LEADERSHIP SHADOWS

Leadership Shadows

Leadership Shadows

Leadership

Leadership is all about understanding people so you can bring out what is best in them. Civic and political leadership is concerned with realizing the positive potential within a community, region, state, or nation. Therefore, any psychological knowledge is helpful in leadership because it is difficult to inspire people if one does not understand them. However, depth psychology is a particularly powerful theory set for leadership because its fundamental premise is that people have minds, hearts, bodies, souls, and spirits—all of which are important to how individuals and groups function. In this way, depth psychology avoids the reductive nature of some psychologies that see people as fundamentally driven by primitive drives and urges.

Depth psychology is particularly useful for leadership because it avoids a focus on pathology, which may be inappropriate in the work of political and civic engagement. Instead, depth psychology emphasizes the ways normal people can learn to find their authentic selves while also fulfilling their family, workplace, and civic responsibilities. In this way, it shows people ways they can be successful (through contributing to society) and personally fulfilled if they individuate, which means they actually find themselves and their uniqueness. In addition, this perspective on human behavior and motivation helps us understand three things: (1) the psychology of groups and nations, (2) how people can work more effectively together, and (3) why people sometimes project onto each other feared or desired qualities. (Johnson, 2009)

The shadow of privilege

Leadership positions, including any professional role, tend to come with certain privileges. Such roles almost always allow for greater autonomy in your daily activities, freedom to set your own time schedules and work projects, higher compensation, less direct supervision and other perks. To the extent that professional roles require greater risks and responsibilities, most of us agree that professionals deserve some recognition in the form of privileges. However, privilege is often a slippery slope in which the professional begins to take more and more advantage of such privilege, often at the cost of the organization, other employees or society as a whole. Think, for example, of the many scandals related to executive compensation these past few years. However, the more common examples of this shadow are subtle: leaving early, arriving late, misusing a company credit card, or delegating more difficult patients to others are examples.

As intersectionality scholarship has traveled across disciplinary locations and into transnational conversations, an emphasis has been placed on understanding the ways in which geographical location transforms the relationships between categories as well as within categories. What it means to be a woman of color differs depending on a woman's geographical location. The systems of power that dictate whether that social identity is a marker of privilege or marginalization also changes according to geographical location and historical configurations of power in that society. How identities are formulated and how the structures of power are organized and maintained vary according to the locations in which they are studied. Scholars interested in women's social location in the Muslim world, ...