Leaders Must Live Up to Their Promises

Source: Stefan Stern for Financial Times
[posted on 01/28/2010]

“It’s the timidity, it’s the smallness of our politics that’s holding us back right now – the idea that there are some problems that are just too big to handle, and if you just ignore them sooner or later they’ll go away ...

“So I say this to you guys, that America is desperate for leadership. I absolutely feel it everywhere I go. They are longing for direction and they want to believe again.”

Senator Barack Obama, speaking in June 2006, could not have known back then how soon the opportunity would come to test himself against his own lofty idealism. After one year in office his harshest critics will tell you that under a number of headings – the economy, healthcare reform and Afghanistan – President Obama has not lived up to the impossibly high expectations many people had.

But Mr Obama’s difficulties are merely the most obvious example of a dilemma that confronts all leaders, at whatever level, in 2010. Most of the world’s major economies have been through recession. The financial system has been saved from the brink of disaster. Businesses and institutions that had been seen as essentially trustworthy and competent have struggled, and in some cases collapsed. And now, how are we supposed to drag ourselves out of this sorry state of affairs? Why, through leadership, of course. New leadership will save us.

Even though it became conventional wisdom in the past year and a half of the financial crisis to declare that “we cannot go back to business as usual”, and that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”, it is not obvious that any big new ideas about leadership have emerged to help us pursue the logic of those two now-clichéd statements.

The most recent large-scale leadership survey to land on desks was produced by the Work Foundation, a British think-tank.

Its report, Exceeding Expectation: the Principles of Outstanding Leadership, offers three main conclusions about what the best leaders look like, drawn up after conducting more than 250 interviews with leaders and their teams in six large businesses.

What do outstanding leaders do? “They think and act systemically,” the Work Foundation says. “They see things as a whole rather than compartmentalising. They connect the parts by a guiding sense of purpose.”

The second key characteristic is that “They see people as the route to performance ... They give significant amounts of time and focus to people.” And third: “They are self-confident without being arrogant: self-awareness is one of their fundamental attributes ... They understand they cannot create performance themselves.”

There is nothing particularly surprising or revelatory in this. As so often happens when research is conducted into the concept of leadership, longish lists of unarguable virtues are the result. We seem to want our leaders to excel in all the time-honoured, civilised modes of human behaviour. But converting abstract virtues into action is not so easy.

One piece of work that came a bit nearer to offering some useful insights was conducted a few years ago by the British academic pairing of Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, in advance of the publication of their provocatively titled book Why should anyone be led by you?

Mr Goffee and Mr Jones concluded – after speaking to followers, i.e. lower-ranking employees rather than leaders – that the best leaders brought four things to their organisations: a sense of community, a sense that the work is significant, a sense of excitement (or fun), and authenticity (meaning that the personality and behaviour of the leader is consistent and credible).

Not too many leaders can place a tick by all four of these requirements. Cynical or disillusioned leaders will just add that list to the pile of other leadership theories, which have urged them to become “servant leaders”, “coaches”, “player managers”, and so on. Meanwhile, the disillusionment and dissatisfaction of those who are led grows. And we do not seem much nearer to establishing a clearer idea of what sort of leadership will work in the cynical and confused world of 2010.

But is this crisis for leadership only a contemporary phenomenon? Have we left a golden age for leaders far behind? Both suggestions seem unlikely.

During the British general election of 1959, the journalist Geoffrey Goodman spent the campaign following the deputy leader of the Labour party, Aneurin Bevan, around the country. He made a record of Bevan’s many memorable speeches. One quotation in particular stands out. Contemplating the world’s increasingly interlinked problems, and the leadership that was on offer to deal with them, Bevan summed up what he saw in these terms: “Smaller and smaller men, strutting across narrower and narrower stages.”

Timidity and smallness in our leaders is nothing new. It has to be exposed and challenged, generation after generation. Even while we secretly hope for powerful new leaders to emerge.

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