Murdochs, Messiahs and getting leadership right

Hard not to relish the Murdochs’ discomfort during their Westminster Leadership Masterclass in Willful Blindness and Implausible Deniability (“I don’t know/recall/recollect/remember”; ““I don’t have direct knowledge of what they knew and at what time”; “Have you any idea how powerful I am and how small you all look from the helm of my death star?”).

Loved too Murdoch Junior’s use of robotic management speak: “There are thresholds of materiality whereby things have to move upstream.” (Try this in a Dalek voice).

This farce stirred up deeply repressed memories of my own leadership disasters and errors of judgment, which, over the years, really do add up.  I still blanche at the sums of cash and number of compromise agreements which piled up before I realised that culture is not part of the game, culture is the game. For too long I didn’t pay anywhere near enough attention to who was being recruited, focussing on skills and experience not attitudes and passions. ‘Hire slowly, fire quickly’ is a phrase I wish I’d heard in my early years as a CEO.

Looking back it’s easy to discern the flawed leadership models I adopted. The Messiah Complex (very common amongst social entrepreneurs): “Follow me and I will save you”. Then there was the Superman Fantasy: “Don’t worry, I can do it all”. And who can forget the Stalin Lapse: “Do what I say or else”. All three can get short and even medium term results. But in the long run believe me they don’t work and certainly don’t lead to powerful and empowered cultures and there is a high cost to pay personally for those foolish enough to adopt them.

Debates in the social enterprise world circle around definitions, impact assessment, public service delivery and money. All important stuff. But the big issue for me is the leadership deficit in the sector. Social entrepreneurs are not inevitably great leaders. Indeed many social entrepreneurs are terrible leaders. Maverick, narcissistic, unreliable and too easily distracted. We need more examples of social entrepreneurs getting their innovations to scale and then performing well as CEO.

I met recently a dozen newly minted CEOs of sizeable chunks of the health service spun out as standalone social enterprises. Grizzled, battle hardened, middle-aged former nurses and union negotiators who now find themselves at the head of multi -million pound organisations. Their leadership tasks: radically improve service quality, make their companies great places to work, save money and create long-term, viable, profitable social businesses. Good luck with that chaps!

I founded Wavelength to change the world for the better through business by mixing ambitious business leaders, entrepreneurs and social innovators from across sectors to build knowledge, insights, resilience, connectivity and networks. A cross subsidy business model enables social enterprise leadersaccess to world-class leadership opportunities usually only open to private sector senior executives.

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