The Coronation Trap: The Curse of the Uncontested Leader

By Psychologist Nik Kinley , leadership consultant, coach, and assessor.

When Labour MPs nominated their new leader this month, 379 of 403 backed Andy Burnham. Only one MP, Neil Coyle, nominated anyone else, and only once Burnham’s win was mathematically certain. His explanation deserves recording: “There was no room left to crawl into Andy Burnham’s backside.”

This week, Burnham becomes Prime Minister without ever having won the argument for it. No rival programme to beat, no weeks of having his thinking pulled apart in public, no queue of doubters to persuade. A coronation, not a contest.

Most commentary treats this as strength: a united party, a clean start. But that unanimity also carries a risk. A leader who never had to win the argument to get the job may struggle to hear the argument once they have it. Businesses should watch closely, too, because the leaders they appoint face the same challenges.

Power already makes hearing hard. Three decades of research show that authority degrades the information reaching leaders. Bad news is softened, complexity is smoothed away, and flattery flows, while power itself inflates leaders’ confidence and reliance on instinct. It happens to the best leaders; it’s just the physics of the role. But a contested rise supplies experience that pushes back against this. And being robbed of this raises serious risks for Burnham.

First, he arrives without an organisation that has learned to challenge him. A leadership contest is where a leader’s court learns to argue with them, and the norms of challenge are established. Burnham’s court has had no such training, and he begins his tenure with a greater proportion of people’s doubts, concerns and counters lying unexpressed, beneath the surface.

The second, bigger risk is that coronation degrades the grounding connection leaders have with the people they lead. Power distances leaders from people anyway, but with this kind of coronation, Burnham never got a chance to get close in the first place. He certainly had the reputation as Manchester Mayor of being grounded in local issues. But national leadership is on a different scale and without a leadership contest, he hasn’t had the chance yet to really connect with the nation and his party.

Burnham’s profile may exacerbate these risks, too. One of his critics’ longstanding complaints is that he shifts positions to please whichever audience he faces. You might think that someone that flexible wouldn’t be at risk of hearing too little. But a leader who changes their mind to please the room is unusually open to influence, and so who is in the room becomes more important.

Unfortunately, in the writer Ian Leslie’s blunt verdict, Burnham is “a people pleaser”, and pleasers pick pleasers. A former adviser says he appoints staff “very much in his own image”, adding, “we don’t ask serious questions about ourselves.” 

He’ll obviously need to absorb rivals into his cabinet to some degree, but it’s his inner circle that matters most. A coronation lets a leader staff to taste to a far greater degree than normal, and Burnham’s taste seems to run to the agreeable. So, he appears more susceptible than most to the wisdom of the room, and more at risk of filling it with people who think similarly to him.

His renown warmth and empathy may compound the problem, too. Expect a No.10 that feels open and scores well on psychological safety. In that environment, the distortions to what he hears are most likely to be driven by helpfulness and optimism rather than fear: inflated good news, a narrowing agenda, or advice filtered of disagreement. 

Businesses run the same experiment daily, whenever they anoint an internal successor or appoint an external one, and the challenges these individuals run in developing an effective flow of information are identical. Before firms rush to stage succession horse races, though, the research is awkward: contests carry their own costs, and prolonged internal races damage firms even when they produce capable CEOs. What contests supply is scrutiny, forced listening, the discipline of persuasion. So, the uncontested leader must engineer what the contest would have provided free.

The engineering required is well known and both structural and process steps are needed. Recruit people who challenge you. Before major decisions, ask questions that reopen smoothed-over advice, such as, “What did you disagree about before you reached this recommendation?” Run pre-mortems against your own optimism. Treat flattery as a warning light, because a leader handed power unopposed becomes a magnet for it. Protect the habits of exposure that the role will conspire to remove: the visits, the unscripted questions, the showing up.

Burnham may yet defy the pattern. His self-awareness is real, and his listening is a genuine asset. What he cannot do is assume that being a good listener will save him, because the coronation has already decided what he will hear. Coyle’s queue did not disappear on nomination day. It moved to Downing Street, and it is longer now.

Psychologist Nik Kinley is a London-based leadership consultant, coach, and assessor with over 30 years’ experience working with some of the world’s biggest companies. An award-winning author, he has written eight books, the latest of which is The Power Trap: How Leadership Changes People and What to Do About It, available now.