Leadership? Brown nosing? Which works better?

Three years into retirement, I’m getting a clearer perspective on certain received principles people like to tell you about work. One of them is the virtue of speaking truth to power. The other is the value of skill in leadership.

Telling truth to power is something we’re all supposed to admire. I’d strongly advise anyone building a career to express boundless admiration for it. When it comes to doing it, however, my equally strong advice is to be a lot more circumspect.

Why? Because in my experience the last thing power wants to hear is the truth. Tell power it’s doing the right thing with great skill, and it’ll love you for it. But tell it it’s off course and doing things wrong? I carry the scars of one firing and four redundancies for doing that.

Brown nosing, as I prefer to call flattery, works far better. If you do it well, at least. I remember a colleague announcing that he had to leave a meeting of ours, only for me to see him later ingratiating himself with some senior executives. Unfortunately, turning up like that amongst the powerful, like a bad penny, doesn’t always work. It can make you seem just a tad too needy. Indeed, to my colleague’s shock his efforts didn’t deliver the promotion he was after. 

Bowing to power often works better than telling it truth

Meanwhile, his reluctance to stick around with the team he was supposed to be leading had won him no friends there either. Failure to lead left him with no one following him. Which is like a line in the The West Wing about a leader with no followers simply being a man out for a stroll.

A man wandering aimlessly. Alone. Achieving nothing.

One of my favourite stories from material I’ve been reading for my History of England podcast was about the first Queen Elizabeth.

She had no children. That meant that her closest heir was King James VI of Scotland, the great-great-grandson of Henry VII of England, who was her grandfather. Which makes him a second cousin twice removed. Distant, but the closest relative she had.

A peaceful and smooth transition from one ruler to the next is pretty important for a country. That’s something good leaders know, unlike the other kind, such as Donald Trump. However, a smooth transition means deciding who’s next, and that was a problem in Elizabeth I’s time.

Just talking about the possibility of the monarch dying was ‘compassing the sovereign’s death’, and that was high treason. Back then, a lot of offences were associated with punishments that were lousy for your health. High treason was terminally bad for it. Why, even James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, found that out when Elizabeth, her dear first cousin once removed, ordered her beheading. 

Elizabeth’s refusal to make a will didn’t help. You know, something like, “yeah, give it to my ghastly cousin Mary’s brat, you know, whoever he is, James V or James VI, up there in Scotland”. But, no, there wasn’t even that. She didn’t like the idea of naming an heir, because she reckoned everyone would then “look to the rising rather than the setting sun”.

Sir Robert Cecil was her Chief minister. He was a highly capable leader, just like his dad, William Cecil, who’d held the job before him. He decided to screw all this compassing business, and get in touch with the Scottish king anyway, though in a hush-hush way, without attracting suspicious eyes.

Funnily enough, it’s likely Elizabeth knew, but said nothing. After all, she understood the importance of a smooth succession too. She might not be prepared to envisage her own death, but probably felt somebody ought to be preparing for it, and who better than Robert Cecil? 

Another problem was that once the monarch died, all the ministers immediately lost their jobs. Cecil would no longer have any authority. He’d be a private individual without official standing.

He came up with a great work-around. He discovered an old tradition that allowed a ‘Grand Council’ to summon Parliament in the absence of the Monarch, normally alone in having the authority to do that.

What was this Great Council? Cecil said it was the Privy Council, the body he chaired and which was made up of the Ministers who’d lose their jobs when Elizabeth died, plus some of leading nobles. So the Privy Councillors would stand down, but immediately reappear in the Grand Council with near royal authority. 

And who was going to dare to tell him no? 

Elizabeth died at 3:00 in the morning of the 24th of March 1603. 

Cecil summoned the ‘Great Council’ immediately. When it assembled, he took the Chair. The leading noble present, the Earl of Northumberland, challenged him. I imagine an exchange along the following lines:

“Why are you chairing this meeting, pal? This isn’t the Privy Council.”

“Err, right,” says Cecil nervously, “you want to take over?” 

Northumberland thinks a bit.

“Naah,” he says, “you’re good. Stay where you are.”

See? Leadership. If you’ve got it, and if you’ve managed to get into a position where you can use it, it works.

By 6:00, a proclamation, virtually identical to one that Cecil had drafted earlier, was read out at the gate of Whitehall Palace. It announced the death of Elizabeth, and that James would succeed her.

The new King himself, in Edinburgh, knew nothing about all this. There were no phones. No telegraph. No WhatsApp.

Now we get to some fine brown nosing.

Cecil had made it clear that no one was to go and tell the new King until he, Cecil, was good and ready. He ordered the palace gates locked. However, a certain Robert Carey had stationed horses all along the road from London to Edinburgh, ready to carry him there with the news, at top speed. 

You can imagine that this must have represented quite an investment. Not one Carey wanted to write off.

Fortunately for him, he had a brother on the Council. The brother ordered the gate opened and Carey rode out. He did well. Leaving before dawn on the 24th of March, he arrived in Edinburgh after nightfall on the 26th, nearly 600 km away, extraordinarily good going on horseback. 

The King was so pleased with Carey’s news that he made him a gentleman of the bedchamber. Carey, of course, was delighted with his reward.

The reward didn’t last long. Cecil wasn’t pleased his orders had been ignored. He rescinded Carey’s appointment. 

Carey did fine in the end, though. He eventually became Earl of Monmouth. Brown nosing can work in time, and he’d browned his on a quite epic scale.

Just like my ex-colleague. He eventually got promotion. Without having shown much capacity for leadership, or indeed even being very good at brown nosing.

Presumably, he found a boss more like King James, one of England’s more hopeless monarchs, than like Robert Cecil, one its more competent ministers. James came to be known as the wisest fool in Christendom. Sadly, fools are a hell of a sight more common, even in leading positions, than skilled leaders.

Which is the moral of this story.