Post-Pandemic Leadership

Exploring Solutions to a Crisis

Morgen Witzel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000557367
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book shows readers how to rethink and reimagine leadership and charts a course towards a new vision of leadership. It outlines lessons to be learned for leadership – not only after the COVID pandemic but also in light of other ongoing crises around issues such as climate change and global inequality.

The pandemic has shone a harsh spotlight not just on the leaders of organisations but on the concept of leadership itself and the way we lead. Many of those who were in positions of power before the crisis have been found wanting; too often, our idols have turned out to have feet of clay. But does the problem lie with the leaders themselves, or do the roots of the problem lie deeper? Do we need to start rethinking and reimagining the kind of leadership we will need in a post-COVID world? Post-Pandemic Leadership brings voices from every sector to demonstrate what changes we can make in order to make leadership fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.

Illustrating a need for a radical change in leadership, with leaders focusing much more on human relationships, kindness, fairness, well-being and a general sense of responsibility, this book will be of interest to both established leaders and the next generation of leaders in education and in practice.

1 Introduction

Morgen Witzel

DOI: 10.4324/9781003171737-1

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We are in the middle of a perfect storm. Global pandemic, the onrushing environmental disaster, rampant inequality and the rise of authoritarianism loom over us. Old certainties and old faiths about society, community, organisations and leadership are being challenged. Emotionally, it feels like the future is probably more uncertain than it has been at any point in our lifetimes. Rationally, that is probably not true – for one thing, how do you measure uncertainty? – but there is a feeling of existential threat nonetheless.

In times of crisis, we look to our leaders. We ask questions of them: what are they going to do about the problems? How are they going to help us? Where are they going to lead us? But increasingly, it seems our leaders are just as much in the dark as the rest of us. Alarmingly few of them seem to have any plan for dealing with the crisis, or if they do have one, they aren’t communicating with the rest of us. Do our leaders actually know how to lead in the modern world, or are they still clinging to outdated models like command and control in hopes that if they shout loudly enough, someone will listen and obey their orders?

It is relatively easy to lead when times are good, the economy is stable, society is functioning more or less as normal and we can predict the short-term future, at least, with a moderate amount of certainty. But crisis is the true test of a leader. To borrow a metaphor from Warren Buffett, when the tide goes out, that’s when you find out who has been swimming naked. The pandemic and the other crises have exposed the weaknesses of many people in positions of leadership.

Blaming individuals for failures of leadership is easy; too easy. The problem lies much deeper than just the leaders themselves. It lies in our own expectations of leadership, how we define it, what we expect leaders to do. It lies in how we train, develop and select leaders, and the qualities we mistakenly look for in a leader, like authority and decisiveness and charisma. It lies in what we all – leaders included – think makes the ideal leader. Above all, it lies in the long-standing view that leadership is something that is inherent in leaders, a quality that radiates out from them. Leadership is something we do to people, not with them.

And that view of leadership is not longer good enough, if it ever was. The title of this book, Post-Pandemic Leadership: Exploring Solutions to a Crisis, has two meanings. We talk here about leadership lessons from the crisis, but we also believe that leadership itself is in crisis. We need to fundamentally rethink the nature of how we lead, and how we teach and train others to lead. That is what this book is about. It discusses concepts like kindness, humility, fairness, trust and service, and argues that these are the fundamental platform on which leadership is built. If we are to get through the crisis and build a better, fairer world, we need a new kind of leadership and a new kind of leader.

Origins

The idea for this book arose during an online meeting of the Fellows of the Exeter Centre for Leadership during the early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020. The Fellows are a network of professionals from many different backgrounds who support the Centre and the University of Exeter Business School more generally, and one of the purposes of the meeting was to see what, if anything, we could do to respond to the crisis.

These were particularly dark times; hospitalisation rates and death tolls were rising sharply, the UK and most of the rest of the world was under severe lockdown, little was understood about the nature and spread of the disease, and vaccination looked a very long way off. The group was determined, however, to find a silver lining and to do something positive. What lessons could be learned from the crisis? What could we do to make a positive contribution?

Comparing notes from our various perspectives, one of the things we all noticed was how the ‘official’ recognised leaders in a wide range of organisations were struggling to cope with the demands of the crisis. But there was something else. When these leaders failed, others stepped in to fill the void. Community volunteers, doctors and nurses on COVID wards, teachers in beleaguered schools, workers adapting to working from home – all found that when their official leaders failed them, the only thing left was to step up and take the reins oneself.

Other books will hopefully tell the story of these tens of thousand of unsung heroes who got us through the initial stages of the crisis. Our purpose is not to write a history of leadership during the pandemic, but to look at the lessons for leadership and think about some ways of re-imagining leadership in the future. When commissioning this book, we went out to look for people with very different perspectives on leadership, who could suggest different directions going forward. The brief we gave them was simple: we want to see something different, new ways of thinking about and doing leadership.

The contributors come from many different backgrounds: academia, business, journalism, the education and arts sectors, charities, the armed forces. Some were on the front line during the pandemic, or had access to front-line sources; others don’t mention it at all. Some of the chapters are academic and scholarly; others are commentaries or are based on personal experience. Some of the authors are household names in their fields, thought leaders and respected authorities; others are young, first-time writers who write from the perspective of the future of leadership, not its past. Some of the people we originally approached and who were full of enthusiasm for the project were not in the end able to contribute; writing chapters for a book like this was never going to be easy, but writing during a pandemic brought its own special pressures. As a result, some subjects which were dear to our hearts have been left out of the book. To everyone who supported this project in whatever way, we say a heartfelt thank you.

Structure of the book

We have divided the chapters into two parts, although there is considerable overlap between the parts in terms of chapter content. Part I, ‘Reflections on Leadership in Crisis’, is a mix of personal accounts and commentaries on the nature of the crisis and how ‘traditional’ leadership is failing us.

In Chapter 2, Justin Featherstone recounts his experiences among the Konyak people of Nagaland. The history of the Konyaks is one of near continuous warfare and raiding, and danger was ever-present; the sort of society where we would assume that authoritarian leadership was necessary for survival. That assumption would be wrong. What Justin found instead was a form of leadership based on kindness and respect for others. ‘Kindness is so important in a good leader’, one of the Konyak elders tells him. ‘Leaders who lack the quality of kindness cannot build the true relationships that ensure the success of a community.’ The lesson is that in a time of crisis, good leaders concentrate on building communities that can survive the test.

Another quality essential to good leadership is fairness and equity. According to Gay Haskins and Mike Thomas in Chapter 3, fairness is essential to creating trust, which in turn leads to greater engagement and a share sense of purpose. All too often, fairness is a casualty of leadership; leaders who try to be fair to everyone are seen as being weak. But in a world where inequality is rampant, be in terms of educational opportunities, chance for job advancement or access to vaccines, fairness has become something to be prized. Fair leaders tend also to be trusted leaders.

The arguments made by Justin, Gay and Mike would seem to be unassailable; so why, ask Keith Grint and Clare Holt, do we continue to respect leaders who aren’t up to the job? Why do we support the charismatic narcissists who make promises they cannot keep? There is a tendency, they say in Chapter 4, to put our faith in individuals rather than systems, and despite the lessons of history, we keep repeating the same mistake. Their dissection of global failures in the response to COVID is strong evidence for the argument that not only do we pick the wrong leaders, but we also need to think again about what we expect of our leaders and what leadership actually is.

Alan Hooper also questions in Chapter 5 whether we are right to place our hopes in individuals. In his comparative study of two crises, the COVID pandemic and the Falklands War in 1982, Alan suggests that the response to crisis depends on things such as thorough advance planning – even if the plan later has to be substantially adapted – and rapid response when the crisis strikes. Some leaders are capable of responding to crisis, others are not. Systems, rather than individuals, are what often make the difference. Systems are resilient; many people are not.

Building on this, Ian MacQueen argues in Chapter 6 that in times of crisis, compassion, empathy and integrity are among the most valuable attributes a leader can possess. Like Keith and Clare, Ian is sharply critical of ‘messianic’ leaders who promise to lead us to a shining future; very seldom are those promises kept. Instead, he points approvingly to local initiatives and leaders who step into the breach and build strong communities. ‘What has been conceived as effective leadership practices in the past may not work in the future’, Ian warns, calling for leaders to be people of character and judgement rather than charisma.

This argument is reinforced by Stefan Stern, who calls in Chapter 7 for the dismantling of ‘leadership myths’ and a new vision of leadership to embrace the radical uncertainty of our times. Among the myths Stefan dismantles are: 1) the people want a heroic figure out front; 2) the big picture is most important; 3) ‘boosterism’ will carry people along; and 4) men make the most successful, assertive leaders. None of these things is remotely true, says Stefan, and the pandemic has shown all four to be myths. Will these old beliefs about leadership disappear in the aftermath of the epidemic? Human nature being what it is, there is no way of knowing for certain, but there is an opportunity for us to re-invent leadership – should we care to take it.

The counterpunch to Stefan’s article comes from Tawanda Mhindurwa, who issues in Chapter 8 a clarion call for leadership in Africa to become more responsive to the needs of the people. ‘How do we begin creating the continent that will not leave anyone behind, and serve its peoples’ aspirations before selfish needs?’ he asks. ‘What is standing in the way of Africa being great?’ The answer, he argues, is Africa’s leaders who are not only failing to lead progress but in some cases are actively hindering it. Many of the arguments Tawanda makes about Africa can be applied to other parts of the world, as well – including, I submit, the developed West. We have all suffered under leaders who hold us back. It is time for change.

Part II of the book, ‘Future Directions’, discusses some of the future directions for that change. We begin with Alison Hogan’s discussion in Chapter 9 of lessons to be learned from philosophical anarchism. We often think of anarchism as being an absence of leadership, but as Alison points out, leadership actually plays an important role in anarchism. Unlike conventional leadership, in anarchism power is heavily distributed and is exercised through networks rather than individuals. Community leadership has real power, but often that power is latent, buried beneath the weight of bureaucracy and top-down command and control. Clearing away these weighty and inefficient structures can allow leadership to flourish.

Taking a different angle, Eve Poole and Anthony Bash argue in Chapter 10 that leadership should be treated like a craft rather than profession, and focus on what leaders need to do rather than conceptual views of what leadership is. Among a number of key leadership tasks, they identify issues such as taking responsibility and managing ambiguity, but they also point out that leaders need to accept they will not get it right every time. Conventional wisdom suggests that failure is unacceptable in a leader, but the reality is that all leaders fail at some point, and what really matters is how they handle failure. Candour and the swift making of amends are important to rebuild relationships and refashion trust, and one of the ultimate tests of a leader is how well they live and embody their values.

Picking up on some of the points made in earlier chapters, Lucie Hartley and Richard Bolden in Chapter 11 look at why we default towards toxic types of leadership and compare this to the drivers behind drug and alcohol addiction. Changing our mental models of leadership, they argue, is akin to the process of recovery. They describe how the behaviours of toxic leaders create dependence on the part of followers and show how some of the techniques of recovery can be used to reduce that dependence and show us the limitations of so-called ‘heroic’ leadership. One of the conclusions we can draw from this chapter is that toxic leadership is bad for us in many ways, not least for our mental health.

Leaders themselves can become addicted to power, but power comes in different forms. In my own contribution, I argue in Chapter 12 that traditional leadership models concentrate on legal authority and the power to reward and punish. However, these forms of power are often inflexible, and as we saw during the pandemic, and thus are not well suited to leading through a crisis. I argue that other, softer forms of power based on personal skills and experience, and the ability to communicate the trust we engender in other people, are more reflexive and more adap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• List of illustrations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Reflections on Leadership in Crisis
• Part II Future Directions
• Index