct.
So they skip right to what should we do?
Not what is it kind of avoiding all the underlying problem but what should we do?
And they go on to say we propose to study
ethical leadership from a descriptive perspective so that we can better
understand what characterizes ethical leadership and how it relates, listen to
this, how it relates to other variables in its nominological framework.
So in other words, how does what we have
will describe as ethical leadership impact other outcomes?
What will what we are going to define as ethical leadership do?
What impact will it have?
So they offered a definition of ethical leadership.
They built a scale to measure it and used it to demonstrate the scale's utility to
predict certain outcomes, which is a very leadership studies thing to do, build a
scale, find out what these sets of behaviors do.
Let's forget about the problem of does this actually make sense?
That's not against ethical leadership or that's not against leadership studies in
general as I hope would be the problem or I hope would be clear.
It simply goes to the very drive which is
we've got problems to solve and things to get done.
I think people in this room can probably say, you know what, I got to points and
thinking about certain subjects and I just decided I couldn't think about it anymore.
I actually had to do something.
I had to stop aiming.
I had just had to fire right, ready, fire. Aim.
That's essentially what they did.
Here's what they found out and this is
what they started calling ethical leadership.
So when I describe as ethical not being
the adjective anymore, but being part of the noun of this construct of ethical
leadership, this is where it's coming from.
A 2005 article ethical leadership is the
demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and
interpersonal relationships and the promotion of such conduct to followers
through two way communication, reinforcement and decision making.
So what were these conducts that they discerned?
Ethical leaders listen to employees.
They discuss ethics and values with employees.
They ask what is the right action?
They make fair decisions.
They're trustworthy.
They act in the best interests of followers.
They tie success not simply to outcome but to process.
They discipline violations.
They are an ethical model or an exemplar
and they are consistent in their personal life.
Now, all of this was built from survey
work that went out to employees who would describe their their leaders as ethical.
So these are all the things that are
emerging from grounded research to build this definition.
But of course the problem simply persists.
The research endeavor focused on the
outcomes of one description of ethical leadership.
This is Joanne Siola.
Again, she says the name ethical leadership is somewhat misleading and that
the instrument used in these studies only measures people's attributions of ethical
leaders, ethical leadership to their leaders.
It simply assumes that we all kind of know what is ethical.
Again, the fact that the majority of people attribute ethical qualities to a
leader is not sufficient to say that the leader is ethical.
So we might want to some people that are critical of
leadership studies might follow Gary Yuko, who is a leadership scholar, and simply
ask bigger questions of leadership ethics themselves, which is namely one, is
leadership itself ethical in the face of risk?
Is it a good thing, is it valuable, is it defensible to try to persuade people to
follow you into a risky venture, into doing something dangerous?
Is that an ethical thing to do?
Is that a morally appropriate thing to do?
Is it ethical to have people change their beliefs?
Certainly an aspect of leadership, as we saw in the definitions, is to have people
agree on what needs to be done, presumably at least moving from a position of at
least neutrality and perhaps even opposition.
Is it appropriate, is it ethical that people change their beliefs?
Or C? Is it appropriate?
Is leadership appropriate or ethical when
it benefits some, but not all, or does not benefit all equally?
Right? These are kind of underlying questions
that just keep popping up underneath the surface.
So I hope we're kind of seeing what the direction has been.
It's this process of asking
what is leadership and how does it involve what is good and right and moral?
Or how does it produce what's good and right and moral?
And then seeing leadership scholars forge
past this to create an ethical leadership scale.
And there's articles I can cite for you that show how that definition from Brown,
Trevino and Harrison has become the accepted definition.
That article just gets cited over and over and over again as leadership studies are
using studying ethical leadership in that way.
And yet these problems are still
persisting even back to the whole question of, well, is leadership itself ethical?
And giving three examples here.
So let me shift into the final part of it, which is okay for theology.
Why theology?
Theology can be used in the context of
ethics, and theology was used to serve the whole of life.
Ethics was not an aspect of life.
So Stan Harrows wants to say that the bifurcation or the split between
ethics and theology should not have happened.
This rupture should not have come to be.
I've been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer lately, and I saw this example.
I thought, well, this is the example of theology and ethics being merged together.
So he has in life together this quote the
community of Christians springs solely from the Biblical and Reformation message
of justification of man through grace alone.
This alone is the basis of longing of Christian for one another.
Now, you might agree or disagree with Bonhoeffer on that, but that's an example
of theology and ethics just being merged together, the right springs
deeply connected with exactly what it is God is doing.
Stanhar was, of course, bemoans the fact that we actually have a field called
ethics and certainly the bad idea of Christian ethics.
So how do these get split apart if they're originally meant to be brought if they're
originally meant to be together, theology and ethics, how do they get split apart?
From Oliver O'Donovan, he points to this one's.
From Stan Harlow.
He points to penitentials.
So how do we get the proper application of correction to a confession?
If a person comes to confession and there needs to be
reparatory pastoral care, then these penitentials develop and they start to be
kind of rules to flow from good theology but not theology themselves.
O'Donovan points to the Council of Trent,
which emphasized connecting theology and law in the care of souls.
In other words, you want to have pastors
who can make good recommendation or good pastoral care.
Harawas points out the Reformation splits
faith and works because you can't work for your salvation, of course.
And ethics becomes about works.
It's something that's affirmed it's good, but it's separate from theology itself.
Moving to the Enlightenment period and post Enlightenment period, you have a loss
of church dominance, and people are still asking ethical questions about what should
I do, but without church context of baptism, confession, doctrine, et cetera.
And of course, into that postcontian world, you have Schliermacher, who
perhaps unfairly, but at times is certainly writing in a way that he's
defending theology by saying it's useful at making good citizens.
So it's not about Christians now.
It's about making good citizens.
We're defending theology by saying they can still produce good people.
So you have ethics outside the church, so you have ethics at service of the church.
Then you have ethics being used to produce good citizens.
And this, all of it, is splitting apart theology from ethics.
So finally you have Emmanuel Kant saying, I discover that what I can only do sorry.
I discover that what I do can only be unconditionally good to the
extent that I can will what I have done as a universal law.
I discover that what I can do can only be unconditionally good to the
extent that I can will what I have done as a universal law.
And now we finally have the ethical statement that still is often reigning.
And in addition to treat people as ends and not only as means, there are never as
means the final bifurcation of ethics and theology.
And so you can do ethics what is right without doing theology.
Recall back the definitions of ethical leadership that we had above, and all of
those definitions were done atheologically.
And perhaps atheistically.
And some sociologists in here are going to say, well, of course you can't do theology
at the same time as doing sociological research.
And yet I would just give you John
Milbank's theology and Social theory and say, have fun reading this.
There's always theology all the way down from a Christian worldview, even if we
wouldn't posit God as a cause of something.
So here's my thesis for the rest of the presentation.
How can Christian theology help?
Christian theology provides a context for leadership and therefore leadership ethics
within theological anthropology and eschatology.
So essentially, what I would am trying to do, and this is what you've just heard is
all the groundwork that then leads into a much larger project.
We're not going to talk a whole lot about
the project today, just give you the glimpses of it, is that I still think that
we can do leadership ethics, but we can do so in a theologically informed way.
And actually theology undergirds that
entire project by a theological anthropology and eschatology.
And here's where's how I think that can be done.
Oliver O'Donovan is an Anglican
theologian, moral theologian, spent time at actually he was in Toronto.
He used to teach at Wycliffe and Oxford as well.
And most recently, I believe at
somewhere else, maybe Scotland, I can't remember, but he's since retired.
But what O'Donovan says is that Christian
ethics is located between dogmatics or church teaching and statistics, by which
he means sociology or post positivist mindset.
He said that Christian ethics is located right between because people, not just
Christians, have always asked, what should I do?
And if Christians are to help them answer
this question, then there must be Christian ethics.
So the option is not for Christians simply
to keep ethics within the church, it's to say, are we going to have any sense of
helping people ask this question from our point of view, or are we just going to let
them stumble along and try to come up with new answers to old questions all the time?
And O'Donovan thinks that this is a good
thing to do, whereas you might have Stan Harawas, who says they need to become a
Christian first, and then we can help them do theology rightly and have ethics
grounded in baptism and other such Christian actions.
O'Donovan will say there's no preexisting rationale for Christian ethics.
There are simply two basic or primary
ethical questions what was I put on earth to do?
And what does it mean that I was put on earth to do it?
So O'Donovan wants to get a space for doing Christian ethics.
In the experience of people asking this question, what should I do?
And then asking the natural follow up
question, what does it mean that I should do this right?
What's the meta question that I should ask?
If there really is a purchase on my
action, then what does it mean that there is a purchase to do it?
What's the theological foundation or rationale?
So let me start with the first part,
creation as a context of what it means to be a leader.
O'Donovan writes that God has created a
morally ordered world, including moral subjects who can be virtuous beings.
There are new situations that present new
opportunities for action, yet part of the unfolding of the same order.
As a result, right action is not grounded in utility or by the values of the
community, but by the moral order of the creation.
Thus the creation is vested with different
kinds of authority, which is what provide the ground of action.
So all of this is really taking O'donovan's book Resurrection, Moral Order
and trying to put it together into one slide, which is a challenge.
But essentially O'Donovan wants to say we
can do Christian ethics because we live in a morally ordered world.
The world itself has been morally
structured and created by God, who is a moral being.
And while we might present be presented with new situations, we're part not of a
chaotic unfolding, but part of an unfolding or a revealing of the moral
world whenever we define and find good action.
And O'Donovan says that good action or right action can be grounded on different
kinds of authority that are vested in the world.
And he gives these as examples age or wisdom, strength or community.
And authority becomes that which is the hard edge against we take an action.
So for instance,
if my child was to put her dishes in the sink after supper without being
told what to do, and I say Why did you do that?
It could simply be because daddy wants me to.
That's an aspect of community.
My authority as parent grounds that
action, that she doesn't need another better reason for doing that, except that
it was just me that expected her to do that.
And that can get played out in different ways.
O'Donovan especially uses it in political
authority where through duly different people of different
political, the authorized person politically can give
a ground for another person to take an action.
So whenever a judge says to a bailiff,
take that person into custody, the bailiff is doing a right action because of the
authority of the judge hope that gives the kind of the example there.
So that was why creation create the
context of what it means to be a leader, that there's a moral world to act in.
And here's why acting as human beings can be part of that.
Human beings are part of a morally ordered world.
Part of the moral ordering of the world is
authority and authority is a ground for taking right action.
So we just looked at that human beings are rooted in the authority of the world, both
exercising authority and being acted upon properly under authority.
So this might be one that you could unpack
as the call of human beings made in the image
of God to see the prototype of Eden extended into the rest of the world.
So G. K.
Beal has a great book on this, the Temple of God and the Church's Mission, which
looks at the Garden of Eden not as the archetype of all of creation, which we so
often read it in an AUGUSTINIAN mindset, but as the prototype.
In other words, the example that humans
were given to extend into the rest of the world.
Here's the order that I have for you now
take and move this into the rest of the world and do with this.
They're authorized to do that.
Human beings are leading beings.
As a result, if you want to look at it from that mindset, they have right action
to take that moves the mission of God out from Eden.
Ethical leadership as a result, would include acting fittingly in the moral
world with and under appropriate authority.
So with this in mind, if somebody was to ask me what ethical leadership was, I
would draw it back into a creation narrative
that there's a morally ordered world, there's a place of human beings in this
world and as a result and there's a story for them to be part of.
And as a result
they can do what is good and right as a leader by initiating new actions based on
who they've been made to be and what the world is like.
All that of course, in a theological
mindset, but grounded in actual questions of people asking what should I do?
Second part of this eschatology of ethical leadership, the order of the world is not
simply a moral order, but an ordered narrative.
A narrative with a purpose.
In other words, it's not just a static moral universe.
It's one that is dynamic and moving in a certain direction.
O'Donovan writes the narrative of
scripture extends into a bounded future of the world.
There's not simply a chaos or an
undetermined story that our world is headed to, but our eschatology should be
one that regardless of where we might see it going, that if there is a God, that
there is one who is drawing it to this conclusion based on God's desire.
The story of the world is not chaotic or
free floating, but aimed, intended and purposed.
The story of the world is moving in a certain direction which is eschatology.
Thus, ethical leadership does not involve
acting properly as human beings or does not just involve acting properly as human
beings, but moving in the proper direction of the world's.
Story and end.
So if you think back to Cua's definition
of moral manager there's ethical leadership has a moral management
component and an effective an effective action component.
This kind of has a dual component as well acting ethically based in who human beings
are supposed to be and acting ethically in where God is drawing this world.
So as a pioneering act or a new act, we're moving into that which is future to
us, but it's part of the bounded future that God intends.
So creation theology that human beings
have a place in a morally ordered world as leading beings and the world
has a destination, has a story that's unfolding.
Both of those form a foundation for why we can have ethical leadership.
And that's the thesis that I'm trying to
move towards in the broader project out of that space of
ethical leadership kind of breaking down when we just deal with it as a definition.
So I can pull up that last slide again, I apologize that it skipped off.
So that would be my redefinition of ethical leadership is that involves human
beings moving in the proper direction of the world story and end, but as human
beings were meant to be and who we are created to be as well.
Thank you.
In the rich. Lots of chew on there.