Heroes and villains why do we need them? In a crisis we need a hero, a strong leader, someone who inspires confidence in uncertain times, 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 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 amongst the top 100 performing organisations shows that those 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 you also believe that if things go spectacularly wrong then no matter how big the organisation and how far the leader was from the decision they are still to blame. The baby P child abuse case illustrates this point. Despite the fact that the tragedy was down to the actions of front line staff and the decisions of first line managers and despite a positive inspection of the service it was still felt necessary to sack the Director.
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, that is 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 is suffering, when morale is low and unpopular changes are required it will be teams at every level in the organisation that pull us through not the oratory of a high profile celebrity leader.
Blair McPherson is author of People management in a harsh financial climate published by www.russellhouse.co.uk