Carnival Leadership: Carnival as a Metaphor for Leadership Practice in the Caribbean

I was having breakfast in the restaurant of one of my favourite hotels (Bay Gardens Hotel in Saint Lucia) when my attendant decided to engage me in a discussion. He asked what I thought about the state of leadership in the country. Quite an interesting question I thought – but not that simple to answer. I told him that I had to give that some thought…

While I continued to munch on my tastefully crunchy bacon, I thought about what it takes to be a good leader. Well there are countless books and blogs dedicated to answering that question, so there is little that I can add to this already mature debate. Typical answers suggest a leader must: be trustworthy, be a good listener, be a good communicator, have a sense of purpose, be a visionary, have strong emotional intelligence, must be values-driven, be an innovator, be a good delegator, be a good motivator, be a good planner, be focused, have a learning disposition, have an understanding disposition, must set personal goals, etc. etc. The list goes on. I’d like to add that leadership must have the ability to shape an organization’s culture in support of its mission and that there is a distinction between positional leadership and leadership as a characteristic.

With all that is out there, it should be relatively easy for our business leaders to follow these guideposts in order to achieve the height of their leadership effectiveness. But we all know that being an effective leader or nurturing effective organizational leadership is not that simple.

Western Mis-education?

It is my belief that leadership practice possesses both form and content. The attributes listed above are primarily about content. Form on the other hand refers to the style and culture of leadership. Unfortunately, the bulk of leadership literature is prescriptive on content, not form. In my opinion, style and culture can make or break the effectiveness of leadership practice and that leadership form may very well be more important than leadership content. What is significantly at play is that organizational leaders are typically hired/appointed based on content knowledge and experience with insufficient regard for leadership style and culture. We might blame the interview process as an ineffective way of measuring the likely style and culture of a person, since those are traits that must be observed.

We must begin by considering the proposition that leadership is not culturally benign, and that western leadership models reflect a “western” values and cultural system. I submit that Caribbean business leaders ( I would extend that to leaders of African-descended backgrounds) who subscribe to western leadership models may be severely handicapped in that those models are not sufficiently reflective of or aligned to our cultural makeup.  Western leadership models do not readily give agency to Caribbean leadership practice since many of the texts are written from a cultural perspective different from our own.  As such, organizational culture in Caribbean firms becomes fraught with challenges. It is not uncommon for leaders to mistakenly see the challenges attributable to culture as an unwillingness of staff to cooperate when instead it would make sense for them to interrogate their model of leadership practice.

New Approaches To Leading

Our current business environment marred by global challenges, increasing competition, shrinking markets, shrinking incomes, and the like, has precipitated the need to be creative, engaged, and even celebratory in the face of despair. I am reminded of enslaved Africans’ willingness to celebrate life even in the face of great hardship. They found ways to laugh and have fun because it sustained them – it was about survival. Leading organizations in such an environment can be quite a daunting task. Caribbean leaders in search of excellence and success need to explore new models and approaches to leadership. In that search, it is extremely important to have the culture dimension right. One way of getting the culture dimension right is to examine art forms steeped in African/Caribbean culture and ritual as metaphors for leadership practice. Jazz we note in my article, is a profound example embodying Black culture. I’d like to suggest that carnival, a festival prevalent throughout the entire Caribbean and African Diaspora such as Brazil, can provide a powerful model for creating synergy between organizational culture and the culture of Caribbean employees. I believe that such synergy is essential to employee and ultimately organizational performance. I will explore the potential of carnival as a cultural model for leadership practice. “Carnival Leadership” as I will refer to the practice is therefore the use of carnival as a model to inform a cultural aesthetic for Caribbean/African leadership.

What I am about to propose is inspired in part by a 1997 conversation with a Bahamian friend and HR consultant, Roosevelt Finlayson. He along with some colleagues has had an interest in using festivals as a motivational model for employee engagement and has coined the term “Festival in the Workplace”. Their goal is to use lessons learned from the spirited engagement of people with Junkanoo to help motivate employees and transform employee behaviour.

As one who firmly believes that knowledge is not value-free and that values are driven by culture, I am of the view that the one key factor driving leadership challenges in Caribbean organizations is the incongruence between the underlying culture of the western leadership models we adopt and the true cultural ethos of Caribbean people.  I truly believe that a Caribbean cultural aesthetic, at a deep level, must permeate management and leadership style and practice in order to achieve maximum leadership effectiveness.

For those willing to subscribe to my assertion, we are very fortunate in that we have strong cultural models that can enable us to create an appropriate cultural aesthetic in our leadership practice. We have Kele is St. Lucia, Junkanoo in Bahamas and St. Kitts, and of course carnival in Trinidad and throughout the rest of the Caribbean and other parts of the Diaspora. What is unfortunate is that our business leaders might be unaware of the need for a unique cultural ethos in leadership. As such, they have not taken advantage of the cultural models available to them. 

Without a doubt, carnival is one of our most significant and celebrated forms of cultural expression. Today it exudes a confluence of African, Asian, and European cultural aesthetics – reflecting the multi-ethnic makeup of Caribbean people.  As such, I believe carnival offers us the greatest potential for transforming the cultural dimension of Caribbean leadership practice.

Attributes of Carnival

A close examination of carnival will show that many of its attributes provide strong pillars for developing a culturally relevant model of leadership practice. Some of these attributes include: excitement, passion, creativity, improvisation, ritual, pageantry, rhythm and tempo, masking, satire, mimicry, spontaneity, critique, relaxation of rules, the dissolution of classes, and dualisms such as a competition-collaboration duality and a structure-freedom duality. Duality is a common trait in African culture – for example the belief in the dual presence of the living and the dead (ancestors) with both sharing the same space. Hence the reason as ritual, we always acknowledge their presence through libation.   

By using carnival as a metaphor for leadership practice and incorporating its attributes, Caribbean leaders can create a culturally synergistic model of practice. Under carnival leadership, leaders will create opportunities for passion, creativity, and excitement to thrive. The opportunity for creative experiences drives excitement, which in turn drives passion. Employees become passionate when they work on things that really matter; work on things they love; work on things that create anticipation, and when they work with people they like. Allow everyone to experience passion and excitement through effective work assignments. In a carnival band all members of a section experience the excitement of being part of that section. Hence encourage a team culture that empowers employees to actively engage in the look, feel, touch, and output of their “sections”. 

Carnival is synonymous with creativity. Carnival without creativity is simply unimaginable. Mas Camp is a den of creative energy. Organizational leadership that stifles creativity will lead to dysfunction. As such, leadership must encourage creativity without the fear of penalty for failed ideas. It is fair to say that carnival bandleaders always try to outdo last year’s performance – hence a culture of continuous improvement through creativity and innovation would be a hallmark of “carnival leadership”. Highly competitive carnival bands have little room for complacency. On an annual basis, bandleaders must generate new ideas in order to compete. On the contrary, many of our organizational leaders continue to hold on to “old” ideas in perpetuity. They subscribe to the adage “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it” – a sure recipe for stagnation. Carnival leadership would require leaders to have an annual cycle of innovation.

In designing carnival costumes designers find themselves having to constantly improvise and be spontaneous depending on resources, people, changes in concepts, etc. Leadership without improvisation creates a culture of routine and drudgery thereby promoting an inability to be responsive to changes in the organization’s environment. Such organizations are soon departed! The use of improvisation and spontaneity creates excitement in a company. Many subscribe to the adage, “if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail”. While that is true on some levels, the luxury of planning is not always present, and even the best-designed plans are subjected to tensions created by the constant changes in business environments. As such leadership practice must accommodate both planning (composition) and spontaneity (improvisation).

Pageantry, colour, vibrance, rhythm, tempo, are crucial elements of carnival that are sorely lacking in organizational culture. Many of our organizations require their employees to dress in a particular uniform (reminiscent of school children). This allows for a certain degree of control and identification with one’s group. In many cases, the uniforms are colour-coded indicating class and hierarchy within the organization. What is also noteworthy is that uniforms tend to be dull, using mostly conservative colours – grey, dark blue, green, black, etc. If you believe in the idea that “you are what you wear”, then we may ask the question, “is the despondent attitude that characterize so many Caribbean employees somehow related to their uniforms?” When we see them outside of work in outfits of their own choosing, different personalities emerge. I have witnessed this character change among hotel employees in Saint Lucia – especially among custodial staff.

 Carnival bands have uniforms – but there is pageantry, colour, and a kind of vividness and vibrance! If each department were allowed to design its own uniform with some a minimal set of boundaries that allows for creativity, organizations would look a whole lot different and employess may very well be happier for it. I believe a better dispensation would emerge. There would be a need a mindset shift that allows leaders to believe that the company can be both colourful and purpose-driven at the same time. Vivid colours are often synonymous with happiness. The idea of ownership of design can be extended to the look and feel of departments. Let each team decide the colour and the art that adorn their workspace. Don’t just settle for grey walls dotted with plaques.

Try asking a company to describe its rhythm and tempo. I am not sure you will get an answer. History informs us that enslaved Africans on cotton plantations in the US developed a whole collection of work songs to provide rhythm and tempo for work. Music in carnival drives excitement. It helps to create a festive celebratory mood. Organizational leadership must create a sense of rhythm and tempo in order to drive productivity. The challenge is to model particular tempos in the organization. Ex tempo is slow, deliberate, and contemplative. Soca is fun, carefree and fast. Calypso is a happy medium between ex tempo and soca. It can be very serious or very funny. Tempo should match the business environment.

Masking, mimicry and satire can be used as valuable tools in organizational improvement. Masking allows for anonymity. It allows the focus on the mask and not the person behind the mask. One of the ways of diminishing the negative effect of organizational politics is to keep the owners of ideas, proposals, and comments temporarily hidden in the discussion phase. Good ideas will have a better chance of gaining traction. Once accepted, the idea owner could be unmasked.

Masking, mimicry, satire and critique can be used as tools in organizational learning to highlight good and bad practices. As part of the carnival leadership, role-plays and performances must become important activities. Even the symbolic destruction of “Vaval” is a powerful tool that can be used to put bad organizational practices to rest through ritual. The use of masking, mimicry, satire, and critique through social commentary represent a major departure form “western models” of organizational conversation. Imagine a company event where employees are asked to give feedback to company leadership by staging a carnival parade and a calypso tent with no fear of reprisal? Much would be learned about the company. We can reflect both successes and failures through carnival. But even better, what if the employees were asked to conceptualize the organization as a carnival band and design its cultural aesthetic? That would be a tremendous and thrilling experience for employees.

Rule suspension is sometimes necessary to allow organizations to move to another level of creativity. Einstein once said “you can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created”. Rules trap organizations into complacency. They emphasize control rather than creativity. In Trinidad in the 1800s, carnival celebrations provided an opportunity for enslaved Africans to experience an environment with little or no rules, in particular, plantation rules. As such, revellers were allowed to be creative, expressive, loud, etc. in a way that was fun for all. The relaxation of rules can be used in carnival leadership to support creativity. Leaders would specify desired outcomes and relax some company rules to encourage innovation and “out of the box” thinking.

During its evolution, carnival witnessed increasing involvement of the “upper echelons of society”. Eventually, social classes became indistinguishable in carnival band – the bourgeoisie and the maléwé (Saint Lucian vernacula for ordinary people) all jumping and masquerading together. Carnival leadership would require less obvious role distinctions in organizational activity. Imagine meetings where staff members, not supervisors or managers, were given the responsibility to chair and/or facilitate meetings? Over time, organizational relationships would become more collaborative, and capacity within the organization would deepen.

Carnival bands are known to have a king and queen of the band. In addition to the CEO as the administrative head of the organization, the concept of the King and Queen of the band can be used to honour a male and female employee who embodies the culture, ethos, and vision of the company. They would be selected by their peers and be given a ceremonial role within the organization. They could represent the company at particular national events as well as special company events. A team of employees could be engaged in designing the ceremonial dress for the couple. This could be powerfully motivating.

Finally, the recognition and application of dual forces can create exciting results. For example the structure-freedom duality allows for freedom of expression within a given structure. Carnival bands have sections with particular costumes, etc. The overall band represents a theme, and the various sections come together to reflect that theme. Within sections, however, revellers have some freedom to manifest their cultural expression in ways they choose. This is synonymous to a jazz band that provides a basic harmonic form on top of which the soloist improvises. Under carnival leadership, leaders will provide basic structures and some risk-based controls for departments but allow the employees to design systems and processes to produce the desired outcomes. 

The competition-collaboration duality stems from the fact that internally in a carnival band, sections will try to outdo each other, but they recognize as a whole that they must collaborate to defeat other bands. We may recall that in the old days, stick fighting, a strong African tradition, provided opportunity for friendly competition to demonstrate prowess. In carnival leadership, friendly rivalry at the departmental level would be encouraged with the explicit recognition that overall company excellence is the goal. If the company fails, then all departments fail.

I have attempted to provide a sense of how Caribbean leadership practice can be informed by carnival as a cultural model. Transforming organizational culture is no easy task. A mental shift is necessary, not only among leaders, but among staffs as well. The concepts discussed above can be applied to several areas of organizational life: collaboration, learning, employee engagement, innovation, strategy formulation, process improvement, and product and service design.

Given today’s business challenges, organizations must dig deep to find effective and innovative approaches to organizational leadership. In my view, the cultural underpinnings of traditional western leadership models limit their ability to create synergy between organizational culture and the inherent culture of the employees. As such, attaining the next level of business performance requires a philosophical approach to leadership that can be readily embraced by the entire organization. Carnival as a pervasive form of cultural expression in the Caribbean and the Diaspora provides, in my view, great promise. Embracing and executing Carnival Leadership as a new concept will be a journey. It is said, “the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step”. That first step is the recognition on the part of Caribbean leaders looking for new ways to lead that there is a need to incorporate a culturally relevant aesthetic in their leadership practice. Carnival as a cultural model provides us with a powerful transformative model.

Harvey Millar is a management consultant, a full-professor in the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University, and a free-lance columnist. He can be contacted at [email protected].