Local leaders who inspire

It’s not surprising that Australia has so many sound business leaders.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s decisions and actions have been held up globally as examples of sound leadership to be envied, adopted and mirrored.

It is easy to believe there is a shortage of strong leaders around the world. A World Economic Forum report, Survey on the Global Agenda 2015, found 86 per cent of respondents believed there was a global leadership crisis.

It’s understandable why people might be alarmed. Sordid tales of leadership failures are everywhere, from the television to Twitter feeds.

However, I would caution against such broadbrush generalisation and dropping all leadership mistakes into a bucket marked “toxic” so readily. This serves only to make the issue so much more unbearable and it does a disservice to the leaders who actually do lead well.

Without advocating that we turn a blind eye to bad behaviour, we need to spend more time focusing on local leadership. Leadership at a local level presents a different — and more hopeful — picture of the current leadership landscape.

As the leader of an organisation whose primary goal is to lift the standards of management and leadership across our region, I know first-hand that so many leaders put tremendous personal effort into improving the way they lead. What I see in Australia are leaders successfully leading and developing their teams and organisations with sound management practices. Every day they strive to do the right thing and lead others in the right way. There’s a trend towards leadership crisis being resisted and reversed.

It’s not surprising that Australia has so many sound business leaders. After working in leadership roles in the UK and here, I have observed that Australian leadership seems to be based on a sense of fairness and equity. The concept of “a fair go” sits at the heart of local leadership practice.

It’s worth noting that in a survey on political leadership in the region conducted by think tank The Australia Institute, the most trusted leaders were women. This represents a more progressive view of leadership than I witnessed locally since I arrived in the mid-1990s. This progressive approach to leadership offers another hopeful sign for the state of leadership locally and perhaps globally.

Last year, the Institute of Managers and Leaders united with the New Zealand Institute of Management. This merger allows us to take a broader view of leadership practice. There are few other leaders on the global stage who offer a glimpse of what is possible in terms of inspirational and progressive leadership than New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. What is fascinating in the case of Ardern is the way her actions and decisions, while predominantly locally directed, have been held up globally as being examples of sound leadership to be envied, adopted and mirrored.

All of this isn’t to deny that there are considerable problems on the global leadership stage.

However, this shouldn’t prevent us from being inspired by local leadership practice. If we “look local” we will see there are many examples of leaders who give us hope.

Instead of despairing the leadership landscape, let’s spend a little time shouting out inspiring local leaders, celebrating their actions and learning how best to stop this crisis from crippling good leadership everywhere.

David Pich is chief executive of IML ANZ and co-author of Leading Well: 7 Attributes of Very Successful Leaders.