Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Leadership for the Common Good) by Barbara Kellerman

Author:Barbara Kellerman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2004-09-26T14:00:00+00:00

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Rudolph Giuliani, Leona Helmsley, Howell Raines, and Al Dunlap differ in many ways. One was elected; three were appointed. One was in the public sector, three in the private sector. One had followers consisting primarily of political constituents; three had followers who worked for them. Two became leaders because they were motivated mainly by money; the other two became leaders because their greater interest was in public service.

But the similarities among them are striking. They are alike in that all of them were callous. As far as many or most of their followers were concerned, they were uncaring and unkind and dismissive of others’ needs, wants, and wishes. More to the point, perhaps, is that all four shared a lack of empathy and an inability to realize that in late twentieth and early twenty-first century America, the leader’s capacity to empathize matters. Because followers are generally less intimidated than they once were, and because the media is generally more intrusive than it was, callousness is not likely to be tolerated for long. Put another way, there was a reason Bill Clinton kept repeating that he felt our pain.

Because the definition of what constitutes callousness is to a degree culturally determined, I deliberately dug each case of callous leadership out of American soil. This is not to say that in another time and another place Leona Helmsley’s or Al Dunlap’s erratic and abusive behavior would have gone unnoticed. Rather, it is to argue that at this moment in this place, leaders who are consistently callous put themselves in peril, especially if they are highly visible.

It is impossible to know what Guiliani’s political future would have been had 9/11 not intervened. We do know that a year earlier his standing among blacks was “so low as to be virtually unmeasurable,” and we also know that the early polls had him lagging behind Hillary Clinton in the race for the U.S. Senate. As to the other three, their callousness led to their comeuppance. Helmsley was done in by some of her victims. Raines was brought down by Jayson Blair and by those he’d disrespected. And Dunlap, mean and nasty without fail, was hoisted by his own petard. In the end he failed to do even the single thing he was hired to do: increase shareholder value.

Given these outcomes, given that leaders who treat followers badly put themselves at risk, we can speculate that the callous leaders to whom I referred were either self-destructive or lacked emotional intelligence. It doesn’t cost leaders much to be at least minimally respectful of their followers. So if they cannot bring themselves to do even this, the reason likely falls into one of these two categories.

Giuliani and Raines, it seems, just didn’t get it or didn’t want to get it. Neither stupid nor crazy, both men seem to have concluded that being callous was integral to their leadership style and that the costs of such behavior would be outweighed by the benefits. Helmsley and Dunlap are another matter.

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