Characterful Leadership - A Provocation

My provocation to you is to have a conversation with a couple of your own characters whose voice you may not choose to hear that often. What do they want to say to you? - Dr Nelisha Wickremasinghe

When I talk about characterful leadership, I am not referring to people who are (or should be) necessarily virtuous, competent or generally ‘good’. To illuminate what I am interested in, let me offer some examples.

An executive is referred to me for coaching because he has had several angry outbursts which are creating tension and confusion in his team. He is not normally like this and staff feel unable to cope with what they experience as his ‘mixed messages’.

A friend decides to give up a stable and lucrative position in the financial sector to run a bed and breakfast in Pembrokeshire.
A colleague describes feeling ‘out of sorts’. Usually she’s a high energy creative, but she has run out of ideas. Worse she has lost her sense of purpose and direction. Working in the education sector is not what it used to be.
A client tells me he is known as a ‘people pleaser’ – a generous man always willing to help and develop others. Yet, he confesses that he is conflicted, unhappy and often tormented with feelings of guilt because underneath this visible and cultivated persona he harbours grudges, resentments and sheer dislike for the people he works with.
A client proclaims strong feminist values that reject motherhood and childbearing / rearing, and she experiences jealousy and deep sadness every time she is around her sister’s children.

In each case the individual describes feeling ‘not them self’. A sense that their feelings, thoughts and behaviours are strange, unwelcome, don’t belong to them and are beyond their control. In short, they are experiencing their feelings and actions as ‘out of character’ – an expression that disowns, refuses to recognise or accept parts of oneself.

I would argue that there is no such thing as ‘out of character’. Every experience of the self – even, or especially the unconscious ones that appear in dreams or bodily events that we pay little attention to – is our character.

Character is inescapable – if anything were truly out of character what would its source be? What stands behind a whim? From where do stray thoughts arise? Who pushes the urge, the unexpected desire, the unusual outburst?

Character is characters. The multiplicity of self. The ‘crowd of qualities’, the cluster of characteristics. Character is, in James Hillman’s words;

“the partial personalities who stir your impulses and enter your dreams, figures who would dare what you would not, who push and pull you off the beaten track, whose truth breaks through after a carafe of wine in a strange town. Character is characters, our nature is plural complexity, a multiphasic, polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve.”

So, an adequate theory of character – and one which informs our thinking as leaders – must make room for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. These are our characters who stand in the wings – and who are sometimes spied behind the curtain, or who, at the last minute, are called upon and needed. They are our understudies.

And indeed we do under study these characters who live within us, a place Virgina Satir described as the Theatre of the Inside.3 Too often they are denied, hidden, rejected and dismissed. Including them in our life is, as described in Jungian or depth psychology, the work of integration – the meeting of our shadow selves and the waking up to the full cast of characters that live and influence our being. CJ Jung called this process individuation4 because in getting to know our cast of characters – which is unique to us – we reveal what is different, special and distinguishing about us. And so Jung’s psychology fits with the definition of character that you can read in any dictionary,

“observable marks, qualities or properties that make us different from something else”

The study of how each of our characters belongs is the work that must be done if we are to grow towards wisdom, maturity and if we are to contribute the kind of leadership that is required not just in organisations but in our societies generally. In developmental psychology one quality of maturity and complex thinking is our ability to recognise and handle internal and external conflict and paradox. Our restricted notions of character – particularly those which focus on character as ‘virtue’ – narrows or falsely simplifies what we are able to see and thus understand in and about people. And usually, unless we have a trained eye for discrepancy or oddity, our predictions of character will be wrong – or at best partial. A culture blind to the complexities of character gets taken by surprise or hijacked by the many, many instances of character that will show up, that will demand to be seen. Call them inspired illnesses, Freudian slips, ‘angry outbursts’, midlife crises - to name a few.

In the workplace this blindness is apparent in, for example, the ever-growing list of leadership competencies – virtuous attributes towards which senior executives must strive. This moral idea of character, says Hillman, is precisely what prevents us from seeing character. And remember – a person of character is not necessarily a moral exemplar. If sins are your only qualities you may be without morals but not without character.

Yet it is the fear, the denial or pointless control of the ‘extras’, our characters, many of whom are unvirtuous and resentful, that leads to the strangulation, disengagement and alienation from the one character that we did invest in. That person we thought we were, the good person. The one with clarity, ambition and drive.

Tolerance – I call it compassion – towards our multiple selves means we become open, curious and accepting of the angry outburst, of the contradictory, conflicted and paradoxical. In us – and in others. Tolerance abates the war within so that some sort of dialogue and negotiation can finally take place.

We talk about and strive for transformation in organisations – which for me is the transformation or growth of consciousness. Consciousness grows as we invite, may be squeeze in, those characters that have sat out of consciousness for too long. Through our transformation we (our characters) learn to walk, eat, talk together – without falling apart or closing down. The British author, Jeanette Winterson, describes how she now takes a walk with her ‘savage lunatic’ once a day. This is her ‘inner critic’ self which previously, because it was denied, frequently denigrated and belittled her. By giving it voice, albeit just for an hour a day, her inner critic has softened, and they can live more harmoniously.5

My provocation to you is to have a conversation with a couple of your own characters whose voice you may not choose to hear that often. What do they want to say to you? And can you listen without judgment or fear? Can you envisage a time when you will all sit down together and share stories of how it has been and might be? And if you did who would you be now, and what would you become?

This article is based on a talk Dr Nelisha Wickremasinghe gave during the Oxford Cultural Leaders programme at the University of Oxford in 2018.

References

Hillman, J. (1999). The Force of Character and the Lasting Life. New York: Ballantine Books. Jung, C. (2001). Modern man in search of a soul. Oxford: Routledge.

Satir, V. (2009). Your Many Faces: the first step to being loved. California: Celestial Arts. Wickremasinghe, N. (2018). Beyond Threat. Triarchy Press.

Winterson, J. (2012). Why be happy when you could be normal? London: Vintage.

Lucy ShawJanuary 12, 2020