Lessons for leaders

By Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848

There is something disquieting about the speed with which political memoirs arrive including those which, like Tony Blair’s, are not ghost-written by someone else. In ‘A Journey’ there is even a tagged on section about the coalition and its values which says nothing for the value of hindsight and for taking a long-term view of recent history. Instead, the process is more like the medieval precursor to execution which involved cutting the criminal open and spilling their entrails into a bowl in order that they could look at them and repent. That seems to be par for the course these days for political memoirs in the Blair and Mandelson style.

There have been suggestions that the publication of the memoir is at best unfortunate and, at worst, an attempt to disrupt the current leadership election. That is probably unfair. What we do know is that all political publishing takes place around now – before the conference season – and Tony Blair has not been here to fan the flames of controversy apart from the odd pre-recorded TV launch. For the most part, there are no surprises. The past is rehashed in the light of the present and it turns out that Tony Blair did not make too many mistakes – in his view. However, the two more interesting aspects are, firstly, what ‘A Journey’ says about his relationships with other politicians and with Gordon Brown in particular, and, secondly, the way that the book confirms Blair’s personal drive to do what he saw as the right thing. Both say a lot about leadership as a political activity.

The Blair view of Brown and, for that matter, the Brown view of Blair has not been much added to by the publication. As usual, we hear that the victim was admired for various characteristics but possessed fatal flaws. The media emphasises the flaws over the praise. In the end, the popular impression is that Brown is unsociable, difficult, and hard to shift and sulky whereas Blair will always engage, is charming, susceptible to argument and only a little tetchy when pushed. It is not always clear what is a virtue. Blair was clearly persuaded into Iraq by American arguments and his own emotional and moral dispositions at the time. Brown might not have gone there but if he had actively opposed rather than grumpily retreated into his Treasury bunker things could have been different. Blair, by his own account, recognised that a Brown premiership would be a disaster yet, as a fixer and compromiser, declined to lead the party away from it.

What this suggests is that both these people do not do leadership very well. Blair’s messianic drive and Brown’s solid reliance on understated core values both run counter to what modern leadership should look like. Compare the double dealing in cabinet reshuffles over the past few years with what leadership guru Jim Collins says about buses. An old-fashioned corporate leader, and for that read Tony Blair, drives the bus and tells the people on it where they’re going. In contrast, the leaders of improving companies get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats. They put people first and then work out the direction. It isn’t hard to see how Tony Blair had the direction in his mind in 1997 and dismissed any diversion that did not seem to be associated with New Labour. Sometimes that looks like passionate conviction and at others like blindness.

The other thing that leadership gurus talk about today is distributed leadership. The leader describes a vision to the team and the team first agree it through discussion and then work – in their own ways – to deliver it. They don’t go off in different directions and are clearly accountable for what they do. This sort of accountability was always undervalued in the New Labour project which became increasingly centralised so that the team perceived themselves as delivery people and slaves to the message rather than as strategic innovators.

All of this matters because at the end of the current leadership election process, Labour is going to have a new team. One of the things which is abundantly clear from the race is the quality of the candidates and the idea that they will not be involved in the next government because they disagree on some matters with the new leader is absurd. It is equally absurd to think that they will stop disagreeing in some outmoded pretence of cabinet unity. Instead, they need to be on the bus and in the right seats. Achieving that is going to need a change in how our political leadership operates – developing a consensual and agreed vision, giving people real responsibilities and properly holding them to account. If the 2001 government had done that, it is possible that we would not be seeing the inspection of entrails that has characterised the end of the Brown era and the bus would still be running in the right direction.