Leadership has become a risky job.
At its best I think that leadership has always been a difficult job, characterized by sacrifice and putting the needs of others before your own.
At its worst, it is horribly abused and there is a long list of historical figures to support that position going back to the Epic of Gilgamesh written in about 2,100 BCE, where a physically superior king used his position and power to abuse the people under his care. It took another equally powerful opponent to stop his abuse and push him to become a responsible king. However, even during his abuses, he had one job – defend the city – and as long as he did that, any abuses would be excused. The violence of a single man was considered the lesser of two evils when compared to the inevitable violence and enslavement if Gilgamesh was absent. The world was violent and dark, and people chose the lesser of two evils.
Fast forward 4,000 and the modern leader is often confused about what leadership means. This is often because leadership itself has become muddled and expectations have changed.
The Gilgamesh contract is no longer valid – gone is “all ill behavior will be tolerated as long as you deliver financial results” but CEOs are making more money than ever before. Based on CNBC’s 2021 article, the average CEO of one of the top 350 firms make 351 times as much as the average worker. Nice round numbers make the figures easy to remember.
It wasn’t always this way – in 1978 the average CEO made 31 times the average worker. In 1989 it was 69 times. I guess things were rough back in the seventies and eighties. Or maybe today’s CEO leaders are just fantastic leaders, and deserve every dollar of the 351X that they get. Except if they were fantastic leaders, I’d expect to see them stay with the ship through difficulty, especially since the average compensation was $24 million per year, and yet in 2019 we saw more CEOs leave (1,640!!) large companies than ever before (per Challenger, Grey and Christmas).
However, as accountability increased, and the CEOs bolted. Ethical conduct was a bigger driver than poor financial performance. Integrity was the problem, not competence in leadership. Dirty laundry was aired. Private lives and abuses of power became fair game.
Leadership has become a risky job, because of the new expectation of integrity AND competence. And apparently that was a bridge just too far for some CEOs.