Responsible Leadership Beyond Managerial Rationality: The Necessity of Reconnecting Ethics and Spirituality

Abstract

This chapter argues that management expertise is a necessary but insufficient condition for leadership, since leadership implies many aspects which transcend the boundaries of management. Indeed vision distinguishes leadership from management. It requires the mobilisation of imagination as a precondition to innovation. Leadership starts with ‘taking oneself seriously. […] And taking one’s fellow men and women by the hand and leading them back to their own sources.’ The ethics of this sort of leadership is the most underdeveloped aspect of business ethics. In this chapter, I will elucidate its paradoxical nature. The paradox of leadership is, that, one the one hand, it is a condition sine qua non for successful business in an era in which the only constant is change. Late modern culture hinders or sometimes even blocks the development of leadership qualities due to the artificial separation between ethics and spirituality. This chapter will clarify some of these cultural obstacles and describe how spirituality can generate the basic conditions for the moral responsibility of leaders.

Some aspects of this article are worked out more extensively in Johan Verstraeten, Leiderschap met hart en ziel. Spiritualiteit als weg naar oorspronkelijkheid, Tielt, Lannoo, 2003, especially 19–70.