What Authored the Author?

Locating ourselves through our journey of work

We work in organisations, organisations work in us

This essay reflects on a long, diverse and completely enriching work journey that I have travelled. However it is more than a work biography, it is an emotional experience shared. Work is a huge part of our lives, and yet the places and experiences we have at work are rarely reflected on from a perspective of how they impact and influence us.

There are many stories we can tell of ourselves, and I have told my own story ‘what authored the author’ many times over, both in writing and in person to diverse groups. More than other aspects of my teaching, this story stirs something powerful in people, which at first surprised me but now I realise this is the point. It’s not about me, this story is like a mirror, it reflects something back to the reader. What it triggers, stirs and sparks in you is important, it asks you the question ‘what authored you’?

At the end of this essay, I will share some reflective activities that you can do as an individual or as a team to help you think about ‘what authored you’, and to help you and your team, focus on your true desire.

You can’t step into the same river twice - Heraclitus

Each time I tell this story to a live audience I am surprised as the story changes, the saying ‘you can’t step into the same river twice’ seems to be true in this case. My unconscious speaks through me and I forget something and leave it out, or I emphasise something strongly that I don’t usually pay attention to, and I might get emotional at a particular part that awakens me. This story has its own way of telling itself, and as I re-read it, the story plays games with me, teaching me something new about my past life and also about my current self.

What authored the author?

This short biographical narrative is my personal experience of ‘locating myself’ to make connections between my experience of work and the self.

I was born in a council estate in Bristol UK, I left school with a very poor education and few qualifications and began work at the age of 17 as an office boy in a paper-bag-making factory. This was a difficult transition, from being a playful schoolboy into a very harsh work environment. In the factory, I witnessed Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ techniques on production lines. Unionised labour, clocking in and out, women spending all day packing paper bags which tumbled off loud, clattering machines, men labouring to keep the machines going 24 hours a day, feeding them with heavy rolls of paper and ink, this mundane work (now exported to Asia) was brutalising. I remember tough men and women, with a fierce humour to cope. Factory work was manual labour, the employer bought the labourer’s time and body, we clocked in and clocked out. Emotions and thinking were to be left at home. We were all human cogs in the organisational machine.

Robinsons Paper Bag factory Bedminster Bristol (now apartments)

This has had a lasting impact on me and how I regard people at work. In my writings, consultancy and teaching, I critique human resources (we are human beings, not resources) and management techniques that instrumentalise employees to become ‘working machines’. In today’s digital world, all performance is measured, we are asked to measure every service we receive and to wear ‘super-ego technologies’ that tell us we have to move, and that count every step and monitor our sleep. I believe we have internalised the dystopian factory ideology into our workplace culture, and into our bodies and minds.

Encouraged by a nursing friend who I played rugby with, I left the factory at the age of 18 to train as a general nurse. I hadn’t thought at all of this as a career, but was happy to leave the factory, and ‘working with people’ seemed a good idea. It also surprised my friends; for a start men aren’t nurses….are they?

Embodied work

Nurses work intimately with the physical body, probably more than any other profession. Touching and cleaning, injecting, lifting and turning, administering drugs, dressing wounds and evacuating bowels. The nurse works with the inside and outside of the body, and with the living and the dying body. ‘Laying a patient out’ is the phrase used in nursing to dress a patient who has died. I found this process deeply moving, especially when I had closely nursed the patient. Compassionate and loving caring of a dead body seemed to me to be a continuation of the nursing care, and what the patient and the relatives deserved. I noticed that at some stage in the process I could almost physically witness the soul leaving the body, I was an atheist at this time, so this experience surprised me, and also comforted me. I lost my brother Steven to leukemia when he was seven (I was five). I think that my unconscious took me into nursing, as a way of reparation, to try and make good the loss I had experienced, and to make sense of death which had been with me since childhood.

Working with the injured, sick and dying made me acutely aware of the existential issues of mortality, and also how our emotions, thinking and identities are embodied. I worked long nursing shifts, experiencing the primitive human emotions of fear and anxiety when facing mortal threats. Later, when I worked in offices and universities, I reflected on how the body is largely ignored.

The hospital leadership context was a rigid matriarchal nursing system that had echoes of the military - a commander in chief (the matron) with uniforms denoting rank, strict authority, and no first names on the ward. The hospital organisation was structured as a social defense against facing the emotional pain of working with illness and death (Menzies Lyth, 1960). Nurses weren’t encouraged to talk about their feelings, and many patients were cared for physically but not emotionally. After working with a traumatic death, no counselling was offered, just an early coffee break and gallows humour in the bar after work.

Space Invaders

I loved the work, made great friends, and learned huge amounts about life and myself, but struggled in this constraining institutional culture. Nursing leadership was predominantly female, from ward sister to hospital matron, in opposition to the medical leadership, which was predominantly male. This dual leadership created a symbolic structure replicating a ‘hetero-normative’ parental structure – the father leading with technical expertise, and the mother being the carer.^[1] This raised my awareness of gender issues, power, responsibility, and of pay disparity. I was a male on the female team, there were two males in a class of thirty nurses. Often in life, I have found myself in the position of experiencing being ‘othered’ by class or gender and it has really helped me understand others who are othered through ethnicity, age, class, gender etc. At times I was just one of the gang, accepted and felt a sense of belonging. At other times I was fetishised and objectified as ‘an exotic and sought-after object’ on the one hand and as a displaced object who was a ‘space invader’ (see Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place Nirmal Puwar 2004) on the other. I was treated as a lifting machine, as a strong man I was called to lift heavy patients across the hospital, I was not allowed to work on women’s wards, and was once sexually harassed by a ward sister who asked me to sit on her knee when giving me my student report, I refused and got a negative report and nearly left the profession.

Dependency cultures

Within this archetypal parental leadership model, Daddy Doctor and Mummy Nurse, the patients were symbolically childlike in their dependency. When a patient is facing major surgery or death, the contemporary rhetoric of individual choice, and our desire to be in control, are confronted by Freud’s ‘reality principle’, sometimes we have to accept our dependency on others. For some patients the dependency culture was wholly appropriate, enabling them to give up their autonomy to enable the surgeon’s knife to be wielded, and to be bed-bathed, toileted and cared for like an infant. For others in rehabilitation, the dependency culture was completely wrong and hindered their attempts to regain autonomy.

Dependency cultures have a place in some organisations; in education for example, learning requires us to enter a state of ‘not-knowing’ (if we know already we cannot learn something new), and therefore a level of dependency is required in order to learn (Obholzer and Roberts, 1994; Western, 2005). In the hospital, this dependency culture unfortunately affected the staff as well as patients, and became very damaging, undermining innovation and autonomous decision-making. Since this time I have been alert and sensitive when I experience too much dependency and a lack of autonomy in the workplace.

During this period I was a talented rugby player and captained my local club, experiencing leadership at an early age. Rugby provided me with the opportunity to learn motivational skills, experience teamwork, and the rugby club was probably the most honest and egalitarian community I have ever participated in. Our club consisted of lawyers, entrepreneurs, business leaders, the unemployed and ex-convicts, and all were treated with respect. Anybody pulling ego or rank over another was teased mercilessly; it was a leveling experience. We ran the club as a social enterprise and the ethos was interdependency. Leadership, teamwork, having the courage to have a go, and being able to laugh at myself were lessons I took from leading the rugby club.

Whilst doing general nursing I became fascinated by the human condition. After my student training I went traveling and returned to work in a geriatric hospital, where I was in charge of a female ward for a year, which I loved. Working with the aged also was enlightening, the humour, wisdom and resilience I witnessed was moving, and I am continually aware of the growing age-apartheid in our society, where young and old rarely meet.

The Asylum

Naburn Mental Hospital 1906-1988

I left to train as a psychiatric nurse and found freedom in a more relaxed, uniform-free setting, and became totally engaged in human psychology, discovering a life-long passion for psychotherapy and the ‘talking cure’. I worked with the severely mentally ill, obsessive, neurotic, depressed, schizophrenic and psychotic patients in Naburn Mental Hospital, a Victorian-built asylum, which Goffman (1961) describes as a Total Institution.

I witnessed electro-convulsive therapy and worked on wards where 70 men slept in long dorms without curtains or any privacy. Behaviourist approaches such as ‘token economy’ was used with the institutionalised patients. Patients received tokens that were exchanged for cigarettes to reinforce good behaviours, for example for getting out of bed, and they had tokens taken away for ‘bad behaviour’. Institutionalisation had an impact on both staff and patients (sometimes it was hard to tell the difference), and the experience of the asylum and the totalising institution has stayed with me.

The asylum had two aspects: firstly, it did provide ‘asylum’, i.e. a container, a safe and caring space, a refuge from the terrors of the world for those suffering severe mental trauma. On the other hand, it was an oppressive and totalising space, and on particular wards a dehumanising space. When working in corporations and large public sector organisations I am often reminded of the asylum, seeing a refined version of the token economy and institutional culture control take place but in a more benign, hidden form.

Human beings are not human resources and yet HR teams flourish. Managers and trainers use transactional leadership, ‘carrot and stick’ to change behaviour, measuring behavioural change, rewarding performance goals, and I wonder about the humanity of their methods. Transformational leaders draw on culture control to create peer and self-surveillance where we police each other and ourselves. When I later consulted to the banking system, I saw conformist employees, in their dark-suited uniforms, sitting in rows upon rows in vast open-plan glass offices, institutionally eating in the canteen together, and I experienced a different version of a modern-day asylum. I will never forget this formative experience, which alerts me to ethics and the power of institutionalisation. Humanising organisations is one of my passions, and I ask myself, ‘does this leadership stance enhance or diminish humanity’? Other important lessons from psychiatric nursing were to discover how thin and blurred the line is between madness and sanity, and this has helped me work with some of the undiagnosed pathology that occurs in the workplace. I realised that insanity and madness are also both a biological and a social phenomena. At different times in history and in different cultures, madness is defined differently, for example, I met a woman who had suffered from post-natal depression in the 1950s and had never left the asylum.

I also learned counselling skills, group facilitation skills and, most importantly, how to manage my own and others’ anxiety, when facing dangerous and psychotic disturbance and distress. Containing anxiety has been a great transferable lesson for me.

Therapeutic Community

At the age of 23, I worked in a regional residential facility for emotionally disturbed adolescents. This was run as a therapeutic community with the philosophy to devolve leadership and the care of each other to the young people themselves, empowering them to find their voices and to learn how to take responsibility for themselves and others, through experimenting in a safe environment. Within a year I was promoted to become a Charge Nurse, often running the community which was a huge amount of responsibility at a young age, working with young people who had serious problems such as anorexia, who were suicidal and who were abused.

Working closely with the staff team, we radicalised the unit to make it fully self-catering, and the medical input was marginalised, removing the dependency culture and the stigma of being given a medical diagnosis and treated as a sick patient. This was the most therapeutic environment I have experienced and I learnt two key lessons here. First, my anarchic idealism that if you remove leadership, rules and status then power and status will disappear and a pure democracy will flourish; this idea was crushed. Secondly, devolving power and decision-making responsibly, and enabling leadership potential to emerge within safe boundaries works wonderfully. Our so-called ‘disturbed’ young people were able to run the unit, making important decisions together and working on their emotional selves at the same time. They helped us to interview and appoint new staff, took control of their budget, the cooking, and their own destinies, and supported their peers with great skill and empathy.

This experimental community, set in the NHS, marginalised the medical model and gave power back to the client group. I am indebted to this intense learning experience, and to Mike Broughton (now deceased) who was an excellent leader and the first to see my leadership potential and to trust me. At this community, I learned family therapy, group and drama therapy.

Single Parent

In my mid-20s I spent three years as a single parent on welfare, and again found myself challenging gender stereotypes, wandering into mother and toddler groups and struggling with the responses I received. Sometimes I was mothered (which I rejected) and at other times I was considered a threat to the group norm, an external male body to be ejected. However, I loved the freedom of being a home-parent, each day being thrown back to my own resources to make ends meet and creating each day with my beautiful and delightful son, Fynn. I was living on the margins in terms of money and found living without the identity and social respect work brings to be a real challenge. I was nevertheless immensely happy as a father, making fires, stories and pancakes – this was a time of poverty in financial terms, but of wealth in time and adventures!

Family Therapy

On returning to work I spent ten years training and working as a family therapist and psychotherapist with the urban underclass in a deprived city in northern England. I was a clinical manager of a community-based, multi-professional healthcare team. I loved family therapy and took the opportunity to be very creative in therapy sessions. In family therapy, you quickly discover (a) that power is not where you (or the family) think it is, (b) how systems impact on individuals and (c) how patterns of communication completely entrap us, even if we really want to change. This learning has hugely influenced my leadership and coaching work since and helped me to understand team dynamics.

In my 30s I decided to return to education and studied for a Master’s in Counselling and psychotherapy at Keele University, and felt exposed and overwhelmed by the academic language, rituals and culture which made me feel inadequate and an imposter (not having A-levels or a Bachelor’s Degree). I adjusted over the year and found great joy in learning and excelled in my studies gaining a distinction. My thesis was written on Puppets, Masks and Psychotherapy, relating to my interest in how ‘therapy’ has storytelling and cross-cultural roots.

Later, I studied for another Master’s degree, in Psychoanalytic Approaches to Organisational Consultancy, at the internationally renowned Tavistock Centre. My interest was to understand why change was so resisted and to promote collaborative working across health, education and social services in order to better serve families. Developing an understanding of the unconscious processes that underpin organisational culture was a huge learning experience for me, which I have applied in my work ever since.

I finally left the NHS, feeling ‘burnt out’ from the pressure of working with disturbed families and suicidal teenagers in an under-resourced provision. I was frustrated by a leadership dominated by medical power, which allowed little room for constructive dissent and change, particularly if it came from a nurse. The medical model provided the wrong leadership, wrong culture and wrong treatment for these young people and their families. For the most part, my clients were not ill, but suffered from the emotional and social strains of living in a post-industrial society undermined by poverty, drugs, crime and unemployment. They required therapeutic and emotional support, more resources and structural-political change rather than a medical diagnosis, labels and medicines. My attempts with talented and committed others to make changes were partly successful, and more collaborative work now takes place. However, the NHS has an institutional leadership culture that allows little room for innovation or creativity, and it was time for me to break out of this institution.

Quakers and Faith

Another experience, which has informed my understanding of leadership and organisational culture, is my religious affiliation. I have been a Quaker (Religious Society of Friends) since my mid-30s, which contrasted with the secular society all around me. Quakers have an unusual organisational structure without formal leadership. They do not appoint church ministers but believe in a ‘priesthood of all believers’ abolishing not the idea of priests, but abolishing the laity. The business meetings are run (and have been for 350 years) by spiritual consensus. Local, regional and national meetings (which can mean up to 1,000 Quakers at a yearly meeting) decide on Quaker ‘policy’ (www.quaker.org.uk). They don’t vote, but wait in silence until spiritual consensus is agreed, which means individuals often have to balance their personal convictions with the collective.

Quaker meetings are structured around the idea of equality. Sitting in a circle, in silence, anyone moved to speak can ‘minister’ to those present. The Quaker history was an important part of my PhD research, leading me to examine how their informal leadership and organisation have changed over the centuries to accommodate social change, while still holding onto the central experience and structures. 

More recently, I joined the Church of Ireland and have dual membership of Quaker and Anglican communities, appreciating both traditions and their very different leadership and organisational structures. My experience of leadership has been further informed by engaging with social movements and friends who are activists in trade unions, feminist, anarchist, and green movements. This informed my recent research on Autonomist Leadership (Western 2014) and much of my thinking about Eco-leadership. I work with the idea that the human spirit is important in leadership and organisations, whether you have a faith or not.

More recently I have been invited to work with Church of England leaders, and to visit Rome to support a leadership programme across the Catholic Church, aiming to help deliver Pope Francis's initiative of a synodal church i.e. a church that changes from the bottom-up, and engages with the marginalised, young people, indigenous and women to have a greater role in leading the church.

Frustrated by being a nurse, and a clinical manager in the NHS, and burnt out by the intense therapeutic work and also the bureaucratic institutionalisation that was so frustrating, I decided to seek new pastures and wanted to experience corporate life and the private sector. In the public sector, there are fantasies of what happens in the private sector; ‘they are greedy’, ‘they are more efficient’ and I wanted to experience that myself, and see what I could learn.

Academia

I entered a university business school to study for a PhD in leadership and quickly found full-time employment working in leadership development and executive education. Academia is underpinned by a dependency culture that replicates educational models of ‘teacher–student’ dynamics and tends towards bureaucratic managerialism. These days, the university also embraces the culture of capitalism, and is financially driven to the dismay of many faculty.

At Lancaster University’s Management School, I worked in the executive leadership field and suddenly found myself working with very senior corporate leaders internationally, designing and offering coaching and experiential learning. The cultural difference and the language of the corporate world was a huge learning curve for me. A big adjustment took place from working with the poor, disempowered and disturbed, to working with the rich, successful and powerful. My saving grace was the capacity I had developed to ‘think in the face of anxiety’, drawing on my past experiences which enabled me to coach and to work in depth with these powerful executives.

I was later appointed Director of Coaching at Lancaster, where I established a critical approach to coaching drawing heavily on psychoanalytic and systems thinking. I also designed and ran a new postgraduate coaching course. After ten years of executive education, I left to work as an organisational consultant and direct the Master’s Degree in Organisational Consultancy at the Tavistock Clinic (where I was previously a student) and later chose to work independently setting up a new coaching and consulting company specialising in Eco-Leadership.

Today, as a practitioner–scholar, I continue to write and deliver training and keynotes at universities and conferences, coaching and consulting to a delightfully interesting and diverse client group. I deliver Eco-leadership interventions, and coach chief executives and senior leadership teams from global banks and top business schools. I also work with hospitals, hospices and small companies.

Entrepreneur

I founded the Eco-Leadership Institute to put into practice my theoretical work on developing the ideas around Eco-Leadership. We run coaching and leadership courses, have a dynamic community of practice learning together, and are a think-tank continually developing and publishing ideas to support organisational change to adapt to the climate-crisis and technological and social disruptions in our Precarious-Interdependent world.

Being an entrepreneur is interesting, the shift from being a sole-trader to a start up company and thinking about marketing, branding and building a team is fascinating and creative. My work continues to draw on the past experiences I have shared (and many more I have not shared). I remain intrigued by psychoanalysis and the unconscious at work, and in 2017 was elected President of ISPSO an international society working with the psychoanalytic study of organisations.

My latest venture has been for the Eco-Leadership Institute to partner with the Humanitarian Leadership Academy, and Save the Children to deliver a radical change in the humanitarian sector we call Eco-Mutualism.

This work takes me full circle in many ways, bringing a life’s work with people back to the fundamentals of how to create a more humane and compassionate world.

Reflections

My journey highlights a movement from working with the body (in the factory and as a nurse) to working with the mind (as a psychiatric nurse and therapist), to the individual and small group (as a family psychotherapist), then with organisational systems (as an organisational consultant), and finally with wider social issues by engaging with academia, and taking political and philosophical positions.

Leadership crosses all of these dimensions; the body, mind, individual, team, organisation and the social, and my work emanates from the culmination of my lived experience.

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^[1] This is not to paint the stereotypical gendered picture of female nurses as caring angels, which draws on the essentialist rhetoric that women are naturally more humane and emotionally literate leaders than men. Scandals of cruel leadership in ‘caring’ institutions such as hospitals, monasteries and convents reveal that caring or harsh leadership behaviour is less gender specific, and more closely linked to perverse organisational cultures.

Further reflections and consultative questions for yourself and your team: