LEADERSHIP The feeling of managing
What happens if we aban- don our traditional idealised conception of the detached, rational-thinking manager in favour of that of an embodied, engaged, feeling and knowing human being? This was the question posed by Dr Séamas Kelly when he presented his research at the Executive Edge seminar. In a presentation entitled The Feeling of Managing:
Rescuing body and emotion from the margins of management thought, Kelly argued that management research and practice has suffered from an overly narrow view of what a manager is, or should be.
“Management thought is very much a prisoner of a particular way of thinking about the world, about people and about what managers should be concerned with,” he says. “Management is seen as being largely about information processing, decision-making, planning and policy formulation, so you find certain aspects of our experience as managers are written out of management thought, or at least margin- alised – things like anxiety, career politics, or the destructiveness of hypocrisy and lack of engagement in organisations.” In Kelly’s own work within organisations he has found there to be
a dissonance between teaching practice in this area and the realities of the workplace. “If you look at any business school curriculum, not a lot has changed since the Sixties and Seventies. There are at least two possible reasons one could offer for that: either we’ve come to the end of history as regards management, we know everything there is to know; or an alternative – one to which I’d be much more sympa- thetic – we’ve simply exhausted the paradigm.” Kelly believes we need to find new ways of thinking and talking
about management. Moreover, we need to look far beyond the bounds of the traditional business school canon in our search for this newlanguage.His research draws on the work of one of the most cel- ebrated philosophers of the last century, Martin Heidegger, and in particular one of the main interpreters of his work, Hubert Dreyfus, professor of philosophy at Berkeley, California. In the Seventies, Dreyfus made history with his influential book,
What Computers Can’t Do, a critique of the artificial intelligence (AI) movement. “There was a lot of hype at the time about the extent to which human consciousness and intelligence could be replicated, even surpassed, by computers. Dreyfus wrote probably the most devastating philosophical critique of the AI movement,” says Kelly. “Drawing on Heidegger, Dreyfus argues that the key difference
between humans and computers is that human beings inhabit corporeal bodies, and this ‘embodiedness’ means we relate to the world in very distinctive ways. We all share a a common background and understanding of the world in away that a computer could never hope to
replicate.As human beings who live in similar kinds of bodies we all experience things like guilt, ambition, fear, anxiety, happiness and joy. “Dreyfus takes conventional theories of learning and turns them on
their head,” continues Kelly. “Conventional theories would say that novices will start with a number of defined rules and then gradually become more and more expert in a particular area, by refining and expanding their stock of rules. This is a very rule-based, or computa- tional, model of expertise. “Dreyfus argues, however, that this is not the way we become good managers – or good at anything,” says Kelly. “He says we do start with the set rules but, gradually, if we want to move beyond that, if we want to become extremely skilled in any particular domain, then we need to kick our scaffold of rules aside and rely on an educated intu- ition, born of experience.”
Deliberative rationality Kelly goes on to explain the distinction Dreyfus draws between two ways of engaging with the world – one he calls calculative rationality, and the other he calls deliberative rationality. “Calculative rationality is this kind of reductionistic approach to breaking things down into rules and saying: ‘Okay, if this happens again, instead of doing this I should do this.’ “Deliberative rationality, on the other hand, is a form of dwelling emotionally on experiences or events, with a view to letting them sink in, but not in a reductionistic, analytical way.” Dreyfus argues that the need for accountability in increasingly bureaucratised societies has lead to a depersonalised systematised calculative knowledge being seen as the only reliable objective knowledge. “He says that increasingly we’re being forced to produce calculative justifications for our actions. “But he reminds us that, regardless of how we justify our decisions
calculatively, it is extremely unlikely that this is how we actually arrived at the outcome in the first place,” says Kelly. While emotional intelligence has gained an important place in mod-
ern management thought, Kelly’s work has lead him to question some of the assumptions that underpin it. “My problem with EQ is that much of the debate in the area isn’t radical enough or rich enough,” says Kelly. “The Heideggerian position would be that emotion is part and parcel of every decision, and so it would be impossible to point to any kind of human intelligence that isn’t emotional.” This has led Kelly to examine Heidegger’s notion of mood, and his premise that we can never be outside of a mood – as a person, a man- ager or even a board of directors. “Moods are always there, whether positive or toxic, so these are very important part of understanding howwemake decisions, andhowwerelate with others,” saysKelly,who cites the work of Robert C. Solomon and Fernando Flores in this area (Building Trust). “They talk about the importance of cultivating the right mood
within organisations. and one of the things upon which they put a big emphasis is the importance of trust as a mood,” says Kelly. “Most importantly, they say moods are cultivated, things which we enact through our everyday practices. So, they would see the absence of trust and the prevalence of cordial hypocrisy in organisations, for example, as being a toxic dearth of authentic openness,” says Kelly. “The key challenge really is to find richer and more interesting
ways of talking about what it is to be a manager and about the nature and scope of management work.”
Dr Séamas Kelly is a Lecturer at UCD School of Business and Director of the Centre for Innovation, Technology&Organisation (CITO).
UCD BUSINESS CONNECTIONS 29
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