“It was not the cold, clear voice of one giving advice and warning from serene heights to those who were struggling and sinning below, but the warm, living voice of one who was fighting for us and by our sides, and calling on us to help him and ourselves and one another”
Tom Brown’s School Days. Thomas Hughes
Thomas Hughes’ description of leadership seems both very modern for his time and yet a far cry from today’s world. On one side of the Atlantic the President is holed up in his residence lobbing incendiary tweets about his “LOSER” opponents, dispatching his “elite” legal team to berate the media, the justice system and anyone else that is against him. Here on the other side, top government advisers lob imaginary grenades into rooms and ministers swear and shout at their staff with apparent impunity. It’s just another day in the office, dear.
Perhaps what we are witnessing is the inevitable playing out of this era of the “strong man,” where 20 years + of programmes to change our dominant work cultures so that they are fairer and more inclusive have been undone by the practices and behaviours of a cabal of certain of our countries’ leaders and their governments. Or, maybe we were just kidding ourselves to think things were progressing. A 2018 academic article (amongst many) on “Work as a Masculinity Contest” certainly didn’t struggle to find lots of evidence of the continued pervasiveness of traditionally “masculine” work cultures, where manning-up is an endless ritual to prove you have what it takes to get to the top. The antics described in Uber in 2017 by whistleblower employees don’t seem to have evolved much from the macho, shouty culture that characterised the upper management ethos of the global tech company I worked for back in the late 90s and early 2000s. The memory of being alternately screamed at, insulted, ignored, berated and undermined by a European managing director has never left me and it was only thanks to the camaraderie and humour of wonderful fellow-suffering colleagues that I survived the experience relatively unscathed. Nonetheless, I still wonder at how such behaviour was tolerated for so long - and perhaps even encouraged as country teams were pitted against each other - by the company’s top leadership.
If macho masculinity is the model, it’s notable that, with so many shining examples of toxic leadership, the spotlight has fallen nonetheless on one of the few women in town, Priti Patel. Much research has been conducted into how women fare in these kinds of work environments, and, as is so often the case, they find themselves between a rock and a hard place. I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe my own experience of “double binds” until I began to study women’s careers over 10 years ago and now I recognise them everywhere. The case of Priti Patel seems like a good enough example. That her behaviour has been terrible seems to be a given: who shouts and swears at their employees? Well, quite a lot of people it seems - after all “boys will be boys.” But when women try to be shouty, sweary “real men” in the workplace it can become quite tricky. They immediately fall foul of a whole array of taken-for-granted femininity norms - such as nurturing, supporting, bringing home made cakes into the office and so on. In fact, the very same norms that mark you out as unacceptable for promotion in a “masculine” work environment, where there is nothing worse than being a “girl.” Priti- as she is discovering to her cost - can’t win.
Examining her predecessors’ experiences in the famously tough Home Office might have prepared Ms Patel for her fate of being damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t. The first female Home Secretary, the eminently reasonable Jacqui Smith, carried out a few quiet reforms without making a fuss about them, and as a result is only remembered for a more public tussle with Boris Johnson and a minor expenses embarrassment (an example of “you’re damned if you don’t”). Theresa May, on the other hand, made much more of a reputation for herself as Home Secretary, in particular when she marched into the Police Federation annual conference in 2014 and told them to “man down” and start behaving more acceptably by not killing people in custody and accepting responsibility for their previous mistakes. Ian Pointon of Kent police encapsulated the reaction in the room, describing her as “vitriolic” - ever heard that said of a man in a powerful political position?. “This morning” he continued “she left as a bully” (very much “damned if you do”).
For now, Patel is keeping her job, even if her legacy is to be remembered as a bully. Nonetheless, it’s demoralising that at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century we still see such blatant examples of women being treated differently from their male counterparts. Not only is it frustrating for women and their progress, it also distracts us from what is really going on, allowing those right at the top of government to continue to get away with the very behaviours we are condemning in Patel, and worse - including the government immigration policies Patel is implementing, which seem at least to me to be even worse than her office behaviour. Why should she change if they won’t?
I for one would rather a world in which both men and women aspire to be the kind of leaders Hughes describes, with their “warm, living voice” and ability to facilitate, motivate and support us in working towards our common goals. We are a long way from there, but just maybe change is coming. If we want it to take root and be lasting, all of us need to examine the behaviours we model and encourage in our homes, schools and organisations.