We Need New Leaders

by Charlotte Otter: (excerpt number one of two, exclusively for Strategic.Global)

The leadership crisis 

Through almost any lens, our current context is not great. We live in a world at war. The planet is discernibly hotter. A very small number of people are growing richer and richer, a very large number of people are staying very poor and the middle classes are embattled. Despite more awareness, we’re failing to stem sexual violence and violence against those who are demonstrably other. Every election makes us hold our collective breath because it could change everything. 

Because it’s slow, it feels organic. But it is not. Every one of these things follows a leadership decision. Leaders decide to bomb civilians. Leaders decide not to fine or contain fossil fuel companies. Leaders decide not to tax billionaires. Leaders decide not to prosecute people who commit sexual violence or to educate soldiers that rape and torture are not legitimate tools of war.  

You may say we live in a terrible world. I say we live in a world run by terrible leaders with reputations for terrible behaviour. Amongst them are many good leaders. Th e terrible conditions, while not of their own choosing, impact how they lead. They have to navigate the context, act competently, make decisions, explain why they are making them and stand for something so that their employees and citizens in the communities in which they operate understand who they are and whether to follow them or not. Their ability to do so, either well or poorly, is reputational. 

The leadership crisis we are in is both a crisis of leaders (behaviour and personal traits that create our context, and which we reward) and a crisis for leaders (a context that challenges them personally). 

The crisis of leaders 

There is a big gap between the proto-dictators of our time, and leaders of business. However, there is a spectrum of leadership behaviour that we recognize as the norm. Through centuries of experience that have accreted in our brains, we have come to believe that leadership looks, sounds and feels a certain way. 

To us, leadership might be loud. It might be big. It might have a room-owning energy. It might seem always confident. It might be backslappingly supported by others of its type. It might fail upwards. It might take advantage of those who are weaker in social capital. It might mock or exclude those who are other to it. It might engage in exclusive social activities. It might claim other people’s success as its own. It might hire, reward, promote and retain only those who resemble it. 

Leaders like this have got us to where we are today. 

This is because we have a flawed leadership archetype that mistakes confidence for competence. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, whose 2013 Harvard Business Review article ‘Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?’ is one of the most-read articles on that site, encapsulates this in his eponymous book. His take is that it’s not the perceived glass ceiling for women that’s the problem so much as ‘the lack of career obstacles for incompetent men.’

In the book, Chamorro-Premuzic explores the relationship between leadership and the toxic traits of narcissism and psychopathy. He quotes various studies that estimate the rate of psychopathy in senior management roles at between 4–20%; and the rate of narcissism (1% in the general population) amongst CEOs at 5%. ‘Both traits are also more likely to be found in men than in women. For instance, the rate of clinical narcissism is almost 40% higher in men than in women… Meanwhile, psychopathy occurs three times more often in men than it does in women.’  

These traits, he says, help people advance their careers but hurt the people and the organizations they lead. We are so entranced by the confidence and charisma these people exude that we do not recognize that they are not good leaders. 

Kholi, who is the Southern African MD of a global multinational, spoke to this conflation in our interview: 

‘Sometimes our brains have been wired to think that people who look intelligent and come across as charming are intelligent, whereas we might be missing the most intelligent who would actually provide a significant input. What I’ve learned over the years is how I can spot within my team the person who will actually help me take my organization forward rather than the loudest and the smartest. And I think in a sales context, there are so many of those, and one mistake you will make is focusing only on the loudest. You must be able to have that capability to sift through that to find the expertise you need.’  

Our systems of understanding lead us to think we know what a leader looks, sounds and behaves like. These systems make it harder for us to break the mould, and so the hurdles for women, men who do not look like the norm, people of colour and those who present as non-binary are set even higher. Mary Ann Sieghart’s book The Authority Gap defines bias as the flip side of privilege, and it’s our systems of understanding that bias us against leaders who don’t look like the dominant norm. 

Let’s take a brief look at these. 

The systems we are up against 

While this book looks at leadership from an individual lens, it’s important to state from the outset that many of the problems are systemic. I’ve teased out some of the systemic strands but they are all woven together into a thick rope of separation that threads through society. And while many organizations or businesses lay claim to a modern sensibility that would never actively reflect them, the systemic problems are pervasive – in the society in which employees are raised, in the images of the organization or the metaphors it uses to describe itself and how these play out for individuals trying to succeed at work. It may seem systemic, but it is experienced as personal. 

Gareth Morgan’s book Images of Organization is a management literature classic. In it, he references several metaphors that organizations employ whether wittingly or not. Morgan says ‘the evidence for a patriarchal view of organization is easy to see.’ Men were socialized to take management roles; women were socialized to take more subordinate roles. As women started to take on more leadership roles, Morgan says, they were still socialized to appear as rational and analytic (like men) and to downplay any qualities the patriarchy sees as female, such as intuition, nurturing and empathy. ‘So long as organizations are dominated by patriarchal values, the roles of women in organizations will always be played out on “male” terms.’

At their best, these values are paternalistic; at their worst, authoritarian. To create change for leaders and employees alike, we need to learn to value different human qualities. 

Another archetype that besets us at work, and which the masculine archetype plays into because of its top-down command and control nature, is the mechanistic one. We’re all cogs in the machine, each being maximized for profit. This is a metaphor that grew out of the Industrial Revolution. In the twentieth century, it morphed into organizational systems that bureaucratized human output (think of Henry Ford’s production line, clocking in and out, spans of control, goals, objectives and rationalization) and this has not yet left us. 

As Gareth Morgan says, ‘One of the most basic problems of modern management is that the mechanical way of thinking is so ingrained in our everyday conceptions of organization that it is often very difficult to organize in any other way.’

This system of understanding leads us to think that good leaders are good controllers, and employees are silent and obedient. There is little space for change, unless decreed from above, little flexibility, people become passive and the atmosphere is fear-based. However, we do see resistance to this as employees are now more choosy about where they work and adjudicate future employers based on company policy and purpose. The battle currently being played out, which researchers call the ‘Great Disconnect,’ is a symbol of employees’ resistance to being told to return to the office, despite having been incredibly productive during the pandemic.7 The leaders who insist on returns to office risk being seen as controlling, old-fashioned and autocratic. 

The quarterly pursuit of results above building long-term value is another system of understanding that affects how we experience leaders. Renowned British economist Sir John Kay’s recent book The Corporation in the 21st Century describes how the pursuit of shareholder value has destroyed some of the leading companies of the twentieth century. In it, he talks about the tensions between ‘stakeholder capitalism or shareholder priority’ and calls those who presume the two are aligned ‘naive.’ In our current understanding, good leaders lay off employees in order to deliver quarterly shareholder value, or, as in the case of Boeing, systematically underprivilege innovation and market leadership for shareholder value allowing its competitor Airbus’ A320 to overtake the 737 as the bestselling aircraft in history. 

These paternalistic, bureaucratic and short-term systems embrace a transactional form of leadership in which employees are rewarded for doing what they are told and punished for not. The stick-and-carrot leadership style that this engenders is not working, and is partially responsible for the burnout epidemic.10 A recent meta-analysis on workplace aggression (471 studies, across 36 countries and totalling nearly 150,000 people) showed that it is harmful to performance. Kim Scott, who was an executive at Google and Apple before going on to write her acclaimed book Radical Candor, says that: ‘command and control can hinder innovation and harm a team’s ability to improve the efficiency of routine work. Bosses and companies get better results when they voluntarily lay down unilateral power and encourage their teams and peers to hold them accountable, when they quit trying to control employees and focus instead on encouraging agency.’

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Charlotte Otter is an author, speaker and executive communications advisor. She spent most of her career in tech, leading executive and employee communications, but now serve global clients in a variety of industries. With more than 25 years of experience in communications, including global leadership roles, Charlotte helps high-performing CEOs, CxOs and teams craft and deliver compelling stories that support their business strategy and goals. Her latest book We Need New Leaders is grounded in her experience as a communications executive, as well as her novel research for her MSc in Change Leadership from HEC Paris. It is both a handbook and a manifesto for change at the leadership level and will be published on 2 June 2025. Charlotte writes on LinkedIn and on her Substack newsletter Speech Bubbles.

Written by: Editor