Abstract

Leadership and the body’s capacity

A phenomelogical study of how to use body, time and space as navigation points to shift more weight onto Being

In today’s knowledge enterprises, managers are considered primarily as a Cogito, a thinking subject. It is almost exclusively the manager’s thought processes and cognitive capacities that are recruited, trained and developed, and in many places being seems to have been pushed into a corner by the constant need for action and efficiency. Here, the ‘Being’ should be seen in relation to the leadership concept of Negative Capability,which describes a condition wherein space is given to allow one to think and reflect over possibilities in a pressured situation, without automatically making a decision or reacting on the basis of already tested strategies.

The opposite of Negative Capability is Positive Capability, where action, and the immediate act of kick-starting the process of deciding, responding and doing are in focus. In terms of the future’s leadership tasks, there is the potential to look at the body’s capacity in a leadership context and at body, time and space as navigation points in relation to anchoring the Being more in the physical leadership space. A leadership space where the Being is allowed more room can enable the creation of a gap, with better conditions for a resonance to spring up between manager and employees and to allow listening, dialogue and creativity, co-creation and innovative thought processes to unfold more easily, for the benefit of both companies and the world outside of them.

This thesis is a phenomenological hermeneutic study based on a number of qualitative interviews with three selected leaders. In the interviews, the three leaders’ consciousness and language are studied in regard to actively addressing the concepts of body, time and space in their leadership work. The question is whether the three concepts can be used as navigation points to shift more weight onto the Being, rather than it being primarily the action that is in focus.

This is a field within leadership development for which there is relatively little literature or research. The thesis includes theory from the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as from Martin Buber, who explores the philosophy of dialogue. From Merleau-Ponty’s body phenomenological perspective, we sense and experience the world through our bodies, and we always acknowledge on the basis of our body from a specific position in space and with a specific temporal sensation or at a specific tempo.

My study culminates in a discussion of how leaders can actively train the use of their physical capacity, for example through the use of body-setting techniques, which focus on activating the body’s intelligence when communicating and leading.