Gaspar Isaac Melsión Pérez – gimp@kth.

se ME2089 – Assignment 1

Leadership perspectives on Christiana Figueres

Christiana Figueres was appointed by the United Nations (UN) to lead the intergovernmental
process to deliver the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change. She was the executive secretary
of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from July 2010, six
years after the miserable failure of the Copenhagen Agreement (COP15), until 2016, right after 195
countries agreed unanimously to intentionally change the course of global warming. During her
tenure, Figueres brought together the public and private sector to establish a direction and
timeline to stop climate change, being capable to align the interest of each party to collaborate
towards a common goal.

The task for which was selected undoubtedly required a high leadership level for the person in
charge, and she had shown a strong “ability to bring warring factions together, with calm, good
humour and occasional flashes of anger” (The Guardian, 2016) during her previous career in the
UN, which coincide with some of the traits described by Jackson and Parry (2018) that a leader
should demonstrate. As a matter of fact, it is very good news that a woman was selected for a
world-class leading role with such importance when there are still so few women holding senior
level positions in the 21st century (AAUW, 2016). In particular, this case follows the challenge of
the ‘glass cliff’ posited by Haslam and Ryan (2008, in Jackson and Parry, 2018), who suggest that
the appointment of women as chiefs is usually prompted by a poor performance of the
organisation, as occurred in the Copenhagen accord.

Figueres assumed the full responsibility of the global climate change negotiations in a moment
where no one believed that such an agreement could ever be possible. She claims that the key to
accomplish her objective was to change the (first hers, and finally the world’s) attitude on the
topic, shifting from pessimism to optimism, describing it as “the fundamental belief that we
humans can come together and can help each other to better the fate of mankind” (TED Talk C.
Figueres, 2016). This idea is directly associated with the transformational leadership perspective,
where a vision is created by the leader to conduct the change through inspirational motivation and
willing to attain the commitment of all individual parties. This conceptualisation enabled
governments to understand the compounded risks caused by climate change to finally make
them comprehend that was in their national interest to contribute to a global endeavour.

On the other hand, it can be stated that the transactional leadership style was not present in the
strategy followed by Figueres, because her actions were not driven by convincing the nations to
take part of the change by giving out rewards or punishments. Furthermore, since she was
working with governments whom are sovereign in their decisions, she had absolutely no authority
above them to focus on supervision or performance as the transactional approach asserts. Thus,
the followers in this process of leadership are people who are running their own countries as
leaders, hence the follower-centered perspective “followers as recipients of leadership” described
by Jackson and Parry (2018) is clearly not existent in this leadership process. It would be
ingenuous to think that Mrs. Figueres could have succeeded just by applying the correct
procedures without expecting the followers to take an active role in the process.

To summarise, Christiana Figueres adopted a very important and difficult leading role to change
the conception of the governments regarding the global warming. She had to create the strong
belief that it was possible and transmit this vision to the followers, which, at the same time, played
an essential role in the process, where they were an active part of it, and they should be seen as
co-producers of the leadership. Figueres applied a “pragmatic leadership” (Jackson and Parry,
2018) working within the individual approach of each nation and meeting their respective needs to
ultimately bring about an unprecedented unanimous agreement of 195 nations towards a
common goal by, in her own words, “stubbornly, relentlessly injecting transformational optimism”.

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Gaspar Isaac Melsión Pérez – gimp@kth.se ME2089 – Assignment 1

References
(1) TED Talks by strong women leaders (2016), Christiana Figueres: The inside story of the Paris
climate agreement, TED2016, https://www.ted.com/playlists/486/
ted_talks_by_strong_women_lead, Visited on November, 2018.

(2) AAUW (2016), Barriers and Bias: The Status of Women in Leadership, https://www.aauw.org/
research/barriers-and-bias/, Visited on November, 2018.

(3) The Guardian (2016), Christiana Figueres nominated for post of UN secretary general, https://
www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/07/christiana-figueres-nominated-for-post-of-un-
secretary-general, Visited on November, 2018.

(4) Jackson, B. and Parry, K. (2018) A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book
about studying leadership. London: Sage.

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