Never Good Enough
In the UK our leadership is currently in crisis. We have lost faith with the government’s ability to guide the nation through Brexit and Theresa May has just announced that should her Brexit deal be accepted she would step aside as leader of the Tory Party. Yesterday we witnessed a leader who determined to be ‘strong and stable’ and ‘execute the will of the people’ make one last strategic attempt to gain support from her Tory party for her deal.
Throughout the Brexit process we have had the disconcerting experience of observing our public servants exhibiting political opportunism in the Brexit process - changing their ideological positions and creating internal conflicts in an attempt to elevate their own political status. We have seen Theresa May struggle to gain support from her party and wider parliamentarians and witnessed her lose the confidence of the nation.
The difficulties of Theresa May’s leadership journey have been exacerbated by the unique pressures of leading in the most prominent public-facing position. As a politician she is highly visible and open to public scrutiny and faces a challenge similar to high profile CEOs or sports team managers. Their leadership is observed and scrutinised by a wide, distantly connected audience. They are compelled to operate in the world of PR and sound bites - where a stray tweet or misplaced statement can lead to widespread vilification or a fall in their company’s stock price.
In this article I want to explore four key reasons why politicians and those in public facing leadership roles always appear to end up falling out of favour with us. I want to think about how Theresa’s ‘May Day’ came about through her own decisions but was exacerbated by the tenuous relationship that we have with people who have the perilous task of leading in plain sight.
1. We often assume that we know and understand public facing leaders and are therefore more critical. Over the past few years we have heard Theresa May talk in parliament. We have seen her dance whilst on ministerial visits abroad and seen her lose her voice after losing another parliamentary debate. We have read online articles exploring her character and motivations. The continual exposure to public facing leaders means that we feel as though we know them and therefore develop tightly formed judgements about their motivations, behaviours and decisions and arrive at harsher conclusions.
2. We often overestimate the power of public facing leaders and blame lack of progress on their incompetence. As children we may have been asked the question: “What would you do if you were prime minister or president?” Most children would have responded with an answer that presupposed the power of a country’s premier leader to instantaneously introduce changes they want to make. But the reality for May and other public facing leaders is that the actual power they can yield is limited. A leader in a public facing role is often consumed with winning support from within and outside their own organisation as well as the wider public. Many of us fail to appreciate that senior leadership is often the challenge of constant compromise, managing multiple stakeholders and making difficult decisions that will inevitably please some and upset others. The assumption that our leaders have large amounts of power means that we often conclude that limited progression is due to their own ineptitude or lack of motivation.
3. We often idealise public facing leaders and project on to them unrealistic expectations for what they can achieve; and end up disappointed when they fall short. We are constantly searching for public facing leaders who will magically bring about the change we need. Rather than acknowledging the inevitable limitations of human governance; we would rather defensively hold onto the hope that a hero or heroine can solve our problems. A common pattern occurs with public facing leaders where they are idealised and swiftly denigrated when we realize they share our common flawed humanity.
4. We often use public facing leaders as scapegoats for complex problems. During difficult and unpredictable times we unconsciously look for simplistic answers to problems. We become more susceptible to the promise of simplistic causal narratives on the left and right end of the political spectrum. We tend to seek a reductive narrative or source of blame to explain our present difficulties; defensive behaviour that overshadows feelings of utter helplessness. This is why conspiracy theories become so compelling during times of difficulty - people begin to look for a binary explanation and tangible person that we can project blame on to - and a very visible leader becomes a convenient repository.
5. We often protest against public facing leaders and engage in continual fault finding. Activism is in vogue and many people feel empowered to speak against leaders and the establishment about their misgivings about decisions that are being made. This has led to hyper vigilance amongst the public about leaders’ behaviours and it can take one word or turn of phrase that can lead to a person’s vilification. The public and the media’s critical gaze means that politicians become incredibly defensive in their posture and we begin to experience them as inauthentic. This then further corrodes the precarious relationship of trust that we have with our leaders.
As the pages continue to turn in this Brexit drama, Theresa May’s announcement reminds us that there will inevitably be a new prime minister in the UK. As we begin to reflect on or critique her tenure in leadership perhaps we can temper our judgement with the knowledge that whoever replaces her will face the same shortfall that public facing leaders of governments, companies and institutions are bound to encounter.
