Stoic Leadership

An interview with executive coach Alexander Zock

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels

This week we have a special interview with leadership consultant Alexander Zock about his book The Stoic Path in Leadership (currently available in German as Der Weg der Stoa in der Führung).

Alexander was trained as a geophysicist and planetary scientist before he joined Deutsche Lufthansa AG, where he worked in different positions for about a decade. For the last 15 years he is working as a self-employed executive coach and organizational consultant. He is an active member of the German Stoic community and runs next to a Stoic meetup community a Stoic podcast titled “The way of the Stoa.” In his book he combines his professional expertise about modern leadership environments with his keen interest in Stoic philosophy to develop a conceptual scheme for a Stoic path in leadership.

Although the book is only available in German at the moment, Alexander shares some of its main points with us in English. You can find more of his ideas in English at www.alexander-zock.de/en/.

Can you tell us about your experience with leadership and philosophy? How did you come to put these two things together?

Well, I guess the first question would be, which came first for me? I am neither a trained philosopher nor a graduate of a business school. My original degree is in physics and planetary sciences, but after my Ph.D. I joined Lufthansa to do a management trainee program. In parallel, my interest in philosophy grew out of my interest in the philosophy of quantum mechanics, which later brought me also into other fields of philosophy.

So, coming back to your question, I guess these to fields of interest were for a long time two parallel tracks in my life. The first time they started to converge was much later in my career, when I was already working as an executive coach and organizational consultant. At that time, my interest in philosophy had already brought me into the field of Stoicism and my professional interest circled around questions of personality, personhood and their social embeddedness. Here both interests came together as philosophy, especially of the Hellenistic kind, provides a lot of insights about the latter topics.

Based on that insight, I started to ask myself what philosophy could offer for “people that are working in leadership environments.” I prefer to use this phrase instead of talking about leaders. The latter carries for me too strong a connotation that leadership is dependent on leaders and their personality, which carries some truth in it, but not as much, as it is typically assumed.

My interest was further triggered by a book that I came across by James March and Thierry Weil called On Leadership. In this book March and Weil say that from their point of view the challenges of life and of leadership are more or less identical. They concluded that leadership must be able to deal with the existential aspects of life and therefore can not be fully instructed by a typical business school education, which mainly focuses on methods and techniques. This gap in the understanding of leadership really resonated with me and instantly convinced me that leadership needed more in order to meet the challenges in a modern organizational environment.

What can Stoicism offer in the field of leadership? What is unique or special about it that non-Stoic leadership theories might miss?

First and foremost, Stoicism, like other Hellenistic philosophical schools, must be understood as a “philosophy for life,” or as Pierre Hadot phrased it as “a way of life.” If that is so—and everything I learned about Stoicism points in that direction—one could formulate the hypothesis that Stoicism might be understood as a form to live one's life and to deal with its respective challenges.

From my point of view that would mean that leadership, which is nothing but the practice of a socially defined role in an organizational setting, must benefit from such a philosophy of life. How so? Well, here Stoicism has some very distinct offerings to make. It is, for example, the only ancient philosophy of life that provides a full theory of the human psyche, human emotions, and the development of a personal identity that is socially embedded. It furthermore supplies a full-fledged model of human action.

I love how you reference Socrates as a sort of leadership coach to Alcibiades! What and how did Socrates teach Alcibiades about leadership?

Socrates was intrigued by the complex personality of Alcibiades and I guess he was also aware of the fact that an Alcibiades gone rogue could actually do a lot of harm to the Athenian city state, as history unfortunately proved. So when the two of them met around the year 430 B. C., Socrates believed that Alcibiades, who was only 19 years at the time, might still be reachable and potentially willing to develop himself into the direction of a virtuous life of inner wisdom.

When Socrates then dragged Alcibiades into one of his “Socratic dialogues” his main goal was to trigger in Alcibiades an understanding that he did not know anything solid about the real issues of leadership. To achieve that, he guided Alcibiades through a stepwise procedure, in which he first made him understand that he did not have the qualifications for a leadership position. In the second step he made him aware of the fact that his knowledge was shaky at its core and that missing knowledge cannot be compensated for by things like political games.

Once they were through this stage in the process, Socrates made Alcibiades understand that not solid or absent knowledge was the problem, but that deception about one’s own knowledge establishes the real danger. Finally, Socrates made Alcibiades understand that if he did not resolve this deception about his own knowledge and himself, he was not worthy to act in a leadership position. The interaction ends with Alcibiades being in deep distress, but he obviously did not remain in this condition, as history teaches us. Unfortunately for himself and the Athenians.

In your new book The Stoic Path in Leadership you develop some fascinating ideas on systemic-syntactic leadership theory and Stoicism. Can you explain the theory and how it’s useful for leaders?

Ok, the first idea is that organizations, teams and even dyads can best be understood as systems of their own making (“autopoietic”). That means that these entities are established by communications in a self-organized fashion, an idea first formulated by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann.

Luhmann’s second idea was that organizations and their accompanying interaction systems like a team or a dyad are established by specific communications, i.e. decision communication. His third idea in this context was that these systems are characterized by typical structural elements that he called decisions premises (examples for these are roles, processes, persons, goals). These structural elements are used to ground decisions in a system and always show up in systems of that kind independent of their concrete nature (business, welfare, administration, etc.).

Given this universality one can call these structural elements the syntax of organizing. What do I mean by that? Well, the term syntax is typically known from the domain of language and describes here the structural elements of language (also called the grammar of language). To understand a sentence, you need to know two things: first the grammar (syntax, e.g. subject, object, verb etc.) of the sentence and second the semantics of the sentence (what is it about). If we use this kind of thinking for organizations, we could formulate the idea that the decision premises in organizations describe the syntax of an organization. So, if we want to understand an organization, a team or a dyad, we have to understand the systemic character of the entity of interest and its syntax.

Based on this reasoning, I formulated my systemic-syntactic approach to organizations in my book. But we are not yet done here. How does this kind of thinking help us with respect to a better understanding of leadership? The answer in my book is, that leadership is a function which is needed in organizations as the syntax elements in an organization can be in tension with each other and leadership is needed to take care of these tensions.

Let me give you an example. If the people in an organization do not like the new roles after a reorganization, a tension between these two syntax elements builds up in the organization. This tension can lead to really bad developments if it is not taken care of, which would typically be done by a person in a responsible leadership role in this organization. So, leadership is functionally equivalent to syntactic tension management in organizations.

What is interesting about this way of looking at leadership is the fact that leadership is functionally needed by organizations and that people are mainly needed as role carriers who can organize and deliver these leadership functions. The goal of leadership interventions could therefore be understood as to establish some kind of inner (syntactic) coherence or harmony in an organization.

Here I see a first connection to Stoicism since the goal of Stoicism is to live in agreement (Greek: homologia), which could be partially understood in this picture as living in organizations that display an inner coherence or harmony (i. e., homologia). But the connection between these two worlds does not stop there. A second really interesting finding in my book is the fact that one can understand the Stoic theory of personal identity development (Greek: oikeiosis) as an early form of a systemic- syntactic understanding of a person, with very similar syntax elements as we find them in an organization or a team.

Interestingly, we find a practical application of this idea in Cicero’s book On Duties where he talks about Panaetius of Rhodes’ concept of the four personas. These personas can be understood as part of the syntax elements in a person that need to be considered to be able to make a good inner decision about some action you want to perform. The general idea that one can take from this thinking is that a person’s personhood is established in analogy to an organization and its leadership system as a combined EGO-system with an accompanying system called the Self. The function of the Self is to ensure that the EGO is able to develop itself in a way that its inner and outer harmony and coherence is always intact. The Self keeps the EGO in this picture on its track to virtue.

Stoic philosophy can, through such a way of thinking, be reconceptualized as an integrated development theory for an EGO-Self-System. In this picture most Stoic exercises would be targeting the establishment of a morally functioning Self (in Stoic terms this would be a functioning prohairesis).

Based on this framework, people in leadership roles can benefit in two ways. First they get a clear development framework for their EGO-Self-System from Stoic principles and exercises, and secondly they also get a full-fledged framework for intervening into their surrounding systems (e.g., organizations, teams, dyads) guided by the Stoic idea of “homologia.” Both benefits are covered in the third part of my book, which provides an eight-part program to work on both directions in a leadership environment.

Could you recommend some practical steps toward applying Stoic leadership at work? For example, how could we use the concepts of prosochē, virtue, or the discipline of assent in our professional roles?

All the Stoic concepts that you just mentioned are part of my eight-part program to work on your Self. The others are:

• the Stoic concept of inner freedom (Greek: eleutheria)

• the concept of Stoic role models

• the Stoic idea of a stepwise development of the Self and the EGO

• the three disciplines of Epictetus which include the discipline of assent, the discipline of desire, and the discipline of action

• the Stoic concept of the kosmopolis of all humans

The relationship of this program to the Stoic concept of virtue is simple. If you use this program, all tensions in your EGO and your Self will dissolve, as being virtuous implies that there are no more tensions in your EGO-Self systems that go rogue. This inner state of harmony and inner coherence will lead to inner peace, positive emotions and to the appearance of decorum in your personhood. The latter means that people will perceive you as a person and your way of dealing with yourself and your environment as fitting and beautiful. The leadership actions of a virtuous person would therefore be beautiful and fitting in every circumstance, a conclusion that I really like as it adds an aesthetic element to the practice of leadership.

But let us come back to the other program parts you mentioned. Let us start with prosochē the Stoic concept of inner attention or mindfulness. This concept is a basic feature in the whole development program, as without inner attention, the Self cannot direct the EGO. So basically, one could phase it as follows: no attention, no development. For a person in a leadership role, this means that one should always be attentive to the inner movements of the EGO. Where is my free will leading me towards and why? Do I want to follow that path and if so, why? To practice prosochē it is therefore important to familiarize yourself with the inner workings of your free will.

The discipline of assent is a bit trickier, but in simple terms it is all about your inner assumptions and value beliefs. What the Stoics tried to make us understand with this discipline is that only if we are constantly on guard, when it comes to our inner assumptions, we can actually avoid to follow an action path that will lead us to wrong developments. In the book I use the example of a person who believes that to possess only a “little bit” of money is an evil that one needs to avoid. If we look very closely at this assumption from a Stoic point of view, we will realize that it comprises wrong assumptions (e.g., money is a good) and ill defined terms (e.g., little is not a clearly defined term). Based on this insight, one can directly deduce that a leadership practice that is based on the original assumptions and terms will most probably lead to bad leadership decisions and actions. Such actions might not increase our inner or outer homologia and might also not lead to more harmony and coherence in the systemic environment entrusted to us.

What are some of the most common frustrations or challenges you see in your work with leaders, and how can Stoicism help us address them?

The classic Alcibiades syndrome of not knowing that one does not know and needs to know to be able to develop oneself, others and organizational systems. Too often, I have the feeling that people in leadership positions are driven by the wrong motivations and are looking for the wrong solutions. Leadership is not about money, status or power, but about inner and outer development. This development path leads, in the terminology of the Stoics, to virtue and inner and outer harmony and coherence or as the Stoics called it homologia.

While writing my book, I became more and more convinced that modern organizational environments need a much more developmentally focused mindset than they have today. I am absolutely convinced that a change in mindset favoring inner and outer development as a goal in itself would lead to much healthier—and in the end more productive—environments than we find them today.

Last but not least this way of thinking could also open the door to a really integrated ecological perspective for modern organizations as this kind of ecological attitude would be rooted in the inner core of the people and their organizations or teams, not some outer requirement put on us by outside pressure. Just as the Stoics tried to convince us that we need to understand ourselves as citizens of the human kosmopolis and I would even go so far as to say the cosmos.

Let’s say someone doesn’t have a designated leadership role at work. In what other ways can Stoic leadership theory inform their lives?

As the conceptual framework that I describe in my book is focused on understanding complete personhood, I would claim you can apply the idea of developing your EGO-Self-System to all aspects of yourself as a person. This includes all your roles, be they part of an organization, a family, a partnership or a friendship. You are always asked to ensure your inner harmony and coherence as well as the outer coherence with every environment you are dealing with.

Any other thoughts you would like to share with readers of Stoicism for Humans?

The concepts that I presented in my book about the Stoic path in leadership do hold from my point of view the potential to inform practices that are related to leadership questions as we have discussed them before. I also believe that these concepts could help us to clarify the discussion of some fuzzy Stoic terms in the Stoic community.

One important example could be the term prohairesis, which from my point of view is still a bit unclear in the Stoic literature. In the framework that I am proposing in my book, prohairesis is the Self in action. A fully virtuous Self would therefore mean that all aspects of the Self are in coherence and harmony, which would establish a moral character in the best sense of the word. I also believe that the functional relationship of the EGO and the Self establishes a very clear distinction between both systems. Based on this distinction we might also be able to be more precise in our discussions of the workings of the human psyche and its hegemonikon (ruling center).

Thank you to Alexander Zock for sharing his ideas on Stoicism and leadership! Learn more (in German) from his book Der Weg der Stoa in der Führung, or find him at www.alexander-zock.de.

---