Are modern leaders good enough?

I have been invited to a dinner discussion that intrigues me.  The question to be discussed with the assemblage – quite a high-powered one including a Lord, a Dame and a couple of high quality business academics – is this:

‘Contemporary leadership let-downs. Are the links between power, responsibility, accountability and ethics especially problematic in the modern era?  Are we expecting too much or the wrong things of leaders in these times? Are our leadership models becoming unsustainable due to the complexity, immediacy and intense visibility of leaders’ actions? What we could do to ensure that we have leaders who are equipped with the right qualities, mind-sets, supports and relationships to serve us better?’ (The ‘we’ here refers to business schools.)

A mouthful to be sure and hardly a subject to be done and dusted over one dinner table discussion. We each have a 5 minute contribution before a general discussion develops. So I thought I would use this blog to work out what I think. As a citizen, I have views on public institutional leadership but no direct experience. But with a career in business, actually working in business as opposed to teaching it, I do have relevant experience.

Business leadership is unquestionably under pressure in public companies: short-term thinking dominated by financial reporting impacts a company’s culture negatively. Many would go further and blame the entire shareholder value construct for the ills of our time and a book being reviewed in the next issue of Market Leader explores this in detail. But my first-hand experience was of two companies – one employed me for 25 years and the other I worked as a consultant.  Both were large public companies in totally different sectors: the first a large public international advertising agency (pre-digital age) and the second couldn’t have been more different  – a large public technology-based financial services company selling asset management services to pension schemes – very much post digital.  

Yet they shared a number of characteristics that made them wonderful places to work. The management trusted its staff, gave individuals a great deal of freedom, had very porous silos, and spent a great deal of money on bringing the staff together in various forms of social/seminar/training events. Perhaps, most important of all, both companies exuded integrity and high ethical standards. This seems simple, but why is the culture of so many companies almost exactly the opposite? Companies where senior executives live in a state of fear, distrust, frustration and paranoia.
 
I have no glib answers but worry about the absence of trust that leaders seem to have in their staff, the rigidity of silos, the mixed messages of team vs individual working: we must work as a team but be rewarded as individuals, and perhaps the most corrosive of all, the vast salaries that CEOs seem able to command. It is well known that the ratios of lowest to highest or even highest to average have been increasing to obscene degrees and this can so easily corrupt the culture.  In my experience of the technology/financial company, the chief executive (who founded the company) was, rightfully a very, very rich man.  But he opened his home, life, his family and his wealth to employees in a way that overcame resentment.  Indeed staff was very proud of his accomplishments – which included a world-class modern art collection and lavish charitable work.

Why isn’t this more common? Never in my early career has the terms psychopath and sociopath been thrown around so liberally to refer to power-hungry, greedy CEOs. Something about the way people with CEO ambitions are taught (what I think of as ‘kick ass’ styles) and are rewarded, not only encourage people (sadly, usually men) with such tendencies to fight their way, Alpha Male style to the top or – more importantly and more likely – discourage people with more rounded values to try for the prize. Not surprisingly they may conclude that the money and power can’t really be worth the sacrifice.

I look forward to the contributions of people from other fields and at the same time, recommend reading an excellent article in the next issue of Market Leader by Jules Goddard about the importance of leaders building moral capital in their companies.

Read more from Judie in our Clubhouse.

(Feature image courtesy of Peter Kaminski.)