Responsible leadership

Responsible leadership

'If you don’t stand up for your values when they are tested, then they aren’t values, they are hobbies' – Jon Stewart.

There are lots of ways of modifying the word ‘leadership’. Almost all of these emphasise a positive, benign sort of leadership – the Servant Leader, the Compassionate Leader, the Tireless Leader, perhaps even the Mindful Leader (we’ll save that one for another time).

But there is one adjective that seems to hold more power than most in summarising a type of leadership for modern times and that is the Responsible Leader. In this article I want to explore the idea of Responsible Leadership and its potential role in providing the sort of leadership we seem to be so short of.

A crisis of leadership development

I regard leadership as the defining issue of our age. Everywhere we look, from our companies, to our institutions and governments, I see a leadership gap – a gap between what is needed and what is provided. When I look at the global issues that confront us (climate change, energy, migration, financialisation, globalisation etc.) I see a lack of effective leadership helping us to navigate the difficult territory ahead. Pick a topic and tell me I’m wrong.

We are living in a time when leadership has never been more needed yet talent is, apparently, scarce. So what is going on? And what does any of this have to do with responsible leadership?

In times of crisis, it is a common response to look to be saved by a hero. Another response to a lack of leadership is for organisations to produce a leadership competency framework that runs to three pages, and a person specification to several more.

My colleagues and I sat down and tried to collate all the competency frameworks suggested by many authors across many more books. We stopped counting at 226 leadership competencies. For the record I have never met anyone whose personal, professional, emotional, and intellectual human-being ness could be mapped effectively onto a competency framework. Most leadership frameworks I have seen effectively exclude everyone except Superman or Superwoman. 

Rethinking leadership

As Charles Handy, the famous management thinker and writer, once said: 'We cannot wait for great leaders to emerge for they are in short supply. We must light our own fires in the darkness.'

One of the ‘fires’ we can light is to try and consider more deeply what we mean by leadership and, particularly, what it is to be someone who is responsible in their leadership.

In our companies, organisations, institutions, and governments (and probably in our hearts) perhaps we continue to be gripped by stale ideas of what it is to be a leader and what we mean by leadership.

I agree with a good friend of mine who says that the only competencies required for leadership are the wisdom to see what must be done, the courage to do it and the compassion and humour to act for the good of all. Wisdom, courage, compassion and humour seem to me to embody an essential humanity and provide a great insight into what is required to act responsibly.

Developing leaders through action

One of the things that many organisations miss in trying to build their leadership capacity is that leadership only ever manifests itself in action. We can ascribe someone to a leadership position but they do not instantly become leaders. It is only when they take action that their leadership is manifest.

Leadership isn’t a person, or a set of character traits or positional authority. Leadership is a special and vital form of action. It isn’t leaders that are missing in our organisations, our companies and institutions. What is missing is effective leadership action. It isn’t heroes we are yearning for; it is the need for the kind of action that makes a difference.

Such leadership action can and must come from everywhere, not just from those with positional or other types of authority. When I talk to companies about what is missing when they discuss their leadership agenda we eventually agree that it is leadership action that they need, from across their organisation, from everyone, every day.

So now we can begin to see the idea of responsible leadership more clearly. If leadership is action, then responsible leadership is responsible action.

This isn’t the traditional definition. For example the Financial Times defines responsible leadership as: '...making decisions that, next to the interests of shareholders, also takes into account all the other stakeholders, such as workers, clients, suppliers, the environment, the community and future generations.'

Isn’t that just running businesses or organisations effectively? Why do we need a special name for simply doing the obvious things, like caring about workers, clients, suppliers and the environment? We can’t define responsible leadership as just the everyday work of running an effective organisation because to do so traps us into giving prizes or accolades to those organisations not actively being ‘irresponsible’. We need to raise the bar a lot higher than that.

The power of conscience

Responsible leadership is taking responsible action. But who defines what is responsible and what is not? The most direct answer to my mind is that it is our conscience that guides us.

Conscience is important and something that we rarely discuss in organisations. It is an incredibly powerful force in helping us to navigate the complexity of our everyday lives. It provides us with an expression of our personal sense of what is right and wrong and helps guide our decisions and actions. While a deeper investigation into the nature of conscience is beyond the scope of this short piece I believe that it is central to the notion of responsible action.

Stephen Covey frames conscience clearly in relation to responsible action: ‘Every human has four endowments – self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.’

It is this power to choose that is at the heart of the act of leadership, the decision to act, to respond, and to change. Our guide to responsible leadership action can only be ourselves: what it is that we notice about the situation, what we notice about others, and what we notice about ourselves in the moment.

All too often, we have seen a ‘saying-doing’ gap in our organisations. In a world of mass communications, we become familiar with the glib promises that organisations make to us as customers, as shareholders, as suppliers or citizens. We also become familiar with an all-too-frequent failure to match those promises in the delivery. Such a ‘saying-doing’ gap erodes trust in organisations, embeds cynicism across all stakeholders, and frustrates the role of effective leadership action.

At an individual level, a ‘saying-doing’ gap opens when we fail to act in line with our conscience. We are all familiar with this feeling, of letting ourselves down; of not meeting the standards we have set ourselves; of lacking in courage, commitment, determination, and grit.

Authenticity: The secret weapon of responsible leaders

Responsible leadership starts with us meeting our responsibility to ourselves, to live authentically, for real.

My experience tells me that one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, source of negative stress in our busy lives is the erosion of our sense of self-worth through regularly failing to act in line with our conscience. And negative stress reduces the capacity to perform at our best. And being able to get the best from our talented people is at the heart of the leadership challenge confronting organisations.

I also know through years of practicing executive coaching, that if a senior leader is not acting in line with their conscience, then it makes it more difficult for everyone else to do so. This is because they, in turn, use my coachee as an excuse for their own failure to act responsibly.

This ‘passing the buck’ of responsibility is exactly how organisations composed of good people can end up failing to act in line with their espoused values and failing to act in line with the demands of society for businesses to act responsibly.

This is exactly why too many organisations have toxic cultures, are not great places to work, and struggle to elevate their productivity to even modest levels. And it is exactly why we have a leadership crisis. Because if leadership is a special and vital form of action, and if we cannot easily act in line our conscience, then we are likely not to act at all. 

The opposite of responsible leadership isn’t irresponsible leadership; it is inaction. It is good people doing nothing. In an organisational context, it is talented people not performing. In a leadership context, it is leaders not leading.

This is why the idea of responsible leadership matters. We need all our organisations, companies, institutions, government departments, charities, and community groups to be the best expressions of our humanity. After all, we created our organisations to serve us (not the other way around) and they are the primary vehicle we have for changing the world for the better. If our organisations are to help us meet the challenges that we face as a global society then they must act responsibly – be a force for good. Otherwise at best they are irrelevant and at worst they are getting in the way.

Responsible leadership is about action