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Leadership: Is It A Calling?

Speech by Tim Livesey, Secretary for Public Affairs to Archbishop Rowan Williams and a former Downing Street information and policy officer during the Blair administration.

Delivered at the 2009 Niblett Memorial Lecture, 19 September 2009

Download Tim Livesey's speech on leadership as a pdf

I was both humbled and daunted when Keith Lamdin asked, out of the blue, if I would deliver this lecture – the Roy Niblett Lecture. My saying yes, and your being here tonight, illustrates something about what it means to be Christian which is relevant to our theme this evening. It means saying yes to an invitation we do not entirely understand and the consequences of which we do not know; it means letting go of our fears and trusting that we are invited for a reason; and it means trusting in God’s providence – he after all is the author of any good that we can do. As Christians we – unlike Samuel sleeping in the sanctuary when the Lord calls – may not be very good at saying yes, but we are quite used to the idea that the generous, rather than the calculating, response to invitation, to a call, is usually the right one.

So thank you for coming; for taking a risk with your Saturday evening. I trust that together we might do some honour to Roy Niblett’s memory. Some of you may have known him and can therefore vouch personally for his tremendous gifts, including his strong faith and his “conviction that religion is an inescapable dimension of human fullness” ; a conviction I, and I suspect most of us here, share. As a teacher by training and formation Roy Niblett believed, to use his words, that "to show confidence in others, matters in untold measure" . This, and his increasing concern during his time as Dean of the Institute of Education in London, to which he was appointed in 1960, that in “response to a government-led policy, ... economic considerations [in education] increasingly predominated, at the expense of regard for imagination, creativity and personal development”, are relevant to what I would like to say this evening. So too was his unwavering belief that higher education had an obligation “to offer challenge and constructive criticism to society, and not to confine itself to an agenda set by others”. One of the characteristics of leaders – Roy Niblett being a case in point – is that they tend not to follow, or at least not to follow uncritically, the dictates of prevailing fashion or orthodoxy, especially I suspect, when that orthodoxy has been elaborated by government. As I hope to show most will be responding to much deeper resonances than the fashions of the day.

The title for this talk emerges from a conversation with Keith in which we discovered a common interest in the question of leadership – what is it? Where does it come from? How is it to be discerned? And, perhaps most importantly, how is it to be nourished and cherished? For different reasons, and coming from very different professional backgrounds, we have both been exposed to what can seem, at times, a de-moralising (I use the word advisedly) account of leadership. Not that there is any lack of talk about leadership. It seems to be everywhere. We, or on our behalf the media, are forever demanding more and better leadership. But what on earth are we looking for? Do we really know? Or is demanding better leadership more of a form of ritualistic complaint against everything and everyone – not be taken too literally or too seriously? Perhaps – but since a whole industry of leadership training and development has grown up, and as many of our key decision makers are themselves the product of recent and current leadership thinking, we ought perhaps to take the issue reasonably seriously whilst retaining a healthy scepticism about the ultimate importance of some of what we discuss.

Some of my own scepticism developed during a period of turbulent modernisation across the public sector which began as far back as the 80’s though my experience of its effects was more recent. Every organisation has to change and develop over time; and there will always be difficult decisions to be made about what change is necessary, and how it is to be achieved. In an age of globalisation, rapid and constant technological development and instant and endless communication, both the substance of those decisions and the speed with which they become obsolete poses a daunting challenge. All the more reason I would suggest to be completely clear about what things must remain whatever else changes; what, for want of a better phrase, one might call core values or core moral purpose, both of which are essential in any healthy organisation. To cut a complicated story short the organisation I worked for about 20 years – the FCO - modernised rapidly, with mixed results. It is still too early - as Mao famously and wisely remarked about the French Revolution – to tell whether the changes have been a success. There are many who think they haven’t.

Experiencing the pace and method of that broad attempt to modernise and rationalise the modus operandi of an organization set me on a train of thought some of which I will be sharing with you this evening. It is a train of thought which is necessarily incomplete, indeed in many ways highly speculative. I have no very firm conclusions. I am sure of some things, and very unsure of others. The questions I am asking are not, in essence, academic. They are practical. Only experience will provide answers, and even these must, necessarily, be provisional. They are also, I think, profoundly moral; and spiritual. For me, and perhaps for you too, one very important and overarching question provides the perspective in which the issue of leadership ought to be approached: does the person of Jesus, and do the teachings of the Gospel, have anything to do with what most people would see as an entirely secular question; namely the question of leadership?

My answer to that overarching question is very simple – it’s a yes. I recognise that in exploring more deeply the moral and spiritual connections between our faith and contemporary questions like the kind of leadership we should be nurturing, we have to find resonances which connect us with the world of those who do not believe, or who believe differently. Thankfully some of that that can be for another day, and will I’m sure be touched on by subsequent speakers in this series. Tonight I am going to assume a good deal, and in particular that, along with Roy Niblett, most of us here are prepared to take seriously what we have learnt and continue to learn from our tradition. The division of Church and State does not, indeed cannot, mean the deliberate alienation of the insights of religion from the business of contemporary living, even if we live in a largely, and increasingly, secular society.

We need first I think to disentangle a number of things which have a tendency to become confused. The first is leadership and leadership positions. The two have become synonymous for many people. All people occupying, or being considered, for leadership positions are leaders, or potential leaders. Not so. There are many in leadership positions who emphatically are not leaders, though they may be very good managers, or highly esteemed corporate men and women. Many leaders are left behind by, or consciously choose to be left behind by, the promotion and selection game. Opting out can be a decisive act of – particularly moral – leadership. Think of Thomas More.

Second we must distinguish between management and leadership - if only to acknowledge that what most people and organisations are developing these days is management capability, even if they are talking about leadership.

Third we need to distinguish between competence and virtue. For the most part large public sector organisations and big corporations are concerned to build capacity or competence - attributes which can be measured, and are skills, or are cognitive based. Between them these organisation employ and run the greater part of our economy and workforce (the NHS for example is the third largest employer in the world with 1.3 million employees) with all that means in terms of their cumulative effect on our society and its values. Though sound judgment is an absolutely vital capacity in right decision-making in any environment, and particularly in a large and complex one, big organisations tend to eschew the development of moral and spiritual capacity. It is almost as though it is understood that this is someone else’s job – presumably the Church’s in days past.

When it comes to the moral or ethical dimension of leadership, or even management, individual conscience is deliberately de-emphasized in favour of corporate ethic, whatever that means. Rules – what we tend to know as regulations – are developed centrally, and these provide the moral compass by which we are meant to be guided. The management environment is a regulated environment. The manager, and increasingly the “leader” is a regulator. The rules by which his or her actions are governed are set by the company. In an extraordinary explosion of confidence in the market’s ability to regulate effectively both the efficiency (machines) and therefore productivity (the workforce) of the workplace, and its moral and ethical life, unprecedented amounts of money were poured first by the private sector in the 80’s, and then by the public sector from the 90’s, into management consultancy. All sectors of industry, the BBC, the NHS and finally every government department, including local government, decided that the best people to proscribe the competences and the calculus of modern management – material and moral - were consultants. In April this year, even as the Chancellor was announcing his austerity budget, the Office for Government Commerce was managing tenders for £4bn of management consultancy contracts.

The increasing privatisation of moral as well as managerial capacity, the two are not entirely separable, is disturbing. There is plenty of evidence – from the billions lost on failed IT projects managed by well paid consultants to the crisis of confidence in the education sector, and the progressive dismantling now underway of many of the management and measurement tools imposed in the past 10 years - to suggest that the calculation was wrong. There is also ample evidence that the moral vacuum created by an excessive emphasis on the measurable, and in particular efficiency and profitability, has cost us dear, even in purely financial terms. Suddenly the market is preaching a more ethical message. But how long will that last if it is a technical adjustment to a blip in the market mechanism rather than a moral and programmatic response to signs of a deeper malaise?

Overly muscular approaches to policing demonstrations, the appropriateness of the regulatory framework for treating with intelligence services which engage in torture, and the legality of going to war – to take a few recent controversies - are also being questioned. No doubt some were questioning, or trying to question these policies, at the time they were first being advanced. But often it is precisely the moral considerations that are relegated by decision-makers – those occupying leadership positions - when confronted with the apparent efficiency of another way of working. Being wise after the event is scant consolation to those whose lives are affected, or even, in the most extreme circumstances lost, as a direct consequence of some unpalatable truth being compromised, or ignored, for reasons of so-called realpolitik, or corporate profit.

This is not to say that we have got it all wrong. It is to question why, in respect of the outsourcing of policy making (what we might call “government by management consultancy”), there has been such a collapse in public or political confidence in the ability of the practitioners to figure out how to improve standards without damaging the core moral purpose of the public body concerned? Why did government begin to shop around for politically convenient advice or legal opinion, or modernise to the point of losing sight of, if not inadvertently abandoning, core principles such as the primacy of Parliament, and the absolute impartiality and independence of the Civil service; rather than working with the existing grain to improve what needed to be improved?

It is also to ask whether one of the casualties of our apparent loss of personal and institutional self-confidence is an instinctive recognition that it is often unpredictable experience, extraordinary and highly individual, but also sometimes apparently simple and mundane, qualities that make for really great leaders; not any corporate moulding machine.

Creating the conditions within which real leadership can emerge, valuing the gift of leadership in whatever form it takes, and learning to nourish the leadership qualities that are present in some measure in everyone – these are challenges which, in my experience, we are meeting more by luck than judgment at present, if we are meeting them at all. It seems that to an alarming degree we have lost our feel for what it is that makes for real leadership. By focusing so much attention on the range of skills which are seen as key to the delivery of measurable outcomes such as reduced costs, improved yields, shorter waiting times, increased choice, greater profitability (measured alas in the shortest of terms), improved league table results – we have lost sight of some of the more intangible, yet morally and spiritually essential, ingredients of a just, humane and sustainable order.

Collectively we are not safe – even our money is not safe - if the moral and spiritual dimension of the lives of those who take decisions on our behalf is wanting. Recent events in the world of capital markets, economic management, regulation, policing, and representative politics give us due cause to question whether we are developing sufficiently clear-sighted, independent-minded, right-thinking, plain speaking and courageous leaders – if we didn’t know enough already to ask the question.

We know that obeying rules – operating within the guidelines – is no excuse for immoral, inconsiderate, or harmful behaviour. Especially when we have good reason to believe that the rules themselves are morally flawed. Not everything can be reduced to things measurable - the market’s metrics; the government’s evidence-based policy making; electoral majorities than are in fact miniscule minorities of those eligible to vote. We should be sceptical of what sounds like, and often, is self-serving jargon. What about all the things that cannot be measured? What about Roy Niblett’s “imagination, creativity and personal development “? Who in the midst of all this – think of MP’s expenses - will stand for what is true? Where are the really reliable sources of information? What about that vocation of which Roy spoke to “to offer challenge and constructive criticism to society, and not to confine [one]self to an agenda set by others”. If something is wrong should not every one of us have the confidence and the courage to admit error? After all we hardly deserve real leadership if we cannot accept that we all have a part to play in creating a just order.

Roy’s dictum "to show confidence in others, matters in untold measure” is a searing insight which has to travel, and apply, in all directions. Our leaders need to know we have confidence in them, and we, the “led”, need to know that our leaders have confidence in us. We all have leadership qualities which at different times in our lives we are called upon to display, to develop, to put to the test. Confidence and trust in ourselves and in the community which calls us is crucial. If at times it feels as though trust is in short supply we probably only have ourselves to blame.

So what do we mean when we talk of leaders and leadership? I doubt if any of us is sure but perhaps I can suggest a working definition. Leaders are people who inspire in others a deep desire to be all that they can be, to play their full part in the created order, to step-up in times of trouble, and to have both the vision, and the generosity, when they do to allow others to step up to play their part too. Vision is important – “where there is no vision the people perish” . So too is a proper sense of one’s place alongside others. Leaders are not solo actors; they are members of a community which will prosper when the vision is caught and when people co-operate together. Over time and through generations there should be a virtuous circle in operation: vision being caught, members of the community becoming enthused, discovering their own gifts, taking their turn to lead the people.

Leadership in this sense is not fundamentally about competence. It is about the active recognition of gift, and of calling. It is about not hiding from the truth of who we are, and what we know in our heart to be true (our moral sense), but embracing that truth courageously. It is not something bestowed by some higher earthly power – that it to confuse it with position. And it is not about the expression of ego. That is to confuse it with the fulfilment of personal ambition.

There will be something deeply, even dauntingly, generous about the mature leader. He or she is one who has learned to give of him or herself unstintingly, instinctively, even unthinkingly. At its best this generosity becomes an ingrained habit. It leads to fearlessness; a preparedness, if need be, to go through the sternest testing, the most unpitying criticism , the most appalling misrepresentation. It is also the generosity that comes from knowing that great things can only be achieved by people acting together. Being the centre of attention or the sole actor in the play would be entirely self-defeating. So what is it that calls forth this gift, this generosity, this courage? And how can we recognise it better in the midst of the mess we seem to have got ourselves into – economically, politically, socially?

I am not sure. But my observation of the lives of some who have responded to the call suggests strongly that this generosity comes from within, but often in response to a call from without. For some that response may be to a blatant injustice – I think of Nelson Mandela, Oscar Romero or Aung Sang Suu Kyi; for others it may be a response to a call from the family, the close community or the nation – I think for example of Etty Hilsum, Jean Vanier, Winston Churchill, Chad Varah; and for some - and I suppose it is they, or rather their calling and their response, which interests me most - the call comes from God. Having recently been to Taize Brother Roger springs to mind. Competence, material resource, probability of success, technical back-up, even vision – all of them emphasised by contemporary development and recruitment programmes, none of them unimportant – do not figure centrally in the call to leadership. Rather it is what is inside – our God-given potential – and what is outside – God’s Providence and grace – that provide both the wherewithal and the opportunity.

This makes for something of a problem in our hollowed-out secular culture. How do we speak of such things? What language should we use? Overtly religious language, whilst entirely natural and nourishing for some, is deeply discomforting, opaque or alien for many. This is part of our challenge: to acknowledge that God calls each of us to lives of service, including for some the service of leadership, without becoming incoherent, cut off from a discourse which finds it hard at best, impossible or inadmissible at worst, to speak in these terms.
As Christians we believe that we are created by God, in His image, and that we are each called by Him into a life of discipleship which for some, but only for some, means taking special responsibility in the community, whether the community of believers or the wider community. The link between vocation – calling – and leadership is, in theological terms, indistinguishable from the link between vocation and discipleship. They are the same. It is only in responding faithfully and with humility to God working in our lives that we become what we are meant to be, and that we discover what we are meant to do. If our calling is to take a lead for others, on their behalf, to go where they may not be prepared, at least initially, to go, then that is what we have to do.

As Christians there is no need to see leadership as different from discipleship. No need to invest it with mythical status. For us leadership can be less personally dramatic, less vested with the paraphernalia of rank and position and more a question of responding honestly to the working out of our inner life. It is a question of responding to the call to love. Sometimes it is the community which will encourage us to take on specific roles and responsibilities. Sometimes we may discern this for ourselves. For many of us that rather clichéd interview question “where do you see yourself in ten years time?” is particularly challenging. Not only do we not know; we don’t necessarily much care. We do not see ourselves as the authors of our own destiny in this way. We do not see life simply as a series of career choices; an a la carte menu from which we choose according to our ability, opportunity and drive to achieve. Responding to Christ’s commandment to love and to do the will of the Father is what we are meant to be about but try saying that in a job interview!

Some months before the announcement that Archbishop Vincent Nicholls was to become the next Archbishop of Westminster the Tablet published an interesting vox pop of people answering the questions “What do you think are the qualities we should be looking for in the next Archbishop of Westminster”. A striking proportion of respondents lay and clerical stressed the importance of managerial competence, and especially of being good with the media. For many the competences which would be given priority in a classic executive recruitment exercise in the corporate world, or the senior civil service, are just as important for those chosen for high office in the Church. For me this is a challenging reality. Made more challenging by the suggestion that the Church and its leadership were, or ought to be somehow in competition with secular authority - adversaries fighting for the soul of the nation - rather than complementary voices contributing to the common good. I’m not so sure. The response which intrigued me most was Anne Widdecombe’s. It was characteristically terse. The most important characteristic in her view (indeed the only characteristic) was that “he must not want the job” .

A leadership of service has to be a leadership of self-sacrifice. It is a particularly hard road, a particularly narrow way and one to which not all are called; though all are called to some form of discipleship. And yet it is those who live out this special vocation who in turn most inspire the rest of us to live as authentically and generously as we can. They are our conscience and our model. They keep before our eyes another way to live. I think for example of Abbe Pierre who founded the Emmaus communities for the homeless and was famous for delivering uncomfortable truths to those in power without causing personal offence; to use his words: being "a flea in the ear of the great". Despite being an unconventional figure, and not someone whose life was spent in the public eye, he was voted consistently for decades the most popular and respected public figure in French public life. I think of Oscar Romero who was jolted by the killing of his Jesuit friend Rutillio Grande by paramilitaries in El Salvador to stand up very publicly and say “Basta ya”: enough is enough; “The killing must stop; in God’s name stop the killing”; knowing full well that he would be next. And when they came for him it was God’s Providence that he should be saying the Mass in a hospital chapel. They gunned him down anyway.

I’d like to quote these words from a poem he wrote called “A future not our own”. They embody some of the humility - that true sense of our place in the scheme of things – that is an essential underpinning for really authentic leadership:
It helps now and then to step back/And take the long view./The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,/It is even beyond our vision./We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction/Of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work./Nothing we do is complete/Which is another way of saying/That the kingdom always lies beyond us./That is what we are about/We plant the seed that one day will grow./We water seeds already planted/Knowing that they hold future promise./We lay foundations that will need further development./It may be incomplete but it is a beginning,/A step along the way,/An opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter/And do the rest./We may never see then end results/but that is the difference between/the master and the worker. /We are workers, not master builder,/ministers, not messiahs./We are prophets of a future not our own.

There is in this poem an echo of the advice given to the new President Obama by the black American novelist Alice Walker in an open letter written (and published in the Guardian and elsewhere ) on 6 November last year. To me she displays a rare understanding of the challenges faced by someone in a highly exposed and powerful leadership position. In this case also someone who appears to have a very remarkable gift for leadership. Alice Walker understands that what really matters when the chips are down, and in the case of President Obama that will be much of the time, is who you are, not what you are. And she understands that it is in the soul that true leadership is forged and nourished, and among family and friends, and in prayer, that it can be sustained and maintained. Her advice is about soul and spirit; not about competence and capacity.

She begins with an echo of Romero: “I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance.” She continues, and I am quoting at some length: “A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. … We are used to seeing men in the White House soon become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your family deserve this fate. One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want. …I would further advise you not to take on other people's enemies. Most damage that others do to us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion. We must learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise… There must be no more crushing of whole communities, no more torture, no more dehumanizing as a means of ruling a people's spirit…… A good model of how to "work with the enemy" internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet. Because, finally, it is the soul that must be preserved, if one is to remain a credible leader. All else might be lost; but when the soul dies, the connection to earth, to peoples, to animals, to rivers, to mountain ranges, purple and majestic, also dies. And your smile, with which we watch you do gracious battle with unjust characterizations, distortions and lies, is that expression of healthy self-worth, spirit and soul, that, kept happy and free and relaxed, can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening the world./ In Peace and Joy,/Alice Walker.

In his wonderful book “Silence and Honeycakes – Wisdom of the Desert”, Rowan Williams describes the enduring significance for the Church of the wisdom, teaching and spirituality of the desert fathers of the third and fourth century. He quotes one anonymous elder’s less colourful advice to a brother struggling with temptation: “Go. Sit in your cell and give your body in pledge to the walls” . Presumably he was referring to the walls of his cell. But there is much more in this pithy piece of advice than meets the eye. The servant leader will every day have to pledge him or herself to the walls of his cell, his calling, his or her vocation to carry the community for the sake of the kingdom, enduring all manner of hardships for the common good of humankind. Or as Rowan Williams puts it “You have to promise yourself to yourself and to your actual environment…You have to espouse reality rather than unreality”.

Alice Walker points President Obama to the Dalai Lama, monk and man of prayer as her example of how to care for one’s soul in order to confront and defeat the enemy within and, as she implies, the enemy without as well. Not by yielding to temptation, the temptation to power, to repression, to falsehood, but by pledging oneself to the walls – the walls of who I am, who I am called to be: the who of the One who made me.

This is a model of leadership which needs to be much better understood in our contemporary culture with its over-reliance on management toolkits where something far more profound is needed, if difficult decisions are to be made and their consequences lived out faithfully, without panic, and without resort to coercion or oppression. This kind of leadership is modelled not in manuals but by real people who find it in themselves to answer a call to service of the highest order. I think of Jean Vanier, Mother Theresa, Mahatma Ghandi, Aung Sang Suu Kyi and, who knows, maybe Barack Obama. We will all know less dramatic examples from our own life experience. It is they whose lives we seek to emulate.

I will finish if I may with the gospel of St John which tells us all that we, as Christians, need to know about what it might mean to be called by God to a life of service and why, if that is our particular calling, our “very reason”, then we should not be afraid. We are not alone.

“I tell you most solemnly unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest. Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If a man serves me he must follow me...Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say? Father save me from this hour? But it was for that reason that I have come to this hour. Father glorify your name!”

Trying to understand, with all the moral and spiritual resources we have at our disposal, what this example might mean in our contemporary context is to attempt to do what Roy Niblett described as “offer[ing] challenge and constructive criticism to society, and [choosing] not to confine [ourselves] to an agenda set by others”: is that not at the heart of our Christian calling?

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