Avoiding career or leadership catastrophes: Part 3 (Labour)

This post is Part 3 in a 4 part blog that reflects on the lessons in leadership and strategy to be learnt from the unexpected outcome of the 2015 UK General Election.

By contrast with the Conservatives (see Part 2) Labour egregiously failed to learn the lessons of political history, above all its own, in the 2015 UK general election.  

Can they recover, and if so how quickly?

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In Why selflessness is good business I explained that ill-advised attempts at rational argument (neo-cortex to neo-cortex communication), without accepting the brutal realities of the recipients' emotions and brainstems (primitive brains), are like trying to jump the Grand Canyon - depressingly futile, and suicidal to boot.  It can be equated to going ‘over the top’ in First World War trench warfare to face machine gun annihilation, or Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.  Yet that's exactly what Labour did.  How?

On BBC Radio 4 on Friday former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) Ken Clarke hit the nail on the head, as he usually does.  He recalled that in 1997 the Conservatives were intellectually and morally bankrupt, engaged in bitter internecine warfare.  So the electorate threw them out and refused to have them back until they had repented, like the wife who changes the locks to keep out her drunk, abusive husband.  

A politician's relationship with the electorate is disconcertingly personal.  It’s like being married to 60 million people and, even worse, having to deal with their mother too!!! 

A further striking truth is this - too often politicians interpret their victory in an election as an endorsement of their manifesto promises, which then turn out to be ill-conceived or undeliverable.  However, very often what the electorate is saying is simply "You are the best of a bad bunch!"  The same principle often applies to business wins.  This is why empirically it's proven that humility and caution are far more effective leadership characteristics than hubris and bravado; unfortunately the majority of leaders don't know or believe that.

Ken Clarke went on to say everyone knows that Labour mismanaged the economy when it was last in power (1997 - 2010), yet it has never accepted this and 'worn sackcloth and ashes' (my phrase, not his) in front of the electorate.  The Labour Party representative at the interview table immediately objected to his comments.  She indignantly denied that Labour had mismanaged the economy and said the problem was that they had not sufficiently trumpeted their achievements whilst in Government.  Clarke simply replied "There you are - see what I mean?!"

Labour remained in steadfast denial, and potentially may do so for many years to come if it's not ruthless in coming to terms with brutal realities.  On this morning's Andrew Marr show on BBC1 TV Lord Peter Mandelson, Labour party grandee and architect of Tony Blair's New Labour, was blunt.  He said: "When Ed Miliband was elected Leader of the Labour Party we were all told to shake our fists angrily at the Tories and say we were for the poor, and we hated the rich.  This is not an intelligent strategy to win over aspirational voters".

Labour has often struggled throughout its history to understand the brainstems and emotions of the large body of floating voters it needs to win over.  These voters simply aren't going to roll over and surrender to facile bravado.  They don't trust Labour on the economy, period.  Ed Miliband's coterie of metropolitan champagne socialists indulged their followers in a naive grand political experiment.  Meantime as the hefty majority party in Scotland they fell asleep on the bridge whilst the great liner 'Caledonia' steamed headlong into the Nationalist iceberg (from their, and the UK perspective, whatever your sympathies over Scottish independence!)  

They have only themselves to blame that the SNP took them to the cleaners on May 7th.  Hundreds of thousands of Scottish Labour supporters, amongst the most visceral tribes on these islands, deserted them for the first time ever.  They did so because after decades of dissatisfaction they'd given up on the Labour Party as an effective representative of their interests in Westminster.

Ed Miliband is a decent man, dedicated to public service, but he and his acolytes behaved as wet-behind-the-ears demagogues.  They never fathomed or accepted that whilst the UK economy shed thousands of public sector jobs during the coalition Government (2010-2015) it created 4 to 5 times that number of private sector jobs, which are NOT all zero hours or minimum wage contracts.  Neither did they come to terms with the fact that the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition had turned the UK into the fastest growing economy in the G7.  Incidentally here's a surprising fact - the majority of people on zero hours contracts say they like the flexibility it affords them and want to stay that way!!  Yes, there are rogue employers, but they are a minority. 

It's extremely dangerous and irresponsible to falsely demonise anything, yet politicians do it all the time, especially to their opponents.  Then they wonder why the electorate is so cynical and disenchanted with them.  You know what?  Talk is the cheapest commodity on earth, and too much political rhetoric is just glorified, baseless tittle-tattle.

After decades of self-delusion under both Conservative and Labour governments the UK, in my humble opinion and David Cameron's too the most creative nation on earth, is finally...FINALLY!!! starting to see that the pinnacle of success is not only becoming a doctor, lawyer or civil servant, and that business is not squalid and sleazy. Thank God for that! Welcome, fellow Brits, to the 21st Century world of China, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Scandinavia and the US, plus many other aspirational nations.  You got here just in time - the train is about to leave the station!

Oh, and by the way, where do the taxes come from to pay for our cherished National Health Service, for teachers, social workers, refuse cleaners, etc.?  Money doesn't grow on trees, or flow out of taps, and the world of business is NOT, contrary to popular socialist worker myth infested solely with rapacious bankers and other ne'er do wells!!!

Labour can only start to address these problems effectively once it has started with a prolonged, sincere mea culpa to the electorate, even if it feels this is unjust, and put its economic house fully in order.  All further intellectual policy wonking and vacuous demonising of anyone not in the Labour family should be banned.  And frankly I do wonder whether the two wings of the Party can, and should, be reconciled long-term.  

If I was a strategic advisor to the new Labour leader I might well be advocating much more radical action, along the lines I suggested in Are 'political leaders' an oxymoron?!  To be blunt, if political parties were businesses they would be subject to mergers and acquisitions far more often.  I am no raging free marketeer, but the discipline of the market acts as an important enforcer of the Laws of Evolution and stops organisational dinosaurs living on past their sell-by date, unlike politics.

Of course Labour’s other manifest, depressingly (for them) predictable, problem was electing the wrong Miliband.  Ed was never, ever credible as Prime Minister in waiting – Labour canvassers have confirmed they were told this (the bleeding obvious) ad nauseam on the doorsteps.  His brother David was, but was not elected as Leader of the Labour Party because his candidacy was too threatening (that brainstem thing again) to the Jurassic Left Wing of the Labour Party.

So, many salutory lessons to be learnt from the gun the Labour Party under Ed Miliband pointed at its own foot with entirely predictable consequences.

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I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:

Leadership - can you master it?

High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?

10 reasons to stick your neck out!

Do you ever think you've got it tough?

Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove

How the brain works and why you should know

Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?

Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you

Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.

The business I lead, Resolve Gets Results (RGR), provides hands-on leadership, management, problem solving, customer/market development, sales and fundraising capabilities to companies with long-term growth potential.  I'm also actively involved in Linked2Success (L2S), a business which helps clients to use social media intelligently to build professional relationships and grow.  RGR and L2S work together as a single team to leverage the benefits of our respective skill sets, giving tremendous business value to far-sighted clients..

I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

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Mark Ashton