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Eco-Leadership proposes a new form of organisational leadership, one that has emerged due to the technological, societal and environmental changes taking place since the turn of the 21st Century and one that addresses the complex ecosystems of the workplace, specifically in the context of the digital age, social and environmental responsibility and ethical practices. The Eco-Leadership discourse originally emerged from the work of others such as Capra, Castells  and Wheatley  who in their work focused on complexity theory, systems theory, networks and ecological systems in the new millennium. Categorising this body of work, as not only dominant discourse but as a meta-discourse, is through the work of Dr Simon Western. Western proposes that Eco-Leadership offers new ways of leading in complex, networked organisations by accounting for the 'internal ecosystems' in organisations which challenge the traditional hierarchal management of the last century, by focusing instead on distributing leadership and connectivity across boundaries.

Many others have attempted to not only define and debate about what constitutes leadership, or indeed proposing various leadership models (see transactional leadership, distributed leadership etc) but in questioning how leadership is interconnected to our wider systems. Western in his PhD study has analysed leadership over the last century and defined the dominant discourses (the taken for granted thinking or assumptions) prevalent at any one time, to arrive at 4 discourses or schools of thought. He argues that despite being anchored to various periods in time, these discourses continue to influence how we view and practice leadership, even in today’s multi-networked world.

Eco-Leadership therefore is a interconnected view of leadership, a new way to think about modern organisations: where stability and assurance is less of a guarantee, and where disruption and fluctuation is the norm. It seems to attempt to capture how ecosystems have become features of our modern organisational life and how Eco-mindsets are now dominating our global relatedness to the world both in business and in privately. In practice some have attempted to study what this looks like in real world terms  and seem to indicate that recognising the interconnections inside and outside the organisation and adapting to the technological, environmental and social ecosystems that together disrupt organisations - is in fact what Eco-Leadership embodies. Western describes this in the first edition of Leadership: A Critical Text in 2008.

Background and Origin
Leadership seems to have always been a contested concept, one which some have argued sits with the individual (in their style or set of traits), others suggest it is interchangeable with the concept of management, and others attesting that leadership alone is perhaps the holy grail of organisational success. Contemporary critical scholars have debated such phenomena at length and historically Eco-leadership was a term mainly associated with leadership only in environmental settings. In Western's context Eco-Leadership 'addresses a paradigm change, rather than fixes a problem'  drawing on systems and complexity theory,  ecology and network theories. He suggests that Eco-Leadership is the 4th discourse of leadership that has existed in the last century (Controller, Therapist and Messiah leadership), which sits alongside these (not replacing them) embracing the 21st century idea of ‘organisations being ecosystems within ecosystems’.

Like the other discourses of leadership, Eco-Leadership is present in every organisation, but has arisen since the turn of the 21st century due to globalised markets, rapid technology and the need for more ethical practices in today's modern world.

Western suggests that various forms of Eco-Leadership are taught in business schools and universities, and used by progressive organisations, leadership educators and practitioners internationally and across diverse sectors, to support new distributed and transactional approaches to leadership in order to address the disruptive and turbulent organisational environments that exist today.

Eco-Leadership Discourse
Discourse refers to the ways we think about a subject, that is, those taken for granted assumptions, which powerfully shape our ideas, attitudes and practices in relation to a specific topic. Leadership has its own constructed discourses which are embedded in our practises and approaches, and which shape how we think about leaders and leadership, and the influence and power we attribute to the individuals we call leaders.

Western states that Eco-Leadership does not shadow the other discourses of Controller, Therapist and Messiah  but instead influences how the four discourses work together. Eco-Leadership as a discourse has shaped organisational and social life due to economic, social, political, technological and historical influences on businesses and organisations.

Western sets out four dominant discourses that emerged over the past century. Each of these discourses remain present in organizations today, having their own particular strengths and weaknesses, which can work alongside each other – sometimes in harmony – but often in tension. Western suggests that understanding which discourse is dominant in any one organisation or situation, thus getting the right balance, is key in the Eco-Leadership approach.

Controller Leadership Discourse
Scientific Rationalism and Efficiency

Emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century and epitomised by Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, the Controller leader focuses on productivity, incentives and coercion to lead. From this perspective the organisation is viewed as a system whereby inputs are converted to outputs through the most efficient means.

Employees are viewed as cogs in a machine, replaceable and motivated through coercion and monetary reward. Western proposes that the leader’s focus is therefore on the body of the employee, with a leadership approach that utilises scientific rationalism to improve efficiency and productivity. For example, Time and Motion studies, close supervision and the division of labour, were all used in the Controller discourse. Henry Ford in automobile assembly lines epitomised this approach that enabled mass production. Controller leadership is a top down leadership approach, with industrial leaders ensuring that close supervision of employees, closing aligning their bodies with the machines they worked on. It has been criticized for limiting employee autonomy and being inhuman, with targets and end goals, not people, being the priority.

Controller leadership moved from the factory to office bureaucratic cultures in the 1950’s and entered a period of demise, it is on the rise again due to the digital age, whereby workers are ‘controlled by numbers’. The rise in computer and mobile technology has enabled new surveillance, audit and target cultures to emerge in organisations. Controller leadership achieved phenomenal success delivering mass production, and remains necessary in all organisations, focusing on task, output and efficiencies. However, it requires balancing with other leadership discourses or it can deliver inhuman organisational cultures, and this remains a danger in the work of increasing data, surveillance and employee tracking.

Therapist Leadership Discourse
Happy workers are more productive workers

Emerging from the post-war period this leadership style reflected a societal desire for less authority and control from leaders, and mirrored the shift towards democracy and an equalitarian society. The 1960's counter-cultural movement saw the rise of individualism, choice and expression, and therapeutic culture become more important in society, these cultural shifts entered the workplace via the human relations and human potential movements. Psychology entered the workplace, for example as can be seen in the Tavistock Institute’s work, and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs became a prominent model. This reflected the shift towards motivation of individual’s and teams, rather than leading by coercion and control. Personnel departments were founded to look at the people side of the work, as more and more employees no longer viewed work as a transactional experience, but began looking to work for fulfilling and meaningful experiences. Therapist leadership continue to evolve with the growth of executive coaching, emotional intelligence and psychometric testing in the workplace. It remains a very strong and important discourse, and today many people ‘come to work to work on themselves.’ A limitation of this approach is the focus on individuals and teams, and its inability to equip leaders to work strategically or work with organisation culture change.

Messiah Leadership Discourse
Charismatic Leaders and Strong Cultures

Messiah Leadership discourse emerged in the 1980’s following a downturn in the economy in the West, after the success of the Asian tiger economies pointed to a new way forward. Their collective cultures were deemed as part of the success story, and leaders in the West looked for new ways to replicate this by creating strong organisational cultures. A strong example of this was in the engineering culture where success was attributed to messiah leadership. To achieve this type of transformational leadership became the leading theory of the 1980’s and 1990’s. This type of leader was not a regurgitation of past heroic leaders, but instead an approach to leadership which attempted to transform the failing economies in the west by re-organizing the workplace.

Messiah leadership demands charismatic leaders who set out a company vision that evokes dynamic yet conformist behaviours in employees. Employees/followers align themselves to the Messiah leader and to the company’s greater purpose. The messiah is therefore a role model, a visionary, who arguably requires ‘disciples’. Layers of management were removed and hierarchies flattened, as employees were now controlled by peer and self-surveillance and through culture control. Messiah leadership can be seen in many new technology companies like Apple – where Steve Jobs led with charisma and related a strong company culture (and consumer brand culture) driving employee’s hard to deliver great success. The Public sector also imported this model of leadership into its workplace, as a means to transforming over-bureaucratic delivery and processes. Messiah leadership therefore dominated the 1980’s and 1990’s, and CEO salaries rose matching the messiah status of new leaders.

There are disputes about how transformative these leaders are, however what cannot be disputed is how much this approach dominated the literature, business schools and workplaces. Messiah leadership removes the need for close supervision, however its concepts such as open plan offices, enables control through peer surveillance. Messiah leaders therefore hold a lot of power and lead by creating harmony through employee loyalty and cultural alignment. Criticisms of Messiah Leadership suggest that this discourse serves as a smoke screen, serving only to ensure employee compliance, and can create toxic cultures that deem critical thinking as disloyalty.

Messiah leadership remains a powerful influence today. Strong leadership with clear purpose and vision, with strong company cultures, remain a dominant feature of organizations, yet the dangers are clear. Too much Messiah leadership leads to conformist cultures that expel difference, critical thinking is regarded as disloyalty and lead to group think.

Eco-Leadership Discourse
Connectivity, Networks, Ethics

Western clams that the Eco-Leadership Discourse provides a new discourse 'fit for the beginning of the digital age'. It shifts the twentieth century metaphor of the efficient machine, to ‘organisations as ecosystems within ecosystems (5)’, i.e. internally as interconnected ecosystems that are interdependently connected to technological, environmental an social ecosystems externally. This transforms the way we think about organisations and therefore how we lead them.

Leading an ecosystem requires a radical rethink of leadership: where it is located and how it remains adaptive for the future. This shift requires a rebalancing of our traditional views of leadership which is mainly hierarchical and bureaucratic, to focus on embracing networks and lateral working. Leadership is repositioned from being an individual attribute to being a distributed attribute in the system. Engaging with external ecosystems creates a demand from companies to transition from being closed systems whose primary purpose is to make a profit; to an open system whose values are interdependently connected successes are linked to a ‘healthy society and healthy environment’.

Taking an ethical and systemic position, Eco-Leadership supports a leadership movement which encapsulates the need for leaders to work across boundaries, to be adaptive and to respond to fast paced change in our networked world. It therefore embraces the connectivity of our digital age and advocates for leaders to act in ways which support interdependence and sustainability: a call to action at a time when behaving ethically and socially responsible is more important than ever.

Eco-Leadership therefore promotes the fact that the leader looks internally and externally: working within the eco-systems of the organization and the wider eco-system outside. They therefore look at the whole system when leading and making decisions and recognize the interdependencies within and beyond the organisation. Leadership is distributed within a fluid network of leaders and followers, self-management and network capability increase how organisations become more adaptive and innovative.

In each organisation different leadership discourses dominate more than others e.g. in a traditional manufacturing industry, the Controller discourse will be the most dominant and in an emerging high tech company such as Tesla, the Messiah discourse being the prominent leadership narrative, supported by Eco-Leadership as the company responds to technological and environmental ecosystem demands and opportunities.

Eco-Leadership acts as a meta-discourse and does not replace the other discourses, but instead supports an ecosystem paradigm, ensuring that the right balance of Controller, Therapist, Messiah, Eco-Leadership operate within the organisation. This ensures that the organisation adapts to changes in their business by observing the technological, social and environmental ecosystems in their habitat, and beyond by analysing external ecosystems.

Theory and Practice of Eco-Leadership
Eco-Leadership theory and practice has been developed through action-research and published in Western 2010, 2019. This emergent theory of Eco-Leadership is gaining interest and being further developed in directions by other theorists and practitioners. Eco-Leadership focuses on taking an ethical stance plus a pragmatic stance to the changing nature of work and organizations. Ethically it takes social responsibility, aiming to humanize organisations and engage employees harnessing their full potential, whilst also addressing supply chains in their ecosystems, for example preventing child labour and poor treatment of downstream workers, and takes account of environmental concerns such as climate change and local pollution. Pragmatically it addresses the urgent need to change organisations so they can adapt to disruption and fast change. This means distributing leadership throughout the organisational ecosystems, so that changes at the edges are addressed; ensuring that technology and people are aligned, and that social changes are accounted for in relation to employees, customers and citizens in general.

Four Eco-Leadership Principles
There are four principles that guide Eco-Leadership practice (Western 2019):


 * Connectivity and Interdependence Recognizing our inescapable connectivity and inter-dependences within our social, natural and technological eco-systems.
 * Systemic Ethics Addressing ethical issues beyond the personal ethics of doing no harm and taking a more systemic approach i.e. taking responsibility for use of carbon and pollution or for poor working conditions of outsourced workers.
 * Leadership Spirit Placing the human spirit in it’s many forms at the heart of leadership, to ensure leaders strive for the ‘good society’ and don’t become distracted by ‘false idols’ that diminish human beings.
 * Organizational Belonging Organizations are not separate but belong within local and global communities and to the natural world, and their members should fully participate in both the joys and responsibilities that full engagement and belonging entails.

Beyond Environmentalism: Three Disruptive Ecosystems
Eco-Leadership is differentiated from environmental leadership approaches that draw on ecology and biomimicry to inform leadership practice. [1] Eco-Leadership learns from ecological approaches and focuses on sustainability, but it goes further.

The ecosystems it addresses are:


 * Technological ecosystem - platform economics, fintech, mobile technologies, etc.
 * Social ecosystem - economics, politics, desires and defences, cultural & identity changes.
 * Environmental ecosystem – climate changes, resources, local pollution, natural-manmade habitats: spaces and places we live and work in.

All three ecosystems work together and cannot be separated. All disrupt and shape contemporary organisations and society beyond, and therefore leaders must work in all these domains.

Eco-Leadership Emergent Practices
Guiding Eco-Leadership practice Western  advocates changing organisational purpose to social purpose, and adding value to the wider ecosystems to which organisations belong. Distributing leadership everywhere and blurring the boundaries of leadership and followership is essential to get a participative organisation.

Developing Eco-mindsets is an essential but challenging aspect of Eco-Leadership, as leaders quickly return to the more familiar and comfortable Controller, Therapist and Messiah mindsets they have grown up with.


 * Social Purpose – It is ethical and purpose driven. Aiming to create shared value for wider society, beyond shareholder profit/organizational growth.
 * Participative Organizations – Engaging employees and distributing leadership everywhere, maximising the potential of each person and the whole. Creating adaptive, learning & dynamic organizations. [6]
 * Eco-Mindsets – From machine to ecosystem mindset. Shifting from top-down control to influencing ecosystems and networks. Internally leaders create sharing cultures, connecting across boundaries, creating networks of desire. Externally Eco-leaders observe tech, environmental and social ecosystems, seeing new opportunities and adapting to disruption.

Eco-Leadership Formation and Development
Developing Eco-Leadership in organisations is to create leadership formation processes. Leadership formation chapter in Western (2019) Leadership: A Critical Text  focuses on culture, embedding eco-mindsets and engaging in participative leadership, in all business, strategy and service decisions.

Creating bespoke formation processes for individuals and teams, and creating spaces for leadership to flourish everywhere, is how Eco-Leadership cultures are developed. Leaders don’t become leaders through skills and competency training alone, they are formed by experience.

Eco-Leadership development relies on creating the right experiences, placing an emphasis on learning from each other, learning from experience and learning from practice.

Eco-Leadership approaches have been used in healthcare settings, to decentralise healthcare and create ecosystems that link health and social care, education and public health, and break the link between expert medics and dependent patients, creating social systems of well-being. Eco-Leadership is utilised in finance, commerce, retail, manufacturing, education as all operate in turbulent environments that require distributed.

Eco-Leadership in modern day organisations
Microsoft has arguably the worlds largest evidence of working in an Ecosystem model. Sataya Nadella, the current CEO of Microsoft states that they have the largest network of partners in the world and work in ways which relies heavily on distributed networks of leaders who take their products in to large and small scale organisations globally. The same could be said about multi-networked companies such as Amazon, Google, Netflix, Facebook and Apple who all work in ways which cross boundaries, countries and at blur the relationship between consumer and provider.

However just because such organisations work like ecosystems, does not mean they go far enough in meeting the conditions (or the four principles for Eco-Leadership as defined by Western - see above) where ethics and social purpose outweigh profit and commercial gain.

An organisation where ethical Eco-Leadership could be seen in practice especially with regards to the circular economy could be seen in Unilever's Sustainability Plan where working ethically, sustainably, digitally and responsively are all part of their interconnected business model.

Digital Age
Technological changes mean we live in an increasingly fast changing and hyper-connected society, which demands new leadership approaches in order to adapt and perform within these new challenges. Top-down and individualistic leadership models are passé, meaning that a paradigm shift, which calls on a radical rethink of leadership to shift power from vertical hierarchies, to lateral distributed models, is gaining momentum.

Hyper-Globalization
In global markets supply chains, partners, customers and regulators are international, creating complex eco-systems and inter-dependencies. These demand holistic leadership which can respond appropriately, make collective decisions and can navigate complex systems.

Environmental challenges
Local pollution and global climate changes impact on business and public services in many ways. It has therefore been argued that ethical and innovative leadership approaches are urgently required to address these issues, not only from politicians but also from business leaders. In this way adopting an Eco-leadership paradigm benefits business and society as a whole.

Business Success
Visionary leaders realize that running a successful business depends on these key factors:


 * Nurturing the internal organizational eco-system, to get the very best from employees and technologies together.
 * Leveraging success from the external eco-systems in which the organization operates and adapting to disruptions.
 * Re-imagining value and purpose beyond short term growth and profit, to deliver shared value across the ecosystem. This has secondary unexpected benefits, such as new innovations, attracting talent and the retention of committed employees and benefiting stakeholders.

In this sense approaching leadership in ways which are adaptive but inclusive and which see the whole picture can contribute to organisational success.

Systems approaches
Never before has it been more important to view the organisation as a whole, with it's internal interconnections and it's external connections, which Western (2018) calls 'insider leadership' and 'outsider leadership'. Reconceptualising organisations from being closed systems to open ecosystems and therefore viewing them as are webs of connections and networks (operating like an ecosystem) ensures therefore that we can realise the interdependent whole, and connect the internal interdependencies, with the larger ecosystems that leaders and organisations operate in e.g. financial and economic ecosystems, technological and non-human ecosystems, social-political ecosystems, local and global natural ecosystems.

Web links

 * A Brief Guide to Eco-Leadership
 * Eco-Leadership: Transforming coaching to transform Leadership.
 * Eco-Leadership Towards a New Paradigm
 * Eco-Leadership Deck Presentation Galway University
 * Eco-Leadership, new skills for organisational success and sustainability
 * Emergent Leadership Discourse
 * Eco-Leadership: A new discourse for the network society
 * Global Perspectives: Insights and Analysis
 * Integral Leadership Review: Analytic-Network Coaching for Distributed Leadership
 * Leadership in Healthcare: Interview with Dr Simon Western by Martin McNamara
 * National Research Project using Eco-Leadership in Further Education UK. Hidden Leadership: exploring the assumptions that define further education leadership 2018

Further sources

 * Allen, K. (2019). Leading from the Roots: Nature-Inspired Leadership Lessons for Today’s World. New York: Morgan James.
 * Castells, M. (2000) The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, I. Oxford: Blackwell.
 * Capra, F. (1996). The web of life. New York, NY: Doubleday.
 * Cletzer, D. A. (2016). Eco-leadership in practice: A mixed methods study of county 4-H programs (Doctoral dissertation).
 * Cletzer, A. and Kaufman, E. (2018) Eco-Leadership, Complexity Science and the 21st century, in Redekop, B.W., Gallagher, D.R. & Satterwhite, R. (Eds) Innovation in Environmental Leadership: Critical Perspectives. New York & London: Routledge
 * Gosling, J. and Western, S. (2018) Leadership exchange: contextualized learning about how leadership is accomplished and personalized leadership development, in S. Kempster, A. Turner and G. Edwards (eds.) Leadership development field guide. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.  
 * Grint, K. (2005) Leadership Limits and Possibilities. London/New York: Palgrave.
 * Ladkin, D. (2006) ‘The enchantment of the charismatic leader: charisma reconsidered as an aesthetic encounter’, Leadership, 2(2): 165–179.
 * Lovelock, J. (1982) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 * Redekop, B.W. (2007) Leading Into A Sustainable Future: The Current Challenge, in Harvey, M. & Huber, N. (Eds.) Leadership: Impact, Culture, and Sustainability. College Park: The James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, 134-46.Redekop, B.W. (2010) Leadership, in Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability: The Business of Sustainability. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.
 * Redekop B.W. (2010) Challenges and Strategies of Leading for Sustainability, in Redekop, B.W. (Ed.), Leadership for Environmental Sustainability. New York & Abingdon: Routledge.
 * Redekop, B.W. (2016) Embodying the Story: The Conservation Leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, in Leadership 12,2, 159-85.
 * Redekop, B.W. & Schleifer, I. (2017) The Eco-Leadership Paradigm in the Classroom and Beyond, in Miller, V. (Ed.) Apocalyptic Leadership in Education: Facing an Unsustainable World from Where we Stand. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.  
 * Redekop, B.W., Gallagher, D.R., & Scatterwhite, R. (2018) (Eds) Innovation in Environmental Leadership: Critical Perspectives. New York & London: Routledge
 * Redekop, B.W. & Thomas, M. (2018) Climate Change Leadership: From Tragic to Comic Discourse, in Redekop, B.W., Gallagher, D.R., & Scatterwhite, R. (Eds.), Innovation in Environmental Leadership. Abingdon: Routledge
 * Senge, P. (1994) The Fifth Discipline. London: Century Business.


 * Stober, S., Brown, T., & Cullen, S. (2013) Nature-centered Leadership: An aspirational narrative. Champaign, IL: Common Ground Publishing LLC.


 * Western S. (2008) Leadership: A Critical Text. Sage publications.
 * Western, S. (2008). Democratising Strategy, in Campbell, D. & Huffington, D. Organizations Connected: A handbook of Systemic Consultation. London: Karnac Publications .Western, S. (2010) Eco-Leadership: Towards the Development of a New Paradigm, Redekop, B.W. (Ed) Leadership for Environmental Sustainability. New York, New York & Milton Park: Routledge, UK.
 * Western, S. (2011) The Discourses of Leadership, in Preedy, M., Bennett, N. and Wise, C. (Eds) Educational Leadership: Context, Strategy and Collaboration. London: Sage/Open University Press.
 * Western S. (2012) Coaching and Mentoring: A Critical Text. London: Sage publications
 * Western S. (2013) (2nd Ed) Leadership: A Critical Text. London: Sage publications
 * Western, S. (2014). Autonomist leadership in leaderless movements: anarchists leading the way. Ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 14(4), 673-698.
 * Western, S. (2018). The Eco-Leadership Paradox, in Redekop, B.W., Gallagher, D.R., & Satterwhite, R. (Eds.) Innovation in Environmental Leadership: Critical perspectives. New York and London: Routledge.
 * Western, S. & Garcia, EJ (2018) Global Leadership Perspectives: Insights and Analysis. London: Sage publications
 * Western, S. (2019) (3rd Ed) Leadership: A Critical Text. London: Sage publications
 * Western, S. (2020)  Eco-Leadership: Transforming coaching to transform Leadership. Coaching Perspectives, The Association of Coaching Global Magazine April 20th 2020 Issue 25
 * Wielkiewicz, R. M. & Stelzner, S. P. (2005). An ecological perspective on leadership theory, research, and practice. Review of General Psychology, 9(4), 326-341. doi: 10.1037/10892680.9.4.326
 * Wheatley, M. J. (2006) Leadership and the New Science. San Francisco, CA: Berrett–Koehler.
 * Wilber, K. (2000) A Theory of Everything. Boston, MA: Shambala.
 * Western S. & McNamara, M. (2015) Leadership in Healthcare: Interview with Dr Simon Western by Martin McNamara, WIN (World of Irish Nursing and Midwifery) vol 23 no 7, pp 33-3