100th Blog Piece: BBC Director-General, George Entwistle – Credible Leader Or Not? And What About You?

BBC Director-General George Entwistle’s recent account before the Commons Select Committee to answer questions about the BBC and serial child abuser Jimmy Savile has been widely criticized in the media and raises many questions about the nature of leadership and organizational culture, beyond Savile’s vile actions.

Whether he was (or wasn’t) prepared/coached and informed of the facts, it’s all about the perception he created. And to commentators who forensically examined his performance, he seemed ill prepared and ill at ease, lacking authority, confidence and conviction in his responses to questioning from MP’s.

According to respected leadership experts, Jim Kouzes & Barry Posner in their book The Leadership Challenge, we have to believe the messenger before we believe the message. Based on what we witnessed, George Entwistle lacked what Kouzes & Posner call ‘source credibility’. We recognise the absence of this leadership characteristic – as in George Entwistle’s case – when someone appears out of their depth.

When questioned by the Select Committee about his conversation with Helen Boaden, Director of BBC News, the wheels seemed to come off George Entwistle’s wagon altogether. She gave him a ‘heads up’ about the potential need to change the Xmas tv programme schedules, for which he was responsible at the time – tributes to Jimmy Savile had already been planned for broadcast and the Newsnight programme then in development about Savile’s persistent abuse of children over many years and on BBC premises would scupper these tributes. He simply thanked her for the ‘heads up’ as he described it and left it at that.

This ‘ten second conversation’ at an awards luncheon coupled with his responses to questions posed by MP’s gives us a revealing insight into George Entwistle’s leadership style and the drawbacks of the seemingly rigid, hierarchical structure and organizational culture at the BBC:

• Where was George Entwistle’s ‘natural curiosity’ as one MP put it?
• Why didn’t he ask Helen Boaden to elaborate?
• Why did he think that asking more questions would be ‘showing undue interest’?
• Wasn’t it his responsibility to ask questions and to understand the impact the Newsnight programme would have on scheduling and to make an informed decision?
• Why did he act passively and wait for the ‘BBC structures and processes to report upwards’ and for Helen Boaden to come back to him?
• Where was his sense of urgency to resolve the potential impact on scheduling?
• What does this tell us about his decision making style and the BBC’s decision-making processes and its silo culture?
• Where was his commercial awareness to spot a news scoop, even though he was responsible at that time for scheduling and not journalistic content?

Commons Select Committee member and former BBC journalist Ben Bradshaw made the point to Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in the wake of the George Entwistle’s appearance before the Commons Select Committee that George Entwistle must “get a grip, assemble the facts and act on them quickly”, and not wait for the findings of the two independent enquiries he has put in place. He needs to demonstrate his agility.

The implication is that the Director General needs to be seen by the public to be acting robustly to restore confidence in the BBC and him. George Entwistle must change perceptions and demonstrate that he is indeed a credible leader and that the stewardship of a national institution is in safe hands.

So as you reflect on this piece, consider your role as a leader, the perceptions others have of you, the vitality and transparency of your organizational culture, particularly when under pressure or in crisis. What will it encourage you to do as a result and when?

Post a reply, it will be great to hear from you.

PS. As a postscript to this piece, the really sad thing is the impact that the BBC has had in ‘Savile-gate’ and the tailspin that George Entwistle and the Corporation now find themselves in could have been avoided. The focus could and should have rightly remained on the victims of Savile’s vile and cruel abuse. If only George Entwistle had dug deeper in his conversation with Helen Boaden or had visibly flexed his muscles as Director General when ITV’s programme about Savile had aired three weeks ago.