How people leaders should respond when the CEO is out of touch and out of control
When Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s office confirmed it had bought a pre-owned private jet to support “flexible, secure and confidential travel” for Ford, reaction came quickly. Critics within the opposition and in the general public slammed the move as an out-of-touch luxury during a time when both government employees and the general public were dealing with an affordability crunch. Within two days, Ford reversed course and promised to sell what critics called his “gravy plane.” The provincial government eventually sold the jet to Bombardier.
For HR leaders, the storm around the jet purchase shows the risk when a leader seems out of touch with those lower in the hierarchy. When a powerful figure appears insulated from people’s daily realities, trust erodes quickly and every other message from the top is heard through a colder, more cynical filter, according to Mary Crossan, a professor of strategic leadership at Western University.
Crossan believes that HR leaders can’t be a bystander when that happens, because “HR plays a hugely strategic role.” People leaders need to understand both why judgment fails at the top and how to respond in a way that restores trust rather than simply containing damage,” she says.
Why leaders drift out of touch
Controversial decisions rarely come out of nowhere, as they reflect how leaders have been selected, rewarded, and developed over time, according to Crossan. She believes HR’s most important work starts long before any crisis, in the conditions that shape senior judgment. “The cornerstone of HR is the responsibility to ensure that the leaders of the organization and the practices and processes of the organization support being in a position for great judgment,” she says. “And we pick up the ingredients for judgment as being strength of character, competence, and commitment of the leader.”
Too often, systems outweigh competence and short-term results, says Crossan. “The unfortunate part is a lot of HR tends to focus on competence, whereas a lot of failures of judgment are actually character-related,” she says. When ambition and drive are prized without equal attention to humanity and humility, leaders can slowly lose touch with the people they are meant to serve, Crossan says.
“[An organization’s leader] might just have a lot of drive and a lot of courage, but weak temperance, so they go off and make these unilateral decisions that can land the organization offside of where it needs to be,” she says. “But there's a set of character dimensions that need to be strong in working together to support great judgment.”
Rebuilding trust, reinforcing accountability
A perceived indulgence at the top, announced while staff face wage freezes or rising costs, can undo years of engagement work, says Crossan, while HR is then asked to repair morale and explain how it happened.
She believes that cosmetic responses won’t work if the root cause is a character imbalance. “Number one is regaining trust [within the organization], so you have to solve the problem,” she says. “If the problem is an imbalance of character, you can't just wallpaper over it, you have to actually do the work — and my observation with senior leadership teams is people want to do good work and they do believe they have good character.”
Instead, Crossan suggests people leaders need to support genuine change in how senior teams make sense of their roles, the risks they take, and the signals they send. “When they start to get an assessment that strength and control, paired with weak humanity or collaboration, is leading to them being controlling and obsessive, not somebody who's operating with strong accountability, their eyes may open up about this — and then I think the reverberation to the organization becomes the messaging that goes down,” she says. “And the message being, we want to strengthen the quality of judgment and decision-making throughout the organization, not just our senior leadership team — then that starts to make real cultural shift in the organization.”
Raising the bar on who gets to lead
Ford’s jet reversal also exposes another familiar pattern: big decisions made in a tight inner circle and only changed after backlash. The corporate version is an executive group that hears uncomfortable truths only when staff speak out publicly or vote with their feet.
“This is where both HR and the board of directors have really got to put character and competence simultaneously as prerequisites for leadership in the organization,” says Crossan. “Where there's evidence of imbalances of character that a leader isn’t prepared to address, that's a risk.”
Treating that risk like any other material exposure gives HR a concrete basis for engaging directors when a CEO seems out of control, adds Crossan. “Character has to be on the radar with respect to a foundational aspect of everyday judgment because a lot of decisions aren't about whether they're ethical or unethical, they're really just about the solid basis of judgment and decision-making,” she says.
Developing character with the leadership team or take the risk to the board
Crossan also says many HR leaders and their teams haven't developed their skills on how to deal with a leader who’s a risk to the organization but people leaders have more tools than they may realize. “I think that being able to pursue this pathway of assessing and developing character, HR practitioners could feel a bit of hope and promise that they actually have a path forward in working with these individuals,” she says. “You don't want to single out one individual, but you'd be looking at the top management team as working collectively on this.”
Alternatively, Crossan says HR leaders aren’t necessarily on their own in addressing problematic CEO actions. “The other avenue is, if there’s pushback or inability from the CEO to amend their ways, then it becomes a risk factor that the board should be looking at.”
Crossan acknowledges that it can be a challenge for an HR leader to address out-of-touch and controversial behaviour by a CEO. “It takes a lot of accountability, a lot of courage, a lot of temperance, humanity, and humility to be able to navigate the turbulent waters of what I would say is dysfunctional decision-making at the top levels of the organization,” she says. “It's equipping themselves as HR professionals for that journey.”
