Ideagen Radio
Ideagen Radio
Erica Parker on Navigating the Leadership Crisis and Evolving Corporate Responsibilities
Erica Parker, the Managing Director of Custom Research at the Harris Poll, joins us to illuminate the evolving expectations of modern leadership. What happens when trust in public institutions crumbles and the spotlight shifts to corporate leaders? Erica shares how this shift has intensified in recent years, especially through the pandemic, leading to a complex web of political entanglements. Discover how consumer purchasing decisions are now heavily influenced by perceived political stances and the notion that leaders may be impeding social progress. This episode is a deep dive into the leadership crisis, unraveling the intricate connection between societal anxieties and corporate responsibility.
In our conversation with Erica, we tackle the pressing societal issues highlighted by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, from hunger and poverty to health and education. How can leaders effectively prioritize and address these challenges in a world fraught with public stress and institutional distrust? The episode emphasizes the need for collaborative efforts among public, private, and individual sectors to foster genuine change. We discuss the essential qualities leaders must embody—selflessness, innovation, and hard work—and explore the shift from corporate-driven initiatives to broader cooperative approaches. Join us as we map out the path forward for impactful leadership amidst today's unprecedented challenges.
#harrispoll #ideagen #gls2025
View Erica's LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erica-wolf-parker/
See more from Harris on Demand here: https://theharrispoll.com/solutions/harris-on-demand/
View the entire 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit
Good afternoon everyone. My name is Erica Parker and I'm the Managing Director of Custom Research at the Harris Poll. At the Harris Poll, we strive to reveal the authentic values of modern society. So today, what I plan to share with you will be a variety of different data points we've collected, be it thought leadership on our own behalf, on behalf of our clients, or data we actually collected just for today's summit presentation. And really all that data will do and share with you will really tap into the realities of the modern leader and how expectations have really rapidly shifted and changed for those leaders just in the past five years. I actually just watched back to the future with my children.
Speaker 1:So what we're going to do is we're going to get in the DeLorean and go back and travel back in time to 2019, which probably feels like a very distant past to many of us. These days, we have an annual study called the Reputation Quotient, or RQ, that we actually release with Axios now. That really keeps the pulse on the public's expectations of corporate America. So at this time in 2019, when we measured this, there was a lot of erosion of trust in public institutions, particularly in government, and the public was really turning to companies at that time to really create change across various social issues and the list here you can run down the list from data privacy, healthcare access, veteran support, health and well-being, education, et cetera. And then, of course, the pandemic hit in 2020. And we started a tracker we call America this Week, where we were immediately tracking various fears. That fear of emerging variances gave way to threats of a recession, of job loss, of global conflict. So just painting the picture for sort of how Americans are feeling at this time and that anxiety around those issues really started to translate into fear and threat to one's basic needs. Work that we conducted on behalf of MetLife was really showing that the psychological and physiological floor was really crumbling for folks. Wealth inequity is a serious national issue and, according to Gen Z and millennials, 81% saw that and believed in that and additionally, gen Z globally, 61% of them really felt that they would expected that they would need to relocate due to issues in their environment in the next 20 years.
Speaker 1:Now let's fast forward to today, and that lack of trust we saw in institutions, particularly in government, is now extending to other organizations Bill, you sort of alluded to this earlier, and now it's including big business as well as the news media and social media. And what was, you know, once an expectation of the public for leadership to take a stance and speak out and be visible on particular social issues? Now really has leadership caught up in political battles and social wars. Majorities of Americans say that companies are becoming more political than ever and wish their brands would stay out of politics, and nearly three quarters of Americans aren't interested in supporting companies that have become too political, even regardless of whether they agree with their stances on the issue. Ceos speaking out really now presents risk to organizations. The words once used in a lot of public statements, even by CEOs, are politicized and now are seen to drive a wedge between the public. The public sees companies getting into more controversy as they try to appease both sides of the aisle, and corporate stances on social issues are not seen as authentic and are seen more, as you know, a marketing ploy. Certainly, we had some research that said that companies are now, all of their climate activities are more greenwashing activities than anything else of their climate activities are more greenwashing activities than anything else, and thus the majority of public really believes that it is risky for CEOs to speak out on social issues today. So what does this mean and how does a CEO speaking out affect brands and companies? Well, we have this sort of picture here to tell you and illustrate that people aren't just voting in the voting booth these days, where once they sort of relied on the consumer side of their brain when they would be making purchase decisions and the sort of political side of their brain when they were voting, consumers are now taking sort of that political side of their brain into the store and to the checkout screen with them and, as I'm sure you're all well aware of all these headlines, the past two years several companies got themselves caught up in political controversy and culture wars which did impact their customer base and ultimately, their sales.
Speaker 1:And what we found in some research we conducted along with US News and World Report, that leadership is in a state of crisis today. 87% of Americans believe there is a leadership crisis today in the US, believe there is a leadership crisis today in the US and they are disappointed by leaders in society, particularly those in the federal government, in big business, organized religion and even local government and leaders. With sort of that lack of trust in leaders comes the fact that the public doesn't see them as equipped to respond to the emerging crises that we face today, and three quarters of the public really believe that leaders are even a barrier to the social progress that we need. So where does that leave us? Right, because there still remains looming issues that are important yet quite difficult for us to solve today. And so there's new data that we prepared to provide for this summit, where we took the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and asked the public to give us a sense of how important they feel these issues are, along with how difficult they believe they are to solve, and we plotted them together so that, taken together, we can understand where there might be potential priorities to focus and give sort of a roadmap to leadership.
Speaker 1:So the next slide, these are the results of that sort of plotting, right, so we put the most important to solve versus the most difficult to solve. So obviously, up in the right-hand quadrant is really what's high, high, right, it's most important but probably most difficult to solve, and we've labeled those as strategic obstacles. Obviously, as I said, they're the most important but most challenging, and we find hunger and poverty sort of falling into those buckets. But really what might be the priority area is sort of the bottom, right-hand quadrant, right those that society feels are most important to create positive change and are relatively less difficult to solve but still probably difficult, I'm sure and those that fall into that bucket are health and well-being, education, economic growth, as well as clean water and sanitation. Now, who is really best suited to solve these issues? So we asked the public to rate these, and what you'll find is really I want to point you to the data point over here where most really selected more than one entity working together.
Speaker 1:So there was a lot of conversation today, obviously, about partnerships and how important it is for both public and private sector to work together, as well as individuals and organizations, to really tackle these types of social issues, and these issues are really going to require certain characteristics in leaders to move these forward. So what we did was we asked the public and we presented them with different characteristics of a leader and which they would associate with those 17 sustainable development goals and, as you can see, it will take a variety of different attributes and characteristics to address these issues. Selflessness is going to be required to address poverty, hunger and inequities. Innovation needed, in particular, for two priority areas health and well-being, as well as clean water and sanitation, logic when it comes to education and hard work for work and economic growth. So, in summary, we'll kind of wrap up all that we learned here with what we shared. So the tables have turned right.
Speaker 1:We were talking about sort of the pendulum swinging from, you know, the public in 2019 saying, hey, companies, corporate America, I need you to take a stance on these issues because I don't feel like, you know, the government is really making an impact here. But where once stood that mandate to get involved, it's now sort of swung the other way and presents risk to leaders and organizations when they speak out on particular issues. And right now, you know, consumers are burdened and the public is burdened with quite a lot. Right, there's a lot of red flags when it comes to them in terms of the level of stress, and we talked about mental health issues that folks are facing, and there is just their basic needs are threatened, right, so they lack trust and confidence in institutions and in leaders to address the fundamental issues that would ultimately help them.
Speaker 1:But there is still a call to action. Right, there are still issues that need to be addressed in society, and we know that it can't be done by any one person and it's really going to require collaboration across all of these different organizations and leaders to achieve these goals. So that's to the point of there's really no I in team right. Collaboration across public, private, individuals and organizations is needed to be able to address these issues. Characteristics to be effective, qualities such as selflessness, innovation and honesty are really required to evoke real change. And that is all, Thank you.