South Africa's leaders and why they fail

A new book about leadership suggests we all suffer from heroic bias

‘I am disappointed when a leader fails,’ writes Willem Fourie, an associate professor at the Albert Luthuli Leadership Institute of the University of Pretoria, in a new book – Why leaders fail and what it teaches us about leadership. ‘A part of me expects leaders to be better equipped than the rest of us to deal with the complexities of my team, organisation, or institution.’

Yet leaders fail all the time. Constantly. In business. In parliament. In your church, or sports team, or homeowners association. That, according to Fourie, is partly because of us followers: we have a heroic bias, meaning that we expect our leaders to be individuals with ‘exceptional abilities, a charismatic personality, and an ability to beat the odds’. They almost always are not, and therefore they disappoint us when they fail. We have too high expectations of those that lead.

But Fourie makes a subtler and bolder claim: our high expectations of our leaders (our heroic bias) cause them to fail. There are five reasons for this: the leader’s personality, their influence, their bias towards the ingroup, their relationship with their organisation’s culture and how they handle risk.

We tend to prefer leaders with certain personality traits. But often those traits are more likely to lead to failure. Consider even ‘good traits’, like courage. We don’t want a leader to be a coward, so some courage is necessary. But too much courage can lead to recklessness and failure. Or take conscientiousness. Conscientious leaders are disciplined, efficient and detail-oriented. But too much conscientiousness can make leaders overly cautious, resistant to change, and abrasive.

And then there are bad traits – things like narcissism and psychopathy. Fourie argues not only that these traits make leaders more likely to fail, but because of our heroic bias, we are more likely to choose leaders with these traits. That is because these leaders often appear charismatic at first. They are overly self-confident, grandiose and entitled; in other words, exactly the kind of traits we associate with heroes. But these traits are also more likely to make them fail. Grandiose narcissists, research shows, tend to be sceptical of experts, more confident and more impulsive. As Fourie notes, ‘even our common sense tells us that these traits are likely to lead to bad decisions’. Yet we still give them the benefit of the doubt.

Just like personality traits, a leader’s influence, ingroup preference, relationship with the organisation’s culture and risk profile also explain why our heroic bias leads us to prefer leaders that are more likely to fail. For example, Fourie shows that leaders of an organisation with a poor culture may try to change the culture – the heroic thing to do – when the less heroic thing – quitting – might have been the more sensible route. When those leaders inevitably fail, we blame the (heroic) leader rather than the organisation’s culture.

All of this may sound very theoretical, but it is not too difficult to find real-world examples. South Africans don’t need to look far for leaders who disappointed many of us. Eskom’s CEO. UCT’s rector. I have a long list of politicians to add to the list. And there are many recent examples of business leader failures, too, often of individuals that at some stage were considered heroes: Markus Jooste, Iqbal Survé, Louis Liebenberg, to name just a few.

I asked Fourie whether South Africa is experiencing a leadership crisis. ‘It’s usually much easier to be a good leader when things are going well than when a society faces the challenges we see in South Africa. Effective leadership is not solely dependent on an individual’s inherent qualities and behaviour. And there’s some fascinating, if slightly controversial, research that shows that in many situations leaders don’t actually cause good things to happen but know how to take credit for it.’

He continues: ‘During trying times, people seek simple solutions and look to their leaders to provide them. However, these are also the times when leaders have the least amount of room to manoeuvre. When leaders fail to achieve impossible goals, people are often disappointed and fail to recognise their role in the outcome. So, to answer your question, I think it’s exceedingly difficult to be perceived as a good leader in current-day South Africa. Any leader worth their salt will need to tell their followers that it will take time to turn things around, they’ll need to forge partnerships with competing groups and organisations, and they’ll need to have the ability to navigate an urgent yet complex set of challenges. But leaders who do this will likely disappoint those seeking simple solutions.’

I ask Fourie two more questions. First, what can we, as South Africans, do to improve the quality of our leaders? ‘One thing we can perhaps do is to keep our expectations in check. If there were a quick fix to a problem, it would likely have been implemented already. But this does not mean we must let our leaders off the hook. We cannot allow our leaders to do the relatively easy things wrong – mundane things like doing an honest day’s work. There’s a sobering piece of research on political accountability in settings where leaders underperform: counter-intuitively, followers lower their expectations when leaders underperform. We must resist this temptation.’ In short, we must balance hoping for a messiah and being satisfied with a slug.

I then ask Fourie what prospective leaders can do to equip themselves for these challenging times. ‘There’s consensus that good leadership can be taught; it’s not an innate quality possessed by a select few. There is also consensus that probably all people are leaders in some contexts. In my book, I list seven lessons that could be of use. To get started, I’d emphasise at least two things.’

‘Firstly, recognise and expand your sense of responsibility. In my research, I have found that this sense of agency is key, and more important than already having the skills or resources to enact your responsibility. Skills and resources are easier to obtain than this sense of responsibility.’

‘Secondly, people who want to be good leaders must learn to stay open to external input. For example, leaders who insulate themselves from the critical input of followers are more likely to fail. Humility is an important predictor of whether or not a leader will be able to use this input.’

It is good to be reminded that leaders fail. It is even better to remind ourselves that we share some responsibility for those failures. We expect our leaders to be heroes, supporting those we believe have the personality traits to be a ‘strong leader’. But those choices inevitably set us up for failure. Perhaps both leaders and followers need more humility to recognise that, if we are to build a thriving organisation, business or even country, we should accept the responsibility of making difficult decisions, listen to those critical of us, and keep our heroic expectations in check.

An edited version of this article was first published on News24. Photo by Mehdi MeSSrro on Unsplash.