A Leadership Test

Leaders are judged on how they deal with their most significant challenges.

As American Express CEO Ken Chenault said on the cover of the November, 2007 Fortune, “We have to remember that reputations are won or lost in a crisis.”

Each year the consulting firm Booz & Company studies CEO turnover among the 2,500 largest public companies in the world.  Their report, published in Booz’ online magazine Strategy+Business, is worth reading, and provides not merely statistical data and trends, but also insights into the particular leadership challenges facing CEOs today.

The 2008 CEO Succession Survey, published this month, concludes that the financial and economic meltdown that began in the last third of last year is still causing CEO turmoil.  Forced CEO turnover remained high in 2008, but those CEOs who kept their jobs aren’t out of the woods yet: Read more

Worth Reading: Harvard Business Review, June, 2009, special section: Rebuilding Trust

I’ve been teaching ethics in graduate business and communication programs at New York University for more than 20 years, and every semester we lament the decline of trust.

But this year seems to be worse than most.  Trust in US corporations is at an all-time low, 38 percent, according to the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer.  And most other measures of trust in institutions also point to continuing declines.

The June issue of Harvard Business Review takes on the issue of trust with a 25-page special report, Rebuilding Trust.  It’s worth reading.  The package includes a forceful critique of business school curricula, a 100-year timeline of highlights and lowlights in the public’s trust of business, and a counter-intuitive piece on how despite recent events people may still be trusting too much.

But the real payoff is the first piece in the package, by James O’Toole and Warren Bennis.   O’Toole is the Daniels Distinguished Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, and Bennis is University Professor at the University of Southern California.  The two are co-authors (with Daniel Goleman and Patricia Ward Biederman) of Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor (Jossey-Bass, 2008).

The special report opens with O’Toole’s and Bennis’ conclusion:

“We won’t be able to rebuild trust in institutions until leaders learn how to communicate honestly — and create organizations where that’s the norm.”

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A public apology is a good way to express remorse and offer reconciliation to an affected party. But the very act of apologizing can be daunting.

If delivered effectively, an apology can mend relationships and restore trust between two or more parties.

If delivered effectively, an apology can help maintain company’s competitive advantage, reduce litigation costs and minimize business disruptions.

If delivered effectively, an apology can create a perception of genuine regret on behalf of the offender and mend his or her reputation.

But here is a question:

Can an effective delivery distract the audience from an insufficient apology?

And,

Can a weak delivery diminish a powerful message of a genuine apology?

I invite you to look at three recent apologies and share your opinion about the effectiveness of each apology is in terms of its message and its presentation.

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Humility is strength.

More than a year ago I began a series on this blog about humility as a leadership attribute.  I noted that

A dollop of humility tempers other attributes, and makes a leader even stronger. Humility helps a leader to recognize that maybe – just maybe – he or she might be wrong; that there may be other valid perspectives; that he or she doesn’t have to be the smartest person in every room, at every meeting.

Humility also helps leaders to connect with others up, down, and across the chain of command; to build organizations and cultures that more likely thrive; to understand the perspectives of other stakeholders.

Yesterday at the close of the G-20 Summit in London, President Obama put his leadership in full focus as he demonstrated both confidence and humility on the world stage.  It worked.

He gained the confidence of world leaders, including those who had previously been America’s adversaries or who had predicted that the Summit would fail.  He even got a rousing ovation from an otherwise skeptical world press corps.

In a press conference closing the Summit, President Obama demonstrated a tone that was a stark contrast to that of his predecessor, and that rallied other world leaders to seek to cooperate with the United States rather than to resist us.

President Obama set the tone before a single question was asked: Read more

Photo by KiraKalina

Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.
” Paul Boese

A significant increase in public apologies over the past months could be seen as a positive trend.

We saw the most senior leader of this country apologizing to the American public: “I screwed up.” We watched two prominent athletes A-Rod and Michael Phelps issue painful apologies to their fans.

We saw four bosses of British banks saying sorry to the Treasury Select Committee, and watched Japan’s Finance Minister announce his resignation along with a formal mea culpa.

And finally, in the last couple of weeks we heard the words of regret from Rupert Murdoch and Bishop Richard Williamson.

And yet many of these highly visible apologies failed to earn public forgiveness. Some were criticized for being too shallow and insincere, others could be hardly recognized as apologies at all.

So, what does it take to make an effective apology that comes across as true and genuine? And what are some examples of ineffective apologies that failed to resolve conflicts or earn forgiveness?
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Leadership in a Crisis

A hearty salute to Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger, III, the US Airways pilot whose cool and decisive handling of a breaking crisis prevented a plane crash from becoming a tragedy.

Captain Sullenberger, a former US Air Force fighter pilot, a pilot union safety official, and a sometime plane crash investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), exhibited exceptional leadership skills when his Airbus 320 aircraft hit a flock of geese when taking off from LaGuardia airport yesterday afternoon.

The geese took out both of his plane’s engines at approximately 3,200 feet as the plane was making a left turn over the Bronx.  With no power in his engines, Captain Sullenberger had a choice to make, and very little time to make it. Read more

What a week for crises!

Forget about the financial melt-down, the transition to the new president, or any of the really old news.

Last week was one for the record books.

The curtain rose Monday, December 8, on the usual tired old economic meltdown crises, particularly  the prospect of an auto bailout (that still hasn’t happened).

Then things got curiouser and curiouser…

Not Available on E-Bay

Tuesday Illinois governor Rod R. Blagojevich was arrested for trying to sell his appointment of President Elect Barack Obama’s vacant senate seat to a high bidder.  He’s still governor (as of 3:30 PM Monday, December 15).

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‘Nuff said….

Fred

Mumbai by karmadude, under a Creative Commons license

Mumbai by karmadude, under a Creative Commons license

Like many people in the U.S., I was out of town for Thanksgiving when I heard about the Mumbai attacks last week. After a Wednesday afternoon spent grocery shopping in Denver, CO, my family and I returned to my relatives’ house, turned on the news, and saw our first reports about the horrific attacks on CNN. Trying to learn more, I pulled up Twitter on a laptop, and searched for reports about what was happening. A flood of information started coming in.

Apparently, I wasn’t alone in using Twitter to follow the crisis. Twitter is a social networking tool that allows users (“Twitterers”) to post 140-character updates (or “tweets”) to their followers (or the public – over 80% of the 6 million users have public pages), either online, via text message or through other tools. This New York Times article notes that, “At the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word ‘Mumbai’ in it was being posted to Twitter.” Approximately 80 tweets were sent via SMS (text message) every five seconds (CNN).
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The Global Financial Market Melt-Down

I’ve been at a loss about whether or what to blog about the financial crisis, for several reasons.

  • First, our firm’s largest sector is finance/investments/insurance, and we’ve been up to our eyeballs, on things we can’t talk about.
  • Second, the policy prescriptions for solving the problem have become embroiled in the presidential election campaign.  We try very hard not to be overtly political in our work, and opining on the policy prescriptions risked getting into the presidential election scrum.

But today there’s a teachable moment, so I’ll pounce.
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