APS Blog

The war in the Ukraine as a lesson in leadership

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 17:27:00 Z

Background

We are currently in times of rapidly accelerating global crises which are profoundly affecting our ability to sustain ourselves economically, to maintain the quality of our health services and to reverse our recent destructive impact on the planet. The new and violent war in the Ukraine can be seen as an escalation in every one of these domains. It is of paramount importance that we keep learning from our self-inflicted crises and begin reversing the patterns of destruction. In this article I argue that one area where we can undertake vital learnings is the area of leadership. Leadership has often been called the most pervasive and important problem in human affairs. With good leadership, nations prosper and behave better towards their neighbours. I take the opportunity here to draw some basic management lessons from the leadership in this war, that has been well-reported.

Methods

This brief report is an application of my earlier research on criteria for good leadership and the predictors of a leader’s journey, including the importance of dealing with one’s own and other people’s leadership shadows (De Haan, 2016).

Findings and conclusions

Large organisations such as the NHS can still learn more from well-functioning democracies, in order to bring out and implement the very best leadership within the organisation. Suggestions for leaders at all levels in healthcare and beyond follow from a simple thought experiment: “what would we do now if this were a democracy?”

One prominent feature of the war which currently takes place in Ukraine is the degree to which it appears to be a conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, especially on the leadership level. On the one side, we see an isolated leader with totalitarian control of his country, not allowing any dissent or even information to percolate through to the masses in ‘his’ country – a leader who seems to be riddled with fear, needing total control, and lacking a positive vision of the future. On the other side, we see a leader who appears open and direct, personable, fiercely democratic, and setting an example for us all with decisiveness, openness to dialogue, and selfless compassion for the afflicted.

Part of this split into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is to do with the partisan projections that leaders naturally attract, but even if we take those into account, I believe the differences in the implementation of leadership are stark in this conflict.

I have been studying leadership over many years, including studying differences between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ leadership, and more particularly differences between ‘good’ and ‘successful’ leadership. Both these leaders are obviously successful, but their impact and style could not be any different, and the amount of ‘goodness’ that they bring is often contrasted. We see the same differences playing out in today’s large organisations. There are many successful leaders who lead empires with up to a million employees, but the amount of ‘goodness’ that they bring is often debated. We know from reliable estimates that less than 50% of leaders would get the predicate ‘good enough’ from within their organisation, provided free polls are taken which is not always straightforward (Hogan, Kaiser, Sherman & Harms, 2021; Chénard-Poirier, Morin, Boudrias & Gillet, 2022).

Most of the larger institutions in today’s world are essentially non-democratic, as leaders are not elected. I think this is partly what is causing some of the unpopularity of our organisations’ leaders.

So, before going into good versus evil, what is good leadership and what is successful leadership, and how are they different?

Successful leadership is easiest to define and recognise. It is the influence or rank of the position that a leader has achieved. The higher the position the more leadership they can exert. Leaders in larger institutions generally become more successful as they can convince the layer above them to take them on, i.e., to promote or elect them for a vacancy. The president of Russia is a straightforward example of this kind of success, as he essentially owes his position to one man and one man only: Boris Yeltsin, who promoted him and then made him into the ‘succession plan’ for his own job. In a democratic country or organisation, one has to convince a great many more people to obtain similar success.

Good leadership can be defined by contributions to the process of making an organisation more effective, more competitive, more sustainable, or more strategic (Campbell, 1956). Good leaders help others to become more effective as a team or organisation.

I think just as we instinctively know who has higher morals in the Ukrainian war, and we can back this intuition up with arguments and facts, so we also know how to recognise good leadership. My own research (as summarised in De Haan, 2016) has led me to think that good leadership consists mostly of organising upwards feedback, i.e., taking as many views as possible on board so that the organisation can make use of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ (Surowiecki, 2005). Good leaders are able to facilitate a dynamic ebb and flow of such information, feedback, and feelings of motivation. They welcome varying views including dissident and critical voices, which they summarise into a broadly shared sense of direction, which in turn helps to give meaning and purpose to the work of the team. We can see this process work in all implementations of leadership, including during wars and stressful transitions.

In summary, I believe in the science of work and organisations, we still have a lot to learn from free democracies. We can see that the political world is shaping up increasingly as a rivalry between free democracies and exceedingly controlling autocracies. Yet what is less reflected upon is that we see the same conflict very much playing out in the leadership of large organisations too. Effective leaders do need to take the ‘dressing room’ with them and understand the various views. Authoritarian leaders can afford not to do that, but only to the detriment of their team.

Here are a few of my more specific learnings from the horrendous ordeal we have seen playing out in Ukraine:

We should actively support democratic leaders and also democratic processes within organisations. It was Pericles who already realised the fragility of a democracy and spoke about it in his famous funeral speech to the war victims. Tolstoy was recently quoted by Alexander Navalny, the Russian freedom fighter: “War is a product of despotism. Those who want to fight war must only fight despotism.” (Tolstoy & Christian, 2015; diary entry 1904). The same could be said of a lot of ineffectiveness in organisations.
We should be in support of fixed terms for leaders, and not just in political appointments.
We should actively help senior leaders to contain their authoritarian traits, such as narcissism, hubris syndrome, and other derailment factors, by regularly collecting feedback about their reputation at work and actively challenging them when reflecting on their reputation and the risks their leadership offers.
When dealing with authoritarians, sometimes called ‘petty tyrants’ or ‘dark triads’, it is important to apply free expression and multilateral pressures, to form coalitions and maintain a sense of personal purpose, as it does take a huge and risky effort to refresh and emancipate leadership. Whistle-blower protections need to be strengthened further in most organisations I have worked with.

Campbell, D.T. (1956). Leadership and its effects upon the group. Columbus: Ohio State University.

Chénard-Poirier, L. A., Morin, A. J., Boudrias, J. S., & Gillet, N. (2022). The combined effects of destructive and constructive leadership on thriving at work and behavioral empowerment. Journal of Business and Psychology, 37(1), 173-189.

Christian, R. F., & Tolstoy, L. (2015). Tolstoy's Diaries Volume 2: 1895-1910 (Vol. 2). Faber & Faber.

De Haan, E. (2016). The leadership shadow: How to recognise and avoid derailment, hubris and overdrive. Leadership 12: 504-512.

Hogan, R., Kaiser, R. B., Sherman, R. A., & Harms, P. D. (2021). Twenty years on the dark side: Six lessons about bad leadership. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research.

Surowiecki, J. (2005) The Wisdom of Crowds, Anchor, New York.

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New quantitative research provides support for executive coaching being particularly useful for the leadership shadow

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 00:00:00 Z

The modern executive can no longer leave their personality and emotions at home. He or she needs to draw on all of their senses, sensitivity and intuition; and have the courage to speak to others with full conviction, as well as deeply listen to them whilst reading between the lines.

Addressing emotions, handling stress and staying open and receptive under pressure has become, perhaps, the most important success criteria in the 21^st century; arguably, leaders need to be creative, receptive, flexible and strong-willed all at the same time.

I am proud that the Dutch version of my book The Leadership Shadow is having a reprint now, five years after it was first published. It is certainly a sign of our times that the hidden and highly personal aspects of leadership are receiving more attention. As argued in this book, leadership is now under much more pressure and scrutiny than it was, say, twenty years ago: positions are no longer fixed and predictable, replacing executives in changing circumstances is the order of the day, and as long as you are “in post” you are under immense pressure. Markets and products are constantly changing, customer expectations are high, and processes are continuously undergoing a radical redesign. Work that was commonplace only a few years ago has now been automated out of existence, and new tasks have taken its place, arising from new products, new legislation, new networks and software, fluctuating markets and emerging opportunities.

Our highly personal responses to stress are much more important for our leadership contribution, and it is increasingly vital to understand how the leadership role slowly but inevitably corrupts us. This book is about these hidden reactions to stress and leadership, at the core of our being. It describes and details the phenomena that we find in leaders, and suggests what we can do about these risks caused by stress and hubris.

For readers of the book, there is important news this year. For the first time, we have found clear and statistically significant evidence that executive coaching really can help with the “shadow side” of leadership. In two meticulous experiments (randomised studies with control groups), we found statistically defensible evidence that coaching is not only appropriate for the resilient, tough, traditional leader but also specifically addresses and mitigates the leadership shadow.

One experiment involved around a hundred business school students who were coached by accredited executive coaches (and another hundred students in the control group). Together with their coaches, they completed extensive questionnaires before and after each of six sessions, and again three months after the end of coaching. Like many other researchers, we found that coaching was an effective intervention, but we also found that it was mainly the students’ “resilience” that was a good predictor of the final outcome and the change effected through coaching. The more resilient, tougher and stronger a leader, therefore, the more likely it is that coaching will really help. And as The Leadership Shadow shows, it is often the more resilient leaders who rise to the top. Coaching works especially well for this type of leader.

The other experiment (De Haan et al., 2019) was carried out with a group of over a hundred senior managers in an international pharmaceutical company, who were coached by recognised internal coaches. Once again, there was an equally sized control group that was not coached, and again we found clear effectiveness of the intervention in comparison with the control group. This time we also decided to use the Hogan Insight Series to measure the personality of the leaders being coached. This was done both before the coaching and after six months (around six sessions) of coaching. As expected, the leader’s personality remained entirely the same after the six months of coaching: most of the 28 personality dimensions were unchanged or fluctuated similarly in control and target group. However, we found that two dimensions were slightly but significantly altered after the coaching intervention (i.e. only in the group being coached). We can, therefore, assume that these two dimensions were influenced by the coaching.

These two personality aspects are related as well. The first, “Prudence” (self-discipline, responsibility and conscientiousness), had gone up significantly. The second, “Excitable” (moodiness, irritability and emotionality), had conversely gone down significantly. Two positive developments for leaders, which in our view may well have been part of the same effect of coaching. The managers appear to have become demonstrably both more responsible and more even-tempered. The second personality dimension (“Excitable”) is also described as a leadership dimension in this book, namely in Chapter 7 under the heading “borderline patterns in leaders”. The definition used in this book and in our experiment was exactly the same, i.e. derived from the Hogan Development Survey. This research, therefore, confirms what many coaches already believed, namely that executive coaching is an excellent intervention for leadership development that also takes into account the leader’s less visible “shadow side”. Coaching is, after all, made-to-measure, focused on the specific contract with this individual executive. Coaching is also safe, confidential and – within the carefully protected conversational space – challenging and confronting, enabling the shadow sides of leadership to be addressed robustly. This is unfortunately not the case with other forms of leadership development, for example, training programmes, MBAs or organisational focus groups, wherein my view it is never really safe enough, or tailored enough, to confront individual executives with their shadow.

It is high time we made sure that our modern executives are equipped for the stress and risks of leadership in a rapidly changing world, that they operate ethically and effectively, and that they do not cause damage within their teams and companies, as so many do. This research and the book on the shadow side of leadership provide us with some initial tools to grow leadership in a healthy way in modern organisations.

De Haan, E., Gray, D.E. & Bonneywell, S. (2019). Executive coaching outcome research in a field setting: A randomized controlled trial study in a global healthcare corporation. Academy of Management Learning and Education, August.