Steve_Bamlett_blog

Do you see yourself as a leader?

Thoughtful leaders are first of all concerned with keeping their organisation ‘on task’. In pursuit of this, thoughtful leadership provides containment, is available for thought, and mobilises others in the organisation to be thoughtful. Throughout the paper lessons are drawn from the work of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion on the development of the capacity for thought.

Above I quote from the abstract of an article from two organisational leadership teachers, Peter Simpson and Robert French of the University of the West Of England at Bristol. If you are interested you can access the whole article at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261708197_Thoughtful_Leadership_Lessons_from_Bion. It appealed because it is increasingly rare for me, now I don’t teach myself to see the name of Wilfred Bion invoked.

In an age obsessed by the function of political ‘leadership’ the fact that culture is silent on Bion is a pity. For in politics alone, the career of Keir Starmer is enough to show caution about whether wisdom about the function of leadership is increasing. Leadership, such as he understands it, is a concept he inherits from Tony Blair and the doleful institute he ‘leads’. It is born from Blair’s perception in power as Prime Minister that Margaret Thatcher was a model of leadership. It birthed a world of what were called ‘kitchen cabinets’ (elites within a cabinet answerable only to one person), top-down decision-making with an onus on others to merely ‘follow’ without question or thought. It birthed too functional use of lieing as part of the machinery of governance: the best example being a ‘dossier of facts’ showing ‘evidence’ that Saddam Hussein had Weapons for Mass Destruction (WMD) targeted at the UK. This dossier sought to validate the most destructive action to destabilise world politics since the First World War. Worse, these very traits made possible the surge of the populist demand for leadership to make ‘us’ great again that was one of the forces that saw Donald Trump in the USA and Boris Johnson in the UK sweep to power. In the UK we also had Brexit too, of course, anathema to Blair, but Brexit beliefs feed off the desire for leadership of a group that is not shared with others and is not ever consensual but leads from the ‘gut’.

The Blair leadership ideologies fed this very contradiction to his personal beliefs, even if, for him, they were based in the perpetuation of the economics of growth as the only way forward for liberal democracies. Boris Johnson’s use of ‘lies’ as an instrument of power is not unlike Blair’s; except that Johnson is, in essence, an incapacitated clown.

Starmer now takes every opportunity to bruit his STRONG leadership. This ensures that he takes a simplistic view on the eradication of Antisemitism (focusing this effort, as was done in the 2019 election, on the stereotype of Jeremy Corbyn rather than on the real threat, and going soft on the true threat to democracy in Israel as perceived by non-fundamentalist Israelis themselves as their own government. The mas of non-fundamentalist Jews take to the streets more often than we are told to say that the current Israeli government lacks legitimacy: a right-wing cabal led by a proven liar and criminal.

Keir Starmer today focused his ‘thoughts’ on tackling the migrant crisis – identifying the cause of world migration in exactly the same populist and racist way as Rishi Sunak (and even the sinister and knowing ideologue, Suella Braverman) do. Meanwhile, he attempts to solve culture wars by admitting to the most tenuous of the gender-critical movements views; that trans identity is an issue that can only be defined by the medical category of gender dysphoria, and that the green movement is populated by ‘tree-huggers’, antagonistic to economic growth (not so unlike the arguments of short-lived Tory Prime Minister Liz Truss, who coined the term ‘Anti-Growth Alliance’ to denote her political enemies).

None of this is though the ‘thoughtful leadership’ described by Simpson and French, a description dependent on the group psychological studies of Bion. And it is that kind of leadership we need. We don’t get it, in part (as Bion describes it in Experience in Groups) in groups there is a psychological need from the first, one that a thoughtful leader will resist, to be saved, redeemed or rescued by a ‘leader’ – he described this state of group identity as a dependency group’. Though it is merely a phase of group identity it has been a feature of Western politics so much that a Trump second-coming leadership still seems viable to some. Starmer still feeds the belief in leadership that does not make wider thought available and present to the alliance of opposition forces to the present Tory government and rushes to solutions based on taking a ‘lead’ on what people seem to want.

When I consider my own role in political life I have to confess that I would not have the skills to be such a leader, even of a small organisation (like ones I have attempted to lead with ‘vision’ like a university Social Work department) even if I wanted that. But neither do I think I particularly have them to be a ‘thoughtful leader’, for such qualities of the use of social and individual containment and facilitation of the thought of others are passingly rare, unfortunately.

In truth Jeremy Corbyn did not have them either, though he had the aspiration to them I believe, as decent people do – even though these will be misread by enemies. For the obverse of dependency group feeling is the belief in an Anti-Christ, the false leader who will betray us, and groups will project such typologies onto people unfairly precisely because the Saviour-leader type is an illusion few can sustain either, or it is just a chimera. But if people have let you believe they are what you want them to be, they will inevitably look like conscious frauds; a phenomenon recognised by the easy way in which Christ figures can be turned into anti-Christs, Churchill-type war-winners into false prophets for the future. This occurred to Tony Blair and, of course, Churchill himself (to say nothing of Thatcher and Johnson).

Simpson and French’s abstract name two factors in thoughtful leadership. We could look at them:

1. thoughtful leadership provides containment;
2. thoughtful leadership is available for thought, and;
3. thoughtful leadership mobilises others in the organisation to be thoughtful.

This is a good enough list – perhaps, and this is a danger, a potentially ‘perfect’ one for the chance of holding onto the values, skills and knowledge that can be maintained are not only ‘passingly rare’ as I said before but also open to corruption, slippage to ‘easier’ ways of leading (in the short-term at least), including succumbing to the dependency stage of a group or organisation looking for a saviour. Saviours are those who will rescue us all by their own virtues alone. Let’s explicate their hardships one by one.

One: thoughtful leadership provides containment;

Containment is that quality of holding and being held which the good enough caregiver affords to a child. Children become overwhelmed by anxiety they cannot regulate (for they have not yet developed the ego skills necessary). To contain is to physically ‘hold’ the child in ways that dispel the fear of self-fragmentation that surge through them. That physical holding has its cognitive and emotional representation in the brain and in the social sphere of the group; at its best it is a sense of ‘security’ and ‘stability’ that is NOT merely conservatism. It is a sense that there is a purpose to ‘keeping on task’, even when the task is to change an organisational culture or its cultural ideology and to integrate these into workable praxis. Achieving containment (holding in) is essential because of the dependencies which give groups at all levels a cult feel. Some would-be leaders feel that this is the equivalent of a group’s natural function and will pander to it as the Labour leadership is currently doing in validating the fear of migrants rather than exposing it as an irrational scapegoating response.

Containment is not giving way but finding frameworks in which the discussion of both problems and the range of possible resolutions are themselves reframed.

Two: thoughtful leadership is available for thought

This is vital. The cult quality of the demand for decisiveness is too often responded to in a manner that does not contain it but feeds its anarchic potential. Thought on the issue is reduced to basic simple propositions that are rarely tested even if testable. Debate takes the form of people casting to each. ‘Can’t you see: what’s going on here is obvious, the solution is simple!’ However, both formulation of problem and solution are too often in this case unitary in nature (thus avoiding the complexities we would rather not exist) tend to be stereotypes. Only this way could mass migrations be presented as selfish individuals being led by other criminally selfish people who exacerbate the problem. The solution. Defeat the criminal, demonise the migrant by quicker legal process. It’s very sad.

Three (and finally): thoughtful leadership mobilises others in the organisation to be thoughtful.

If a leader wants to lead thoughtfully, the source of thought cannot only be from them and their loyal colleagues, who think in similar ways to them; one’s ‘kitchen cabinet’. It requires the problem, its solution and challenges to proposed options to be shared and shareable.

The art of facilitating thought in others ought to be second nature in a good teacher, and sometimes I was that, but alas, it’s hard work and maybe these days my skills are not only less than they were but not as motivated either. But it is not facilitating thought that matters here but, its mobilisation: turning thoughts into a set of agreed, accomplishable and measurable actions whose consequences too can be measured. I don’t, of course, only mean by this quantitative measures, though I think they should play a role when applicable. I was able to do this as a Primary Care Mental Health Worker, and, as is usual in health work, my success in this role, made me seem unplayable who led by other means, usual prescribed ones.

Conclusion?

Leadership is difficult and bad leadership is dangerous, perhaps in global terms now where it seems that leaders are choosing between different means of extinguishing good and beauty in the world, and perhaps the world itself faster. Ecological and border crises are no longer just the stuff of everyday: to bey are the stuff of potential Armageddon. But that is too big an issue for me. In the past I have been a successful leader who too often lost faith in myself and succumbed to institutional priorities against better judgement. A main point of not succeeding has been failure to contain the group’s anxieties when change has seemed overwhelming.

I have to conclude now I am retired that I am not a leader by either other people’s or my own criteria for effective leadership. But that is because self-esteem has to be high and stable and mine never has been so. It is only in the case of maintainable self-esteem that the self-efficacy of a group facing change can be developed for it falters on issues of belief, trust and faith. These factors are not the same as they are in religions but they are analogous. The point is not to think that their is an ultimate Redeemer and that it is their job alone to redeem us all.

With love

Steve xxxx