Eating the Menu Rather than the Dinner: Tao and Leadership

Abstract

Despite many thousands of theoretical and empirical studies, leadership remains a tantalizing enigma for Western thinkers and practitioners. This is perhaps the result of two interrelated presuppositions. First, our conceptions of leadership are rooted in a cultural framework, ultimately theological in origin, of hierarchy and control that emphasizes outside direction and separation. Second, Western language codes leadership as a noun and therefore as a separable object of study. Nouns are typically regarded as denoting physical objects, and therefore leadership tends on the whole to be reified and treated as if it can be dissected and examined much as one would examine any other object in the environment. In contrast the Eastern tradition of Taoism treats leadership, more specifically the use of power, as a fluid set of interrelations co-ordinated with a natural order as it is, emphasizing co-ordination, location and connection with environmental contexts, rather than modification of the environment in line with an intellectual idea of what we would prefer it to be. Whereas for the West leadership is about active and shaping control, for Taoism it is more about engagement, understanding and co-ordination. This article argues that this approach offers some timely and important insights that have been consistently overlooked or downplayed in Western theorizing.