Seven Deadly Narratives of Leadership: Exploring the Dark Side

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Short Description

This discussion will reframe the classic list of seven deadly sins into the context of organizations and the practices of leaders in turbulent times. Do leaders subtly fall into rationalization, self-justification, foolishness, and callous indifference through being complicit with their maleficent internal narratives? What leader development interventions might respond to wrongheaded leader narratives?

Detailed Abstract

We often hear questions like: “What must that leader have been thinking?” “What possessed her to do that?” “That CEO needs to give his head a shake!” or “It so disappointing to see the pain cause by one wrong-headed and self-serving leader!” This paper is a conceptualized attempt at making sense of why leaders' actions sometimes fall within the dark side of organizational theory and behavior. How is it that leaders who have found the favour of others in the service of a great cause (i.e., the education of children and youth) get sucked into making space for perpetuating wrong-doing or facilitating unthinkably bad things. In this paper, vicious (non-virtuous) thinking, inner political churnings, unconscious or obdurant reinforcement of systemic evil, and innovative but hurtful ways of exercising influence over and with others are named and challenged. We ask: Do deadly leader narratives, in part, provide an explanation for turbulent times? And, what leader development interventions might respond to wrongheaded leader narratives?

In this paper, we describe how leaders may subtly fall into rationalization, self-justification, foolishness and callous indifference through being complicit with their maleficent internal narratives. We make value judgments and proffer our exploratory exposition of probabilities about the impulses of leaders’ vicious (non-virtuous) thinking, hurtful inner political churnings, unconscious reinforcement of systemic evil, and hurtful ways of influencing or disadvantaging others. We suggest that false leader narratives collude with situated factors to provide one explanation for leader perpetrated evil and unhealthy disruptions.

This paper offers the view that the leaders respond to impulses and drives of many sorts, including those rooted in false, inimical, ruinous and pernicious internal narratives. The stories that leaders attract, absorb, store and randomly access provide the content for their minds that, in turn, create the emotions leading to their decisions and behaviours. Of course, our physical bodies also have their say and sway on our inner complexities by generating effectual impulses or alerts that direct our wills (“time to eat” or “strike out at that threat with immobilizing words”). It is well appreciated that peer pleasing and social pressure may move leaders to make decisions that result in certain actions: good and bad. In part, leaders lead according to the stories and the experiences of their lives that are entered into their narrative repositories. Along with biological, environmental and social interactions, what a leader thinks and the intelligences with which she or he communicates (their stories and scripts) will shape their behaviour and the views of others about them (Staub, 2003; Kekes, 2005; Zimbardo, 2007; Zoller, Lahera, & Normore, 2015).

We offer the claim that “as a leader thinks, so they become.” In other words, we suggest that there are internal narratives or scripts that “play” in leader’s minds and hearts that may be determinate with respect to their attitudes and actions, good or bad. We offer our conjecture that these scripts contain beliefs about the leader’s identity, their longings, their fears, the best means for survival, the safest approaches to challenges and the fundamental values about other people, relationships, and how the world works. From this perspective there are positive and virtuous scripts and there are negative and vicious scripts. Our focus is to briefly describe and project seven longstanding negative narratives that we believe co-mingle to result in a leader’s thinking, choosing and behaving in ways that may be unbecoming of what followers hope for in their leaders. We interrogate the so-called “dark triad” of Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy that has been associated with the seven deadly narratives (Veselka, Giammaro, & Verons, 2014) and the we consider the concepts of careerism, extreme power-seeking and numenification. What we will offer in this presentation is a view that the dark side of leadership and evil may at least, in part, be explained by leaders who choose to see that heir existence may be believed to be singularly about themselves, their needs, wants and desires. If this seems a bit drastic to the reader, then we would invite the skeptics to join us in our observations of toxic leaders.

We conclude this paper with the haunting lyrics from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. There is a sense that leader narratives woo them, compete for their attention and then direct them. The leader’s internal narratives have incredible sway and power over their lives and the lives of others, their choices, their attitudes, and their actions.

Sing once again with me our strange duet, my power over you grows stronger yet . . . in this labyrinth, where night is blind, the Phantom of the Opera is there - inside your mind. Let your mind start the journey through a strange, new world! Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before! Let your soul take you where you long to be! Only then can you belong to me . . . floating, falling, sweet intoxication! Touch me, trust me, savour each sensation! Let the dream begin, let your darker side give into the power of the music that I write - the power of the music of the night.

The lack of capacity to transcend, to be introspective, to be critical of one’s own narratives results in terrible things for such leaders and their followers. When leaders habituate and allow themselves to be inhabited by the deadly narratives then there is thick heartedness and viciousness that results in the permitting and unleashing of evil and corruption. We will invite conference colleagues to engage with us on the leadership development implications of the propositions described and elaborated in this paper.

Participants

• Keith D. Walker, University of Saskatchewan

• Benjamin Kutsyuruba, Queen's University