What's happened to leadership in the age of 'FUCU'?

When speaking to groups about leadership, I've found that there's little argument when I suggest that personal character is the defining quality of outstanding leaders.

For a moment, think about the people who are making (or who have made) an impact on your life. In my business career, there were three leaders who influenced me profoundly.

What I learned from my first boss - I was in my Twenties - was to DWYSYWD! ('Do what you say you will do.')  I attached this dictum to every task I undertook in those young, ambitious years. The mantra became a lifelong, unshakeable habit.

The second leader taught me to carve out time to 'do only the things you can do, because that's what the company pays you for. ' Otherwise, he suggested, 'they'll find someone else to do your job!' In other words, he encouraged me to be indispensable. He told me that every person in my work environment, every interruption, would attempt to steal that critical solo time; if I wanted to protect those hours and minutes, I needed to ring-fence them every day. In my world, that meant arriving at the office at 7AM and taking no calls or meetings until 8.30AM. And guess what? I found it was impossible to lose an account in ninety minutes.

Finally, my third significant boss asked me to imagine that every individual wore what she called 'a virtual T shirt'; the T shirt stated 'I want to feel important.' If I understood that, she said, people would be keen to work with me. So I tried to remember that 'everyone has a story', that every person I came across in the daily grind had likely got some bad thing happening, or some grief, in their life. Keeping that thought front and center made it a lot easier to be kind, and to find a way to lift their mood.

For me, those three individuals were exceptional leaders. They were authentic people. If you circled them, you wouldn't find struts holding them up, like cheap scenery in a play staged in a small town. Those leaders always fulfilled promises - or, if events made it impossible, they would be transparently honest about the reasons. They exuded calm, you knew they were on top of their life, and their tasks. And finally, they always made time for others. 

Let's now consider the leaders of our two great democracies, Donald Trump and Theresa May. Let's measure them against that package of gifts that - I submit - constitute personal character: fulfilling promises; dominating your skill set; caring about people and, to top it all, being authentic. I suggest we don't have to go into detail to know that these two flawed individuals fall short on all criteria.

Perhaps that lack of personal character has sapped any faith people might have had in most leaders worldwide. Theresa May - in an action that became known as the 'dementia tax' - wanted to drain people's home equity, rather than the state's coffers, to support them in old age. After massive protests from people and the Press, she did a U turn.

Here in the US, Donald Trump's Republican Health Bill, if it becomes law, would leave twenty-three million people uninsured in a decade. Trump himself has called the Bill 'mean'. So why do it? Because it will give tax cuts to the one-percent of Americans who least need them. And just this week, our tweeting POTUS and his vice-POTUS 'lawyered up' to face charges of obstruction of justice from a special counsel.

Who writes this stuff? Oh, wait a minute... all this is actually happening.

It may be fair (if not obvious) to suggest that this conflation of leaders and events has brought us to the age of FUCU (to borrow an acronym coined this week* by Gillian Tett of the Financial Times) where technology has made us Fragmented, Untrusting, Customized and Unpredictable. Yes, she writes, we are still tribal but we are Fragmented by social platforms that 'only allow us to connect with people we select.' She reports that a survey by PR firm Edelman finds that we are Untrusting about institutions and self-styled experts but we remain trustful of 'a person like me'; so perhaps it's not surprising that research should find we trust our colleagues more than we do our CEOs. We live in a Customized world, used to 'having it my way' but that's why we're not satisfied by tired 'off the peg' political solutions; we want something tailored to our specific needs. That's why the 'forgotten people' wanted Trump; that's why the old and the disadvantaged wanted Brexit.

All of these swirling influences make the world an Unpredictable place, she suggests. And that's why pollsters are unable to tap into voter intentions with any degree of accuracy. That's why elite intellectuals, academics, and 'the commentariat' found it so hard to foresee the votes for Brexit and Trump.

For me, the only 'grown-up' presently on the political world stage is Angela Merkel; dour, plain, patient, modest, authentic - with heaps of personal character. Attach those adjectives to May or Trump and you'll realize they don't fit.

Leading people or leading countries is, as anyone still reading this knows, a matter of providing a vision that has meaning for those that follow. Such leadership is infectious, consistent, humble, authentic and, above all, adult.

In the age of FUCU, it seems the adults have left the building. But we don't have to follow.


© Brian Clewly Johnson
Amagansett, June 2017

* 'Cultural shifts among voters that underpin poll surprises.' - FT 17/18 June 2017.