Leadership literature: The good and bad

Reflecting on the topic of Stoicism and leadership, a number of thoughts came to mind. There is a sizable literature engaging with the topic, ranging from genuinely insightful and well-researched work all the way to the diametric opposite of that, where a few “Stoic” ideas get used basically as window-dressing for whatever it is the author seems to be selling. Leadership is already one of those rather fuzzy and often let’s say “aspirational” terms. There are myriad conceptions, perspectives, and theories of “leadership” out there, varying widely in quality.  Perhaps the place to start is noting that if we are looking for substantive, productive, and applicable intersections between Stoic philosophy and leadership, what we really will need on both parts is the “good stuff.”

Not as simple as it sounds

Stoic leadership is definitely not something impossible, but I expect that it will prove in some respects a lot harder to conceptualize and to enact consistently than many people imagine.  One can’t simply take a robust, complex, systematic philosophy as a way of life like Stoicism and mash it up with some conception of leadership and expect these to fit neatly with each other, particularly if we are understanding leadership in traditional terms of managing entire groups or organizations, decision-making, setting priorities, identifying and developing other’s capacities, and the like.

All too often, in literature on Stoicism and leadership, what we see is “instrumentalization” of Stoic philosophy on behalf of some (perhaps dubious) notion of leadership. Stoicism, or frankly any virtue ethics worth calling that, isn’t the type of system of thought and living that can be co-opted or harnessed by people, communities, movements, or processes clearly incompatible with its core doctrines and values without deforming it into something that is no longer Stoic in any real sense. 

Stoicism as an exploitative tool

A workplace leader, for example, who wants their employees to learn about and practice “Stoicism” in order to develop resilience not primarily as something good for those people under their leadership, but precisely so that they can extract more productivity out of them (particularly if that leader isn’t engaged in study and application of Stoicism themselves), has definitely lost any connection to any “Stoicism” worth calling by that name. (As a side-note, perhaps we need for this “Stoicism as a way to extract more work” motif a moniker analogous to the “broicism” or “$toicism” coined earlier for other common perversions or deformations of Stoic philosophy.)

What’s counter-productive about that sort of “Stoic leadership”?  One main problem is that it focuses on what Stoics (and really all the ancient virtue ethicists) identified as “externals”, primarily things like money, property, positions, power, prestige, or reputation. It makes generating more of these into the main or perhaps only motivation for someone studying and applying Stoicism. That’s not inherently a bad thing of course. From the Stoic perspective, externals are neither good nor bad but indifferents, in this case all preferred indifferents. And the virtues, which a Stoic ought to be developing and acting in accordance with, actually do bear upon those externals. Prudence or practical wisdom involves using, arranging, prioritizing those externals wisely and well, and justice involves doing that in accordance with its own requirements of fairness, merit, commitment, benevolence, and so on.

Prioritizing externals over ethics

The problem arises, undermining good leadership, when these externals get accorded priority over what should matter more, for example treating employees justly, as fellow human beings rather than as revenue generators or as people to exert power over.  And for any leader who isn’t entirely virtuous (if there is any such leader-sage!), allowing oneself to be seduced into those misprioritizations will always be a temptation one needs to be on guard and deliberately struggle against. Real Stoic leadership will require a different set of measures and metrics for its success (or even continued existence) than appealing to externals. And at the same time, paradoxically, it will involve attention to a vast variety of externals, managing, deciding, planning, and prioritizing rightly, that is, in right proportion and perspective

There is far more that could and should be said about the particular warning and worry just barely outlined here, I’ll readily admit. But perhaps, despite not going anywhere far or deep enough, these short reflections will prove to be a useful thought-provoker. Stoic leadership is indeed possible, but if the Stoic part is not to be undermined and eroded, it will demand a very different kind of “leadership” than what many would-be leaders would be comfortable with.

Greg Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a member of the Modern Stoicism Team, an APPAcertified philosophical counselor, and teaches at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

---