The Crisis of Leadership

?When I wrote my book “Leadership for Good Guys in 2019” I thought I had said everything I wanted and needed to say after a long career. Sinking into retirement I find that not a day goes past when something hits the news regarding organisational failure and poor leadership. My book was aimed at aspiring leaders and naively assumed that it is possible for good people to become leaders.

Examples of bad practice are rife. Take the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick. On her watch people are stopped for little or no reason, dragged from cars, some of them repeatedly. Evidence has been withheld and officers accused of wife-beating have been over-looked.

Wayne Couzens wasn't investigated following reports of sexual misconduct and wasn't vetted when moving from one force to another. All this has to point to the person at the top who sets the standards and the culture within which others operate.

I have cited the Post Office previously; the postmasters who were accused, dismissed, imprisoned could have been treated fairly but those at the top allowed the injustice to continue.

The CEO of southern healthcare Katrina Percy was in post while hundreds of patients with different levels of handicap died. She picked up a huge salary and kept saying that she was on top of things and would make things better. Guess what? She was finally forced to step down but was given an advisory role!

On the radio today there was discussion regarding the treatment of female military personnel who had been abused and bullied; again, all this comes from the top where senior people preside over abusive cultures.

My partner has experienced bullying in the work place; in her case it was within secondary schools where you would expect headteachers to be more erudite and sensitive to the needs of others, but some had massive egos and paranoid tendencies which created hostile environments in which to try and teach. In my own experience bullying has occurred on two occasions and no policy has ever led to a fair outcome.

When things do go wrong there is the inevitable inquiry, review, report and a page of recommendations. Can the system be improved to make sure this never happens again?

In my view these efforts will do little to improve things and to change a failing culture.

Bad leaders will continue to lack vision, focus on micro management, avoid the blame, take the credit, exhibit bad judgement, penalise and not care for their staff.

This continuing pattern leads me to question two things: one, why people behave this way when they are in a position to do so much good and two, how these types of people get to senior positions and even, how we let them get there.

Some years ago I was fascinated by a television programme looking at psychopaths. Like most people I instantly thought of axe-wielding maniacs but no, most psychopaths don’t operate to that extreme but have distinctive character traits. They can be intelligent, bright, charming and can talk well at interviews; it turns out that many leaders of large organisations have this brain pattern. Interestingly when the professor making the programme had his own brain scanned, it turned out that he too exhibited the brain activity associated with psychopathic behaviours. The reason he had not resorted to typical psychopathic behaviours was the old question of nature over nurture or vice versa. He had grown up in a stable, loving family and it seemed that this was more powerful than his cognitive predisposition. The typical verdict on psychopaths in business leadership was that they do attain high positions but actually achieve very little when they get there.

This led me to think of powerful people in government where they can do most harm. Many of our leaders have been to boarding school and I posit that they have had less parental influence than kids at regular schools. Could it be that without loving, caring family support any psychopathic tendencies could be allowed to flourish and lead to great confidence in one’s own abilities and an ambition to get to the top at any cost?

What we need is good people in the right positions doing a good job. So, how do we do this?

In my experience interview processes have become slicker and more able to test the competence of someone to carry out the functions defined in a job description; many of us have endured an all-day assessment and been grilled by multi-person panels. But is this process selecting the right people to lead us? Maybe Jimmy Savile could demonstrate that he could perform the role of a hospital porter but the panel didn’t spot that he was a paedophile!

Talking to an old contractor colleague recently, he described how he was over the moon with a young lady he had employed to work in their busy office. She was bright, quick, accurate, had initiative and personality. I asked what interviewing process he went through to make sure he employed the right staff. He said “I talk to them”. He didn't have a set of testing technical questions but sought to explore their personal stories, their ambitions and meaning in their lives. Over the years he was convinced that a person’s true character and ability would come out and he had no examples of people he had to let go.

My instinct is that we need to re-think the interview process for leaders to be able to assess true character, integrity, trust, judgement, compassion and the ability to lead. That someone can espouse a vision and, as Simon Sinek puts it, select people who are not in charge of other people but people who look after those in their charge.

We can learn the technical stuff and in many leadership positions that is not the over-riding requirement.

Possibly the job requirements could specify leadership characteristics and questions like – why do you want to be a leader, how will you lead/develop your team, what will you do when something goes wrong, how will you encourage risk-taking, how will you demonstrate that you will listen more than speak, how will you encourage cognitive diversity, how will you recognise success in your team,?

Until this happens, the existing incumbents will continue to recruit in their own image and nothing will improve.