The Leadership Toll: Zombies, Dragons & Moral Injury
A few weeks ago I was unexpectedly thrust into a leadership position. Yes friends, I have been promoted to be an alliance leader in an online zombie game I play! This may sound ridiculous, but the challenges I have faced in this role have been surprisingly testing. In the wake of turbulent times (battling division between alliances, losing alliance members to other alliances), I have found myself experiencing a mild sense of burnout and compassion fatigue.
Now this is a small, low-stakes version of something much bigger. But it gave me an unexpected view into a side of leadership I had never had to think about before, the interior experience of what it is like to be a leader: what it feels like and the concerted effort it takes for leaders to manage people inclusively, fairly, and with compassion. It is all too easy to look at leaders in the public eye and see bad actors - people operating with personal agendas, without good faith (and yes, some leaders genuinely are bad actors). Yet could it also be possible that many of these individuals fall into the archetype of the well-intentioned, but constrained leader?
Take politicians. Many find themselves trapped within certain systems and structures that are so impossible to navigate with integrity that they crush people, and even those with the staunchest principles can find themselves in between a rock and a hard place. The reality is that the distinction between good and bad leadership is rarely binary. How do we discern where the line is between a leader who compromises strategically whilst maintaining integrity, and one who's compromised so often there's nothing left to protect?
The TV show ‘House of the Dragon’ recently depicted this stark tension when Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen found herself making increasingly difficult choices to maintain her place on the throne (Season 3, Episode 3). In a candid conversation with Alicent Hightower - childhood friend, now enemy and prisoner - Alicent protests being held responsible for what the men around her have done and warns Rhaenyra of the decisions she will be forced to make as Queen, some of which will fundamentally change who she is. Here Alicent’s constraint is explicitly structural, she has no direct power and never has: she only has influence exercised through institutions built by men. Rhaenyra is also pushed to the brink, finding her moral lines harder to maintain resulting in a visceral deterioration of her mental state.
So, what happens to leaders with good intentions who want to lead with their principles, but exist within environments where they are asked to make impossible choices? In the first instance leaders will experience moral distress (Jameton, 1984), in which they know exactly what the right thing to do is, but the system will not allow them to do it. This isn’t confusion or apathy, it is constraint. Each incident of constraint, of going against one’s principles leaves a deposit, a residue, which over time accumulates - it is death from a thousand cuts (Epstein & Hamric, 2009). Enough of these cuts and moral distress becomes moral injury: a lasting wound not just to how you work, but to who you understand yourself to be (Shay, 2014). The ultimate cost of this is compassion fatigue, in which leaders’ resources are so depleted that they are no longer able to maintain their empathic feelings (Figley, 1995).
In essence, the well-intentioned leader is being worn down from both directions at once: carrying a moral load they can't put down, while spending the very resources that might have helped them carry it. Eventually, this reaches a critical mass where continuing to feel all of it is no longer survivable. Fighting the good fight within a broken system becomes too much to bear, the toll on one’s mental health intolerable. And so, these leaders stop, and they harden. Not out of malice but out of self-preservation. This is the death of compassion.
While it is vital we understand the mechanisms that cause someone to harden, it of course doesn't absolve them from what decisions they make after they do.
Importantly, everyone’s tolerance for moral injury varies. I know a leader who fits this archetype: generally well-intentioned, who cares about the right things but consistently finds themself having to relinquish their values and principles. I often wonder how they feel every day after work. When all is said and done, and the laptop is closed, I imagine the exhaustion they must feel. This leader isn't unusual. Most organisations have several, and most of them are quietly running down a resource nobody is measuring.
At Ardent, we deal in the murky gap between intentions and reality. We help organisations align their values to their behaviours. Yet the real challenge is that culture change asks constrained people to change the systems constraining them. If organisations fail to account for that, they simply add to the moral load of their leaders, whilst calling it a transformation programme. Which is why "lead with compassion" cannot only be an instruction to individuals. Compassion without the power to act on it is just distress. If we want leaders who can keep caring, we must build the conditions that make caring survivable.
References
Epstein, E. G., & Hamric, A. B. (2009). Moral distress, moral residue, and the crescendo effect. The Journal of Clinical Ethics, 20(4), 330-342.
Figley, C. R. (1995). Compassion fatigue. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 5-30.
Jameton, A. (1984). Nursing practice: The ethical issues. Prentice-Hall.
Shay, J. (2014). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic psychology, 31(2), 182-191.