LEADERSHIP FOR CHANGE: Spirituality, and a PostModern Perspective

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LEADERSHIP FOR CHANGE Spirituality, and a
Post-Modern Perspective

• James Beebe
• Gonzaga University

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Leadership and Power

• There is an urgent need to recognize that many of
  us really do have power.
• The challenge is to use it well. (Welch 1999)

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Understanding good and evil

• There is a need for images of hope that can
  counter cynicism and despair without relying on
  utopian expectation.
• A first step is to start by rejecting the myth
  of social change similar to the comforting and
  illusory story of evolutionary progress.
• Whether society is better in the future is
  irrelevant

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Working for social justice

• How, then, do we work, with power and passion,
  for social justice without the assurances of
  eventual victory and without the ego- and
  group-building dynamics of self-righteousness and
  demonizing?
• What can replace the vitality of being right and
  on the winning side?

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Stage One When Old Enemies Disappear

• We may be the administrators.
• It is often difficult to shift from radical
  opposition to coalition building and
  institutional change.

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Kanters theory of proportions

• Resistance to social change increases when the
  tipping point is reached.
• Those who were allies often become resistant,
  finding themselves, despite their intentions,
  resisting the ways in which their power is now
  being challenged.
• In-fighting often characterizes many progressive
  groups.

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Kanters theory of proportions

• Power struggles in groups may be fueled by
  simplistic understanding of good and evil and by
  a logic of self-righteousness and demonizing
  others.
• Leads us to evade our own weaknesses
• Leads us to exaggerate the significance of
  mistakes, failures, and differences, taking
  significant differences between colleagues as a
  sign of fundamental enmity

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Kanters theory of proportions

• Chaos often accompanies shifts in the power of
  naming.
• We may be comfortable with the energy and even
  the uncertainties of the good fight.
• We may not be comfortable with the chaos that
  accompanies changes in self and group definition

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Kanters theory of proportions

• WE NEED METAPHORS OF POWER TO HELP US MOVE WITHIN
  THE CHAOS OF SOCIAL CHANGE

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Stage Two Exercising Power while Recognizing
Our Own Potential for Error and Harm

• The challenge is to reject the relatively easy
  strategy of mobilizing political energy for
  social change based on righteousness and
  scape-goating.
• Self-righteousness is no longer an option.
• The alternative is not an abdication of power but
  an exercise of power that coexists with a
  deep-seated awareness of our limits and our own
  potential for error and harm.

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The Evasion of Tolerance

• We must develop models of engaging differences
  that gets us out of the evasions of tolerance.
• Tolerance allows us to note differences but to
  not really take them seriously.
• The need is for modes of discourse through which
  we engage differences in ways that are mutually
  challenging and dynamic.

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Stage Three Maintaining Coalitions

• An ideology of power-with often evades deep
  differences.
• We need to recognize that we are bad at
  communication and working together.

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Effective Use of Power

• The effective use of power requires us to
• Stop evading the complexity of power
• Start recognizing the value of conflict
• Get over the fear of exercising power ourselves
  or seeing it exercised by our coalition partners.

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Stage Four Developing a More Modest Hope

• We begin by developing hope without reference to
  a future that is either utopian or tragic.
• Rather than hope for eventual victory, for a
  world without injustice or serious conflict, we
  need a more modest hope, a hope for resilience, a
  hope for company along the way.

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Rejecting Nostalgic Solutions

• We need to reject calls for a return to an
  imagined past of
• Strong families and cohesive communities
• traditional roles for women and men
• We need to be especially apprehensive about
  telling those who have been disadvantaged that
  they need just work hard and accept the current
  inequitable distribution because we need to end
  the culture of complaint.

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Without Illusions of Progress

• It is possible to create and resist without the
  illusion of progress.
• It is possible to live fully and well without
  hopes for ultimate victory and certain
  vindication.
• There can be joy in politics without utopia,
  ethics without virtue, and spirituality.

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Stage Six Embracing Humanism

• We are all engaged in the construction of groups
  and individual identity based on constructions of
  what it means to be human.
• Non dualistic understanding of human being, both
  individually and collectively.
• Recognition of capacities
• For courage and error
• For insight and illusion
• For compassion, self-deception, and harm

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Exercising Power

• How do we act, think, and judge when we know that
  both the oppressor and the oppressed are capable
  of corruption and self-serving delusions?

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Exercising Power

• We need to grow up and realize that there is no
  one else to complain to, to denounce, or
  challenge, no other adults who will hear our
  cries of injustice and transform reality.
• We need to reject the myth denounce the evil and
  those in power will redress it.
• WE ARE THE ONES IN CHARGE, IN SMALL WAYS AND IN
  LARGE.

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Exercising Power

• We must recognize the limits on our ability to
  act by historical and cultural factors.
• We are not autonomous agents, but the creatures
  of social and political forces that exist outside
  us.

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Stage Six Integrating Spirituality and the
Exercise of Power

• Spirituality means experiencing the
  transcendence.
• Spirituality can be the results of ecstatic
  religious experience, but it can also be the
  results of group cohesion, of being buoyed and
  supported by others, of awareness of forces large
  than oneself.
• Spirituality is the sense of being energized, of
  being connected with forces outside oneself.

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The Experience of Transcendence is not
Foundational

• The fact that a group feels a tremendous surge of
  vitality says nothing about the truth of its
  claims or the legitimacy of the projects.
• Critical humanism provides a way to check the
  claims.
• We need to examine the actual impact on people of
  a communitys constructions of good, order,
  truth, and power.

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That Which Heals Also Harms

• The strengths that people bring to political
  work, to institutions, are inextricable tied to
  our weaknesses.
• Instead of trying to excise these weaknesses we
  can acknowledge the ambiguity of power.
• Acknowledging the ambiguity of power enables
  communities to work for justice without
  self-righteousness, without fanaticism, and
  without naiveté about the likely abuse of power.

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There Are No Definitive Answers

• There are ways of acting without closure and
  without guarantees.

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• Sharon Welch. 1999. Sweet Dreams in America
  Making Ethics and Spirituality Work. New York
  Routledge

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• http//www.gonzaga.edu/doctoral/Ateneo