Avoid the blame game

In a crisis we need a hero, a strong leader, someone who inspires confidence; someone who we believe knows what’s going on and what to do about it. The other side of this is that when things go wrong we need someone to blame. This is both unhealthy and unhelpful.

We confuse leadership qualities with charisma. We worship those who, by sheer force of personality, make things happen. This is unhealthy because we are being influenced by personality not reason, and unhelpful because we stop thinking for ourselves. Blindly following the leader becomes an act of faith or fear and professional values become secondary to misguided loyalty or simply telling the powerful what they want to hear. It leads to organisations competing for these star performers in the belief that they will turn around a failing organisation or guarantee success. Yet research conducted by academics Morten Hansen, Herminia Ibarra and Urs Peyer, which involved collecting data on 2,000 chief executives worldwide - first published in the Harvard Business Review in January this year - shows that those companies with high-profile chief executives perform no better than those with ‘quiet ones’, who, rather than promote themselves, prefer to surround themselves with a strong team.

If you believe that the leader makes the difference, then you also believe that if things go spectacularly wrong, no matter how big the organisation
and how far the leader was from the decision, they are still to blame.

We need a more sophisticated understanding of leadership, one that recognises the importance of team work, co-operation and partnership and views all managers as requiring leadership qualities. These are the ability to inspire staff, the willingness to take responsibility and the skills to explain to staff what needs to be done.

We need to change the way we think of leaders and change the way we develop our managers. Leaders should not be over-praised for success - the credit should be shared -and when things go wrong, the criticism should be apportioned appropriately.

When things get difficult, budgets are under pressure, performance suffers, morale is low and unpopular changes are required, it will be teams
at every level in the organisation that pull it through, not the oratory of a high-profile celebrity leader.

Blair McPherson is author of People management in a harsh financial climate

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