How we can rebuild trust in our leaders

Our leaders are plumbing new depths in our consciousness. Since the turn of the century, we’ve learned that our corporate leaders have illegally avoided taxes, lied about emissions in the car industry, rigged interest rates, presided over an offshore banking system that was larger than anyone ever thought and destroyed pension funds as they themselves grew wealthier. Collectively, they oversaw the biggest collapse of the financial system and watched as their life savings placed into investment funds set up by leaders of unimpeachable integrity turned out to be Ponzi schemes. Our spiritual leaders have covered up sexual abuse in the Church. Our political leaders have cheated on their expenses, admitted sexually inappropriate behaviour and were taken completely by surprise by the Brexit vote. Our charity leaders have sexually abused the vulnerable. Our entertainment leaders are facing multiple allegations of sexual harassment and abuse. Our leading broadcasters have falsely accused some political figures of being child abusers, while allowing actual abusers to commit crimes on their premises. Meanwhile, our sporting leaders have been caught cheating and doping.

These events sound unlikely, unbelievable, even impossible. But they all happened in the last two decades. Outside of the cataclysmic events of the world wars, it is difficult to remember a time when our leaders have appeared more thoroughly and completely discredited.

That’s our starting point. How do we rebuild trust in our leaders? It won’t be quick or easy. We cannot establish the presence of the positive without first ensuring the absence of the negative. We have to understand why these events happened by asking what they had in common. Could it be that we lacked the imagination to think this was even possible? Did the leaders never imagine that they would be caught? An obvious connection was that they all had leadership groups that lacked diversity. Another factor is that these groups were fronted by confident men. We’ve seen the effect of this in pollsters and pundits who didn’t see Donald Trump or Brexit or the financial collapse of 2009. We have to stop predicting one outcome and preparing for all outcomes.

In Professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It), he points out the problem. Men apply for jobs when they have a modicum of the skills required. Women only do so when they have the majority of the skills. Dr Pippa Malmgren and I have taken his research further forward by interviewing leaders from all around the world over a three-year period. It seems that our model of leadership is all too-often based on the single infallible ‘leader’ and not enough on the ‘ship’. Whether it’s Jesus Christ or Steve Jobs, Moses or Elon Musk, we’re fascinated by the hero leader. This model can be gloriously right and celebrated or it can be tragically wrong, as in the cases above. This level of binary outcome involves an enormous waste of resource and cost in broken careers and damaged people.

Another factor was that all of these leaders have been traditionally educated in drill-down, analytic, Western Reductionism. This makes them good at drilling-down, but not necessarily at looking across. Diverse groups, by their very nature tend to have a broader view, think longer-term in their views and tend to be qualitative. A disproportionate number of MPs are from privately-educated background and/or attended Oxford or Cambridge. Equality and representation in leadership is not just a matter of social justice, it’s a matter of business efficiency.

The over-reliance on logic and analysis, tends to favour the thinking, rather than the feeling or mood at the time. During the expenses scandal, the politicians argued that the scale of the expenses abuses were tiny compared to state expenditure. They were missing the point about the overall level of trust.

If it’s a problem of trust you’re trying to fix, you have to start with understanding that what makes us trust our leaders is not always logical. More data and more education may not be the answer. We’re looking for evidence that they are representing our interests first and not just their own. If they looked more representative of the communities they are seeking to serve, then this would be a start.

This is especially true of the technology industry. Its leaders can no longer argue that they are furthering the interests of the community they serve when they treat personal data carelessly. Cambridge Analytica was an example of this. If this wasn’t enough, Facebook providing a live-stream of the murdering of Muslims in mosques was a turning point.

Trust is something that takes years to establish that can be lost in moments. It’s so precious that we can no longer entrust it to one infallible individual. It needs be invested in teams that work in a collective structure that have timeless values. These are called leadership institutions and they survive the test of time better than any individual leader.

It may take decades, so the sooner we start, the better.

Chris Lewis and Pippa Malmgren are the authors of The Leadership Lab (Kogan Page, £14.99) and winners of Business Book of the Year 2019. Entries for The Business Book Awards 2020 open in June. Find out more at businessbookawards.co.uk

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