I always try to see the best in people; give them the benefit of the doubt and the opportunity to prove me right. Or wrong. We never truly know what others are going through, however they present, and most get up in the morning intent on doing the right thing and to live a good life.
The UK Leadership Crisis: How Did We Get Here?
However, I’ve witnessed many times how some people’s take on the world is skewed by the company they keep, the environment they operate in or the people they mix with. That’s not to say those things change the core of who they are but they can tilt them off the track they sought to follow. The world is going through a leadership crisis, the UK very much included. It’s rare that I write these columns with no idea who the Prime Minister will be when they’re published but I find myself in that situation just now.
I am sure most of our politicians and other public sector leaders started their careers with a heartfelt ambition to make the world a better place in whatever way they can. They will have had a vision of what they wanted to achieve and how they might execute that. Then, they climb the ladder of success, are told how talented they are and encouraged to reach for the stars. They gather supporters and acolytes on the way and start to believe their own publicity. And that’s where it all goes wrong.
The current crisis at the top of the Labour Party, and therefore the country, has not just come from their disastrous local election results but from a catalogue of perceived leadership failures which has led to Sir Kier Starmer’s gloss as a messianic saviour of our broken nation being catastrophically tarnished. As I write, he is still hanging on to the top job despite in the time he’s had in power being a huge let down. He has talents, is ambitious and no doubt works incredibly hard. He’s probably a nice guy too but it’s his ambition that has blinkered him, and making him forget the principles I hope he entered politics with. But he’s suckered himself into the illusion that he, and only he, can fix the mess we are now in.
Is Ambition The Enemy Of Effective Leadership?
Plato said, ‘Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it.’ The author, Douglas Adams, developed this by saying, ‘It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.’ Now, I’m not getting into presidents here but certainly one’s confidence or desire to lead does not always equate to any competence to do so.
In a 2024 study, published by Stanford Graduate School of Business, “A Legend in One’s Own Mind: The Link between Ambition and Leadership Evaluations,” researchers asked more than 450 executives in a Stanford leadership development program to answer questions about their ambition and rate themselves in ten areas of competence, including motivating others, managing collaborative work, coaching and developing people and communicating ideas. The team then asked each executive’s managers, peers and direct reports to score them on the same competencies. Not surprisingly, these executives scored high on ambition, yet there was a discrepancy between how they and the people they worked with rated their leadership abilities. ‘We found that individuals with higher levels of ambition are more likely to hold positive views of their own effectiveness,’ the researchers said. However, according to ratings by those who worked with them, these individuals were no more effective in a leadership role than their less-ambitious peers. This perception gap was pronounced in not just one or two areas, but across seven of the ten leadership competencies.
Obviously in politics a high degree of confidence in one’s and one’s party’s ability to deliver is important – otherwise why should the voting public trust you? However, we need to be sharper in differentiating between those whose blind faith in themselves eclipses the greater mission of building something meaningful and those who keep their feet on the ground, do the job and are prepared to move on when they can no longer cut it.
I originally wrote this for my weekly column in The Argus, published on Monday, 18 May 2026.
