Have we been promoting the ‘wrong’ people into leadership roles for 30 years?

Nigel Girling
Jul 28, 2017 · 5 min read

A quick bit about me: I’m English, will be 60 soon and work as a writer, speaker and thinker about contemporary leadership and as a mentor to many senior leaders. In my daily life I work for an educational organization which trains and qualifies thousands of people every year, including senior and middle managers & leaders from pre-graduate to doctoral level. I write a ‘professional’ blog in the UK for our leader candidates, but this is somewhere to say the things I can’t or won’t say to a professional audience in my ‘official’ capacity.

So, to the question posed in the title. For the last 30 years, I have been observing, supporting, mentoring and working alongside leaders in a variety of sectors and organizations: private, public, large, small, Government.. you name it.

I have formed the opinion that we* just don’t:

*(in the UK that is — I have limited exposure to leaders in the USA or any other cultures)

a) Take leadership seriously as a profession

A teacher, lawyer, doctor, dentist, accountant, architect or even gas heating engineer — all have to be professionally qualified and regularly update their skills and knowledge. The CEO can have no leadership & management qualifications at all — as long as they look and sound good and went to the right school… and maybe studied finance. And don’teven get me started on the MBA… decades of teaching leaders that finance and marketing or the only thing that matters while selling the course on the basis of enhancement to salary…. We’re lucky we didn’t just create a cohort of leaders obsessed by numbers and PR, with a highly-developed sense of arrogance and entitlement and a frenzy to self-aggrandize and pocket the big money… Oh, hang on a minute, we did…

b) Understand what capabilities a leader needs

A large proportion of the senior leaders I meet have no idea what it is they should be striving to be good at. They think that the fact they have training in accountancy, engineering or some other technical discipline is enough. They often have no clue that their role is meant to be about inspiring, engaging and growing a large group of people and — even if they did — are often completely unsuited to do so, as they much prefer numbers or things to people.

c) Care very much about our people

When we coined the phrase ‘Human Resources’, we identified our people as a resource and as a cost. Most leaders and organizations I know see HR as a very big ‘R’ and an almost invisible ‘H’. We discipline them when they step out of line, or even just miss an arbitrary target that some compliance-junkie pulled out of the air. We lay them off when we have financial challenges, or just want to massage our results — even though the cost-saving of shedding them all is about half what we could have saved by cancelling the CEO and Board’s bonuses and leaves them unable to feed their children or hold their head up in public. If we keep them, we often drive them into mental health issues, stress and illness in order to make their leaders look good and hit their numbers, so that we can give even more money to people who already have way more than they need, and often earn fifty times the salary of the workers at the sharp end. We still often drag them into an arbitrary location to do work they could just as easily have done at home, or even from the beach — except we don’t trust them unless we can watch them work…

d) Deserve their loyalty — yet expect it anyway

I’m often amazed (or at least, I used to be) that highly-paid senior leaders blithely expect their often underpaid and overworked people to go several extra miles, come up with money-saving or money-making innovations, seek constant improvements in performance and to constantly develop their skills and capabilities — while the leaders pocket the cash without adding much value or working particularly hard. It’s unethical, unkind and frankly idiotic. More to the point, the people are starting to realize and won’t stand for it much longer…

e) Care much about the impact of our activities on society

Oh sure, we make the right noises about corporate social responsibility — especially if there’s a tax incentive and we can talk about it in the media — but we rarely seem to me to actually care. The structure of our markets and the drive for share/stockholder value above all else means that our organizations — and their leaders — make decisions primarily in the interests of the shareholders and the market. Everyone else can take a hike. We will happily destroy our suppliers, shift our operations to cheaper countries and abandon our workforces and the local communities that have been developed to serve the company, often for generations — and all for the sake of a few pounds or dollars. We pollute, we consume, we use toxic materials, we create waste and we do damage to the environmental, societal and human well-being that our organizations depend on for their future. That makes us fools, as well as uncaring exploiters.

I could go on. Many who know me will say that I often do. I’ll be retiring before too long, and when I look around me at the leadership cohort I leave behind, I am ashamed.

I’ve given 30 years of my life to developing outstanding leaders, but too few to turn the tide. Meanwhile, the money-making beast has far more firepower than I and those who think similarly can possible muster. TV and films continue to show us that greed is good and that money is the only goal worth attaining — and the world is full of ‘apprentices’ eager to follow the examples of wealthy, fortunate, amoral & ruthless leaders.

So is there any hope at all for the future of leadership? Well, yes, some at least. The inevitable increase in gender balance at the top will help a lot. Less testosterone, more caring, less ego and more focus on what really matters — and on the people who make it happen — will all help and should result to some degree. Increased diversity of all categories should have a positive impact, albeit painfully slow in coming. The rising generations, raised in a different society and often with a very different attitude and approach to their working life, will have a significant impact. But as Don Henley said so eloquently in ‘Heart of the matter’… “Oh these times are so uncertain, there’s a yearning undefined, and people filled with rage. We all need a little tenderness, how can love survive, in such a graceless age?”.

Please can we start promoting leaders who love people, care about their world, want to do things for the greater good and are happy to share the benefits fairly? Can they be taught the skills and knowledge they need to lead with heart and ethics and courage, seeking to add real value to the world?

I hope so. I really do.

Nigel Girling

Written by

Leader, thinker, mentor, writer, picker and other things like that

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade