We Need New Leaders is a vital guide for emerging and aspiring leaders — especially those from diverse backgrounds — who are ready to step into influence with clarity and conviction. Whether you’re just beginning to envision yourself as a leader or you’ve already signed the dotted line, this book serves as a trusted companion on the journey to leadership.
It’s also an essential resource for the communicators who shape executive narratives, where the reputation of the CEO and senior leadership often defines the public perception of the entire organisation. And for founders, it offers strategic insight into crafting a compelling founder story — critical for attracting investment and building trust.
Through more than 60 interviews with global leaders and communications strategists, the book reveals the architecture of reputation: why it matters not only for companies but for the individuals who lead them, and how CEOs and heads of communications build trust to navigate reputational risk.
EXTRACT
The crisis for leaders
We live in a complex, multi-crisis world and no business exists context-free. Other geopolitical pressures include the rise of AI, the increased regulatory environment, mis- and disinformation, and the ongoing friction between employees and leaders on return to work policies.
Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer found that nearly half of their 36,000 survey respondents view government and media as divisive forces, and people want more leadership from business. Their 2023 report showed again that business is the most trusted institution and is expected to “inform debate and deliver solutions on climate, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and skills training”. While the media is still actively mistrusted, and trust in business is falling, business is still expected to deliver the most innovation to society.
The pattern is there: in a world where trust is being eroded, people look to business as the most trusted institution and the place from where societal innovation must be delivered.
So on top of all the pressures of leading a business, inspiring employees, assuring all the various audiences, growing and innovating, business leaders also need to stand up for society. Leaders need to have a deep understanding of a number of topics external to their business and take a meaningful position on them.
This is why I say this is a crisis for leaders: they carry a weight on their shoulders.
Rise of social media
Just as the paternalistic, mechanistic and transactional styles of leadership were beginning to be replaced by transformational leadership, social media arrived to hold up a mirror to everything a leader says and does. When I was leading executive communications, we received constant requests from employees, the DEI and social media team for executive commentary on breaking news. And in the moment, we had to adjudicate the request, get the executive’s buy-in and huddle with them on the nuances of the response.
And it’s a tightrope walk, because, with social media, everything a leader says is flashed around the world in an instant and remains on the public record for eternity. It’s reputational. Social media — and the blurring of boundaries between internal and external communication — has completely changed the leadership game.
But a leader can’t respond to every breaking news event. If they speak on everything that happens in the world, they become a broadcast outlet and neglect their role in business. What they comment on becomes just as important as how they comment. It’s important for leaders to find a pathway through the social media jungle that is authentic to them, meaningful for their audiences, represents their business fairly, and shows their employees and external partners and audiences not only how much they care but that they care about the right things.
An additional challenge with social media is the amount of digital noise. Leaders need to have a strong point of view, backed up with insights and opinions, to break through for the right reasons.
Putting reputation at risk
What you say in response to a major world event is one thing; how you act is another. Acting too slowly, or not acting at all, can also be reputational.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 2022, the world was shocked. Many leaders adopted a wait-and-see attitude, perhaps hoping the war would be over quickly. Martin Böhringer and the leadership team of Staffbase, a German scale-up that creates software for communications professionals, acted at lightning speed. One of their customers was a Russian state-owned business that Martin believed was using his company’s products to justify the war. This was against Staffbase’s people-centred values. He cancelled the contract on February 24 — having never done anything like this before — and posted the entire letter with the company’s name redacted on his personal LinkedIn.
Compare this to other companies that dragged their feet about exiting Russia, and as a result damaged their reputations. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his team at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute began keeping an active list shortly after the war started.
Only when the list was made public, did companies like Starbucks, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s pull out.
How, and how fast, companies act in response to major world events signals their values to the world. And any gap between what they say (their values) and what they do is a risk to reputation and threatens to break trust between the company and its audiences.
When companies start to try to explain the gap, this is what we call “spin”. Rupert Younger, who runs the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation, says that “spin occurs when the story told begins to diverge too far from the reality”.
A recent example of this is the Kyte Baby scandal that broke in January 2024. Kyte Baby is an alternative baby clothes company that espouses strong parent-friendly values. However, when an employee requested the right to remote work when she and her partner adopted a baby who was born at 22 weeks and needed intensive care, she was fired.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charlotte Otter is a seasoned executive communications strategist, acclaimed novelist, former journalist, and sought-after speaker and advisor. Born in South Africa and based in Europe for the past three decades, Charlotte brings a global perspective to her work. She has held senior roles in major corporations, where she led high-performing communications teams across international markets. Today, she consults with a diverse portfolio of clients, offering expert guidance on reputation management, change communications, and the development of agile, effective communications strategies.
We Need New Leaders, published by Practical Inspiration Publishing, is her first business book.
