We Need Great Leadership Now, and Here's What It Looks Like
In a time of crisis, like we are in now, with people feeling frightened and uncertain, leadership doesn’t just matter more. It matters exponentially more.
Because even small errors in navigation can have exponential consequences when you’re spending $1 trillion in a week — while fighting a pandemic that spreads so fast that hesitating for just a week can totally sap your ability to manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.
In moments like these, when the choices we make are so impactful, people desperately want to believe that their leaders know what they’re doing. But they quickly learn that in times like these, leaders either grow or swell — they either grow out of their weaknesses and rise to the level of the challenge or all of their worst weaknesses swell to new levels.
And pandemics leave nothing hidden. They flow into every tiny corner and pore and expose every weakness or strength in your society: how much trust you have in your government; how much social trust exists in your community to enable collaboration; the strength of your companies’ balance sheets; how prepared your government is to tackle the unexpected; how many of its people are living paycheck to paycheck; and what kind of public health care safety nets you’ve built.
We have never had a simultaneous global leadership stress test like this — one that is testing leaders from the schoolhouse to the White House and from city halls to corporate suites. Everyone will be graded.
Because this is such a critical leadership test at all levels, and because it is so not over, I called my teacher and friend Dov Seidman — who is the founder and chairman of both the ethics and compliance company LRN and the How Institute for Society, which promotes values-based leadership — to explore this issue.
This is an edited version of our conversation:
TF: It’s hard to think of a time since World War II when the question of what makes a good leader was more central.
DS: Because leadership in so many different levels and spheres has never mattered so much all at the same time — teachers, principals, presidents, school superintendents, hospital directors, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors, media and parents. And everywhere these leaders turn they face vexing moral issues and trade-offs. That’s because what started as a health crisis exploded into a humanitarian crisis and then quickly became an unprecedented economic and unemployment crisis. And now it’s also a moral crisis, forcing leaders to balance saving lives and saving livelihoods.
On top of all that, these crises are combusting together in the age of social media, so fear, panic and misinformation spread instantly and widely, and leaders can be challenged, scrutinized, criticized and exposed from a million different directions.
TF: It’s not easy leading anything today, but what do the best leaders have in common?
DS: Great leaders trust people with the truth. And they make hard decisions guided by values and principles, not just politics, popularity or short-term profits. Great leaders understand that when so many vulnerable and scared people are so willing, so quickly, to put their livelihoods and even their lives in their leaders’ hands, and make sacrifices asked of them, they expect the truth and nothing but the truth in return. Leaders who trust people with the truth are trusted more in return. But you better not betray my trust — by not telling me the truth — when I have literally put my life in your hands.
The leaders we will remember from this crisis are those who put more shared truth into our world, not muddied it. And those who put more trust into our world and not eroded it.
In my view, trust is the only legal performance-enhancing drug. Whenever there is more trust in a company, country or community, good things happen.