Heeding the moral compass in leadership: The Straits Times, March 10, 2010

England’s football Manager Fabio Capello has made it clear to John Terry that his extra-marital affair with the former fiancée of Wayne Bridge his England teammate made him unfit to be a leader.

In taking away the captaincy he said “I always ask the captain to be a role model for the children and the fans. But I will keep him in the team because I don’t think the team has lost respect for him”.

Rob Hughes in a column in this newspaper ( ‘In good conscience”, ST Feb 27) makes an interesting observation .The England manager he said is choosing footballers for England, not priests for the church. Form, not infidelity is manager Fabio Capello’s priority. Obviously he is single mindedly focused on delivering the best results for England.

Herein lies the leadership dilemma. Let us transpose the foot-balling situation to the corporate world. You have a CEO who has been caught committing an immoral act outside the office which has come to light in a way that is difficult to ignore. The company is in the midst of completing an intricate merger where the CEO is playing a pivotal role. In fact this CEO has had an amazing track record always delivering on promises and is the darling of the Board and the shareholders. Removing him at such a critical point would be a disaster for the company.

The Board could make one of three decisions. The first option would be to sack the CEO immediately. Or it could appoint another person to the post but retain him by creating a special position for him, allowing him to continue contributing to the company. The third choice: Punish the CEO by taking away his bonus for the year and then underplay the matter.

Fabio Capello went for the middle option. He is clearly focused on the short term and believes the team will be able to accept his decision because of the innate qualities of John Terry as a footballer. His competence will be enough to counter his moral failings, which does not seem to bother most of his colleagues, in any event. In other words, Capello’s decision was based on his perception of the team’s culture.

Leadership in organizations is demonstrated through the interaction of the leader and the followers in a given situation. It reflects the values and behaviors of the people in the organization today and what you want it to be going forward. The kind of leaders that emerges will depend on the quality of decisions made in the group which in turn reveal what balance has been achieved between the mind and the heart.

The development of leaders today focuses on their technical or cognitive skills while ignoring emotional intelligence. This oversight can come back to bite leaders – or worse still, their organizations when they are least prepared for it.

Who takes responsibility for the development and measurement of empathy which is so critical for a leader’s success and the ability of the organization to develop the right culture to be able to implement strategy? There is evidence to show that 67% of the abilities deemed essential for effective leadership is related to emotional competencies. Yet leadership or those responsible for it’s development seem to ignore it.

We have the collective responsibility to invest in developing the moral fiber of our leaders so they will be able to successfully negotiate the moral dilemmas of the kind referred to earlier.

If leaders lead with both their hearts and minds, they and the people they lead would live far more fulfilling lives.

Pratap Nambiar is the Executive in Residence at the National University of Singapore Business School. He is the founder and Chief Executive of Thought Perfect Pte Ltd an organization that helps CEOs and Business Leaders maximize their potential. www.thoughtperfect.com