Facilitative leadership: drawing on Jürgen Habermas’ model of ideal speech to propose a less impositional way to lead

Abstract

Even leadership prescriptions that claim facilitative, democratic or participative credentials struggle to break away from the depiction of leadership as a fundamentally impositional undertaking; a feature which may put many academics and practitioners off the subject altogether. This article therefore calls for more attention to the question of how people who find themselves in leadership roles might lead in a less impositional manner. It also offers a contribution to that agenda. After highlighting some limitations of potential sources of reassurance against leadership’s impositional connotations, the article draws on Jürgen Habermas’ discussion of ideal speech, along with some commentaries on Habermas’ work, to propose an outline for a model of leadership as the facilitation of ideal speech. It also considers the practical feasibility, in contemporary organizations, of leadership that facilitates ideal speech, identifying some aspects of organizational theory and practice that may offer nourishment to such an approach.