The Courageous Leader
When we first started talking about collaborating on beyondnewnormal last year, we couldn’t have anticipated the blockbusting black swan events of 2016 — first the British referendum vote to leave the European Union, then the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America.
Nobody really did. A black swan event, by definition, ‘comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalised after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.’
As we write this, the initial wave of shock and awe reaction to the Trump victory has passed. But retro-fitted rationalisations of the result are still coming at us thick and fast.
As in the aftermath of Brexit, the Anglophone media (which is mainly what we access) is focused on the crisis of legitimacy of left/liberal elites, the rise of nativist and xenophobic populism, and the anger of what used to be called the white working class. Including because the US election campaign deployed unusually low-end messaging around gender, reflections on the contemporary state of identity politics also feature strongly. The mix has been increasingly muddied by Cold War-style, alarmist conspiracy theories surrounding Russia’s role in this result — and more postmodern ones related to Julian Assange, the alt-right, Facebook and more.
In our last article, we promised examples of contemporary leaders practising virtue.
This is an out-of-frame offer – relative to the optics of most credible explainers, and relative to the behavior of more and more people in leadership roles. It’s even more outlying than when we first contemplated beyondnewnormal. So outlying, that it may seem preposterous.
Trump’s election win certainly gave us special cause to pause. (By coincidence, during that campaign period we’d each been binge-watching House of Cards, and agreed a real life President more unlovely than Francis Underwood was difficult to imagine.) But we decided to press ahead with beyondnewnormal. We remain convinced that virtue is the missing piece at the heart of today’s leadership puzzle, and that virtue in action is now needed more urgently than ever.
Consider the example of Jo Cox, the 41 year old British parliamentarian who was murdered during the Brexit campaign in June by Thomas Mair, a Nazi-obsessed, far-right extremist who reportedly yelled ‘this is for Britain’ as he shot and stabbed her to death. A self-described ‘political activist’, Mair’s target was a leader whose own political agenda was enthusiastically pro-EU, who’d worked for Oxfam for many years, was an unapologetic advocate of immigration and multiculturalism, and was dedicated to social justice initiatives. By all accounts, Cox was also an unusually warm and positive woman and a much loved mother, wife, sister, daughter, friend and colleague. Her named virtues included optimism, humour, generosity, humanity, humility and courage.
It is the last of these virtues — courage — that we believe is the starting place for a turning point.
It does seem that fewer and fewer people like Cox are even putting their hand up — for election, for promotion, for position. That’s in any field of influence, not just politics. Our client bases cross the corporate, industry, education, community, creative and public sectors. We also work across different nation states, regional locations and hemispheres. And for some time we’ve each observed an alarming spike in the appointment of individuals to influential leadership roles for which they are woefully underequipped — especially if at least one serious criterion for performance assessment is a basic competence in virtue.
Cox smashed that key KPI in a hugely brave and practical way. Interestingly, much of her best work was carried out quietly in her local community and in the international development field, largely out of the public eye. And look what happened to Cox when she stuck her head above the proverbial parapet. This is no incentive for anyone quietly ‘soldiering on’ at their professional or community coalface to expose themselves more visibly. Extra disincentive is the vulgar and personal attacks we’ve increasingly seen directed at public figures — including recent US Presidential candidate Hilary Clinton, Australia’s first woman Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and outgoing US President Barack Obama.
If this trend continues — and more and more of us fail to find or show the courage of our convictions — where will we end up?
At best? In some version of very bad reality tv.
At worst? Let your imagination run riot for a while.
Then find your own courage to start making a real correction — by taking the best inspiration from Jo Cox:
‘What would Jo think now, [her friend Stephen Kinnock] often muses, imagining her arriving at work after the election of Donald Trump. “She would be saying: ‘What the hell is happening in our world? What should we be doing?’ and ‘What does it mean about the values we cherish?’”
Read more:
Our past articles explain why virtue should be core business for contemporary leaders — and how to find it.
Future articles will explore more examples of virtue in action.
beyondnewnormal is a new collaboration between Natasha Cica and Alex Cameron.
Natasha Cica is director of Kapacity.org, which works globally to help leaders, teams and organisations deliver effective and sustainable change. She was recognized by the Australian Financial Review and Westpac banking group as one of Australia’s 100 Women of Influence and is an adjunct professor at the Australian National University. Natasha has over twenty years’ experience delivering professional development in Australia, Europe and the Western Balkans. She has a doctorate in law from the University of Cambridge, was founding director of the Inglis Clark Centre and was an inaugural Sidney Myer Creative Fellow.
Alex Cameron is a founding partner in Socia Ltd, a business that works with leaders, boards and executive teams focused on enabling productive collaboration in today’s complex interconnected world. He is a co-author of Collaborative leadership: Building relationships, handling conflict and sharing control.
