Transformers: 20 leadership role models for a post-COVID world

Words _Kate Bassett, Charles Orton-Jones and Matthew Rock

Leaders and managers will have to behave differently as we emerge from this marathon COVID-19 crisis. The ability to build trust; the need for constant, empathetic communication; awesome listening skills; being open to diverse perspectives; creating a sense of belonging… these are just some of the attributes that managers will have to dial up post-COVID – and which are detailed in CMI’s recent ‘Management Transformed’ project.

We’ve spent the past few months looking for stories of leaders who embody these new qualities. And wow, what a set of transformative leaders we’ve found...

Vera Daves de Sousa

THE ANGOLAN POLITICIAN COUNTERING DEEP-ROOTED PROBLEMS WITH FRESH PERSPECTIVES AND A PIONEERING SPIRIT

Toughest leadership challenge in the world? Well, the role of Angolan finance minister must be up there. The nation is still recovering from four decades of war: first for independence, then a civil war. Oil accounts for 90 per cent of exports and 65 per cent of government revenue, but a price slump put Angola into a recession in 2015. It’s still not out. A plan to peg the currency to the dollar caused the Angolan kwanza to fall by two-thirds. The richest woman in Africa – the daughter of the former president – has left the country amid corruption charges.

Enter Vera Daves de Sousa. Appointed finance minister in 2019 aged just 35, she arrived with a willingness to embrace new perspectives and a plan to overhaul the Angolan economy. Oil is out. Entrepreneurs are in. “In terms of revenues, the economy still struggles with a high dependence on revenues coming from oil,” she says. “We’ll do our best to make sure diversification starts to happen in a more consistent way, and that we remove the bottlenecks.”

Her style fuses academic rigour with plain speaking. She is an economics graduate, and wrote a book on public finance with her professor, who called her “one of the best students I ever had”.

Daves de Sousa is just one of two female finance ministers in Africa. Her youth, cerebral approach and desire to break with the unruly policies of Angola’s past make her a formidable role model in her nation and across the continent.

Carolyn McCall

THE FTSE LEADER SETTING A KINDER TONE BY MAKING A PERSONAL SACRIFICE DURING COVID-19

The COVID crisis has been a test for leaders. How do they inspire unity in workers who may be suffering like never before? Carolyn McCall OBE CMgr CCMI is the CEO of ITV. Her immediate response to falling ad revenues was to take a 20 per cent pay cut and give up her bonus – and persuade the board to do likewise. Her move back in April helped to set a philanthropic tone in the corporate world. At Sky, chief executive Jeremy Darroch followed suit by donating nine months of his 2020 salary to coronavirus relief charities such as the National Emergency Trust. Joe Garner, chief executive of Nationwide, agreed to cut his pay and pension by 20 per cent. McCall already had a strong track record. Before ITV, she turned EasyJet from a basket case with worse punctuality than Air Zimbabwe to Europe’s top-rated airline. Her readiness to be among the first to forgo rewards only burnishes her reputation.

Nadia Murad

THE FIGHTER FOR YAZIDI JUSTICE RALLYING OTHERS TO HER CAUSE THROUGH UNSTINTING COMMUNICATION

“As a young girl, I dreamed of finishing high school. It was my dream to have a beauty parlour in our village and to live near my family in Sinjar. But this dream became a nightmare. Unexpected things happened. Genocide took place. As a consequence, I lost my mother, six of my brothers and my brothers’ children. Every Yazidi family has a similar story.”

Nadia Murad is one of the main reasons why we know those stories. Aged 19, she was captured, enslaved, raped and tortured by Islamic State fighters. She escaped after three months and today leads global efforts to bring justice for the Yazidi people and to end sexual violence as a weapon of war. She became the United Nations’ first goodwill ambassador for the dignity of survivors of human trafficking. She enlisted the Pope and Barack Obama to support her movement, Nadia’s Initiative. Thanks to her tireless efforts, trials of Islamic State leaders and fighters are now under way.

In 2018, she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her dignity of survivors relentless pursuit of justice.

Stephen Wolfram

THE BRITISH-AMERICAN COMPUTER SCIENTIST RAISING THE BAR FOR ORIGINAL THINKING

Most people use Google as their default search engine. Nerds use Wolfram Alpha. It’s just one of the creations of Stephen Wolfram, a scientist turned entrepreneur. His life is too varied to summarise. He wrote his first science paper aged 15 while at Eton, and got his PhD from Caltech aged 20. He invented Mathematica, a popular computing platform, used notably for neural networks and machine learning. He even sketched out a radical new approach to how we think about the universe in his magnum opus A New Kind of Science. He sees no distinction between pure and applied thinking, academia and popular writing, or business and philosophy.

As just one of his many side projects, Wolfram measures his own life in minute detail. He records keystrokes, mouse movements, phone calls and even physical movements back to the 1980s. His book, for example, took “over one million keystrokes and one hundred mouse miles”.

The Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman said of Wolfram: “He seems to have worked on everything and has some original or careful judgement on any topic.” We all like to think we’re original. Stephen Wolfram puts that claim into perspective.

Lual Mayen

THE FORMER REFUGEE SHOWING WHY ITPAYS TO THINK LIKE AN OUTSIDER

Refugees are natural entrepreneurs and innovators. Just look at pizza chain Firezza, started by a pair of Bosnian refugees who arrived in the UK in 1992 without speaking a word of English. As outsiders and natural self-starters, they were able to spot an opportunity to do things differently.

Or take Lual Mayen, the CEO of Junub Games. Mayen was born during his parents’ 200-mile trek from war-torn South Sudan to a refugee camp in northern Uganda. He grew up there and spotted his first computer – at a refugee registration centre – when he was 12. He begged his mother for one. She eventually saved enough money, working as the camp’s seamstress, to buy him a used laptop.

By watching online tutorials, Mayen taught himself English, programming and graphic design – and built a video game, which was picked up and shared among the international gaming community. Mayen was subsequently invited to serve as a consultant for the World Bank and was granted a visa to move to the US.

His company, Junub Games, is on the brink of officially releasing Salaam, a high-tension runner game that puts a player in the shoes of a refugee forced to flee a war-torn region. Mayen has been recognisedas a Global Gaming Citizen and is leading the way in social impact gaming, promoting peace and empathy instead of violence.

Dave Goldhill

THE US HEALTHCARE PIONEER WITH AN UNSTOPPABLE SENSE OF PURPOSE

“How American health care killed my father” is the title of a 2009 article by Dave Goldhill, an American entrepreneur and former CEO of Universal Studios. His father went to hospital with pneumonia and caught sepsis. “My dad became a statistic – merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals.” Thus began Goldhill's war on US healthcare.

He wrote a book, Catastrophic Care, and then two more on the subject. Then he launched Sesame, an online marketplace for healthcare services that cuts out insurance companies. The prices are upfront and clear. Sesame offers an MRI scan for $275 and a diabetes video consultancy with a doctor for $55. That’s ten times lower than the usual fees for healthcare in the US.

Goldhill is now a figurehead for reform of a notoriously hard-to-fix problem. Steve Forbes, the founder of Forbes magazine, interviewed Goldhill recently and remarked: “Often it’s an outsider who incisively sizes up an industry and sets in motion profound changes.” Goldhill combines a relentless approach with a forensic analysis of what’s gone wrong. His sense of purpose and the purity of his motives mean that even his critics take him seriously. And now, after a decade of trying, he’s starting to make a serious impact.

Benny the Irish Polyglot

THE LEARN-A-LANGUAGE PIONEER WHO SAYS YOUACHIEVE MOST WHEN YOU OWN YOUR MISTAKES

Learning from failure, failing fast – these are truisms of modern leadership. Benny the Irish Polyglot is an advocate of a new way of learning languages who says that his mission in life is “giving people permission to make mistakes”.

Born in Ireland, he managed a C in German at school. After graduating, he moved to Spain and took a year to learn the language. He researched where he was going wrong and wrote up the results in a book called Fluent in 3 Months. He argues that anyone can reach fluency in three months… with the right approach. He now speaks more than 20 languages and promotes his theories on YouTube and via TED talks.

“The more mistakes you make, the faster you become a confident language learner,” he says. He suggests going up to strangers and just saying “Hi”, “Ciao”, “Guten tag”, or “здравствуйте”.Stick to that language. Make mistakes. Make friends. And just keep talking to anyone who’ll listen. It’s the opposite of the UK’s regimen of chanting schoolchildren and grades-based tests.

Leaders need to communicate. Benny the Irish Polyglot can help you master new tongues, no matter how schrecklich you were at school.

Liz Johnson

THE SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR TEACHING US TO LEARN FROM PEOPLE WHO OVERCOME CHALLENGES

Great leaders are energised by problems. The greater the challenge, the greater the victory. Liz Johnson is a phenomenal example. Born with cerebral palsy, she competed in national swimming races aged 14, then in three Paralympic Games in the S6 breaststroke category, winning gold in Beijing, plus multiple world and European titles. The respect her fellow athletes felt for her meant she was asked to read the athletes’ oath at the London 2012 Paralympic Games opening ceremony.

But it’s in her life beyond sport that she truly impresses. Liz is a patron of Dreamflight, which organises holidays to Florida for seriously disabled children. She’s a qualified accountant with a degree in business management and finance. And now she’s an social entrepreneur, as co-founder of The Ability People – an employment agency staffed by people with disabilities.

“I thought they would make perfect recruitment consultants, because it’s all about balancing long hours and a life with an impairment, which can be difficult. We have to work towards a goal to get something done, because our first attempt won’t be successful. You have to build up good relationships with strangers, often. Resilience is high, because we have to focus to get a job done.”

Stephanie Drakes

THE UK ADVERTISING BOSS DEMONSTRATING THE COMMERCIAL IMPACT OF BEING INCLUSIVE

Research from deloitte shows that organisations with inclusive cultures are twice as likely to exceed their financial targets, six times more likely to be more innovative and eight times more likely to achieve better business outcomes.

Stephanie Drakes is one of Britain’s most inclusive leaders. After being made redundant from ad land in her mid-50s, she started her own agency – with a difference. As the CEO of Social & Local, she actively hires individuals who are typically excluded from the advertising workforce, such as mums, carers and OAPs. And she has disrupted the traditional and often harsh “bleed-to-succeed” advertising agency model by providing “flexibility and work/life balance for the sharpest minds in the industry, irrespective of life circumstances”.

Drakes leads by example too, working three days a week and taking a mid-morning break to visit her husband in his nursing home.

With clients ranging from the National Grid to Breast Cancer UK, Social & Local is the only communications firm to be established as a Community Interest Company, investing 50 per cent of its profit into social projects.

Slava Solonitsyn (and his team)

THE ENTREPRENEUR WHOSE LATERAL THINKINGMAY UNLOCK A GLOBAL PROBLEM

Housing is a global problem. There is a shortage of cheap, modern, durable housing. Bricks and mortar are labour-intensive and time-consuming to work with, putting accommodation out of reach for millions of people.

Slava Solonitsyn and his co-founders at Mighty Buildings are approaching the housing shortage from a different angle. They took 3D printing technology and scaled it up to solve the housing problem. A 3D-printed Mighty Buildings house is cheap, eco-friendly and made to last. “As soon as you are able to produce not only the walls but also floor and ceiling, that saves a huge amount of hours,” says Solonitsyn. “Specifically labour hours, which are very expensive.”

According to McKinsey, construction misses out on more than £1 trillion of value a year due to low productivity. 3D printing reduces the required labour by 95 per cent and results in ten times less waste – at twice the speed. The cost is 45 per cent lower. 3D printing could change the housing equation forever.

Petra De Sutter

BELGIUM’S TRANSGENDER DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER, WHO’S SHOWINGTHAT EVERYONE HAS THE RIGHT TO BE WHO THEY ARE

A 2018 survey from LGBT+ charity Stonewall found that half of trans people — those whose gender is not the same as their biological sex at birth — have been so afraid of discrimination at work that they have hidden their identity. One in eight reported having been physically attacked by colleagues or customers.

But the landscape is gradually shifting as transgender rights climb up the boardroom agenda and more trans people move into positions of power.

Take Petra De Sutter, for example. In October, she was named as one of Belgium’s seven deputy prime ministers, making her the highest-ranking transgender politician in Europe.

The fact that her appointment didn’t cause a media frenzy hints at more progressive attitudes towards trans leaders. Sutter, who is also a gynaecologist and a former professor of reproductive medicine, tweeted that she was proud that in Belgium and most of the EU “your gender identity does not define you as a person and is a non-issue. I hope that my appointment as minister and deputy PM can trigger the debate in countries where this is not yet the case.”

Sinéad Burke

THE IRISH ACTIVIST ASKING US TO CONSIDER WHO’S NOT IN THE ROOM

Despite the business case for diversity, many organisations are still missing out on a huge pool of disabled talent. Just 51 per cent of disabled people of working age are in employment (compared with 81 per cent of non-disabled people), and they are paid on average 12 per cent less than their able-bodied peers.

Born with achondroplasia (the most common type of dwarfism), Irish activist Sinéad Burke is helping to “tilt the lens” and change the conversation around disability.

Burke grew up in Dublin with four “average-sized” siblings and trained as a primaryschool teacher, graduating from Marino Institute of Education at the top of her class. Her 2017 TED talk, “Why design should include everyone”, where she talked openly about her struggles to buy appropriateclothes, use public toilets and navigate airport terminals, kick-started her stratospheric rise. She has since attended the Met Gala in New York, spoken about disability at the World Economic Forum in Davos and was chosen by Meghan Markle to front the September 2019 issue of British Vogue.

Last year, the BBC named her as one of the world’s most inspiring and influential women. “We must continuously ask, ‘Who’s not in the room?’” she says.

Zarifa Ghafari

THE LOCAL LEADER FACING UP TO DANGERWITH GENUINE COURAGE

“Most of our lives, we’re beset by crises,” says Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn. “Courageous leaders are not cowed or intimidated. They realise that, in the midst of turbulence, there lies an opportunity to grow and rise.”

Zarifa Ghafari is an extraordinary example of a courageous leader. She became mayor of Maidan Shar in Afghanistan’s Wardak province at the age of 26. It’s a deeply conservative area: support for the Taliban is so widespread that many major highways are not safe for civilians.

On her first day at work, her office was mobbed by angry men brandishing sticks and rocks. Ghafari was forced to flee and her mayoral term was delayed – but she returned to office nine months later.

She has survived six assasination attempts and continues to battle for educational and economic rights for women in Afghanistan. “I am the mayor of a province where people still don’t believe women should take part in society. It’s really dangerous and full of problems… But I’m in love with my job.”

Ghafari was recognised as an International Woman of Courage by the US Secretary of State in October.

Ana Brnabić

SERBIA’S FIRST FEMALE – AND FIRST GAY – PRIME MINISTER, WHO’S ENCOURAGING TOLERANCE IN A CONSERVATIVE NATION

In the corridors of power, representation matters. According to Andrew Reynolds’ book The Children of Harvey Milk, LGBT+ leaders not only have a positive effect on their community but also on wider society.

Ana Brnabić broke through two glass ceilings when she took office as prime minister of Serbia in 2017, as the first woman to hold this position as well as the first gay person. She was a surprise choice for the traditionally conservative Balkan nation, where 65 per cent of people believe that homosexuality is an illness and 78 per cent think that homosexuality should not be expressed outside the home.

Heralding a new era of leadership and serving as proof ofincreasing tolerance, she said: “Serbia is changing and changing fast, and if you will, I am part of that change.”

Brnabić, a University of Hull graduate, is working towards raising living standards across Serbia, reducing the country’s budget deficit (it’s now one of seven countries to have set aside more than 10 per cent of GDP) and joining the EU in 2025.

Dr Sabrina Cohen-Hatton

THE FIRE SERVICE LEADER SHOWING THAT SUCCESS ISN’T DETERMINED BY WHERE YOU COME FROM

Class privilege remains deeply entrenched in corporate Britain. The government’s latest State of the Nation report on social mobility found that those from better-off backgrounds are almost 80 per cent more likely to land a top job than their working-class peers – an effect known as the “sticky ceiling”.

“If we want a meritocracy, we need to recognise that so many people are yards behind the start line. That’s not a fair race,” says Dr Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, chief fire officer at West Sussex Fire and Rescue Service and author of The Heat of the Moment.

Cohen-Hatton is a rare example of someone who has risen to the top of her profession, despite her background. She grew up in Newport in Wales but ended up living on the streets when she was 15 after her father passed away and her relationship with her mother broke down.

In an attempt to turn her life around, she started selling The Big Issue and eventually scraped enough money together to put down a deposit on a tiny rented flat. She went on to join the fire service and is now one of just six female fire chiefs in the country – and the youngest. “I didn’t need a degree or formal qualifications to join the fire service: they hired me on the strength of who they believed I could be,” she says.

Jack Dorsey

THE BIG-TECH CEO WHO’S ADOPTEDA “LIFE’S TOO SHORT” MENTALITY

Earlier this year, The Wellcome Trust called on business leaders to help fund research into COVID-19 vaccines, treatment and testing, describing it as “the best investment your business can make” and “the world’s best exit strategy” for tackling coronavirus. For many leaders, this pandemic has forced a reckoning between profit and social purpose.

Jack Dorsey, the 44-year-old co-founder of Twitter, seized the moment to make his first major foray into philanthropy, announcing that he will devote $1bn of his equity in payment startup Square – or about 28 per cent of his total wealth – to a COVID-19 relief fund. And, for the sake of transparency, he’s detailing every donation in a publicly available Google spreadsheet. Any remaining money will be funnelled into supporting education for girls and universal basic income.

“Why now? The needs are increasingly urgent, and I want to see the impact in my lifetime,” he tweeted. “I hope this inspires others to do something similar. Life’s too short, so let’s do everything we can today to help people now.”

It’s by far the biggest single donation to tackling COVID-19, with Fortune including Dorsey in its list of the “World’s 25 Greatest Leaders: Heroes of the pandemic”.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya

BELARUS’S ACCIDENTAL LEADER, WHO HAS BECOME THE EMBODIMENT OF HOPE

Many people find themselves thrust into leadership positions with little preparation. In the COVID-19 crisis, many managers have had to step suddenly into unfamiliar roles. But Svetlana Tikhanovskay's experiences take "accidental leadership" to a whole new level. The former English teacher was catapulted to political stardom in Belarus earlier this year when she stepped into the role of opposition leader and attempted to unseat Alexander Lukashenko, the man known as "Europe's last dictator".

Tikhanovskaya was a reluctant challenger. She was initially a stand-in for her husband, a popular blogger barred from running and jailed by the authorities, and put herself forward out of concern for the people of Belarus. The political novice quickly became a national hero, with tens of thousands rallying to support her bid.

In defiance of Lukashenko, who said “our constitution is not for a woman… and our society is not mature enough to vote for a woman”, Tikhanovskaya united with two female campaigners, Veronika Tsepkalo and Maria Kolesnikova, helping to transform the image of the country’s male-dominated politics.

Currently living in exile in Lithuania, Tikhanovskaya refuses to accept Lukashenko’s claim to victory in a poll marred by vote-rigging. She describes herself as the country’s “chosen president”. “I have become the embodiment of people’s hope, their longing for change,” she says.

Joe Biden & Kamala Harris (and watch out for Jason Grumet)

THE INCOMING US PRESIDENT AND VICE-PRESIDENTTRYING TO BUILD BRIDGES – AND TRUST

There’s no more obvious test of leadership than the one facing the incoming US president and vice-president. In a fractured America, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will – we hope – start to find common ground, especially in how they try to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. It was striking that in the president-elect’s first speech he said: “I will work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did”.

Kamala Harris will bring a distinctive style of leadership. illustrated when, as vice-presidential nominee, she chose the Secret Service codename “Pioneer”. Born to a Jamaican father and Indian mother in Oakland, near San Francisco, Harris entered politics in 2003 and has spent the best part of two decades in public life notching up firsts: the first black woman to be elected district attorney in California history; the first woman to be California’s attorney general; the first Indian- American senator; and now the first woman elected as vicepresident. When asked by a reporter what her motto was, she responded by quoting her mother: “You may be the first, but make sure you’re not the last.”

A final note about a lesser known figure. Jason Grumet (below) is notable as the founder of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which promotes bipartisan solutions to the country’s most intractable public policy challenges. That feels like a good way forward...