Astrid Davies on the Leadership Crisis: Why "Accidental Leaders" Are Failing and What Ethical Leadership Really Looks Like
After 30 years leading teams across the private, public, and voluntary sectors, Astrid Davies made the leap into consultancy to do something she couldn't do as an employee: work with a wider range of clients, on her own terms. Today she runs Astrid Davies Consulting, helping leaders navigate what she describes as nothing less than a global leadership crisis, one where compassion is too often mistaken for weakness and true leadership gets confused with simply winning the peace.
Astrid's work spans two very different worlds. A significant part of her practice supports charity and community leaders, who she says are constantly balancing internal management, trustees, community presence, and financial sustainability, often while overworking themselves for causes they're passionate about. At the same time, she's become a vocal advocate for what she calls "accidental leaders": people pushed into leadership roles without any formal training, a phenomenon she traces back through centuries of business history.
In this interview, Astrid unpacks why so many organizations are being run by leaders who don't know what they don't know, why management has wrongly been treated as "leadership-lite," and how she helps both charity leaders and accidental leaders build the self-awareness and purpose they need to lead well, without burning out.
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Q: You've spent 30 years leading high-performing teams across private, public, and voluntary sectors before founding Astrid Davies Consulting. What prompted you to make the leap into consultancy, and how did your eclectic background shape the way you approach leadership development today?
I wanted to be able to help a wider diversity of clients than I would be able to do in employment. I also wanted to run my own show after 30 years! By carving out my consultancy from my varied range of experience, I am able to bring the right elements of my practice to the right clients at the right time. I say this not because it's what I think; I say this because it's what my clients say. What my experience has taught me is that leadership is in crisis right now. On a global stage, leadership is wrongly conflated by some with geo-political bullying, and compassion is wrongly conflated with weakness. That's not leadership, it's winning the peace. True leadership is building a consensus, where the benefit of the many should outweigh the financial opportunities of the few. True leadership is building a vision for a better world, not a vision of a more lucrative future. And true leadership is about finding practical strategic solutions, taking the harder path, when often it is easier to continue to kick an issue down the road for the next generation to deal with. I am writing a book about ethics in leadership, informed by what I have seen and observed over the past 30+ years. It won't pull any punches!
Q: A significant portion of your work supports charities and community organizations, where leaders describe their roles as "a balancing act" between internal management, trustees, community presence, and financial sustainability. What are the most common leadership challenges you see in this sector, and how do you help charity leaders navigate them without burning out?
Charity leaders fall into two camps: the volunteers who are Trustees of charities and set/agree the direction for each charity and who are responsible for its governance; and the paid staff who head up the operations (and who, in practice, often end up running charities anyhow). Often paid staff are underpaid and overqualified for the roles they perform, but they do so because they are passionate about the cause that their charity supports. These contexts offer up a wide range of challenges. Some specific leadership challenges which I note appear frequently in client conversations are:
Too many small charities all focused on solving the same problem. While it is totally understandable that memorial charities exist, it is such a shame that, in doing so in isolation, they splinter the marketplace and lower the sums of money invested in important causes as a result. Sometimes these charities are set up as cathartic expressions of frustration. Often they are established to fill a gap in service provision by the State. What these reasons mean in turn is that the "beneficiaries" of the charity may not always just be the people it states it will serve and support. Sometimes it can offer a lifeline for the grieving and the lost. I would love to see more psychological support being offered to those who establish charities in memoriam, so they can focus on their charity AND themselves. In turn this can put a huge strain on those paid to lead within such organisations, both on the emotional AND commercial levels.
The passion that volunteers and paid staff have for their charity can often overspill into overwork. Longer hours, harder tasks, often completed with a sigh "because who else will do them if I don't?". This is a key leadership challenge - the challenge to prevent self-exploitation by charity staff. There are all kinds of workplace wellbeing issues at play here. There is also a fundamental challenge facing many leaders: how to keep the show on the road with too few people to do it within the realms of workplace legislation. This is a difficult circle to square. Some leaders will keep pushing on and hope to recruit more volunteers to fill the hole. Other leaders will take the tough but necessary decision to close the charity's doors for limited periods, to permit the staff and volunteers to have a break. In the voluntary sector, saying "No" is sometimes the kindest thing a leader can do. It just doesn't feel like it.
Q: You write about "accidental leaders" - people who find themselves in leadership positions without formal training or preparation. Why is this such a critical issue for organizations today, and what's your approach to helping these accidental leaders evolve into confident, purposeful leaders?
"Accidental" leadership has always been the norm in business, going back to ancient times. The leaders who were trained to lead were mostly in the clergy, the social elite and/or armed forces. The concept of leadership has been taught for centuries. However, where people (mostly men in the yawning gap between classical times and the 20th Century) did manage to secure some kind of social mobility, they would pursue being "a man of letters" as part of that mobility. This, in practice, would be reference to a limited range of texts, all of which focused on how to get what you want (Sun Tzu - Art of War, Machiavelli - The Prince, numerous writers from the 18th Century with the advent of mass printing) - the so-called "mirrors for princes". It was a conscious and demanding act of personal development to acquire leadership skills if you weren't from the leader classes, in most countries in the Northern Hemisphere, until the 20th Century.
With the advent of mass industrialisation and the growth of business moguls, social mobility meant more wealth and control - and sometimes even power - reaching more people who had never had access to the literature. Thus started the long and troubled history of the accidental leader. Why are these such a problem? It's because they don't know what they don't know. As a result, their leadership could be inconsistent, reactive and often visceral. Human emotion and the stress of making money often resulted in poor behaviours in the workplace, with exploitation and insecure employment a norm. The leaders who bucked this trend were famous for doing so: the Cadbury and Rowntree families in the UK were famously philanthropic. And yet they weren't saints. They had simply worked out that if you treat your workforce well, you can expect more from them. And they did.
Bringing this up to date, we see more inexperienced "leaders" in the workplace than ever before. Leadership is sold, stacked high and sold cheap, to anyone who wants to get on. Management (which I believe is the foundation of all effective leadership) is seen as "leadership-lite" and somehow less-than, when compared with leadership. Everyone wants to be a leader, but no one wants to be a manager because it's inferred to be inferior. This is fundamentally wrong. Organisations today rely on effective management for their success: monitoring; assessing; reviewing; planning; organising; building; training... And they always did. The list goes on. Where accidental leadership falls down is that it doesn't have a way to reliably respond to this plethora of challenges. It lacks resilience, self-awareness and, often, purpose. It just gets on with getting on. Not only then are these accidental leaders untrained and ill-equipped for what is facing them in the VUCA workplace of the 21st Century, but they often are performing a function, rather than choosing a role to fulfill with gusto. That lack of vision is crucial because it is what can really hold businesses back. Add into that, we also see accidental leaders who know how to manage but can't then build on that to add in mission-setting, sharing a purpose and motivating a staff team, and you start to see cracks appearing in businesses, big and small.
I have a solution for this (I would, wouldn't I, given this is my focus?!). Help anyone in a management or leadership role to understand their role. What are they for? When they can answer that, for the business, the team and themselves, they are a long way along the track to success. Understanding how someone fits in their "accidental" role is so important. It helps define what the organisation expects of anyone in their role. It could also clarify what the organisation might expect from a specific individual. That, in turn, will help that individual be clear about their own expectations of self. Self-awareness and self-compassion don't often go hand in hand, but for the accidental leaders out there, this is a non-negotiable. Without it, you are setting up innocent managers to fail at leadership. Not on my watch! When I work with leaders, whether accidental or the sort who have ticked off all the training but let it wash over them (there's always one...), I emphasise the importance of purpose, fit and clarified expectations. With those in place, success can be pretty hard to avoid; leaders are confident of their purpose, they understand their role's purpose (not the same thing) and they understand how they contribute to the wider corporate agenda. It's all about motivating them, pulling the right levers in a way that they learn about their own levers and can self-direct at will. I have spent a lifetime doing this and I love seeing the results.
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