When pally beats harry

Maybe coaching and definitely no bullying. That’s the conclusion drawn about the chair’s role in guiding a chief executive—in particular an inexperienced one—at a London Business School (LBS) roundtable.

Involving a panel of chairs and CEOs, the discussion explored what is means for a chair to be “the ultimate guardian of an organisation”. An LBS report says the chair has to be a “trusted advisor” and perform a “coaching role”. But there must be accountability, too.

“While trust is essential, there is a need for the chair—and indeed other board members—to be sufficiently probing and curious to hold the CEO to account, in a constructive manner.

“It is not helpful for the board to create (or the chair to allow) a dynamic that is aggressive and ‘bullying’ of the CEO to emerge.”

Hard to imagine most CEOs being bullied, but there you go, it can happen.

Slim pickings

Investors don’t like junk food. That may be a surprise given the volume of sales (OK, we admit some of that is down to Board Agenda), but The Times reports investors, among them Legal & General, have expressed concern that ministers are not going ahead with a league table showing which companies sell the most sugar, salt and fat.

That shows investors adding a new issue to sustainability concerns. That may surprise some but likely not others, who have been highlighting sugar as the next big health scandal for some time.

All we can say is that Board Agenda is relieved no one’s calling for a league table of sugar consumers. Could possibly be the only thing we’d ever win.

Psycho killer

Here’s one we missed a while back but thought it worth returning to: chief executives have been unfairly labelled as psychopaths. Emilia Bunea, an executive and graduate of London Business School, writes for Psychology Today that the public perception is that there is a disproportionate number of psychopaths among corporate leaders.

But she says mistakes have been made. Detecting “psychopathy” among business leaders is no surprise: it’s present in most people. But only clinical levels mean someone is a psychopath, and there’s not much evidence there are many of those among business leaders.

Why is it important to set things right? Bunea says the idea corporates are teeming with psychos could keep young people from entering the business world. And who would that affect most? “Those who are already underprivileged, as they are less likely to have friends or relatives in corporates who could give them first-hand experience.”

There’s another reason. Filled with the idea that their bosses could be psychopaths, employees could avoid giving honest feedback. Bunea says “feedback is essential for personal and organisational learning…”. And if you are working with the boss “from hell”, well, “knowing that they are very unlikely to be clinical psychopaths would make you feel safer in looking for ways to get them brought to justice…”.

You don’t have to be mad to lead in business and it doesn’t help to think everyone else is.