Leadership: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Grint Keith

Author:Grint, Keith [Grint, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

So what kinds of characters do leaders seem to be now? Kaplan’s analysis suggests an even more stereotyped model – CEOs are not just THWM but also archetypal alpha-males: aggressive, efficient, persistent, privileged, and uncompromising. So we can change our acronym now to tall handsome white alpha-males (of) privilege, or THWαMPs (which is easier to say than THWMs). Yet Kaplan’s data are derived from CEOs of private equity firms… the very arena that seems to be mired in financial disaster as I write. Perhaps this personality type explains why, according to Andrew Clark, five days after the world’s largest insurance company, AIG, accepted an $85 billion emergency loan from the US government to stave off bankruptcy (17 September 2008), the company spent $440,000 on a week-long corporate retreat at one of California’s top beachside resorts. Or, as Henry Waxman, chair of the US Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said to Richard Fuld, then CEO of Lehman Brothers, on 8 October 2008: ‘Your company is bankrupt and our economy is in a state of crisis. Yet you get to keep $480m. I have a very basic question: Is that fair?’ The following day, AIG was granted access to a further $37.8 billion from the US state; it must have been a great party. In fact, the party must still be in full swing: in 1999, the average ratio of CEO to employee pay in the UK rose from 47 to 128, with Bart Becht, CEO of Reckitt Benckiser, topping the show at 1,374 (Becht received £37 million in 2008, whilst the average employee salary of the Slough-based multinational was £26,700 – the UK’s national average). Not that Becht needed to fear isolation: the average pay of the top 25 FTSE 100 directors in 2007/8 was over £10 million (as quoted in The Guardian).

Now the real issue here is not about fairness, if the implication is that treating followers as fellow humans rather than corporate resources is the way to lead successfully. That patently is not the case. There are lots of examples of success being driven through monstrous behaviour, by extraordinary cruelty, by slavery, and by many other ‘unfair’ leaders. Perhaps the point is twofold. First, fairness is only an appropriate criterion for judging leaders in contexts that are culturally associated with fairness. In crises, for example in war, survival is probably more important to most followers than fairness. But when the financial crisis struck the global markets in October 2008, the prior assumption about the importance of corporate success over fairness was reversed, and one of the reasons for the delay in passing the rescue package through the US Congress was because it was perceived to be unfair – to favour the bankers who had allegedly caused the problem at the expense of the tax-payers who were expected to rescue the bankers from their own mistakes. Second, returning to Chapter 2, we might suggest that the kind of leadership that works depends on (1) what the situation appears

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