Leadership Crisis as Relationship Crisis — What Confucius Has to Say to Leaders

All disorder in the state, says Confucius, arises from the confusion of concepts (cf. Confucius, Lunyu, 13.3). It is a sentence 2,500 years old — and one that has lost none of its sharpness in the corridors of large organisations, in strategy meetings and change processes. Except that the confusion he speaks of is rarely sought in concepts. It is sought in processes, in structures, in org charts. And precisely for that reason it is not found.

For what Confucius means by concepts is something deeper than definitions. He means clarity about the encounter in which you stand in relation to what surrounds you. To the people entrusted to you. To the people to whom you are entrusted. To what you do and to what it brings about. When these relationships are confused — when you do not know what you owe to whom and what is due to you — then every measure you take is a grasp into the void.

Why Is a Leadership Crisis Often a Relationship Crisis?

The prevailing language of organisational development speaks of leadership crises as though they were defects in the workflow. Communication problems, role ambiguities, missing processes. The solutions that follow are correspondingly: workshops, restructuring, new mission statements. Sometimes this even helps. For a while.

What is overlooked is something that Chinese philosophy has known since the era of the Warring States: the human being is not an isolated decision-centre. They are a relational being. The entirety of human emotionality springs from the I-Thou relation, not the I-It (cf. Buber, 1923, I and Thou). Every feeling a person has is, at its core, a relationship between two beings in space. And whoever leads stands in a multitude of such relationships simultaneously — to employees, to superiors, to customers, to their own family, to themselves.

When one of these relationships is confused, it affects all others. Not because the leader is weak or incompetent, but because relationships are not separable modules. They are the ground on which everything else grows. The soil quality of a society — and this can equally be applied to any organisation — consists of the quality of its relationships. Without the capacity for bonding, without the ability to express one’s own boundaries, to formulate wishes clearly, to follow through on plans, no functioning community can succeed. The people in high positions were once children too. They too were shaped by how closeness was lived or refused in their family. Without this insight, every organisational development remains at the surface.

Why Does Leadership Fail Without Relational Capacity?

Confucius was a realist. He knew human nature — its generosity and its pitfalls. His approach was neither naive nor authoritarian, neither moralising nor cynical. He distinguished precisely between the merely clever ruler, who masters the mechanisms of power, and the wise ruler, who additionally understands human nature. The one governs through calculation. The other leads through what the Chinese tradition calls De — a virtue-radiance that is not forced but grows from self-cultivation (cf. Confucius, Lunyu, 2.1).

This distinction is not a moral appeal. It is a practical observation that can be verified in every organisation to this day. Leadership ethics based solely on rules reaches behaviour but not disposition. Punishment deters but does not create trust. Incentives motivate but do not create connection. What creates connection is something else: the experience that a person near me has found their own order. That they are present to themselves. That they act neither from fear nor from vanity, but from an inner clarity that is contagious.

Confucius called the principle underlying this Ren — humaneness (Confucius, Lunyu, 12.22). It shows itself in the concrete: in the way someone listens, in the willingness to name one’s own mistakes, in the ability to give another their place without losing one’s own. Ren is the opposite of isolation. And isolation, Confucius knew, is the deepest illness of any leadership that relies only on strategy.

Which Philosophical Principles Improve Leadership?

The Confucian relational order knows five fundamental relationships (Wulun, 五倫): between ruler and minister, between parents and child, between elder and younger, between spouses, and between friends (cf. Mencius, Mengzi, 3A:4; Confucius, Lunyu, 12.11). These five relationships are not a rigid hierarchy. They describe reciprocity — each side has obligations, each side has a claim to recognition.

For leaders, this contains a principle that reaches deeper than any org chart. The question is not only: what are my tasks? The question is: in which relationships do I stand, and have I recognised these relationships in their order? For order-work does not begin with the structure of an organisation. It begins with the question of whether the relationships in which you stand are clear. Whether you know what you owe to whom. Whether you can receive what is given to you. Whether you honour the ranking without abusing it.

The order of the family, says Gwendolin Kirchhoff in a lecture on political wisdom in Chinese philosophy (Kirchhoff, G., 2025, “Political Wisdom in Chinese Philosophy”), is the absolute centre for Confucius. Today we know from systemic family constellation how right Confucius was. The ability to connect in love with one’s parents — even when one must keep distance because they have certain shadow sides — has an enormous effect on a person’s entire life: whether they can succeed, whether their relationships flourish, whether they in turn can build a family.

What holds for the family holds for every form of leadership. Whoever does not order their own relationships cannot order the relationships of others. Whoever does not feel the ground beneath their own feet cannot give others stability. The Kogi people of Colombia, one of the oldest living cultures on earth, also know this principle: their spiritual leaders first endeavour to perceive the original order of being — to recognise how the house of nature is built, where one may take and where one may not — and to fit themselves into this order without causing harm. Leadership there means: reading the order before acting.

From Self-Cultivation to Leadership

The sequence Confucius proposed is simple and radical at once: first I cultivate myself. Then I order my family. Only then do I turn to the community (cf. Daxue / The Great Learning). This sequence is not a career plan. It is a description of how judgement arises — not through knowledge alone, but through the willingness to work on one’s own relationships.

How can I positively influence the behaviour of those around me? The summary Confucius gives is strikingly simple: first, leave out many of my useless and unhelpful interventions. Second, be a good example by cultivating myself. Third, through this self-cultivation, radiate something that carries others along. Not through coercion. Not through instruction. Through presence.

What Chinese philosophy describes here is not a relic of a bygone age. It is a living principle that becomes immediately experiential in systemic constellation work. Where relationships come into order, the capacity for action also returns. Where ranking is honoured, calm arises. Where recognition flows, entanglement dissolves. In a succeeding relationship, one always gives back a little more than one received — a small surplus, a generosity that carries both sides. This principle of mutual generosity is the opposite of calculation. It is what Confucius meant by Ren — translated into the language of lived daily life.

Perhaps the most important insight Confucius has to offer leaders lies precisely here: that leadership begins where you stop seeking solutions for others and start looking at the order of your own relationships. Not because the world would then become simpler. But because you would then have the ground on which real decisions can grow.

If you wish to walk this path, philosophical accompaniment for leaders can be a beginning.

Sources

• Buber, M. (1923). I and Thou [Ich und Du]. Leipzig: Insel.
• Confucius. Analects (Lunyu). Trans. Richard Wilhelm. Cited from 2.1, 12.11, 12.22, 13.3.
• Confucius (attr.). Daxue (The Great Learning). Trans. Richard Wilhelm.
• Mencius. Mengzi. Trans. Richard Wilhelm. Cited from 3A:4.
• Kirchhoff, G. (2025). Political Wisdom in Chinese Philosophy — Confucius, Mencius and the I Ching. YouTube [SRhjoVeim_8].