To cite this work: Extract from Chapter 5 Leadership and Diversity pgs 92-100 Western, S. (2013). Leadership: A critical text. Sage. Leadership and Diversity: A psychoanalytic and personal perspective To address diversity is to acknowledge difference. To acknowledge difference we have to firstly recognise and locate ourselves. We all carry personal, social and historical culture/baggage within us, and however ‘PC’ (politically correct) we are, however progressive or liberal, we all belong to social groups, which exclude others, and we all make value judgements on a daily basis, often at unconscious levels. Some differences are easily recognised, gender and ethnicity; yet even here we can be tripped up, making assumptions about another, when less obvious differences also To cite this work: Extract from Chapter 5 Leadership and Diversity pgs 92-100 Western, S. (2013). Leadership: A critical text. Sage. exist. To address difference we must first ‘decriminalise bias’1, not trying to eliminate difference but to recognise we are all different and all carry biases within ourselves and our cultures. Biases do not just belong to ‘evil racists’, and bias itself is not the problem. When bias gets used to discriminate, to oppress, to marginalise it becomes a problem. Becoming more conscious of our unconscious, personal assumptions and biases is important if we are to become more aware of others experience. Our social and cultural bias is more difficult to see as it becomes ‘normative’ and this is where critical theory is important to reveal the discourses and structures, which oppress minority and disadvantaged groups, and reproduce the power and privileged status quo. A Gay friend of mine in America, told me how he watched the first Gay marriage ceremony on television (which he had long supported), and he described how he was shocked by his own homophobic response, “two men in tuxedo’s kissing at the town hall… it just didn’t seem right.” Even when we are part of an activist group which is discriminated against, even when we are aware and supportive of the issues; social norms instilled in us since childhood still inhabit our lives, thoughts and our bodies. We carry around our histories, social class, ethnicity, physical ability/disability, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, and we notice difference in others. Anybody in a leadership position needs to realise that they and their team, will be working from a set of assumptions and biases based on personal and group experience and social location. This includes one’s physical ability, race, nationality, religion, age, sexuality and class that are imprinted upon us and inscribed with social meanings. These meanings are enacted by us, and by others those who encounter us. 1 A term given to me by a colleague Pooja Sachdev To cite this work: Extract from Chapter 5 Leadership and Diversity pgs 92-100 Western, S. (2013). Leadership: A critical text. Sage. Our assumptions from a dominant group gel into our culture and behaviours and become taken-for-granted ‘norms’. Butler (2004: 41) points out that norms can be explicit but are usually implicit, ‘this is just how things are’ and those that deviate from this are made to feel wrong, excluded and imbued with a sense of failure. Difference, Leadership and Projection It is not possible to be a leader or follower and work openly with difference unless we can first locate ourselves. Unless we are self-aware, knowing what we are carrying with us and have an awareness of what others may see in us, we will always be ‘reactionary’. An emotionally charged reaction to the difference we see in others, and to their reactions to us, results in unconscious discrimination and exclusion taking place. When undertaking diversity training I always begin with an exercise where participants ‘locate themselves’ identifying their own place, and locating myself as an example. I write as a white, heterosexual, English male. I carry with me the history, social and cultural meanings, stereotypes, power and privileges and disadvantages, associated with this position. I had ‘working-class’ school education that offered a very poor education. I dropped out of school and didn’t get to university. I accessed higher education in my thirties and now have a two Masters and PhD, which now adds to my privileged status. This experience gives me a heightened awareness and sensitivity to issues of class, the elitism of education, and less personal experience of issues such as disability. When working as Director of Coaching at Lancaster University Management School, taking on a role and the title; ‘Dr Simon Western’, I had a heightened awareness of the powerful unconscious projections I received. By projection(s), I use the term in relation to the object relation’s school of psychoanalysis. Projection occurs when powerful feelings are located in another To cite this work: Extract from Chapter 5 Leadership and Diversity pgs 92-100 Western, S. (2013). Leadership: A critical text. Sage. person. It refers to Melanie Klein’s (1959) original work on splitting, projection and introjection. Powerful feelings (often unwanted feelings) are split off from the conscious mind, and can be located in another person. These can be feelings of love, idealisation, or perhaps hatred or envy. For example parents often project their unfulfilled ambitions on their children. An angry boss may project his anger onto his personal assistant, making him/her angry. The boss retains a safe distance from his own rage, and the assistant (if they introject or take in the projection), acts out this anger. These projections towards an ‘academic’ clashed with the internalised sense of ‘uneducated’ self I had grown up with. These projections arise because of what I represent to others, in my body, personality and role. Depending on their personal emotional and developmental histories and social location, will depend on how they respond to me. This is a two way process a dynamic that is both conscious and unconscious. I have observed that these projections are triggered through five key sources, which I believe are also applicable to leaders working in other contexts Sources that stimulate Projective Responses’ in leaders 1. The Institution and Context: In my case this is the University, which carries with it the history of academia and elite knowledge, which I represent in the ‘here and now’ when standing in front of a lecture theatre. Each leader will have a specific context that ‘speaks through them’ 2. ‘Embodied and Cultural Self’: For example, my whiteness, my sexuality, being British, my accent denoting working class and my region, my maleness, age, ‘able-body’; each individual carries in their embodied self, a cultural self that stimulates reactions in others. 3. Personality: Personality traits, ‘charisma’, quietness, calmness intellectual capability, elements that make us distinctive. Each personality will trigger some people’s feelings in powerful ways, positive and negative and in others they will have a bland reaction. To cite this work: Extract from Chapter 5 Leadership and Diversity pgs 92-100 Western, S. (2013). Leadership: A critical text. Sage. 4. Expertise: I teach Coaching at Masters Level drawing on my psychoanalytic and systemic background. Coaching and therapy can carry the mystique of the ‘shrink’ or of a secular priesthood and with it the fear/curiosity of being able to read the hidden unconscious or people will expect me to be a caring holding figure for them. The expertise signifies meanings, a physics or maths lecturer will stimulate different reactions, an engineer or nurse different reactions again. 5. Role Power As Course Director I have the power and authority to assess students, and position power and influence in the lecture theatre, my voice may be given more weight than others. Leaders must recognise power relations, if they are to overcome bias discussions or worse, ‘silent organizations’ i.e. organizations with employees who speak but say nothing in public of importance or dissent. Leaders and followers should reflect on these five areas when in role at work, to begin to understand what they carry with them, how they use it, what biases they have, and how others react to them. People respond to me differently, pending on their own social and historical location. In my case, mature executives with little academic experience can be daunted by ‘the University’ This can be very displacing, moving from an important role, to a role where you feel like you know very little, and you do not understand the language, the academic writing rules, and the higher educational systems such as the library. They can respond by becoming infantilized very quickly. In a teaching context this is sometimes projected onto me sometimes as anger, when they feel impotent, as I can represent the cause of this impotency, or they can become very dependant and needy towards me, and I can feel like a ‘nursing mother’ or ‘all-knowing Guru’. Other students from China and Korea I supervise often come to me with great deference. Their approach is clearly not about me personally, but about me in a role and their cultural normative response to the student/professor relationship. If I met my Chinese students or executives as an, Asian woman, or a ‘camp’ Gay man, what would their To cite this work: Extract from Chapter 5 Leadership and Diversity pgs 92-100 Western, S. (2013). Leadership: A critical text. Sage. response be? My subject expertise impacts on others, and this links to my personal teaching style. I work differently to many professors, drawing on my experience as a psychotherapist; I deal with emotions and the unconscious in the classroom. I am also aware of the classic ‘patient/analyst’ relationship as one of dependency and how easy/dangerous, it is to enjoy projections of idealisation. Having some awareness of my own social location gives more room to mediate how I deal with different individuals. I do not take their anxiety and projections personally and can distance myself from them, protecting myself from the feelings of omnipotence or by being paralysed by negative projections. Being able to reflect on the biases and projections with my students is an important learning experience and we explore diversity in way that makes it part of the whole, rather than an add-on at the end of the course. I ask students to observe their own responses and we agree a learning contract, ‘this classroom is a learning laboratory, all experience is data for learning… including your feelings… be aware of your responses to each other and to me’. For leaders this ability to understand projections and the idea of social location is very important when dealing with difference. A fundamental principle that applies to leaders is that too much followership dependency undermines critical and innovative thinking and creates a climate that eradicates dissent, or even exploration of difference. It may feel good to a leader to have a dependant followership, but it is not a healthy or sustainable dynamic. Without critical thinking, awareness of role, social location and embodied self, the issues of power, patriarchy and diversity will never be addressed. Space Invaders Nirmal Puwar’s book Space Invaders: Race Gender and Bodies out of Place (2004) eloquently describes this process that marks establishment spaces, and excludes those To cite this work: Extract from Chapter 5 Leadership and Diversity pgs 92-100 Western, S. (2013). Leadership: A critical text. Sage. bodies that are not a part of this space. We particularly notice ‘otherness’ when difference transgresses normal spaces. My own experience alerts me to this as I have transgressed normative gender boundaries; working as a nurse that at the time was a 95% female profession, and as a home-parent walking into mother and toddler groups in the early 1980’s as the sole male figure. My experience of this, was that I was not treated as ‘me’ the subject, but as an ‘object’ either to be feared; a threat of contamination to the homogenous group, (asked to leave some nursing lectures on gynaecology, not being allowed to work on female wards) or in the mother and toddler group as an exotic sexualised object to be flirted with, or an object of pity to be ‘mothered’. Puwar cites Winston Churchill’s reaction to Nancy Astor, the first woman MP to enter the House of Parliament: I find a woman’s intrusion into the House of Commons as embarrassing as if she burst into my bathroom when I had nothing with which to defend myself, not even a sponge. (Winston Churchill cited in Vallance, Women in the House (in Puwar, 2004:13) Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks writes about arriving in France in 1950, from Martinique a French Colony and describes his experience of transgressing boundaries, and the effect of the ‘gaze’ of the other. ‘The movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense that a chemical solution is fixed by a dye….sealed into that crushing objecthood the look imprisoned me. …’ He relates this experience to a ‘Historic-racial schema….a racial epidermal schema’. He was assigned ethnic characteristics, through which, he says: ‘I was battered down by tom toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, festishm, racial defects, slaveships……….I was told to stay within bounds, to go back to where I belonged” ….He cries out “dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes, I am fixed”’ (Fanon, 1970:109–16 in Puwar, 2004: 39) Fanon’s accounts are visceral and insightful from the perspective of how people react to ‘otherness’ and how this becomes internalised To cite this work: Extract from Chapter 5 Leadership and Diversity pgs 92-100 Western, S. (2013). Leadership: A critical text. Sage. . One of the most important issues when dealing with leadership and diversity is to look at the spaces in the workplace. Who inhabits which spaces; who is excluded and what happens if the space is transgressed. What happens when a woman walks into the boardroom full of men? What happens when a black person enters an all white establishment? Does the ‘other’ have to be assimilated? Do they have to learn to be like the majority group, women executives proving their maleness, or black executives their whiteness? Is there a negotiation and co-existence tacitly agreed whereby the ‘other’ conforms to the norm whilst becoming the ‘exotic other’ and performing ‘otherness’ for the majority? (See Said, 1973). Diversity is truly complex, and even those of us committed to equal opportunities, to working with difference, even those in minority groups striving for equality, get tripped up in dynamics that reproduce normative behaviours. Being politically correct can also propagate hidden discrimination. Leaders should reflect deeply about what happens in their workplace, what language is used, how they and their teams react to difference, when a ‘strange body’ enters their work space? Puwar finds that in Britain our colonial past stays with us like a sediment; Black bodies are represented as coming from uncivilised spaces, wildernesses where people are savages and need taming…..whites are associated with spirit and mind, representing the flight from the body’ (Puwar, 2004: 21). Whilst ground has been made on these issues, unconscious gender, sexual, disablity and racial stereotyping is still very much with us. Whiteness Whiteness is a term that aims to make white people visible to themselves as a racialised category (Andermahr et al., 2000). White people have viewed themselves as racially neutral, which it claims gives them power. Invisibility is, as noted by Burgin a general instrument of power: To cite this work: Extract from Chapter 5 Leadership and Diversity pgs 92-100 Western, S. (2013). Leadership: A critical text. Sage. Roland Barthes once defined the bourgeoisie as ‘the social class which does not want to be named’…. By refusing to be named, the bourgeois class represents itself and its interests as a universal norm, from which anything else is a deviation ….White however has the strange property of directing our attention to color while in the very same moment it exnominates itself as a ‘color,’ for we know very well that this means ‘not white.’…..To speak of the color of skin is to speak of a body. The body denied here is a very particular body. (Burgin, 1996: 130–1 in Puwar, 2004: 58) This is important for Critical Leadership especially when dealing with a ‘Corporate European-American ‘Axis of Maleness and Whiteness’ (or as some feminists put it ‘pale, male and stale’). Power and patriarchy are still intimately linked, and whiteness is still regarded as neutral and normative, especially in corporations, although some progress has taken place in the public sector in the UK. The task for those in leadership is to recognise this state of affairs and address this with urgency. When locating ourselves, the concept of whiteness can help bring ‘normative’ European-American behaviours and assumptions into focus. Diversity Education Marginalised minorities face discrimination in subtle and indirect ways, Treacher discusses the difficulty of addressing difference because it is ‘ subtle and yet pervasive’, she refers to: a series of mantras being repeated... it is not that I think these are inadequate or wrong but that they operate as shutters against thought, feeling and recognition of how we are all implicated in fantasies of self and other’ (Treacher, 2000: 12). The only possible way to address diversity is from a perspective that is begins with ourselves, recognising our individual and collective social location and historicalcultural position. Unless leaders can do this, then they address these difficult issues with huge blind-spots triggered by their defence mechanisms. Yet many diversity education settings provoke defences rather than build trust. Discussing diversity is To cite this work: Extract from Chapter 5 Leadership and Diversity pgs 92-100 Western, S. (2013). Leadership: A critical text. Sage. problematic, as it inevitably threatens ones identity. When discussed in leadership circles dominated by white men, diversity also asks uncomfortable questions about privilege and power. My experience of workplace diversity and equality workshops is that they often raise anxieties and create defensive responses amongst the participants who are most in need of change if culture change is to occur. These defences are displayed as either passive-aggressive responses or total compliance. Silent resistance occurs that emerges as vocal resistance in small groups over coffee after the event, or aggressive-defensive behaviours, such as ‘we are all individuals here and nobody is treated differently’ or ‘are you calling me a racist’. Building trust in order to have more transparent conversations is the only possible way to make progress. As every good psychoanalyst knows, pushing at resistance only creates more resistance. When discussing diversity issues it is vitally important not to lose the ability to think or to speak. Diversity policies have made language central to their attempts to change behaviour; however this has a double edge. It does help to improve negative images of racial and gender stereotypes but it also has other consequences. Andrew Cooper points out, ‘one of the unintended consequences of Political Correctness is that it has bred a generation of stutterers’ (Cooper, 1996: 2). People become afraid to speak, for fear of saying the wrong thing, and being accused of being racist or sexist. It is almost impossible to be ‘politically correct’ because there is no ‘correct’ and for those outside the diversity discourse, the nuances and changing terms and acronyms used to describe a diversity is very challenging. For example what does LGBT mean, and who do I apply it to? Homosexual when addressing this issue? Should I say Gay or Should I use Black, person of colour, brown, mixed-race, African-American, Asian, Indian-British? What is accepted in some countries, regions, and contexts is wrong in others, and finding a common To cite this work: Extract from Chapter 5 Leadership and Diversity pgs 92-100 Western, S. (2013). Leadership: A critical text. Sage. language becomes increasingly difficult. Those outside of the latest agreed terms of reference find themselves stuttering or silenced. Engaging people to change from all sides of the diversity spectrum means building trust, openness and understanding. I am concerned about this alienation that occurs during ‘equal opportunity and diversity purges’ in the workplace, which can close down rather than open up dialogue. Learning the mantras is easy, ‘celebrate difference’ ‘empower everyone’. Yet, if real change is to occur, leadership is required to bring the discussions and debates back to practice, and to tolerate mistakes, slips, misunderstandings in order to surface what is really happening, the subtle discrimination, and to identify where change is needed and to being a process to achieve this. Diversity is as much about inclusion as it is exclusion; and this needs to be enacted in diversity education; creating an elite of those who can command the diversity language and agenda, creates new barriers and is not underpinned by the principles of maximising inclusion. Using personal experience to locate ‘personal and shared’ ideas of normative behaviour and defences is the only starting point when dealing with diversity and difference. Addressing systems and power structures, normative attitudes, discourses and behaviours that exclude and diminish minority and marginalised groups is vital to this debate. Successful future leaders will be those who are able to cope with diversity and difference, as the globalised world demands it.