Jennifer Liston-Smith’s reflections on leadership, work-life blend and the meaning of work.
Who’d be prime minister? It plays out in a world of 24/7 scrutiny, where media commentators vie to scoop the next shambles, revelling in a state of permanent poly-crisis, while personalised algorithms reinforce, and amplify, each glimpse of doom we dare to dwell on.
The glare of attention on Sir Keir Starmer gives pause for thought in our own leadership. Would I show anything like his level of resilience myself, in the face of electoral disapproval, constant global unpredictability, conflict and tension, and then undermining speeches and public letters from those I’ve trusted most? Especially if it came to a head in a week when I was attempting a reset speech along with all the royal pomp of setting out the legislative agenda?
Starmer: nice person or good bloke?
Writing in The Telegraph, Will Self offers a diagnosis of the problem. He points beyond Starmer to a systemic failure of belief. “The modern British state no longer knows how to produce solidarity except through compliance architecture. It can still generate procedures; it can no longer generate myth.”
He has plenty of cutting criticism of the man himself (“The sort of man who looks as if he’d report you to HR for making a joke about the biscuits in the office kitchen.”) but feels the failure is more about a yearning for a deeper sense of connection in the system.
Whatever your opinion of Starmer, Self or indeed The Telegraph, there is something familiar in what Self puts at the heart of his piece about the distinction between being perceived as a “nice person” versus a “good bloke”. Starmer is painted as the former, with a focus on doing the right thing by following due process.
Who do we relate to?
Although not explored in Self’s article, Andy Burnham would benefit from the good bloke vibe. And when it comes to tapping in to a yearning for meaning rather than process, different groups might give the good bloke title to either Nigel Farage or Zack Polanski.
However, both the latter are currently beset by degrees of scandal. Farage has been considerably quietened while his personal gift of £5m from his party’s cryptocurrency billionaire donor is investigated. Polanski has faced queries ranging from council tax on his former houseboat to concerns about anti-semitism in the party and in some recent social media posts he has retweeted. Polanski’s Jewish heritage is part of the complicated picture in all the media scrutiny over his role in alleged anti-semitism.
The moral seems to be that there’s something about being relatable that cuts through with the public; and it is severely punished if absent, or found wanting.
It’s not what you say; it’s the way you say it
Donald Trump has demonstrated that one way to thrive in a world that is unsure about objective truth is to be a compelling communicator. The Labour government has been heavily criticised for failing to sell their wins and visibly backtracking on their sterner proposals.
There is a clear feed of progress made, yet somehow also a view that the leader is not getting it across. Which is strange, when academic analysis suggests Starmer displays a much more decisive and uncompromising style than Self and others intuitively ascribe to him.
Modern leadership is no longer judged by old expectations of competence. We increasingly expect leaders who create trust, meaning and connection, especially at a time when institutions can feel procedural, defensive and remote.
An infinite capacity for self-delusion?
As if the unrest within the cabinet and Westminster bubble were not enough, Starmer has had to bear the onslaught of Sir Tony Blair’s essay, cataloguing a series of failures in the government’s nearly two years in power, and musing on Labour’s “almost infinite capacity for self-delusion”.
On a different tack from Self, Blair decides that “The government’s principal problem isn’t Keir’s personality. Or a failure to communicate ‘our achievements’. Or a need to assert more strongly Labour’s ‘values’. It is because we don’t have a worked-out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world and are in the wrong political position from which we can devise one and win a second term”.
Blair’s view is that changing the leader is far from the solution. Calling for a thorough review of overall direction before any switch at the top, Sir Tony signals a world turning on its axis, with particular forces such as the growth of AI to be seized as an opportunity in his eyes.
At the same time, Blair himself is mistrusted by some. Is he in thrall to the tech bros, or to Trump, or simply bringing the advantage of distance and wisdom? He quotes Labour’s mission to ensure that “power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few”. This is a complex mission when AI is positioned as the central force for growth.
How to become a trusted leader?
So what do leaders need to do to be deeply appreciated? We’ve seen it’s important to be liked, to stay relatable, to communicate well and to have a clear plan, even in a complex world when we’re not sure who or what to trust.
Perhaps trust is the one key attribute to aim for. There’s a well-known clip of Simon Sinek in a Q&A session sharing from working with Navy SEALS. For this elite force, Sinek says, trust matters more than performance, and they would promote a High Trust, Medium Performance person any day over a High Performance, Low Trust toxic influence. Yet organisations focus relentlessly on measuring performance, with far fewer metrics to identify trust.
According to a concept called secure base leadership, the trusted leader is someone who has done the inner work, leading to a place where they can consistently:
- Stay Calm
- Accept the Individual
- See Potential
- Use Listening and Inquiry
- Deliver a Powerful Message
- Focus on the Positive
- Encourage Risk-Taking
- Inspire Through Intrinsic Motivation
- Signal Accessibility
To get there? Leaders themselves need a place to be vulnerable, to be accepted as a meaningful human being in all their fallibility as well as their amazingness. They need to be able to explore the complexity without immediate solutions. Secure base coaching to support this draws foundationally on the work of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Carl Rogers and Sir John Whitworth.
Susan Goldsworthy’s playbook Care, Dare, Share explains: “The metaphor of how a lobster grows beautifully illustrates the power of secure base coaching. A lobster must shed its hard shell to grow, a process that leaves it vulnerable but is essential for its development. If it sheds its shell in the open it will be eaten. Therefore, it needs to find a rock or a cave where it feels safe enough to shed its shell and grow a new one. Similarly, secure-based coaching provides a safe and supportive environment where individuals can shed their protective layers of fear and self-doubt.”
A place for leaders to be vulnerable
In my own recent leadership coaching work, I’ve experienced this wish to express vulnerability in a range of ways. The self-aware leader who pushes himself to understand, and empathise with, everything about everyone in his team and his wider stakeholders, yet still needs a place to process hurtful criticism.
The middle manager who wants to manage stress at work, yet when we look a bit deeper, his main concern is how to be more available (and less snappy) to his kids at home. The head of department who declares she has given up on Gen Z’s work ethic yet – when we explore it – readily admits that the key to inspiring the team might rest in her own hands.
Polanski demonstrated disarming humility in telling the BBC he was not yet ready to be prime minister and has “a lot of skills and knowledge to get” before that. At the time of writing, Sir Keir is taking his own calmly, bullish tack of vowing to fight on and fulfil his agenda and remit.
We can only imagine where Starmer finds a place to process his own vulnerability. In this always-on world, could we ever leave him alone long enough to shed his outer shell safely, like Goldsworthy’s lobster? Short of that, and of Tony Blair’s luxury of standing back, Starmer’s sheer ability to carry on – while inconvenient to some – is impressive in itself.
Jennifer is a business psychologist, leadership coach, coaching supervisor and consultant to HR leaders.
As a UK pioneer of parent transition coaching, Jennifer set up, and for a decade led, the Coaching & Consultancy side of what became Bright Horizons Work+Family Solutions, advising employers in banking, professional services, STEM and wider sectors on programmes for working parents and carers and evaluating their impact and ROI, as well as developing coaches and coaching capability.
More recently she was Head of Thought Leadership with Bright Horizons and now serves as an independent consultant in this area.
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
