We need more humble leaders like the former Diageo CEO in our politics
The former chief executive of Diageo, Ivan Menezes, passed away last week. He was the greatest example of a humble leader; we have many of those in business, but unfortunately not enough of them in politics, writes Josh Williams
Last week, a great leader died. Sir Ivan Menezes, the chief executive of Diageo, passed away just a month before he reached his retirement. Menezes had steered the drinks giant through a decade that began with difficulty, but ended with resounding triumph. By the end of his tenure, Diageo’s share price had doubled. A man with a true hinterland, a lover of both theatre and cricket, it would have been a rest both well-earned and properly enjoyed.
But Menezes was more than all that to me, and to many others like me. He was, to anyone who ever worked at Diageo during his tenure, simply “Ivan” – even if you met him only a handful of times.
My handful came when I was an ambitious, if ineffective, trainee on Diageo’s graduate programme. I was there at the very beginning of the Ivan era, and at the very end of that of his predecessor, Paul Walsh, a boardroom bruiser of an older school.
Where Walsh was always a distant figure, Ivan was among us. In Diageo’s then headquarters, in the far from glamorous Park Royal, a stone’s throw from the near impassable Hanger Lane Gyratory, our chief executive was ever-present.
Head to the canteen at lunch and there he was, chatting to some deputy junior nobody with as much focus as if they were the company chairman.
He first spoke to this particular nobody when, hungover, I stepped into a lift and found, to my horror, that its only other occupant was him.
Expecting, indeed hoping, to pass the floors in mute silence, I was wrong. With genuine interest and a kind, if forensic, set of questions, Ivan asked me about who I was, what I did, and – most surprisingly – what I thought of the performance of the business.
The next time I saw him, many months later, he picked up the conversation precisely where we had left it, remembering every detail of a months’ old chat with just about the most junior person in the building.
If this was leadership, I thought, give me more of it. Ivan wasn’t a distant idea. He was a real person. He was interested in what you thought, and humble enough to know that he might learn from it. And when he spoke, you listened, and not only because his lilting voice – bearing the trace of his Delhi upbringing, filtered through first America and then Britain – was so very easy to listen to. As his record at Diageo showed, there was a steeliness and a considerable intellect to him too. For ten years, it served Diageo and its shareholders well.
This should be little wonder. Humble leaders like Ivan outperform their browbeating peers. The academic literature now shows, without question, this is the case. In January this year, three academics at University College London reviewed 115 studies on the performance of so-called “humble leaders”, who collectively managed some 20,000 employees. The findings were clear. Humble leaders inspire better performance from their teams. They make their employees not only more effective, but also – and not unrelatedly – happier at work. Their non-didactic style of leadership works across different regions and cultures, where the ability to understand difference is vital.
There is one very notable caveat in the academics’ findings, however. What is true for business is not true for politics. While we might all say we want our politicians to be more humble, normal and closer to us all, the evidence points otherwise. Leaders who display humility in their communications have been shown to elicit a negative reaction, both to themselves personally and towards the cause they are advocating for.
So, while we often decry the state of our politics and the quality of our politicians, we are blaming the wrong people. The problem isn’t them – it’s us. We rarely want what we really need, and what a shame that is.
When I first saw Sir Ivan Menezes, he delivered a speech to thousands of assembled Diageo employees. I thought then that this was what a great politician must be like. I was wrong. That was to Diageo’s benefit and to the loss of our body politic. At the passing of Sir Ivan Menezes, the loss is a personal one too.