More than two months after I wrote this blog, I found one of my students referring to the 'good enough leader' in one of his essays, citing one of my own earlier works. To my surprise, I discovered that Larry Hirschhorn and I had written about the good enough leader (but without reference to Winnicott) in my 1999 book Organizations in Depth (p. 144-5). The tricks our memory plays! None of this is to detract from Aaron's fine book.
"The perfect is the enemy of the good." - Voltaire
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good. Is that it?" - John Steinbeck
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good. Is that it?" - John Steinbeck
I have recently been working on the relationship between leadership with the ethics of care.
In contrast to the ‘ethics of justice’ which has long dominated the thinking of moral philosophers, ethics of care theorists argue for a different system of morality, one that does not rely on claims of universality, absolute judgements of right and wrong, and perfect virtues. Instead, an ethics of care is a practical morality that grows out of a recognition that all people are embedded in different webs of social relations. We are all dependent on others for our survival and well-being and we are capable of supporting others in their moments of need and helplessness.
It seems to me that, whatever else followers expect of their leaders, a fundamental expectation from which many others follow is that leaders should care. A leader who is perceived not to care for his/her followers (and is therefore regarded as caring only for him/herself) automatically loses any claim to moral leadership, not matter what competences and achievements he/she may be able to display.
Developing a theory of the followers' moral expectations of their leaders calls for a recognition that many leaders occupy a position in their followers' unconscious minds that was occupied in earlier life by those archetypal figures, the primal father and the primal mother. To the eyes of the helpless child, these figures are truly immense in their size, knowledge and power, features later projected onto some leaders.
Being cared for and protected by these great is fundamental to most children's experience and again it forms the kernel of later expectations of leaders. It was this realization to prompted to recall Winnicott's theory of the "good enough mother" - this is the mother who does not seek perfection in her relation with her child, but seeks to provide a safe environment, not too controlling, not too distant, in which the child can discover his/her own identity.
And this prompted me to think of a 'good enough' leader, in contrast to all the supposed super-heroes and super-villains who constantly attract the attention of media, pundits and many theorists. Enter Google. Within a minute I discovered that my old friend Aaron Nurick has just published a book entitled The Good Enough Manager - The manking of a Gem (Routledge, 2012) in which he explores this very theme. Aaron has also published a thought provoking blog, "Good Enough Can Be Great".
Nurick's argument is that letting go of the ideal of perfection is a crucial step towards mature leadership and mature followership. Perfection is a childhood delusion which, more often than not, resurfaces in quite destructive shapes to sabotage what is 'good' - hence the title of this blog. Perfection, as Aristotle realized, is for mathematics and the outer spheres of the universe. The closer we get to the earth (Aristole's meteorology), the messier things become ('complex' is today's favourite expression). Such things call neither for science nor for abstract wisdom but for phronesis (or practical wisdom).
And this brings us to the good enough mother and the good enough leader or manager - the individual who recognizes that perfection is a wish-fulfilling illusion. Destructive perfectionism often becomes a ruthless mechanism of control (think of micromanagement, think of all those benchmarks, all those 'best practices', all those cutting edges and world leaders), of disabling criticism (all those parental voices saying "You disappointed me again") and of defensiveness ("Since we cannot be perfect what is the use of trying?")
Three cheers then for Nurick. Since not everyone one can be No 1 and since No 1 itself is often a chimera let's celebrate what is good enough good enough. Good enough can be great. And let's celebrate good enough leaders and managers who care and get things done rather than pitch our hopes in messiahs and miracle-workers.
Yiannis, I would be curious to hear what you would say about the function of the 'good enough father'. This might perhaps demand taking up the perspective of a late Lacan, but might it help us to consider an ethics of care not based on an implicit sovereign identity within which followers follow? Can Lacan's reading of Antigone suggest another approach to an ethics of care? Philip
ReplyDeleteDear Philip,
ReplyDeleteI wanted to reflect first about your thought-provoking question, before responding. The more I thought about it, the more the idea of a ‘good enough father’ melted away as an impossibility. A good enough father is one who fundamentally undermines the principle represented by fatherhood, the principle of absolute externality and law. A good enough father must be thought of as one who occasionally turns a blind eye, who will sometimes accept an insult without complaining, who will forgive shoddy work and will bend the rule that he himself has set. He occasionally treats his children unequally and his partner with impatience (if not anger). He often fails in his objectives and fails to live to his own standards. He soon lapses into what Howie Schwartz brilliantly describes in ‘the sin of the father’, i.e. the father’s inability to live up to the principle that he represents in the child’s eyes (often with the collusion of the mother). (Schwartz, 2001)
Winnicott, you see, in referring to the good enough mother was addressing himself to the mothers. He was telling them to trust their maternal qualities to guide them in being ‘good enough’ and not listen to various motherhood gurus who were seeking to turn motherhood into a university degree or something similar. By being ‘good enough’ the mother sustains the maternal imago in her child’s eyes, the mother who cares, the mother who is kind and loving, the mother who enables the child to develop his//her own identity without being overawed or abandoned. Exactly the opposite happens with a ‘good enough father’. The paternal imago represents the absolute, the unyielding qualities of the real, the law, hence any deviation of the father from this supplants the paternal imago. If anything, one could argue that Winnicott was urging mothers not to try to be fathers.
I think that this is precisely linked to the ethics of care and its distinction from the ethics of justice. The latter does not permit exceptions, does not permit transgressions and hardly even allows for genuine forgiveness. Exactly the opposite applies to the ethics of care, where everything is treated as an exception, where no rule has universal hold. The consequence then is that leaders who occupy a paternal imago position cannot be ‘good enough’ without fatally compromising themselves – it is maybe not surprising that such leaders are rarely forgiven by their followers when they appear to have broken their own promises, their principles etc. (see, for instance, my blog on Papandreou’s vilification). It is by occupying a mother imago position, that leaders can be accepted as ‘good enough leaders’ and, therefore, as good leaders.
Y
PS. I have always found Lacan’s interpretation of Antigone so perverse that I can only see it as a very bad (but clever) joke. Antigone as representing the fulfilment of pure desire?
Schwartz, H. S. 2001. The revolt of the primitive: An inquiry into the roots of political correctness. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Yiannis,
DeleteThe idea of a good enough father is intriguing. But I must disagree that it is an impossibility. I would look at as a parallel to the good enough mother, which would mean coming at it from the opposite direction.
I’m no expert on Winnicott, but it seems to me that the idea of a good enough mother has an irony to it, in the sense that the good enough mother is actually a better mother than the perfect mother. By helping the child gradually adapt itself to the idea that mother is not the imago, but a human being, she prepares it to live in the world, which does not love it. The alternative, the perfect mother, would maintain her place as the answer to all the child’s needs, would leave the child incapable of coping with the objective world. In that sense, the good enough mother has paternal elements.
By analogy, we could see the good enough father as the one who picks up the child at this point and gradually brings him into the external world, with its demands and it laws, while weaning him from the loving maternal orbit at a speed that is not too frightening. In this sense, he has maternal elements. The “perfect father”, by contrast, would be the perfectionist, the obsessive-compulsive who makes demands without any feeling for the child and his limited capabilities. That father would tend to raise a child with no feeling for himself – another obsessive-compulsive, in other words -- who ultimately would also be unable to cope with the world because he would be incapable of relating to it emotionally. So the good enough father would be a better father than the perfect father, in the sense of the perfectionist father.
By extension, though, it seems to me unnecessarily limited to see the ethics of caring as opposed to the ethics of justice. There is a tension between them, to be sure, but that tension generates the central dynamic of life. No absolute choice is necessary, only balance and moderation, which is why God gave us each a mother and a father.
Howie
The tension of which Howie speaks is between the individual pursuing the ideal itself and placing it in relation to the particular situation through his or her acts. The word 'desire' in the Lacanian world refers to the individual's relation to a beyond of 'knowing' - the individual places the desired object (Lacan's objet petit a) in the place of what s/he wants/lacks. 'Pure desire' is a way of speaking about the structural lack itself and its ultimate unsatisfiability (aka 'drive').
ReplyDeleteSo Antigone's refusing to recognise Creon's leadership is a refusal of Creon's imposing a law regardless of the particular situation of Polyneices' death - a 'knowing' the limitations of which Creon is not prepared to contemplate. Antigone's actions exhibit an 'ethic' rooted in being prepared to recognise what the particular situation demands, even if it means going beyond the current understanding of the law as represented by Creon.
In Lacanese, 'castration' is the acceptance of structural lack in our very being. I would hazard a guess that the 'good enough father' recognises his own limitation in relation to his child, thus preparing a way for the child to come to that same recognition in due time.
Philip