Facilitative leadership: drawing on Jürgen Habermas’ model of ideal speech to propose a less impositional way to lead

Abstract

Even leadership prescriptions that claim facilitative, democratic or participative credentials struggle to break away from the depiction of leadership as a fundamentally impositional undertaking; a feature which may put many academics and practitioners off the subject altogether. This article therefore calls for more attention to the question of how people who find themselves in leadership roles might lead in a less impositional manner. It also offers a contribution to that agenda. After highlighting some limitations of potential sources of reassurance against leadership’s impositional connotations, the article draws on Jürgen Habermas’ discussion of ideal speech, along with some commentaries on Habermas’ work, to propose an outline for a model of leadership as the facilitation of ideal speech. It also considers the practical feasibility, in contemporary organizations, of leadership that facilitates ideal speech, identifying some aspects of organizational theory and practice that may offer nourishment to such an approach.

Keywords

democratic leadership facilitation facilitative leadership ideal speech impositional leadership Jürgen Habermas participative leadership

That the notion of leadership occupies a high profile in contemporary, Western society speaks for itself. Yet, despite the hopes and expectations commonly invested in it, and despite the academic resources devoted in its study over the last 80 years or so, leadership has received relatively little attention in critical management studies (CMS) literature. One reason for this may be that certain aspects of the way that leadership is generally conceived and studied are anathema to the commitments of many CMS academics. For a start, leadership studies traditionally portray leadership capability as emanating from a bundle of traits and behaviours that successful leaders manifest to a greater extent than other people. Consequently, mainstream research has sought to pin down the precise nature of those personal qualities, while practitioners have drawn upon the fruits of these research endeavours in an effort to enhance the performative success of leadership in their own organizations.

To be sure, there have been exceptions to this prevailing approach. For instance, some researchers have considered the extent to which attributions of leadership effectiveness constitute a reassuring projection of special qualities onto those in positions of authority by dependent followers (Bennis and Nannus, 1985; Meindl, 1990); something which flourishes as long as organizations are successful but which pales when they hit hard times (Bryman, 1987, 1992). Others have asked whether apparent leadership capability is at least partly the result of artistically-oriented adeptness at structuring the circumstances and post hoc reporting that surround imputed leadership interventions (Grint, 2000); whether it may be more about senior managers’ positioning and identity-creation than it is about palpable personal characteristics or actual achievements (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003; Carroll and Levy, 2008). Some writers have even questioned whether mainstream leadership researchers, by imputing leadership’s objective certainty, may be responsible for creating, or at least perpetuating, the very beast that they seek to capture (Gemmill and Oakley, 1992).

Studies such as these offer invaluable insights, which enhance understanding of what might be going on when leadership seems to be taking place. They also raise important questions about both the inevitability and the desirability of leadership per se. However, they do not necessarily get to grips with a further reason why the notion of leadership may be offensive to CMS academics. This is that leadership, irrespective of whether it is a bundle of tangible qualities or something that is socially constructed, is generally conceived as an essentially impositional undertaking. By impositional, I mean that leadership is generally thought of as involving leaders imposing themselves and their chosen agendas upon those who they lead. Whether this act of imposition is overt or covert, whether it is self-interested or undertaken with altruistic intent, there is something about it that suggests erosion of the agency of those who are thus ‘led’. So called ‘transformational’ (e.g. Bass, 1985, 1990) and other ‘new paradigm’ (e.g. Shelton, 1997; Sims and Lorenzi, 1991) approaches, which stress the link between performative success and attention to personal, social and cultural matters, tend to be particularly firmly locked within a presupposition of hierarchical prerogative in which the legitimacy of a leader’s transformational vision and their right to impose it, albeit in an empathic and people-sensitive manner, is rarely questioned. The understanding which pervades popular thinking about leadership, and also a great deal of academic writing, is succinctly summed up by Peter Gronn as lying in the notion that ‘leadership is basically doing what the leader wants done’ (2002: 424). To make space for leadership studies might therefore be regarded as perpetuating the assumptions of managerial privilege and elitist power hierarchies that many CMS academics seek to challenge (Calás et al., 2003).

But while this may put critically sensitive academics off the very idea of leadership, it is also likely to concern critically sensitive leaders. I am referring here to people within organizations who, for reasons of status or interpersonal dynamics, find themselves called upon to provide leadership but who are troubled by the expectations that customarily attend such a predicament. For, however contestable its ontological status may be, the notion of leadership has a tenacious phenomenological hold that seems unlikely to diminish: constructed or real, ‘leadership’ is here to stay, at least for the time being. To tell those who confront the expectations associated with our pervasive leadership culture that they are sustaining an ontological chimera may evoke reflection on the precariousness of their situation. However, it is of little help to them in deciding how they might respond to the discomfiting ramifications of that situation. So there seems to be an important role here for CMS. Unless CMS can offer to such people alternative ways of actually doing leadership, which avoid traditional expectations of obtrusion and/or suasion, it is unclear whence challenge to the mainstream, impositional understanding might come. I speak with some feeling here, having spent 25 years in formal ‘leadership’ roles in the private sector, during which time it was hard to get away from the idea that it is both a leader’s right and their duty, as well as a measure of their worth, to set a course on behalf of their organization and to build support for that course.

This, then, is the issue that I seek to address in this article. The article might be read as a call for CMS to pay more attention to leadership; to respond to Smircich and Morgan’s appeal, delivered nearly 30 years ago, for researchers to attend to alternative ways of thinking about leadership that ‘enhance, rather than deny, the ability of individuals to take responsibility for the definition and control of their world’ (1982: 271). But the article also offers a contribution to that project. In order to pursue this second aim, I will begin by considering some possible sources of reassurance, drawn from leadership studies, against the charge that leadership is necessarily impositional. But I will also highlight some ways in which these sources may not provide the vindication that they promise. The article will then suggest an approach to leadership that overcomes some of these limitations. Thus, I will build upon Jürgen Habermas’s model of ‘ideal speech’, and on management and organization research that draws on Habermas’s theory, in order to present an understanding of leadership as facilitation. I will suggest some ways in which this Habermas-inspired approach differs from previous accounts of facilitative leadership, before considering some challenges to Habermas’s work, using these to augment the model already presented. I will round off the article with a few reflections on the practical feasibility of such a leadership style in contemporary organizational settings.

Some potential sources of reassurance against leadership’s impositional overtones

Despite the contrary understanding presented by most popular leadership writing and mainstream leadership studies, there are currents within the literature that offer reassurance against leadership’s impositional overtones. For a start, a number of researchers have drawn attention to the consensual character of leader-follower relationships. Instead of casting leadership as the assertive application of influence by individuals who are privileged by formal status or mysterious configurations of personal alchemy, these commentators highlight the extent to which followers may actually sanction that influence. They thus offer a basis for the legitimation of leaders’ authority: if followers participate in the creation of that authority by signalling, through complex, informal processes, their consent to it, then perhaps we should not be too worried about any asymmetries that characterize it. On this note, Chester Barnard berated mainstream leadership studies for focusing too much on what formally appointed, individual leaders are up to and not enough on the choices made by followers to follow those leaders. According to Barnard, this conventional preoccupation thus failed to acknowledge that ‘The test of the adequacy of leadership is the extent of cooperation, or lack of it, in relation to our ideals and this is largely a matter of the disposition of followers’ (1997 [1948]): 108). For Barnard, formal authority cannot be sustained in the absence of informal acquiescence to the ideals manifested in that authority. To disregard the significance of the latter is to overlook the inevitability that ‘in all formal organizations selection [of leaders] is made simultaneously by two authorities: the formal and the informal … the informal authority we may call acceptance (or rejection). Of the two, the informal is fundamental and controlling. It lies in or consists of the willingness and ability of followers to follow’ (Barnard, 1997[1948]: 108).

The emphasis that more recent researchers than Barnard have placed on the informal, consensual processes through which leadership is negotiated also promise some reassurance against its impositional implications. However, some writers call into question the terms under which this apparent consensus is achieved. For example, Smircich and Morgan (1982) point out that the seemingly informal processes through which organizational leadership is negotiated generally take place within formalized, institutional contexts. Shared understanding is therefore shaped by predetermined authority relationships and patterns of interaction, comprising embedded roles, work practices, rules, and conventions. Similarly, Knights and Willmott (1992) observe that, although shared understanding between leaders and followers may be a negotiated achievement, such negotiation tends to proceed from bargaining positions that are fundamentally unbalanced. Apparently intersubjective reality-construction thus becomes ‘a product of “force” in the sense that followers are often disadvantaged—by a comparative lack of material and symbolic resources—in formulating let alone mounting a challenge’ (1992: 766). Consequently, acquiescence may be a more apt descriptor of followers’ eventual responses than consent.

But if the consensual credentials of leader-follower relations deliver only qualified vindication of leadership’s authoritarian overtones, a second possible source of reassurance can be found in the democratic tone of many instrumental leadership prescriptions. For a long time, commentators have proposed that a top-down, autocratic approach will not suffice to drive organizational achievement; in order to succeed, leaders must give their people a chance to participate in decision-making. In that case, perhaps we should not bother too much about impositional leadership, for it is not likely to last for long. Leaders with a predilection for imposition will not achieve the results needed to get to the top and stay there.

This endorsement of participative inclusion is consonant with the democratic tenor that imbues a lot of management writing throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries (Johnson, 2006). As far as leadership studies are concerned, early behavioural theorists (e.g. Lewin, 1939) drew attention to the limitations of autocratic leadership behaviour, proposing that leaders who encourage participation tend to reduce hostility amongst followers and to foster higher levels of performance. Descriptions of feminine leadership style (Hegelson, 1990; Rosener, 1990), which emphasize the instrumental merits of encouraging participation, power sharing, information sharing, listening skills, and open communication, also testify to the efficacy of democratic inclusion. More recently, research agendas that look at group-centred leadership (Bradford, 1976), team leadership (Manz and Sims, 1987; Day et al., 2004), distributed leadership (Gronn, 2002), and eco-leadership (Western, 2008) add further support to the instrumental benefits of democratically responsive leadership.

However, just how democratic these prescriptions really are is open to question. In the case of earlier endorsements of democratic inclusion, a situational approach (e.g. Burns and Stalker, 1959; Fiedler, 1967; Hersey and Blanchard, 1982), which advocates matching leadership behaviours to prevailing circumstances, soon superseded unequivocal advocacy of participative inclusion. Similarly, calls for an ‘androgynous’ leadership style (Grant, 1992), which combines characteristically ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits, also valorize apposite applications of assertiveness and consultation according to contingent need. Democratically sensitive leadership behaviour is thus cast as just one tool amongst several, to be taken out when suited to a particular scenario but to be put firmly back in its box and replaced by the hammer of imposition once the moment for participation has passed. Furthermore, there is the danger that the emphasis placed by many writers on the motivational benefits of democratic inclusion may encourage no more than superficial, stage-managed versions of it (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996; Claydon, 2000; Dundon et al., 2004; Johnson, 2006): practitioners may take the view that it is enough for leaders to appear to listen to followers; whether they actually take any notice of them is, in motivational terms, of little importance.

But even if democratic inclusion is stable and genuine, concerns have been expressed about just how far leaders’ democratic embrace might extend. For instance, Woods et al. (2004) note a tendency for so-called ‘distributed leadership’ to be distributed according to expertise, where expertise is valorized in relation to its instrumental efficacy in meeting organizational imperatives that are already given. A meritocratic prerogative of expertise thus augments the hierarchical prerogative that is more usually associated with leadership. Furthermore, Philip Woods (2004) observes that decision-making may only be dispersed insofar as it respects boundaries that are pre-set by formally constituted leaders, or insofar as it is consonant with dominant rationalities within organizations. Overarching goals and values may be presented as non-negotiable and, as Woods notes, the imperatives of market-driven, economic rationality tend to be regarded as especially sacrosanct.

Communicative rationality: a template for facilitative leadership

So, if leadership’s consensual and democratic claims bring only qualified exoneration from the charge of imposition, what might a less constraining version of leadership look like? This section will draw on Jürgen Habermas’s work concerning ideal speech in order to sketch out a template for such a version. A model of facilitative leadership will thus be elaborated, which avoids some of the limitations associated with the consensual and democratic vindications outlined above and which might offer a more liberating way of occupying a formal or informal leadership role.

I suggest that Habermas’s work on communicative action and discourse ethics, which includes his ideas concerning ideal speech, can be read, in part, as a response to his earlier call for a type of rationality that might inform critical social theory. A major preoccupation of Habermas’s earlier writing (1974 [1963], 1987 [1968–1969]) had been to clear the ground for a version of rationality that is suited to the development of critical-emancipatory knowledge. In other words, he sought a rationality that could be applied to normative critique of social arrangements. This form of rationality, he suggested, needs to avoid both the positivistic presuppositions that infuse the natural sciences and the interpretive agendas of social scientific enquiry. For, although positivistic and interpretive rationalities enable the needs that pertain within their respective knowledge domains to be met, they are not suited to the development of a critical-emancipatory knowledge whose aim ‘coincides with a step forward in the progress toward the autonomy of the individual, with the elimination of suffering and the furthering of concrete happiness’ (1974 [1963]: 254. The communicative rationality offered in Habermas’s later Theory of Communicative Action (1984 [1981]), 1987 [1981]) offers just such a basis.

Habermas’s elaboration of a model of communicative rationality is premised upon his understanding of the human situation as being fundamentally social. But his social understanding of humanity is not that of social contract theorists (e.g. Hobbes, 1985 [1651]), who envisage a hypothetical contractual arrangement to which individuals tacitly agree because this enables them to realize their separate, individually constituted agendas. Nor does it concur precisely with notions of social capital (e.g. Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 1995), which tends to be commended insofar as it enables the achievement of some ulterior, intrinsically valued purpose. Rather, Habermas accords with the Aristotelian notion of human beings as creatures who inevitably find themselves in social settings and who therefore cannot constitute themselves and their agendas other than through social interaction.

Furthermore, Habermas (1984 [1981]), 1987 [1981]) proposes that, just as we are ineluctably social, we are also fundamentally reliant on communication. This is because, bereft of communication, we would not be able to establish the bases of shared understanding and cooperation upon which social relations depend. Therefore, not only is sociality a key characteristic of humanity; so is communication. And, given the fundamental importance of communication to the human condition, Habermas proposes that any conception of normative ordering of that human condition must look to communication for its basis. However, communication can take different forms. In this respect, Habermas draws a particular distinction between communicative action, which seeks to establish shared understanding, and strategic action, which is aimed at shaping our environments and putting them to effective use. But since even strategic action needs to be socially coordinated, Habermas suggests that we must acknowledge the wider communication structures within which that coordination is located and upon which it depends: we are not able to achieve our strategic goals unless we first establish shared bases of understanding. Habermas concludes that communicative action, carried out in an endeavour to achieve shared understanding, is therefore the primary role of communication. Strategic action, on the other hand, is a derivative usage that is dependent upon achievement of this primary role. Thus, as Habermas puts it, ‘reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech’ (1984 [1981]: 287).

An important ingredient of Habermas’s (1984 [1981], 1987 [1981]) presentation of communicative action is what he calls the ideal speech situation. In other words, he proposes a model of dialogical engagement that permits communicative action to realize its ‘inherent telos’ of reaching understanding. Central to this notion of ideal speech is the raising and challenging of validity claims. What Habermas means by this is that, when a person speaks—in Habermas’s terms, when they perform a ‘speech act’—that person implicitly asks listeners to accept certain assumptions concerning: firstly, the factual content of what they are saying; secondly, their authority to say what they are saying; and thirdly, what they hope to achieve by saying it. If the listener does not share these assumptions, then shared understanding has not been achieved through the performance of that speech act. Therefore, listeners must be at liberty to question those validity claims—those assumptions about factual content, authority, and intent—in order to verify their acceptance of them. Any disagreements that are thus identified can then be negotiated in order to bring about the harmony across each dimension upon which shared understanding depends.

For Habermas, shared agreement, reached under such ideal speech conditions, is the basis of truth. Truth thus lies not in correspondence to some absolute, noumenal reality; it lies in the achievement of shared lifeworld convictions amongst communicatively rational parties. As Habermas puts it:

This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld (1984 [1981]: 10).

This conception of communicatively substantiated truth provides the basis for Habermas’s later model of discourse ethics (1990 [1983]). The basic idea of discourse ethics is that normative legitimacy does not consist of congruence with universal, objective standards of right and wrong. But neither does the absence of such standards mean that normative legitimation cannot take place. Rather, the normative legitimacy of decisions and actions derives from the processual conditions that beget those decisions and actions. Specifically, decisions and actions are legitimate insofar as they are brought about under the conditions of ideal speech outlined above; conditions in which all implicated parties are able to raise validity claims and challenge the validity claims raised by others. Thus, Habermas proposes that normatively legitimating ideal speech occurs when:

Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in the discourse.

Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.

Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse.

Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires and needs.

No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as laid down [by the above principles]. (1990 [1983]: 89).

Some implications for organizational leadership

According to this model of communicative rationality, the task of organizational leaders would be to facilitate the conditions of ideal speech listed above, and to ensure that their own conduct meets those conditions. To lead in such a way would be to envisage organizations as ‘unrestricted communication communities’ (Habermas, 1990 [1983]: 88), in which the force of the better argument is allowed to prevail, unaffected by external or internal coercion. Importantly, if asymmetrically distorted communication is to be avoided, not only should the principles of ideal speech prevail during discourse between junior organizational members; they should also govern relationships between leaders and those who they are supposed to lead. Furthermore, any barriers that might distort communication by restricting participation, by precluding challenges to validity claims, or by otherwise inhibiting ideal speech should be identified and dismantled.

In his study of communicative action within a planning environment, John Forester (1987) lists a number of ways in which communication might become distorted, along with a range of strategies that might be adopted by planners to overcome such distortions. As well as encouraging truth and sincerity in face-to-face encounters, Forester lists a range of organizational and political measures that might aid communicative engagement. These include: minimizing jargon; organizing counter-advocates; encouraging participation in decision-making; exposing unexpressed interests; and institutionalizing debate. It is instructive to reflect on the part that leadership might play in implementing such strategies, for they seem just as pertinent to an organizational leadership context as they are to a public planning environment.

Teresa Waring’s research into information system (IS) implementation also has something to say to the application of facilitative leadership. Waring builds upon earlier theoretical contributions from Rudy Hirchheim and Heinz Klein (1989, 1994) to propose a model of emancipation through rational discourse within an IS environment. Noting that emancipatory IS interventions might be constrained by factors such as illegitimate exercise of power, peer opinion pressure, resource limitations, social differentiation, bias, and limitation of language use, Waring proposes inclusion of a ‘comprehensive set of features to support emancipatory discourse’ (1999: 5), which would encourage the agreement of shared objectives amongst implicated parties. Such features, drawing on Alvesson and Willmott (1992), would include active processes for individual and collective self-determination, critical self-reflection and associated self-transformation. Waring’s advocacy of an explicit procedure for challenging and critically evaluating claims made through the system development process, particularly those made by IS ‘experts’, may also be relevant to a leadership context. Lastly, her suggestion that such emancipatory processes need to be set within broader institutional frameworks that are sensitive to issues of ‘social justice, due process and human freedom’ (1999: 6) points to the need for appointed leaders to do what they can outside their direct sphere of formal authority to promote an organizational ethos within which facilitation can thrive.

There may also be other ways in which leaders can use the influence that attends their formal or imputed status to oil the wheels of communicative engagement. For instance, insofar as a leader’s status may be built upon experience, technical expertise, and training that exceeds that of followers, these advantages might be used as a basis, not to impose the leader’s own, monologically defined vision, but to encourage other organizational members to critically reflect on the presuppositions upon which their own speech acts are premised, or on tensions and contradictions that may be immanent in them. A kind of leadership-as-Socratic-elenchus (Morrell and Anderson, 2005) is thus envisaged. Moreover, leaders might use the formal and informal influence at their disposal to act as a sort of communicative referee: encouraging fealty to the rules of ideal speech; calling time when communicative processes have run their course; and supporting the implementation of communicatively endorsed agendas (Fryer, 2011). I will consider a little later the potential for abuse that such interventions might entail.

Of course, a significant aspect of relationships between leaders and followers concerns the processes by which those relationships come to be and by which they are sustained. Looked at through the prism of communicative rationality, the status of a leader should not be taken for granted. That position, along with everything else, must be up for ongoing communicative authorization. Habermasian ideal speech offers more than a framework for organizational decision-making; it also offers a constitutional procedure by which a leader’s right to occupy their role needs to be justified. The leadership of a facilitative leader, in itself, demands communicative legitimation. This implication is germane to my earlier discussion of consensus in leader-follower relationships. Although the consensual nature of those relationships offers some reassurance against leadership’s impositional connotations, that reassurance is undermined if consensus is forced or constrained. Habermasian theory, for its part, offers a template of consensual purity that might avoid such shortcomings. It also indicates the desirability of some form of formal, democratic participation in the selection, appraisal, and retention of leaders.

Habermasian ideal speech also offers a corrective to the distortions of democratic responsiveness to which some of the leadership recipes considered earlier are prone. For a start, it would not permit leaders’ participative zeal to be switched on and off according to their estimation of contingent need. Moreover, by asserting that any implicated party can introduce any assertion into discourse and that anyone can challenge the validity claims raised by all other participants, it sets clear criteria for inclusion in the community of democratic participation while ruling out any limitations to the scope of participative agendas.

The idea of facilitative leadership is not new. Thomas Moore (2004) notes that the term is quite common amongst leadership trainers and practitioners, and that it is subject to a range of different meanings. The most common interpretation relates to the development of positive working relationships amongst those for whom the leader is responsible. For instance, Pirola-Merlo et al. (2002) present facilitative leadership as closely related to Bernard Bass’s transformational leadership model, speaking of leaders who facilitate ‘positive working relationships among team members’ (2002: 267). Hirst et al. (2004) articulate a similar approach, describing facilitative leadership as when leaders ‘promote respect and positive relationships between team members, productive conflict resolution, and open expression of ideas and opinions’ (Hirst et al., 2004: 312). Such accounts focus on the creation of cohesive teams, paying less attention to participation in defining the agendas to which those teams commit themselves. Moreover, Moore draws attention to the possibility that facilitation may be regarded as one amongst a range of strategies to be embraced by leaders who seek performative success, citing Fran Rees’s (1998) proposal that facilitation should be treated as one skill along a continuum; a prescription that seems prone to the expediency that undermines the democratic purity of some of the participative leadership theories discussed earlier.

On the other hand, Roger Schwarz’s (2002) discussion of facilitation in organizations echoes aspects of Habermasian theory, spelling out some practical strategies by which leaders might move away from ‘a management philosophy based on the values of unilateral control and compliance’ (2002: 328). For instance, Schwarz’s suggestion that ‘For information to be valid, at a minimum people must feel free to disagree with each other without retribution, regardless of any difference in authority or power’ (2002: 332) evokes Habermas’s advocacy of freedom to challenge validity claims, while Schwarz’s invocation to leaders to ‘share the reasoning and intent underlying your statements, questions, and actions’ (Schwarz, 2002: 338) is redolent of Habermas’s criterion of sincerity of intent in ideal speech. If Schwarz’s experience as an organizational psychologist and consultant lends credence to the feasibility of a Habermasian, facilitative style in American work organizations, then the present discussion, as well as providing a normative rationale for Schwarz’s facilitative template, adds further detail to that template.

Some criticisms of communicative rationality

I propose now to expand this discussion by considering some direct challenges that have been offered to Habermas’s work from critics who, although broadly sympathetic to his agenda and its conclusions, nevertheless take issue with some of its detail. Such consideration is worthwhile, for it permits a little more detail to be added to the model of facilitative leadership already outlined.

Avoiding the preclusion of non-conventional modes of expression

Habermas’s idea of communicative rationality has been challenged on the basis that it may actually perpetuate the very exclusiveness that it seeks to undo. As far as leadership is concerned, adopting Habermas’s criteria for communicative legitimation runs the risk of privileging those contributions to organizational agendas that conform to particular discursive conventions. Iris Young (1996), for instance, suggests that Habermas’s emphasis on rational argumentation may preclude modes of articulation that are not emotionally controlled and logically presented. In Young’s opinion, a characteristically white, male, upper-class style of communicative engagement is thus valorized, which may marginalize gender, ethnic and socio-economic groups that do not conform so readily to this model. Indeed, certain groups may even self-deselect from communicative forums as a consequence of an ‘internalized sense of the right one has to speak or not to speak, and from the devaluation of some people’s style of speech and the elevation of others’ (Young, 1996: 122).

Now, it might be argued out that, exclusive though Habermas’s template for rational articulation may be, it is at least preferable to the bacchanalia of masculine assertiveness that sometimes passes for discursive legitimacy in work organizations (Kanter, 1977; Marshall, 1995). Nevertheless, Young has a good point. If the rationalist hegemony of which she warns is to be avoided, it is important not to interpret Habermas’s vision of ideal speech too literally. In particular, the discursive protocols of the ‘Gentleman’s Club’ (Dryzek, 2000: 57) should not be permitted to exercise disciplinary exclusivity. There is clearly a need to expand permissible modes of discourse to include those with which otherwise marginalized groups might feel more at ease (Young, 1996; Sanders, 1997). IT may offer interesting possibilities in this respect. Writers such as Ben Agger (1981), and Timothy Luke and Stephen White (1987) have highlighted the ambivalent potentialities of IT in organizational contexts. Whereas, on the one hand, IT may enable increasingly sophisticated methods of centralized control and surreptitious surveillance of workers, it also, in more discursively sympathetic hands, offers innovative ways to democratize communication. Not only might IT help to overcome the challenges to communicative embrace presented by geographically dispersed organizational forms; it could also shift channels of discourse away from conventional, Enlightenment-rational forms of disputation while permitting a degree of anonymity that is not possible in face-to-face or voice-to-voice encounters. Therefore, those whose discursive idiosyncrasies or hierarchical vulnerability may otherwise preclude whole-hearted participation might feel more inclined to challenge the validity claims raised by their more powerful, more persuasively articulate colleagues and also to introduce their own assertions into communication.

But as well as making more diverse communication media available, there are things that leaders might do on an attitudinal level to ease the process of hermeneutic achievement. Willingness to engage with other people’s perspectives is important, as is encouraging an organizational frame-of-mind that is supportive of such engagement. In this respect, Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1988) advocacy of imaginative engagement seems apposite. MacIntyre proposes that, in order to empathize with perspectives that are articulated from within cultural traditions that differ from our own, we need to make a proactive effort to engage with speakers on their terms rather than trying to translate what they say into the dialect of our own cultural proclivities. Luce Irigaray’s (2004 [1984]) endorsement of an attitude of wonder also has something to say in this respect: Irigaray points to the benefits of a sense of philosophical humility, which encourages receptiveness of other peoples’ points of view as something that we can positively learn from rather than something which we are simply obliged to take account of.

Averting the domination of intersubjective spaces

But the availability of variegated communicative media, along with leaders’ genuine desire to hear what others have to say, may not be enough to encourage people to say what they think. However committed a leader might be to the principles of ideal speech, it is still asking a lot of junior employees to overcome what Nancy Fraser calls ‘informal impediments to participatory parity that can persist even after everyone is formally and legally licensed to participate’ (1992: 119). In particular, subordinates may struggle to disregard the status differentials that are deeply etched into the very notion of leadership. So even the most solicitous leaders may have trouble persuading others that their own ‘validity claims’ are up there to be challenged alongside everybody else’s.

This points to a fundamental challenge that it is hard for leadership to get away from. Jackie Ford, along with John Lawler (2007) and Nancy Harding (2008), offers a philosophically rooted discussion of this issue, drawing on Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, existentialist theory and Jessica Benjamin’s reflections on the challenge to subjectivity that is inherent to intersubjective encounters, in order to highlight the potential for domination that lies within even the most benevolent of leadership stances. Ford and Harding ask whether ‘any relationship in which one person is a “leader” and the other a “follower” can ever be one that is not a relation of dominance’ (2008: 12), suggesting that leadership that is developed in accordance with certain new paradigm recipes may encourage not only the dissolution of followers’ subjectivity in organizational belonging but also that of their otherwise effective ‘authentic transformational’ leaders. But, while Ford and Harding offer a gloomy appraisal of the propensity of leadership development practise to objectify leaders and led, they also hold out the possibility that greater sensitivity to such challenges, amongst those who occupy leadership roles and amongst the leadership development community, may ameliorate that propensity. Perhaps Heidegger’s alternative to Sartre’s (2003 [1943]) pessimistic analysis of the subjectivity-erosive quality of the ‘Look’ is apposite here. Heidegger shares Sartre’s opinion that an ‘inauthentic solicitude’ for others may erode agency, but he also holds out the hope of ‘authentic solicitude’; a relationship that facilitates agency rather than suppressing it. For Heidegger, authentic solicitude would comprise:

a kind of solicitude that does not so much leap in for the other as leap ahead of him in his existential potentiality-for Being, not in order to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give it back to him authentically as such for the first time … it helps the other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it (1962 [1926]: 158–159).

But even leaders’ sensitivity to their propensity to dominate the intersubjective space, coupled with a commitment to Heideggerian authentic solicitude, might not be enough to overcome reticence on the part of subordinates. In this case, it may help to make spaces available where those who are less confident to tread the main stage of discourse, or who perhaps seek a sheltered environment within which to explore their own points of view, can cultivate their ideas without the unnerving presence of hierarchical superiors. On this note, deliberative democracy theorists speak of the importance of ‘subaltern counterpublics’ (Fraser, 1992: 123), ‘protected enclaves’ (Mansbridge, 1996: 57) or ‘homeplaces’ (bell hooks, cited by Honig, 1996: 268). Leaders who aspire to communicative legitimacy would do well to ensure the availability of such intimate forums, where less assertive, less forthright, and less conventionally articulate individuals might develop their points of view as well as their discursive confidence. Clearly, trade unions and other forms of labour organization can play an important role in this respect.

To be sure, there are other reasons why followers might be unwilling to participate in communicative organizational processes. It may be that the expectation to engage in dialogical decision-making fills some, less confident individuals with horror. The intrinsic merits of participation in unconstrained communication might be hard for such people to embrace. Rather, they may prefer to keep their heads below the parapet, leaving decision-making to their more confident and assertive colleagues. Moreover, some may feel that, since those who occupy formal leadership roles have greater access to decision-making resources, and since making decisions is what those leaders are paid to do, they should be left to get on with it. This is a vexed topic, evoking consideration of then extent to which abnegation of individual agency may be encouraged and perpetuated by reliance on formal leaders. Perhaps Habermas’s earlier discussion of the relationship between welfare dependency and the public sphere (Calhoun, 1992) is apposite in this respect. Habermas asks whether the provision of a safety net of basic welfare support has deprived the public sphere of its vigour and generated a collective apathy when it comes to participation in the forms of intersubjective discourse through which shared lifeworld understanding might otherwise be negotiated. In a similar manner, the mainstream leadership paradigm may have become so ingrained in organizational thinking that it induces dependency and erodes individuals’ willingness to engage: organizational expectations may be so imbued with expectations of leadership that many junior employees hope for nothing more than that such leadership is dispensed with paternalistic sensitivity.

That some are unwilling to participate in decision-making, then, rather than being taken as a given, might encourage leaders to reflect on why this might be. Thus, leaders may feel inclined to address impediments to participation and to create, in a non-coercive fashion, an environment where such people will feel more confident, more willing, and more able to participate. Nevertheless, even the most facilitatively supportive organizational contexts may include individuals who would rather leave others to get on with the decision-making. I would make one point in response to this challenge. This is that, while Habermas’s rules of discourse ethics sanction contributions from willing participants, they do not compel them from unwilling participants. The availability of opportunities to participate in discursive processes does not entail an obligation to take up those opportunities.

Avoiding the paradox of coercion

Lying behind most of this discussion of Habermasian ideal speech as a model for facilitative leadership is a particularly knotty problem. Even if leaders in organizations observe fealty to the processual conditions of Habermasian ideal speech, it cannot be presumed that those people who look to them for leadership will necessarily do the same. Participants in discourse may be unwilling to discard their emotional commitments or declare their hidden agendas; complex power dynamics and personal interests may intrude into communicative fora. Furthermore, interlocutors may find it hard to adopt the attitude of openness, sincerity, ‘imaginative engagement’, and ‘wonder’ towards their fellows that is demanded by ideal speech. As mentioned above, encouraging fealty to these conditions might be seen as a legitimate part of facilitative leadership. Whilst privileging discourse that is devoid of hierarchical impediment, then, this leadership model also prevails upon leaders to use whatever means are at their disposal to encourage others to conform to the conditions of ideal speech.

Now, this may seem paradoxical: on the one hand, an ‘unrestricted communication community’, devoid of hierarchical constraint, is envisaged; on the other hand, hierarchical constraint is legitimized in order to propagate the conditions of ideal speech within that community. Jane Mansbridge specifically considers the paradoxical status of coercion during her discussion of deliberative democracy, and two of her observations seem particularly apposite here. Her first point is that a certain amount of coercion may always be necessary, even under a deliberatively democratic constitution: ‘Even regulations that succeed primarily because citizens cooperate freely from public-spirited motivation usually need some coercion around the edges to keep the occasional defector from turning the majority of cooperators into suckers’ (1996: 48). Whereas, for Mansbridge, such interventions would comprise legitimate applications of state-sponsored coercion, within organizational contexts they would delineate the proper application of the administrative apparatus and social influence wielded by those who occupy leadership roles.

To be sure, defences would need to be put in place to protect against misapplication of these coercive apparatus, whether such misapplication is intentional or not. In this respect, the second of Mansbridge’s observations is pertinent. This is that institutional arrangements are needed that will forestall such misapplications, either by calling to order a leader’s fidelity to ideal speech or even by instigating a vote-of-no-confidence in the leader’s right to lead. Just as such institutional safeguards might prevent overly enthusiastic applications of state coercive power, so might they regulate leaders’ personal fealty to the conditions of ideal speech. It therefore seems essential that leaders who aspire to communicative legitimacy should endorse organizational measures that will ensure their own discursive integrity as well as safeguarding against illegitimate coercion on their part.

The improbability of consensus

A further significant challenge to the practical relevance of Habermas’s model of ideal speech relates to its apparent dependency on the possibility of consensus. The feasibility of Habermasian leadership seems to rest upon the likelihood that ideal speech will end in agreement; that, once validity claims have been raised, challenged and resolved, once shared understanding between all parties has been reached on the levels of factuality, authority and intent, all parties will agree on a common agenda. This, particularly in organizations that are characterized by plurality of aspirations, interests and values, seems improbable. However, the improbability of consensus need not undermine the notion of communicative legitimation. As John Forester puts it, ‘The obvious fact that an ideal speech situation is never practically realized—that communication is always imperfect—does not yet mean that the analytic concept has no relevance at all’ (1987: xv). Forester draws an analogy with air pollution in the workplace: all of the air that we breathe may be polluted to some extent, but this does not mean that we should resign ourselves to a specific toxic threat posed by the introduction of materials containing asbestos into a workplace. Nor does it imply that we should abandon the quest to minimize air pollution. According to Forester,

It is as irrelevant and ultimately conservative a criticism of Habermas to say that ‘communicative action is always imperfect’ as it would be a tragically and literally fatalistic step to resign oneself to exposure to chemical hazards in the workplace because one might think that ‘workplaces are never pollution free’ (1987: xvi).

Absolute consensus may indeed be a rare achievement. Furthermore, all of the other legitimating conditions spelled out by Habermas may seldom be realized in practice. But even if decision-making processes have not attained Habermasian perfection, and even if their eventual outcome fails to achieve the support of every participant, that outcome is still preferable, in communicatively rational terms, to one that has eschewed such processes.

Of course, to present communicative purity as a pole to aim at, rather than as a standard to achieve, might be regarded as a cop-out. Diluting the criteria of communicative legitimacy in this way might offer a justification for leaders to drop the processual cloak of ideal speech whenever it suits their agenda to do so, whilst still claiming legitimacy for that agenda. However, such contingent manipulation would not be immune to challenge. Although organizational leaders may be tempted to slip in and out of ideal speech according to its congruence with non-communicatively defined aims, there is nothing to stop other parties from challenging the legitimacy of such a tactic. And receptivity to such challenge is a fundamental condition of communicative legitimacy: for leaders to repeatedly rebuff critique of their fealty to the principles of ideal speech would be to pull the rug from beneath their own claims to communicative legitimacy.

Facilitative leadership in summary

To summarize the discussion so far, the following offers a résumé of the points to which someone who seeks to lead in a facilitative manner might pay attention:

1. Creating unrestricted communication communities

People who wish to lead in a facilitative manner should use the influence at their disposal to promote situations in which:

any party who is affected by a decision is able to participate in that decision;

all are able to introduce any assertion whatsoever into organizational discourse;

all parties, regardless of hierarchical status and expertise, are able to call into question the factual accuracy of assertions made by others, the authority of those others to make those assertions, and the speaker’s intent in making an assertion;

barriers that might distort communication by restricting participation, by precluding challenges to validity claims, or by otherwise inhibiting ideal speech are identified and dismantled.

2. Legitimate application of power

Whatever power and influence a leader may hold, as a consequence of formal status, interpersonal persuasiveness, imputed expertise, experience, or technical nous, can legitimately be used to:

encourage fealty to the principles outlined above, call time when communicative processes have run their course, and support the implementation of discursively agreed agendas;

encourage other organizational members to critically reflect on the presuppositions underpinning their assertions and on tensions or contradictions that those assertions may contain;

promote an organizational ethos and wider institutionalized framework within which discourse can thrive;

encourage a culture that is supportive of imaginative engagement with other people’s perspectives.

3. Encouraging diversity of expression

In order to facilitate the expression of diverse perspectives, leaders should do what they can to:

create sheltered forums where people can debate and develop their views;

enable and encourage respect for diverse manners of expression, including less conventionally rational forms;

arrange for the views of parties who are less comfortable on the available discursive platforms to be represented by delegates who are more confident.

4. Legitimating leadership status

Whatever formal status leaders may hold should be subject to discursive legitimation. More specifically:

formal leadership status should be up for ongoing communicative authorization;

some form of formal, democratic participation in the selection, appraisal, and retention of leaders should be arranged;

an explicit process should be available whereby challenges to a leader’s own discursive fealty can be raised and considered.

The practical feasibility of facilitative leadership

So far, I have drawn on Habermas’s model of ideal speech, along with some criticisms of that model, to outline a way of leading that avoids some of the impositional connotations often associated with leadership. I will round off the article by saying a few words about what may be the greatest challenge to facilitative leadership: that even attempting to lead in such a manner seems hopelessly unrealistic in contemporary organizations. Quite apart from its incompatibility with conventional expectations, which tend to call upon leaders to ‘lead the way’, it may be that the demands of organizational life simply do not lend themselves to consultative decision-making of the kind envisaged by Habermasian theory. Organizational life may be just too time-bounded for such a ponderous leadership style to work. Although a certain amount of consultation amongst a close circle of senior colleagues may be permissible as a corrective to the limitations of monological decision-making, if the tentacles of deliberation are allowed to reach too far into organizational machinations, then organizational paralysis will surely ensue.

On the one hand, this echoes Habermas’s (1984 [1981]) own concern about the insidious creep of what he refers to as ‘steering media’ such as money and power in modern society. According to Habermas, such steering media perform a vital role in enabling the smooth operation of economic and political systems. The problem, as Habermas sees it, is that these enabling steering media have colonized the space of those communicative processes around which the normative ordering of society ought to be structured. The steering media, the enablers, have become an end in themselves; they have usurped their supporting role and have become an overarching preoccupation. The maximization of commercial performance and the acquisition and retention of power have thus come to dominate organizational agendas. Consequently, reaching shared understanding about what those organizations are for and how they should conduct themselves comes well down the list of priorities.

However, despite all this, there are sources of legitimation within contemporary Western society, which might nourish attempts at a communicatively oriented leadership style. For one thing, there is the taken-for-granted endorsement of democratic principles throughout the Western world. As Habermas notes, the steering media of power and money may have stilted the flourishing of those principles, while their instantiation in political reality is often pretty shallow (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996; Wolin, 1996; Dryzek, 2000). Nevertheless, there is no doubting the fervour with which freedom and democracy are publicly championed on both sides of the Atlantic. That democracy is important enough to take to other countries, sometimes ‘on the wings of a tomahawk missile’ (Matten and Crane, 2005: 9), must offer some leverage to leaders who seek to facilitate ideal speech and thus to create their own little piece of democracy at work.

But as well as general sources of legitimation for facilitative leadership, there are also abundant sources specific to management and organization theory. As Phil Johnson (2006) has recounted, compelling business-case rationales are advanced for the efficiency advantages of democratic organizational practices over traditional, hierarchical forms, while human relations management prescriptions are laden with ‘breathless’ (Parker, 2002) advocacy of consultative inclusion. Moreover, as already mentioned, the performative merits of facilitation have been endorsed by a number of theorists. Such homage to organizational democracy and facilitation may well have a hollow ring: HRM’s advocacy of employee participation often has a decidedly superficial air, while prescriptions for facilitative leadership may struggle to break free from the constraints of pre-defined agendas. But even if flirtations with democratic and facilitative forms rarely deliver much in terms of genuine involvement, they indicate an organizational landscape that, for both normative and instrumental reasons, may be ready for more sincere initiatives. It is one thing for misty-eyed critical management theorists to speak of the virtues of workplace democracy, but if hard-bitten pragmatists like Peter Drucker (1993) are also preaching the need for participative organizational forms, there may be something for facilitative leadership to hook on to.

And if such a model of facilitative leadership were to catch on, then studies of the instantiation of communicative action in a public planning environment (Forester, 1987), in public policy settings more generally (Fischer, 2003), in IS implementation (Waring, 1999), and in interaction between private sector and external interest groups (Innes and Booher, 2003) underline its capacity to deliver benefits that hold currency in commercially focussed organizations. For example, Innes and Booher propose that collaborative interaction along the lines of ideal speech does a lot more than offer a productive means for resolving particular issues. They suggest that:

the real changes are more fundamental and typically longer lasting and more pervasive than agreements. These effects include shared meaning and purpose, usable new heuristics, increased social and intellectual capital, networks among which information and feedback can flow and through which a group has power to implement many things that public agencies could not do, new practices, innovations and new ways of understanding and acting (Innes and Booher, 2003: 55).

Although offered as an endorsement of communicative action, Innes and Booher’s list of practical benefits might just as well comprise the justificatory rationale for some new paradigm prescription for effective leadership. If ideal speech can indeed deliver such benefits, then it seems that critically inclined leaders who use it as a blueprint for their own leadership interventions will find it consonant not only with their personal convictions but also with the short- and long-term performative expectations by which leadership success is often measured.

Concluding comments

If this is the case, then perhaps all that is needed is for leaders to take a plunge and show leadership within the realm of leadership. As Sheldon Wolin observes, radical extensions of the scope and depth of democratic inclusion are generally born out of revolutionary acts, which comprise ‘wholesale transgression of inherited forms’ (1996: 37). Meanwhile, leadership theorists (e.g. Bass, 1985; Conger and Kanungo, 1998; Kotter, 1990; Zaleznic, 1977) are inclined to associate leadership with a willingness to undertake such transgressive acts; to challenge convention; to swim against the tide; to question accepted practices; to oppose the status-quo. Well, in that case, maybe if leaders are to lead in a manner that genuinely responds to the legitimizing principles of contemporary, Western political and organizational culture, then they need to challenge conventional expectations of leadership; they need to ‘lead’ leadership. Convention may well privilege hierarchical notions of monological imposition, sometimes, but not always, concealed by a thin veneer of consultative pretence. But if this is what is demanded by convention, then leadership in the field of leadership calls for revolutionary challenge to this conventional understanding. Another way of looking at this is to propose that, while the expectations that structure contemporary leadership contexts may exert a powerful influence upon the prevailing nature of leader follower relationships, the power and influence that these expectations invest in leaders also offers to those leaders the opportunity to turn such forces back upon themselves.

This, perhaps, is why CMS should pay more attention to leadership: because leadership need not necessarily conform to a conventional template of autocratic or oligarchic imposition; because doing leadership can accommodate genuine facilitation. Mainstream leadership studies may exude an ontological rigidity and authoritarian presupposition that is anathema to CMS. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of leadership is ingrained in our cultural psyche. Many people occupy, and will continue to occupy, positions where they are formally expected to ‘lead’. Many others, mysteriously and perhaps ephemerally, find themselves informally wielding the exceptional influence associated with imputations of leadership aptitude. By turning its back on leadership, CMS would leave those who find themselves in such predicaments, and who seek the counsel of management educators, with nowhere to turn but to the mainstream. CMS would thus squander opportunities to encourage leadership in the field of leadership. On the other hand, in paying it more attention, CMS may help to release the capacity, which is immanent in conventional understandings of leadership, to evoke greater and more genuine democratic participation in organizations.

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