Disappointing Leaders Save the Day
March 2024
By Alastair Colin-Jones,
Senior Director, Business Transformation & Learning,
Mutual Value Labs
There is a song filling our home at the moment that starts, “All shout hooray, ‘cause in the night we saved the day!”.
Some will wonder quizzically where that is from, others will recognise it instantly and no doubt will now be smiling because you also have young children. It’s from PJ Masks. For those without 4- or 5-year-old children, it is a superhero series with a simple premise of young children with superpowers who fight various villains through the night (hence the PJs) so that people don’t have their day ruined.
The pressure to be the hero is only increasing, and that is exhausting – especially if you are a business leader. The pressure to be the smartest, fastest, strongest is huge, after all they are things that enable you to save the day, right? There is something very human about that, my sons certainly quite like the idea of ‘Super Cat Speed’ and ‘Super Gekko Strength’ (just some of the PJ Mask super powers). It’s hard to not be drawn in. But the truth is we don’t need more heroic leaders; we actually need more disappointing ones.
Our Oxford program is not a general leadership course where you sign up to learn to be a heroic leader, it’s a program where you will be challenged and supported to become a real leader. More specifically, it is one designed to cultivate and develop leaders that can take forward one of the most profound and urgent transformations, namely: to lead business and finance into a better way of seeing its relationship with people and planet and a better way of doing the work of value creation. It’s a better paradigm for business and finance that we call mutual value creation. Paradoxically, for this task, being a disappointing leader is critical to success.
Guiding people and organizations through such a profound paradigm shift, is in the words of Harvard academic, Ron Heifetz, “a matter of failing people’s expectations at a rate they can stand”. Not your typical core leadership competency! But today, more than ever, we need leaders who don’t reduce the task of leadership to keeping key stakeholders happy, but who see beyond the status quo and are willing to experiment with alternatives and test and learn, robustly. This experimenting is not reckless, and the willingness to challenge is not ignorant. It needs to be done at a rate that people can stand. If you fail to manage effectively in the present, you lose the platform to lead experiments that take us to the future.
It is a delicate and dynamic dance that can’t be done if you aren’t willing to disappoint. Navigating the kind of change entailed by this paradigm shift means that the outcome is uncertain, the path isn’t clear, and the risk is meaningful; “I don’t know” is often the honest answer. It is hard to occupy a now-but-not-yet space between what is, and the transformation that is coming but not fully here. Heifetz used the image of a dance floor and balcony to disguish between the positions that leaders need to occupy. The dance floor is about being in the thick of the action and the balcony about deliberately stepping back, gaining perspective to spot patterns and interplay. But the balcony is wrongly understood if it feels too passive, it is the critical space required for sense-making and reflection.
Our Oxford program is about cultivating leaders who will get on the dance floor and be on the balcony. It is for leaders that want to occupy both spaces and to gain the expert support from peers and practitioners that will help them do so. If you are like me, there will be a lot of disappointment with some classic dad moves, but you can’t learn unless you get on the floor and on the balcony so you can see what is really happening.
This isn’t a call to heoric leadership, even though the stakes are similar, after all the day (and our future) needs saving. We need leaders who are prepared to disappoint, are you?
