23rd International Studying Leadership Conference

Panel discussion on "Leadership and Carelessness"

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Panelists

• Professor Sarah Robinson, IESEG, Paris
• Dr Ron Kerr, University of Edinburgh
• Professor Kezia Dugdale, University of Glasgow
• Professor Juliet Kaarbo, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews
• Roddy Millar, Co-Founder and Director, Scottish Leadership Institute
• Professor Annemette Kjaergaard, Copenhagen Business School

Description

While leadership scholars have shown an interest in studying toxic leadership, narcissistic leaders, and extreme leadership, examinations of poor leadership practice are less common (Thompson et al, 2024). Yet poor leadership practice, or leadership practiced either individually or collectively that lacks care towards others, has material and affective consequences for employees, local communities, and ecological and social environments. The quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby conjures an image of privileged individuals who lack accountability towards others and the spaces they inhabit. 100 years on this image is still all too easily recognisable in both political and corporate spheres.

The last 100 years contains numerous cases of careless leadership in multiple domains. In the corporate sphere, and pertinent to our current location, the audience might recall the contribution of the Royal Bank of Scotland's CEO Fred Goodwin to the 2008 global financial crisis (see Kerr and Robinson 2011; 2016; Tourish and Owen, 2012). Indeed, the continuing relevance of Goodwin's disastrous leadership has recently been shown in a drama performed at this year's Edinburgh International Festival (Make it happen!). But to what extent have we learnt from such examples?

Leadership studies, and leadership development practice, nonetheless continues to be dominated by an optimism that individual leaders hold the best interests of an organisation and their followers at heart. The list of characteristics associated with "great" leaders emphasises the need for leader selflessness and care for others. Recent high-profile examples, including the global financial crisis, and the rise of populism (Bristow and Robinson, 2020; Kerr, Robinson and Sliwa 2024) illustrate the naivete of this view, and a need for leadership research and practice to sensitise us to how leaders become careless and question leadership's position as conceptually neutral.

Returning to the Great Gatsby, the closing line: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" reminds of the tendency to be guided by the past and of the struggle to change established norms, which when facing the prospect of another 100 years of careless leadership provokes us the pose the following questions to our panel:

• how can we recognise careless leadership when we see it?
• by what ways means can it be prevented/stopped?
• how can more care-ful leadership be established?
• how can leadership development address careless leadership and nurture care-ful leadership in current and future leaders?

Panellist biographies

Panel Chair

• Sarah Robinson is Full Professor of Management and Organisation Studies at IESEG School of Management, Paris. She is an Associate Editor of Leadership. She has a long-standing interest in the dark side of organizational leadership and the organization of (the darkside of) political leadership (with Ron Kerr). Other research areas include leadership learning; issues of power, resistance, identity and socialisation within professions often drawing on Bourdieu's sociology.

Panellists

• Kezia Dugdale is Associate Director of the Centre for Public Policy at the University of Glasgow. She has served as a Member of Scottish Parliament (MSP), Leader of Scottish Labour, and most recently Director of the John Smith Centre, University of Glasgow. Kezia has a wealth of experience in law-making and the impact of public policies within communities. She is also Chair of Shelter Scotland, a member of the Oversight Board of the Promise and the Electoral Reform Society.
• Juliet Kaarbo is Professor in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. She co-founded and is the Executive Director of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs. Julie previously held posts at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Kansas and the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Geneva) and was founding co-director of Edinburgh's Centre for Security Research. Julie is currently working on a Leverhulme Trust funded project: Breaking Bad? How Leader Personalities Change and the Consequences for Politics and Foreign Policies. She is also working on projects comparing personality profiles of U.S. presidential candidates to elected presidents.
• Ron Kerr is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh Business School. His research on leaders and leadership, co-authored with Sarah Robinson, traces a toxic threat of symbolic violence in organisations that has occurred and recurred over the years. Studies include: leadership in a British organisation in Post-Soviet Ukraine (2009); the toxic leadership of RBS and its role in the GFC (2012); populist political leadership in England from 1905 to 2016 (2022).
• Annemette Kjaergaard is professor with special responsibilities in management learning and development at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. She teaches personal leadership development in a post-graduate program for public sector in the post-graduate program. Her research activities address topics such as business education, management learning and leadership development and has been published in journals such as Management Learning, Journal of Management Studies, Studies in Higher Education, and Leadership.
• Roddy Millar is Co-Founder and Director of the Scottish Leadership Institute and editorial director of Ideas for Leaders, a platform that delivers research-based content on leadership and management to thousands of executives and managers around the world since 2013. He has worked with the foremost leadership researchers and developers for the last 20 years - making their work more accessible and valued. He is driven to make organisations more human.