On Leadership: Tim Sharpe

Lead Us Not Into Evil: How Empathy Is Prerequisite for Ethical Leadership

Tim Sharpe

I don’t think I’m a leader. Day to day there are a thousand minor leadership tasks to be performed but simply performing them doesn’t make me a leader. No one ‘follows’ me as such; they’re either employed by me (I pay them to follow me), or a customer pays me to deliver some sort of benefit. I don’t view either as leadership – though through the MMU’s excellent LEAD programme, it’s something I’m trying to develop.

Recognising my limited leadership capability releases me from what I believe is a greater level of ethical responsibility. Whilst employees can resign and customers can choose to go elsewhere if faced with an unacceptable course of action, I think leaders demand a greater investment: trust.

This investment of trust means that a leader holds sway over opinions in a way that an administrator doesn’t, which means the leader has a greater responsibility to ensure this trust isn’t abused. Yet that’s surely not enough; for a leader to limit their concerns to their immediate followers risks the welfare of those indirectly affected. For example, the business leader has a responsibility to the families of employees.

Therefore the ethical leader must conduct their affairs in a manner which takes into account the wider impact of their actions, particularly on minorities or the disenfranchised. To fail to do so constitutes something more than just neglect of duty, or lack of respect - history suggests it can develop into cruelty of the most extreme kind.

Richard Holloway, in the exhaustive and excellent ‘Between the Monster and the Saint’, suggests that evil develops from an absence of empathy, a failure to be able to put yourself in the place of those affected by your actions, “the ability to not only feel for the afflicted, but to feel with them,” as Holloway puts it.

He rightly describes how human beings can accommodate cruelty with alarming ease when mobilised to do so by a leader. I would argue that this applies to all leaders, from leading a church group to a leading a country.

So my take on leadership is that a leader who does not demonstrate empathy is a tyrant. A leader can be driven, energetic, tough, demanding, or anything else they need to be, but without empathy they don’t deserve your trust.

As a final thought, my concern is that the ethical responsibilities of leadership are rarely referred to, despite recent lessons from history. We live in a world where Lord Sugar, a moderately successful remnant of the original 1980’s technology boom (others from that period include Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs and Microsoft Founder Bill Gates) is described in awed tones as Britain’s “most belligerent boss”.  Is that a good thing? I think not; to my mind, belligerence doesn’t sit well with empathy.

About A&W & Me

I’m the co-founder of A&W, creators and operators of Sabisu.co, an information integration and management platform for networked enterprises. Drawing on my years in corporate programme delivery, A&W also offers consultancy on programme governance, project management and technology change management. I’m a bit of a geek and a technology enthusiast.