Inclusive leadership and conflict through a systemic lens
“St Andrews university rector urged to apologise over Israel ‘genocide’ claim” reads the BBC news headline.
The Rector was reported to have messaged students referring to "apartheid, siege, illegal occupation and collective punishment" suffered by Palestinians during the Israel-Gaza war, and “genocidal attacks by the Israeli government against Gaza". The University said it was appalled by these comments, referring in particular to the vulnerability of Jewish communities. An apology was requested. In response, the Rector expressed dissatisfaction at the backlash, saying "I really tried to write a statement that would make everyone happy, but realised I wasn't being true to my beliefs….I'm glad I did it and it was the right thing to do" and "I denounce antisemitism in the strongest form. Reject the weaponising of antisemitism." Sometime later a joint statement was issued by the University Principal and the Rector, agreeing to “work together to try to restore an environment of inclusivity and respect.”
Episodes like this tend to be looked at through partisan eyes: people are aligned with one side or the other and judge the situation accordingly. But if we step back from our allegiances and use the events for learning, what then?
Below we explore the story through three systemic lenses. None are concerned with rights and wrongs of the underlying conflict, nor the merits of the Rector’s statement. All are concerned with gaining perspective to inform understanding - necessary skills for any leader.
Lens 1: Place and Role
Everyone has a place and role within the systems to which they belong. Role and place are systemic functions, with a scope, content and purpose required by the system irrespective of personal desire.
Take a football team. Each team requires certain functions to be performed, or positions to be played, whether the players like it or not. When a player is sent off, each team member adjusts their role within the team, some more than others, to ensure that the system continues to function. The systemic role of the missing player gets filled by others.
The same happens in personal systems. When parents divorce, it is common for the oldest child to step up to add care for their younger siblings and even the remaining parent. The system demands that the caring role be filled, and so like it or not, someone in the system is drawn in to perform it.
So too in the work place. Here, roles are usually defined by job description, and colleagues will cover when people are off sick. But beneath the surface description there are also hidden roles within teams that have an energetic quality: the carer, the devil’s advocate, the sceptic, the optimist, and so on. These exist according to the demands of the relationship system and the task being faced. Often when people are drawn into hidden roles, it indicates the need for greater resourcing within the team, or the creation of a new, additional role.
When leaders or team members step outside their role they are “out of place”. This can cause stress within the work system - tension, conflict, exhaustion, underperformance - just as it causes emotional pain within a family system. And so it is essential that all leaders and team members understand place and role.
According to St Andrew’s, the Rector’s role involves a duty to care for all students and look after the welfare of the whole student body - not merely a class of them. From the University’s perspective, the Rector had acted out of place: she had appeared to support some while risking others. The backlash was a classic systemic reaction. Had she been a student herself then of course she would be free to voice her personal opinion. But as a leader her role was wider.
Lens 2: Compassionate Inclusion
This brings us to the second principle: compassionate inclusion. People are either a part of a relationship system (family, business, team, nation, University etc) or they are not. Everyone who is part of a system has an equal right to belong. Inclusion and exclusion are such a fundamental aspects of systemic relationships that huge amounts of resource are engaged in establishing, explaining and enforcing the rules that determine whether people are in or out of a group. Think of membership rules, recruitment processes, disciplinary proceedings, and media stories about resignations, sackings, sanctions, and cancel culture. Our attachment and fascination with these rules runs deep.
When people who belong are excluded the impacts are felt within the system by those who remain, as with the football team and family examples, above. The only sure way to resolve exclusion is to re-include what has been excluded. This may be done literally, as when the sent off team member returns for a future match. Or emotionally, as when the children of a family living with their single mother are allowed to acknowledge their father as their father, despite the conflict between their divorced parents.
Compassionate inclusion can be challenging for leaders because it demands of us the capacity to find a place for the unpopular, the criticised, the unfashionable, and those who may initially invoke our own adverse judgment. Inclusion is not the same as approval.
The family who excludes the violent father may be right to do so; and yet he remains the father, without whom an essential part of the system is missing. And so we face the challenge: how to acknowledge and find a place for those who belong despite our own value judgments about right and wrong.
The events at St Andrew’s illustrate these principles clearly: the initial statements of the Rector are seen as excluding certain groups; the backlash is a call for re-inclusion; the conciliatory joint statement is a movement to signal belonging for all.
Lens 3: Belonging
And this brings us to our third lens: belonging. We are all coded with loyalties that maintain our belonging to various groups that we consciously or unconsciously identify with. Some may be obvious: gender, nationality, religion, race. Others may be less obvious: the oppressed, the underdog, the victim, the poor. Belonging is so deeply encoded that often it is within our blind-spot. We lend our support to a particular group without realising we are doing it, or why.
Confronting rules of belonging carries with it guilt and shame (consider: how did you feel when as a child you were told off for breaking the family rules?), whereas reinforcing belonging carried with it innocence and a sense of “right”. This is why blind adherence to our groups of belonging can cause unexpected harm with a clean conscience.
One can only speculate what hidden dynamics lay beneath the Rectors actions: what loyalties she was obeying when speaking out in a way that would be interpreted as taking sides against one group in favour of another. But the hidden role of belonging which rendered her helpless is perhaps apparent in her own explanation: "I really tried to write a statement that would make everyone happy, but realised I wasn't being true to my beliefs”
Leaders have a particularly important role in belonging because they impact the culture and rules of the group which they lead. Good leadership can strengthen a groups sense of belonging while poor leadership can threaten it. This, too, is illustrated by the events at St Andrew’s.
Leaders of diverse groups face challenges at the best of times, and particularly now in a time of conflict. With workable tools to navigate the dynamics of systems, they can look beyond themselves and see the bigger picture. In this way, more resourceful decisions can be taken - decisions that respect, support and acknowledge the needs of all those within their care.