Leadership must involve accepting responsibility, on top of the perks and privileges of the good times, writes TONY KINSELLA
RESPONSIBILITY AND reward go together. The more senior and more responsible the position an individual holds, the greater their rewards. Rewards can take various forms, including money, status and myriad small tokens – from the size of an office to the deference required of others.
This all comes with an implicit downside. Those who benefit from their leadership positions must also face the music when things go wrong on their watch. A ship’s captain is always responsible for what happens to the vessel he or she commands.
Our societies have developed systems and procedures to analyse failures and attribute responsibility, as currently demonstrated in Pontoise. Most people would call it northern Paris, but in formal terms Pontoise is a separate town, capital of the départementof the Val d'Oise. A trial for involuntary homicide began there last Tuesday to determine the legal responsibility for the deaths of 100 passengers, nine crew and the four people who had the misfortune to be in the budget hotel into which an Air France Concorde crashed in July 2000.
If there is little dispute about what happened, batteries of lawyers and technical experts are arguing about who is responsible. As AF 4590 roared down the runway one or more of its tyres blew out and the debris punctured a wing fuel tank. The leaking fuel caught fire when it spilled over the incandescent engines.
Captain Christian Marty, an experienced pilot, coaxed his damaged plane into the air and then turned for an emergency landing at nearby Le Bourget. But the stricken Concorde, fully laden with fuel for its transatlantic flight, ploughed into the hotel and exploded less than two minutes later.
The accident investigators from France’s BEA concluded that the Concorde’s wheels were damaged when they ran over a non-standard titanium strip from a Continental Airlines DC-10 that had preceded it down the runway. Continental’s lawyers argue that the Concorde was damaged before it hit the titanium strip and lay the blame on Air France procedures and indeed on the Concorde’s original designers.
The court will have to allocate responsibilities between these two theses. Its decision will determine which insurance companies will have to pay out, how much, and to whom. The verdict will destroy some careers and reputations while, hopefully, providing useful lessons for safety improvements.
This professional, Cartesian approach of assembling and analysing evidence to arrive at reasoned conclusions throws the irresponsible approaches involving denial which are employed in other failures into sharp and deeply unflattering relief.
Bishops’ reactions to the Murphy report into child abuse in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin offer one illustration of such irresponsible, even amateurish, denial. The arrogant posturing from many of the world’s bankers provides another.
Judge Yvonne Murphy’s commission had worked for over three years on its report. The draft report had been supplied to State and church authorities well before its publication. Nobody has challenged the damning central conclusions of the report that priests in the archdiocese had abused children over many years and that the priority for the church authorities had been to cover up such actions rather than to protect the victims.
It is cruelly ironic that this desire to protect the reputation of the church as an institution was further damaged by the unprofessional manner in which the institutional church responded to the Murphy report.
The actions and inactions of bishops Murray, Moriarty, Field, Walsh and Drennan featured in last November’s report. Had all five immediately offered their resignations to the Vatican, the gesture would have acted as a damage-reducing shock absorber. This effect would have persisted even if the Vatican had, after a suitable interval, declined some or all of the resignations.
Instead, the first four resigned in dribs and drabs over a month, while the Bishop of Galway, Martin Drennan, continues to cling to his office, seemingly oblivious to the negative impact this may have on the church in Ireland.
The bishops’ incompetence, however, pales into relative insignificance when compared with the systemic failure of banking executives. They managed not only to develop flawed financial models, but ran them into the ground while generously rewarding themselves for their brilliant leadership.
When the world’s governments and taxpayers were obliged to bail out these market geniuses, their response was to defend a business-and-bonus-as-usual approach.
Now, as governments struggle to extricate our economies from the ensuing global recession, most of those same banking leaders dare to lecture us on the evils of the public borrowing requirements for which they are more than partially responsible.
Like their ecclesiastical counterparts, they seem incapable of seeing, much less getting, the obvious message that they failed in their duties. Some financial figures are beginning to accept the need for structural reforms and that it is in their best interests to participate in the elaboration of such measures. Martin Blessing, the head of Germany’s Commerzbank admits “we cannot just return to normalcy”.
Richard Davis, CEO of US Bancorp, last Thursday urged his fellow bankers to participate in the reform debate, saying “we have to be relevant to this fix”. Klaus Schwab, founder of the Davos forum, described bankers’ reluctance to contemplate reform as being either “arrogance or the last battle of the ignorant”. Yet Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann continues to warn against reforms that might disturb “efficient markets”, although it is far from clear just where such markets are to be found today.
Those who seek the prestige of leadership cannot expect to evade, or to be allowed to evade, the responsibilities of the offices they sought.
They otherwise risk taking the very institutions they purported to serve down with them in their inevitable fall to earth.