Category Archives: Leadership

Leaders can be bullies too.

Leaders can be bullies too. And their poor behaviour will infect the whole organisation.

When I hear the word “bully“, even at work, I inevitably recall the schoolyard bullies of my youth. Often with a clique of sycophants, they were the nasty kids who tried to intimidate others. Their gangs were not deeply committed to being mean. They were committed to survival. Better, they reasoned, to support a thug than get sand kicked in their faces. Or worse, become the butt-end of cruel taunts about bad haircuts.

Unfortunately, we do not leave the bullies behind when we leave the playground. Bullies grow up and find their niche in adult life. The ease with which they establish themselves in an organisation—think parasitic wasp, not butterfly—signals the workplace’s tolerance for bad behaviour

In an organisation with a strong supportive culture, managers deal with bullying swiftly and seriously. Minor incidents are treated as teachable moments. At low levels, the strategy may be as simple as one colleague being empowered to stand up for another—to make it known there is a line in the sand. At higher levels, when bad behaviour escalates, complaints about bullying are heard, taken seriously, and investigated rather than diverted and buried.

In one organisation I worked for, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) was a well-known, old-school playground bully without the finesse one might expect from a modern leader.

One day, he wandered into my office. He didn’t like my research group’s strategy and wanted to tell me so. Dropping into a chair without greeting or invitation, he rocked back and started into me. I held my position. He became angrier and raised his voice. His reputation for shouting preceded him, and I was prepared. I had decided to match him decibel for decibel. He became louder; I became louder. 

He quickly realised that we were shouting at each other and began to drop the volume. I followed suit. For about 10 minutes, the loudness of the conversation rose and fell. At the end of it, he smiled at me, said, “good chat”, rocked himself out of the chair and left. We had not agreed, but we had reached a rapprochement, and he left me to manage my own team.

I would not recommend my strategy even though it worked at the time. It can be extremely frightening to have a large adult male shout at you. It is also precisely why they do it. Unless you can cope with the aggressiveness of the interaction (and frankly, why should you?), shouting back is not going to work. It’s also unprofessional and fails to address the more significant structural issue. 

Bullying was a regular tactic in my boss’s amentarium, and I achieved a temporary, personal solution that left others exposed. Because no one had ever managed his behaviour, his experience was that shouting worked. It was rewarded by compliance, and compliance was what he wanted.

Much of the leadership literature is about the qualities that one requires to “bring people along”, sell a vision, encourage engagement, (re-)align activities, and gather support for the (new) organisational strategy. The CEO short-circuited that messy business by bullying staff. Instead of intelligent workers, he wanted compliant widgets. The tactic, however, is stupid and lazy. Leaders who adopt it will lose one of their greatest assets. Disempowering staff reduces an organisation’s human capital. The short term win of reluctant compliance is offset by a deterioration of morale, the loss of good employees, and an absence of fresh perspectives. Organisations that accept bullying in leadership tacitly agree to become weaker organisations

Bullying is also a quickly learned behaviour that obviates the need for senior staff to hone their leadership skills. If at first you don’t succeed, shout louder. Others learn the strategy, and it becomes an existential danger for the organisation.

Unfortunately, bullies in leadership are often not ranting, physical thugs and they don’t wear convenient labels. “BEWARE, BULLY!!!”. They have more polished and sophisticated tacticsThe techniques can be pretty subtle and their true nature is often concealed from those who are not the targets. 

When the most senior person in the organisation is a bully, who then will take action? The organisation’s Board or equivalent should step in, but this is easier said than done. The bullied staff member needs to know how to raise their concerns to the Board, and the Board needs to have the willingness to listen and act.

For a bullied staff member to complain, they have to believe it will make a difference. Unfortunately, complaining is often the employment equivalent of stretching your neck out on the chopping block. The victim needs to trust the process, and many organisations provide no basis for that trust. For managing bullies in leadership, the process should be well known, straightforward, and direct to the Board. It never entered my head to complain about my former CEO. I thought it was my problem, and I did not know of any internal processes, let alone a route to the Board. There are also, almost certainly, gender dimensions to who is bullied, how they manage it, and how seriously they are taken.

To manage bullying complaints about leaders, Board members need to be informed, engaged, and empowered to take the complaints seriously. “The Board has an absolute and unmistakable obligation to exercise oversight of workforce culture“. For NGOs, not-for-profits and other non-commercial Boards, membership is often voluntary or unremunerated. Such part-time, “not too serious” Boards can be particularly vulnerable to Directors’ and Trustees’ ignorance and lack of training. There are also disincentives for Boards to take bullying complaints seriously about senior leadership.

The CEO is usually a member of the Board and a colleague of the rest of the members. Some of the Board members will have been nominated by the CEO. Others may have been a part of the CEO’s selection process. When the CEO nominates a person to the Board, the nominee’s sense of loyalty can cloud their judgment about the CEO’s wrong-doing. After all, if the CEO nominated me, she must be OK because I’m great. When the CEO is found wanting, there may be a real sense of failure or a loss of face by Board members involved in the appointment. If a CEO is a bully, clients and the senior leadership team may question the Board’s competence and seek a review of the due diligence processes, with all the attendant embarrassment that can flow from that. All these impediments encourage Boards to obfuscate.

A quick internal process in the guise of swift action is a short-term (wrong-headed) solution to complaints about senior leadership bullying. The result is a superficial examination of the complaint that gives the Board comfort. It allows for a peremptory dismissal of the complaint and avoids embarrassment or culpability. It is easy to imagine, for instance, excusing bullying as a matter of “management style” rather than seeing it for what it is. This is wrong. There is nothing stylish about a bully. Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), superficial processes for managing leadership misconduct have a nasty habit of coming back to bite an organisation. 

A better approach, which carries a higher initial cost, is to engage an external, independent party. Let them investigate the complaint. It demonstrates the matter is being taken seriously, managed impartially, and led by the evidence. It also sets a loud, zero-tolerance tone within the organisation, setting or reinforcing the organisational culture.

If there are any concerns that bullying may be ongoing, administrative leave for the CEO (without prejudice) can be applied while an investigation is conducted. An excellent example of this was the suspension of the newly appointed Director of SOAS following a complaint of racism. The suspension occurred within months of his appointment, and following an investigation, he was cleared and reinstated. Any initial embarrassment that may have been felt is washed away by sound processes.

Unfortunately, the entire premise of this piece rests on two things. First, staff must be prepared and able to raise concerns about bullying by those in leadership. Second, the Board must be trained, competent and serious about managing it. Pretty words are not enough. 

Staff realities are such that it can be better to suffer in silence or leave the organisation. I have known numerous staff of various organisations who chose to go rather than complain about their toxic workplace. Until you have witnessed the pyrotechnic career collapse of those who complained and were not heard, it is sometimes difficult to understand the reluctance. 

No one wants to join the ranks of the pilloried complainers. The received wisdom is to “slip away” or “put up with it”. If Boards are not prepared to hold CEOs accountable, “slip away” is sound advice—tragic and indicting, but sound.

Conflicts of interest in research leadership (Part II)

(The fond farewell. When enough is enough)

When I started my research career, a research leader’s retirement was a moment to celebrate. Their lives and their contributions were recalled through their research, their papers, their PhD graduates and Postdocs. The Festschrift was often published, literally celebrating their intellectual contribution to a field. Some of those researchers truly retired. Many took honorary appointments that gave them a desk or space in their old laboratory, and access to the library and email. They might mentor junior staff or be a part of a PhD student’s supervisory team. Many continued to do fabulous, original research. Others became the departmental raconteur, recalling embarrassing stories of now senior departmental researchers who were once their postdocs. The retired research leaders were appreciated but no longer had a formal role in the organisational structure.

My experience today with research leaders approaching an age that would, before, have been the time to retire — the time that I am beginning to see on my horizon — is somewhat different. The game now is one of holding back the younger researchers, and hanging on, limpet-like, to substantive position for as long as possible. It is cast as an age discrimination issue. If I am capable, and I am performing at a high level, then my age should not be a barrier to my continued leadership role.  Indeed, I have vastly more experience than junior colleagues, and it would be perverse to choose them over me.

While it is true, age need not be a barrier to the capable performance of one’s duties, it is also true that senior positions are rare, and if they are held by an increasingly ageing leadership, how will we train and develop younger cadres of leaders? Turning over leadership refreshes ideas and organisations.

I recall a radio interviewer with a well known Australian clinical researcher. He recounted how, as a junior researcher, his supervisor put him down as the first author on a significant scientific paper — a career launcher. He had not earned the spot, but the supervisor saw his potential and also recognised his capacity to influence the trajectory of a promising career. Without debating the ethics of that particular decision — it was a different time — there is little doubt that the paper launched one of Australia’s great scientific careers. Forty-plus years after those events, I have seen very capable, senior research leaders forsake their leadership role in favour of hanging on to power. They do not surround themselves with bright, eager, up-and-comers. They do not mentor and position their staff to take over. Instead, they retain non-threatening doers, many of whom will not even appear in the acknowledgements of their scientific papers.

In a post I wrote a little over a year ago I observed that in the interests of gender fairness, men had to be prepared to relinquish power. I have a similar view of intergenerational fairness. Those research leaders among us who were born in a twenty-year, golden age between about 1945 and 1965  have been extraordinarily lucky with the opportunities that we have had. In the interests of fairness and, frankly, in the interests of science, we need to know when to step away. We can still be a part of an exciting research agenda; maybe we do not need to be seen to lead it.

Perhaps the last act of truly great research leaders is to step back.

Staff who want to leave

Learning from a member of staff that she wants to leave can feel surprisingly hurtful. It can be particularly upsetting when he wants to stay within the organisation, just not in your unit.

As bosses, we very often spend far more time with our staff than we do with our own family or friends. We invest time and resources in their development. They become a part of our lives and our plans. When they announce their intention to leave, it can feel like rejection.

I thought you liked it here. You can’t leave now, I’ve invested too much in you. Your the only person who can… And finally, “How ungrateful!!!!”

I have been that person who my boss cursed for leaving, and I have been that boss who cursed (silently) the person who wanted to leave. I have also seen colleagues abuse, belittle and try to destroy the careers of staff who want to leave. No surprise really, with a boss like that, that a person wouldn’t want to stay. Pathological behaviour by a boss in one quarter portends pathology in other quarters.

The most relevant advice I ever received about leaving was from Steve Schwartz, former vice-chancellor or Murdoch, Brunel, and Macquarie Universities. “You have to remember, Daniel”, he said, “the person most interested in advancing your career is you.”

And that is the heart of it. As bosses, we do not act solely with the best interests of our staff in mind. Sure, we are not indifferent to their welfare but that is not the raison d’être of the workplace. When we engage them, challenge them, mentor them, and develop them, it is at least in part because we hope to have smarter more engaged and more productive staff in return.

Inevitably, of your good staff, some will stay and some will leave. If your sensible, you were already a part of the discussions about long term career planning and you had plenty of warning– maybe not in detail, but at least in direction. When the time comes and they want to leave, do not curse them (outwardly). Congratulate them on their new opportunity and wish them well. If there is some outstanding work that desperately needs their skills to complete, you may be able to negotiate a better departure date. Do not try and bully them into staying.  When staff cannot leave, it is not employment, it is servitude.

Research Leaders

Over a 20 year career in global health research, I have worked with some great researchers and some inspiring leaders. They were not necessarily the same people. As the second piece in my reflections on leadership, I discuss the idea of the leader itself.

Two of the most thoughtful leaders I know are Rob Macredie and Richard Parish, both of whom I met while working in the UK. They are not the only impressive leaders I have ever met. Setting them apart, however, was the extent to which they thought about leadership itself: how to lead and how to lead better. Some people do seem to be “natural leaders”, but as far as I can tell, this is the exception rather than the rule, and there is a danger believing that leadership cannot be learned. Thoughtful leaders have a self-reflective, inquisitive edge in improving their skill. 

Of course, if you can learn to become a leader, does this mean that you have to wait until you are promoted to a leadership position before you can learn? And if you can learn to be a leader before you are in a leadership position, how do you practice? To my mind, the real value of these questions is that they reveal a problem with the ways we think about leaders and leadership.

Pick up almost any book or article on leadership, and it envisages a leader as a person who carries a “boss” position within an organisation: the CEO of a research organisation; the head of a department; a team leader. This view is too narrow to capture what it is to be a leader and limits an organisation’s opportunities to recognise and develop leaders.

My 3 am take on a leader is… “A person who acts strategically to move a collective towards its goals. Short, pithy, perhaps a little uninspired (3 am has delusional qualities), and with some nonetheless potentially provocative implications.

First, leaders can lie anywhere in an organisational structure. Second, in acting strategically, leaders may develop and evolve the strategy itself. Third, leaders may set and refine the goals of the collective. It is worth noting that, in the context of this definition, a collective may be (as I tend to think about it) a research group or research organisation, or it may be a commercial organisation or a team within a company, a school, a civil society organisation, or indeed society itself.

The key to being a leader lies in goal-directed, strategic action. That is, they think and act beyond the operational. Not all leaders will set strategy; not all leaders will set goals. Some leaders will hold positions in organisations that do not empower them to set strategy or goals. And some leaders will have both those authorities and would be well-advised not to wield them. Indeed one example of bad leadership is characterised by the need to be an agent-of-change in a collective that is already set on the right course and working effectively.

In the world of agile software development ( “Agile”), there is a refreshing approach to leadership. The software development team will have a head, but leadership roles evolve and shift according to the needs of the team at any time to ensure delivery of the product. One person may step into a leadership role now because of the skills and expertise she possesses, and another person will step up later; this is all done according to the flexible needs of the team to achieve its goals. Teams work this way because of Agile’s short cycles of incremental development and reflection as the software gets better and better.

Agile approaches may not work for the entirety of an organisation. They may, nonetheless, be ideal for smaller, fast-moving, evolving areas of research, a development unit in HR, or a commercialisation team working with a new scientific invention. The key idea, here, is that leaders should be encouraged to emerge according to need and circumstance, not according to rank and hierarchy. These agile leaders won’t be reworking the organisational strategic plan or resetting the organisational goals (unless that is the task). They can, nonetheless, evolve local strategy and local goals. Still, they can act strategically to advance the collective towards its goals — perhaps in something as simple as a small team writing a grant proposal. Interestingly, McKinsey & Co. has begun to embrace ideas of Agile in business transformation.

The management literature talks about “managing up“. If we are to develop research leaders, it is undoubtedly, at least as necessary to prepare staff for leading up. Some of the most successful leaders I have known, lead up. They work behind the scenes, they influence, they nudge, they target. Highly strategic, they are usually well-recognised within the organisation, but often unknown beyond it.

Reflecting on junior colleagues in my Division, some do their job, but some do their job and lead up. And they do this without stepping out of role or stepping on toes. A recent example was a colleague who suggested and then implemented process changes to the management of a large project. The changes will bring more reliable accountability mechanisms to bear for delivering research outputs on time.

Valuable organisational lessons emerge from all this. Invest in developing leadership skills at all levels. Take mentoring seriously. Embed the vision of the organisation, the department and the team to encourage strategic actors.