Wanted: leaders with courage

Leadership is primarily about change. It is about action. It is about having the courage to develop a different vision and strategy, to empower others to act and to have the strength of character to set the right examples and to stay with the pain and sacrifices of change.

Change is an imperative for any organisation but it does take courage to face the real risks of change. Yet as Charles Darwin once said, "it is not the strongest that survive, nor the most intelligent but the ones most responsive to change". And we should recognise that compelling line about change: "the plains of Siberia are littered with the bones of sled drivers who thought that they would rest up for the night and that the pursuing wolves would do the same."

These are definitely stressful times for business leaders but, as a leader in business or in any field, you must have the courage to care, to care enough about your deeply held personal principles, that you hold to these in the face of personal risks.

The recent massive corporate failures in Australia, the United States and other Western countries not only represent, as Business Week says, "corrupt and unethical behaviour on an unimaginable scale", but also major failures of courage. The question is being asked "can trust be rebuilt" in our corporate institutions?

In the case of Enron and WorldCom, this failure of courage manifested as something of a conspiracy of silence that allowed the companies to reel out of control. A similar silence pervaded the 1929 crash. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the financial luminaries of the era: "The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise on Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish have the field to themselves and no-one rebukes them."

And so it has been today, just as 73 years ago. "There's still a tradition, a culture of restraint that keeps one from attacking one's colleagues, one's co-workers, no matter how wrong they seem to be." Galbraith speaks to this failure of nerve and courage when he says, "in any great organisation it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone".

Public trust in the basic truthfulness of companies or their corporate leaders is coming undone. People everywhere are asking - who and what can you trust? According to the latest Gallup Poll, public confidence in big business is at its lowest level since 1981. And based on the structuring of executive compensation packages and the fact that turnover for chief executives has never been higher, it takes a certain courage these days for business leaders to look beyond this year's results to the long-term health of the organisation.

The old adage "you get the behaviours you reward" may never be more appropriate than in these times of "corporate excess" and unethical behaviour on a massive scale. These acts of weakness by certain corporate leaders have, to a significant extent, been driven not only by poor corporate governance practices but by remuneration packages that have fostered short-term thinking, greed and a widespread suspension of acceptable values. Also by an absence of courage.

Today's business leaders used up much of their community credit. Those who exploit the negative public mood, say - now is the time for them to be brutally honest about their actions. Some of these people are politicians, some are civil servants. Each likes to provide a difficulty for every solution. What they share in this preference for "brutal honesty" is that they get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.

It is also important to not confuse conscience and ethics. Conscience has two forms - first, the inner voice that knows what's right and what's not and second, the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking. The fear of being caught is hardly a strong philosophical base for any self-imposed code of commercial behaviour and ethics, and, I suspect, often gets a lot of credit that actually belongs to "cold feet"!

Leadership - and courage in leadership - is knowing what's right and then acting on it.