Executives and boards
How do you lead when you’re being scrutinised from outside the organisation?
Lead the same way you would if nobody was watching. That sounds simple, and it’s the hardest thing to do. External scrutiny — from regulators, media, government, or a public controversy — creates pressure to manage optics over substance, to choose the message over the truth, to make decisions that look right over decisions that are right. Leaders who navigate scrutiny well are the ones who don’t let that pressure change their operating principles.
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: Context, Clarity, Care
Don’t let the external audience become your primary audience
During the Westpac Royal Commission, the temptation was to make every decision with an eye on how it would appear externally. The problem is that an organisation run for external appearances starts making different decisions — slower, more defensive, less honest internally — and eventually produces worse outcomes for both the external audience and its own people. Lead for the organisation first. The external audience can observe that.
Be more transparent internally, not less
Scrutiny tends to produce a retreat into formal communications: carefully worded statements, legal review of every sentence, approved messaging only. The problem is that your team notices the gap between the careful external messaging and the reality they’re living. The more you close down internal communication during a hard period, the more trust you lose with the people who are carrying the load. Tell them what you can. Tell them what you can’t, and why.
Show up physically
During the Royal Commission, I kept doing what I’d been doing — branch visits, staff forums, town halls. Some advisers suggested pulling back to manage the optics. I didn’t, because the organisation needed to see its leadership present, not managing from behind glass. When the external pressure is highest, the internal visibility matters most.
Where judgment matters
Some scrutiny is deserved. If you’re being examined because something went wrong on your watch, the answer is not to perform resilience — it’s to acknowledge what happened, take accountability, and demonstrate through action what’s changing. People can forgive most things. They find it very hard to forgive leaders who don’t own what’s theirs to own.
During the last period of significant external pressure on your organisation, did your team feel more connected to you or less — and do you know why?
Start with the book
The Leadership Star sets out all five practices in full, with the reasoning behind each one.