Human Being Leader

Joanne Pirie

Licentiate Thesis at Stockholm School of Economics

Agenda

• Sammanfattning av avhandling• Diskussion – Metod och tillvägagångssätt– Empiri och presentationen av densamma– Teoretisk referensram– Tolkning och avslutande diskussion

• Sammanfattande omdöme: styrkor och svagheter

Point of departure (p.1)

• Interest in well-being and apparent lack of well-being• Interest in business life and managerial leaders

• ”What are some of the implications of ’norm-al’ life for mangerial leaders?”

• ”What does ”norm-al” life look like when you are a human being who is a managerial leader, in particular one who formally holds the position of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in a business organization?”

Table of Contents

1. The Lives of Managerial Leaders (p. 1-4)2. Theoretical Lenses (p. 5-12)3. Studing Managerial Leader Lives (p. 13-31)4. Managerial Leader Lives in the Company (p.

32-100)5. Stories of Managerial Leader Life (p. 100-111)6. Reflections and Conclusions (p. 112-118)

Table of Contents

1. The Lives of Managerial Leaders (p. 1-4)2. Theoretical Lenses (p. 5-12)3. Studing Managerial Leader Lives (p. 13-31)4. Managerial Leader Lives in the Company (p.

32-100)5. Stories of Managerial Leader Life (p. 100-111)6. Reflections and Conclusions (p. 112-118)

Purpose (p. 4)

”The purpose of this study is to use a ”life view” to study the construction of managerial leader life, and reflect about the implications of this life, for both human beings and organizations.”

• What is the social construction of ”norm-al” life as a managerial leader in business organization?

• What possible implications are there of ”norm-al” managerial leader life for the managerial leader and for other human beings they interact with?

Theoretical Lenses (chapter 2, p. 5-23)

• Social constructionist perspective– Human Beings: physical, mental, emotional– Speech actions and body actions– Co-creation of self together with others

• An ideal-typical model of managerial leader life– Life spheres: public/private, boundaries, activities, relationships

• Work activities and relationships– Legal constraints, norms, values– “Small-talk”, “big-talk”, “body-talk”– Work, family and maintenance, leisure– Boundary strategies

Studying Managerial Leader Life (chapter 3, p. 24-31)

• CEO (six interviews during six months)• Management team, five men and two women

(interviewing each, seven interviews in total)• CEO assistant (one interview)• Board Chair (one interview)• CEO wife (one interview)• CEO friend (one interview)

Studying Managerial Leader Life (chapter 3, p. 24-31)

• Observations– Numerous management team meetings– Internal meetings and presentations– Public presentations– One sports training with CEO and one of his

children

Managerial Leader Lives in the Company (chapter 4, p. 32-99)

• Sara – Mike’s wife – and her stories of life with Mike (p. 32-38, 7 pages)• Harold – Mike’s colleague, mentor and friend (p. 39-42, 4 pages)• Jennifer – Mike’s assistant (p. 42-47, 5 pages)• Chairman of the Board and his work relationship with Mike (p. 47-48, 2

pages)• Stories of Mike – the management team (p. 49-57, 8 pages)• Mike’s stories about his life (p. 57-75, 18 pages)• Stories of former CEO Bruce’s life (p.75-78, 3 pages)• Management team as exemplars of managerial leader life (p.79-99, 20

pages)

Sara (wife)“From there it was on to a job where he was living at home from Monday to Friday once again. I experienced it to be a bigger change compared with the changes now with The Company. I noticed that…we then lived together more compared with the commuting years and the time in the small Swedish town. I noticed that he was expected to be working in the evenings. I didn’t notice it when he was commuting. (…)”

“I think that it’s important that when you have a position like Mike’s and have to move or whatever, then there has to be someone next to you, either you have to be there or you get a divorce because you aren’t there. We had friends who did the opposite to us – she stayed in the same town and he moved and then they divorced. I think that somehow she revealed her position that she wasn’t prepared to sacrifice this for him.”

Sara (wife)“Somewhere I have felt that my time will also come. I really did want to be at home with the children. Someone has to be there anyhow. We have often talked about this – if we are both going to have a career then we need a nanny and I felt that I wasn’t prepared to do that. We have the children for our own sake; I don’t want someone else to take care of them. So one of us has to earn sufficient amounts of money that the other can take it easy during those years. I think that it is really important to be by his side and support him otherwise I think that it is pretty close to impossible.”

“(…) I often feel that I have someone who sleeps at home at night and can drop the children off in the mornings. Then when he comes home late at night it doesn’t matter so much because everything rolls along regardless. The eldest goes off to training alone and doesn’t need a lift. The children are growing and manage more on their own and so you aren’t so dependent on the other.”

Harold (colleague, mentor and friend)

“I’ve talked with him. We aren’t so good at talking about relationships or feelings. We do things together – on a simple level. We talk about that, we talked about it a long time before he got the job at The Company. Above all about security in his family and that the family is stable. Sara has a simple background, she is stable and is a no-nonsense person; an important factor.”

“There is a lot of action also in free time with all sorts of different toys like boats.”

“We both cultivate old friendships. I have three high school friends, who I have known since the 1960s, that I meet regularly. These friendships are more and more valuable.”

Jennifer (executive assistant) Jennifer says that at times she has work phone calls with Mike on weeknights and

weekends.

“It helps that I book his trips and I sit and book a lot of trips. It may be so that I book a trip for the whole family, that I plan summer accommodation for him and then he doesn’t live in a hotel but rather in a place where he can bring his family.”

“… you’re met often with an expectation that you should work very long hours and at the same time there’s pressure that you should have a large social network, you should hobbies, have time to train, drink cocktails the whole lot. It’s really important, which I think Mike has shown, that it’s possible to balance. For him all these things are very important too, not in the least his family and children. He manages to combine them.”

Cecil (board chairman)“His whole way of being…it’s a damned... he gives an impression so to speak of well not power but vitality and such like. In that way he charmed the committee somewhat. Then Mike had a good background.”

“(…) There are high demands placed on employers with regards to equality in order to manage this issue of families with children, especially with regards to women and women’s career possibilities. This we should rightfully do and yet we also have the problem that there is not equality in people’s families so that both take the same amount of responsibility. I have found numerous situations where the girls are always at home when children are sick because the man can’t. There are workplaces where you lose part of your bonus and other things if you take fatherhood leave. As far as leadership in companies are concerned equality is better there but we haven’t managed to deal with equality in family situations. People themselves haven’t dealt with equality in their families, I don’t know how it is in the case of Mike, and if they don’t it will be difficult to make the whole thing function at work either.”

Management teamThe story that most of the members of the management team tell is that Mike’s family relationships and activities are important to him. (…)There is also an acknowledgement of how important it is for a managerial leader to have, in their words, a “wife” who has the possibility to deal with family responsibilities.

“It’s definitely a contrast to Bruce. Mike doesn’t talk so much about his private life. He mentions his wife sometimes and then his children in internal information he writes, and that he gives them lifts to training and such like. In any case it’s mostly in descriptive terms about something that has happened so to speak. It’s not like he says that he has a child at home who has problems or… this is what I’ve done or taken them to training. It’s more like facts. There are no problems, no depths, no feelings or anything like that.”

Mike’s stories about his life“I contribute by setting a context, doing the necessary analysis, explain what needs to be done, why we need to do it and where we are going. This is what leadership is about and then to communicate a feeling that this is a hell of a lot of fun, you have to burn for what you do and then all the time you can do things a bit better, a bit different from how they’re done today. All the time striving towards excellence… This is what I am good at. Then I have other qualities like being full of ideas and active but they don’t have so much to do with leadership, they’re perhaps better from a purely operative perspective. I have a certain eye for detail. But I guess my greatest strength is probably my analytical ability, my ability to then turn my analysis into a plan of action and a definite goal and consequently the ability to rhetorically explain why we are going go for this goal and what may happen if we don’t do so. I can be uncannily persuasive if I need to be (…).”

Mike’s stories about his life

“I am rather Lutheran – I like being here in the office early in the morning and being last in the evening. I don’t care how others do their work, doing a good job involves delivering. I have a bad conscience if I leave work too early. I think it’s a good quality to be Lutheran.”

“(…) I said that I am concerned about balance in life and that it is only them who can find it but that it’s good for me to know roughly speaking what that implies and that they must be able to go from work at short notice, or if they can’t come in early in the morning because they have a wife who can’t drop children off at kindergarten and such like. In that way they don’t have to have a bad conscience for it. But then just how they make their boundaries is up to them what they do and they have their routines.”

Mike’s stories about his life“There are two things that I am thinking of - a quote from one of the children when I came home early on a weekday. I managed to catch a flight from Copenhagen at 3pm so I got home by 5pm. They asked ‘What are you doing at home? Are you going back to work?’ … ‘Dad came home when it was still light.’ They have a very strong perception of time so it was completely wrong that I was at home at 5pm when they had just finished eating.”

“Sometimes I think of myself as a bad father because my energy runs out when I come home but generally speaking I know that I am quite a good father. I do probably more than others in my situation do for their children. (…) I try to spend a lot of time with them on the weekends.”

Mike’s stories about his lifeJP: Has your life and lifestyle have changed over time as a managerial leader?

Mike: No it’s pretty much the same. It changes along with my own development as a person and how the family develops. My lifestyle is directed more by my private situation than my work situation. (…).

JP: How would other employees at The Company answer the question – “What do you think Mike’s life is like as a whole?”

Mike: They’d think that I spend a lot of time and care a lot about my family. I think so…it’s in the internal information that I write. I don’t know I don’t dare answer the question. How would they see me? I don’t know. My assistant said something about that. She hadn’t expected me to be able to do so much, or to have so much time with the children and the family and all of that. I can’t remember how she expressed it ... Oh I think they see so little of me that I think it’s difficult for them to form an opinion, other than those close colleagues who have a clearer picture.

Management team on former CEO

• Focus on relations rather than task • Confirming and appreciative• Unclear communication, focus on consensus• Worked all the time – no boundaries• Unavailable and non-present due to excessive

travel and other work commitments

Perceived to be very different from Mike!

Management team on their own lives

“I sleep nearly five hours, until 6am. I am at work between 7:30am and 5pm. Then I do a little sport. I work with youngsters and train a team, as well as sit on the board of the club and work on some projects. I go to training with them three days a week and then several hours disappear for matches each weekend. After training its time for work, a bit of food and helping the children with their homework for about an hour or two. Then work – I do some preparation for work the following day and think a little about things. (…) On Fridays at 5pm I “turn off” unless there is some real crisis (He repeats “if it is a real crisis” three times in the next sentences- author’s note.) I spend time with the family, make a good meal, watch TV, hug the kids, always on Friday evenings. I never work on Friday evening unless there’s something really serious. Saturdays are always spent with the family and then Sundays until around dinnertime, after which I work 2-3 hours from about 7pm in preparation for the new week. That’s how the week looks.”

Management team on their own lives“It’s very free. At higher levels it’s very much up to the individual to solve it. If you like weren’t here a few half days or half a day and it wasn’t clear where you were it would be a problem. But then it’s very flexible but all the people who report to me work more than 40 hours a week.”

“I think that I have very free working hours in the sense that, and Mike has also commented on this, it doesn’t matter where I am and where I do my work. If they’re done they’re done and that’s what counts. I told him in one of our first meetings that I try to work at home one day a week, partly to avoid sitting in traffic jams, partly because you get little… you can get certain work tasks done a little better when you are undisturbed, have peace and quiet. I am contactable and I know that my closest colleagues can reach me. When you sit quietly at home it’s better. Mike said that’s great and he has said to me that it’s important to have this balance between work life and private life. So this is I guess one way to try to achieve that.”

Stories of managerial leader life (chapter 5, p. 100-111)

• Work organizing life: In practice work activities and relationships are number one priority• “Big talk” + Co-constructing the managerial “self”: Big talk constructs CEO as exception-al, all

spheres of CEO is seen as embodiment of organization, CEO constructs an image of himself as a family man

• “Body talk”: Symbolic aspects of managerial body in terms of appearance and fitness, energy, feelings (stay positive)

• Relationships: Managerial leaders are dependant on others yet they seem unaware of the support they get (masculine gendered career pattern), they rely on on old relationships which hinders personal development

• Maintenance sphere: Depends on a life partner to take care of home/family, pressure on the body and bodily needs

• Leisure sphere activities: Adapted to work and then a combination of own interest and family (football coaches, skiing, boats)

• Multi-faceted human beings: contradictions between “speech-actions” and “body-actions”

Reflections and conclusions (chapter 6, p. 112-118)

• Managerial leader “self” at the center of attention: Position of power makes unaware of impact and dependence on others, “frozen” and “rigid” self.

• Human doing leader vs. human being leader: Un-reflected person unable to grasp ethical/moral dilemmas, pressure on “life leadership” manage work-life-balance and and keeping the managerial body fit and strong

• Managerial leaders – life competence/qualifications: Stable family that adjusts to the CEO’s work, being able to work all the time, adapt the “self”/”personality”

• Constructing the “norm-al” and “exception-al” managerial leader: Narrowing life space, elitism, lack of inflow of norms and values, intolerance of humanness

First question…

WHO IS HE?!!

Second question: Access

• Given his incredibly busy schedule, why did he want to participate in your study?

• What was his agenda and how has it affected your material?

Interviews and observations• Why not more informants from private sphere: children, parents,

sibblings, close friends?• Why only observing one private occasion?• Why not more interviews with CEO:s wife?• Ask them to create a “life-line” visualizing private/public events?• What about challenging questions reversing focus from public to private,

from CEO to CEO’s wife, children etc? Inviting interviewees to critically reflect?

• Did someone ever ask for your feedback or thoughts? • Interview guide?

Presenting the material

• How come you choose to present the material in this way?

• Start with basic facts? Education, background, different jobs, number of children, their age…

• Why didn’t you use your observations more?

When interpreting your material…

… was this what you expected or was there something that surprised you?

Theoretical lens

Would have expected…• … additional theories and research on

construction of self• … additional theories and research on well-

being and stress in work life• … additional theories and research on private-

public divide

Research of interest to your study…

• Organizing work-family obligations (Wahl 1992, Franzén, Linghag & Zander 1998, Andersson 1997, Höök 2001b,

Bekkengen 2002, Reis 2004)

• Power relations between spouses within heterosexual couples (Haavind 1994, Holmberg 1999)

• Managers overtime culture (Cockburn 1992, Halford et al 1997, Rutherford 2011)

• Work-life-stress and work-life-balance (Lundberg & Frankenhaeuser 1999, Martin 1999, Linghag 2010)

• Manager-secretary-relationship, manager-wife-relationship (Kanter 1977, Pringle 1989, Reis 2004)

• Male norm in leadership (Kanter 1977, Collinson & Hearn 1996, Wahl 1996, Höök 2001a)

• Different masculinities among managers and executives (Collinson & Hearn 1996, Holgersson 2003, Fogelberg

Eriksson 2005)

• Social class among groups of elite men (Lindgren 1992, 1999, Holgersson 2003, Göransson 2006, Hamrén 2007)

• Homosociality (Kanter 1977, Roper 1996, Lindgren 1996, Holgersson 2006, Hamrén 2007)

What I find of particular interest…

Different masculinities: the rise of “the new CEO”

Social class, international careers and family

arrangements

Work-life-balance and flexibility discourse

individualizing structures

FOSFOR/HHS/2003

• Authoritarianism• Paternalism• Entrepreneurialism• Careerism• Informalism

(Collinson & Hearn, 1996)

Different Business Masculinities

FOSFOR/HHS/2003

• Authoritarianism• Paternalism• Entrepreneurialism• Careerism• Informalism

(Collinson & Hearn, 1996)

Different Business Masculinities

Fantomen är död! Länge leve Fantomen!

How different are they?!

“The rise of the new CEO”

• Speed of execution• Impatient• Focus on task and result• Challenge their organizations• Speaks of opportunities and solutions

• Straight forward (no tie)• Athletic and competitive (runs races)• Finance focus rather than technology• International experience (ex pat)• Emphasize diversity • Believes gender equality is a non-issue

• Stable marriage, supportive wife• More than two children and a pet• Talks about family (football coach)• Manage others to balance his work-life-situation• Class traveler

The “young guys” challenging the “old guys” through homosocial

confirmation rituals resulting in inclusion and exclusion…

“The CEO of today”

• Who is he: A hero? A pampered narcissistic “doer”? A self-destructive nutcase? A victim?

• How do these social constructions of managerial leaders impact society (business and industry and work-life)?

Strengths and weaknesses in thesis

• + interesting and important topic• + interesting empirical material• + well-written• +/- clear, yet quite limited, theoretical position• - limited references to previous research • +/- valid and interesting, yet quite “shallow”,

interpretations without theoretical references• +/- opens up for opportunity to discuss impact on work-

life and society at large, but does not take this opportunity