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Author’s note: For the indefinite future, my digital articles will be short and shorter. Why? Because I’ve gotten myself ensnared in writing another book – a book that will appear after the next one. My next book – to be published in September by Cambridge University Press – is co-authored with Todd Pittinsky. It is titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. 

For the better part of this year, Dr. Anthony Fauci was the apparently ready and willing follower of President Donald Trump. Though it was clear all along that Fauci was expert on the pandemic and Trump, to understate it, inexpert, the former was nevertheless willing to bow to the latter in what he publicly said, when he publicly said it, and how he publicly said it.

Though Fauci tried as he might to accommodate his boss, in time the relationship between them became untenable. Interestingly, it became untenable not so much, as I would have predicted, from Fauci’s side as from Trump’s. Given that Fauci was willing to play along for many months – play the part of scientist in an administration that was militantly anti-science – what reasons did Trump have for turning against Fauci?

Here three. First, because no matter how circumspect Fauci, no matter how cautious and careful his every syllable, the differences between him and his superior became blindingly clear. Second, because the facts on the ground changed. While Trump repeatedly wished the virus away, not only did it not in time vanish, it became in time more pernicious. Finally, and most importantly, Trump soured on Fauci because in recent months his approval ratings soared sky high. They were much higher in fact than were Trump’s, at least as they pertained to the all-important question of who was better at handling the virus crisis. For the president such a comparison was unacceptable, intolerable. He cannot stomach polls that show Fauci or anyone else for that matter with as much as a 27-point lead.

No wonder then that for the time being at least Trump has frozen Fauci out. On several occasions the president muzzled his underling by, for example scuttling some of his previously scheduled television appearances. And since early June Trump has effectively locked him out of the Oval Office. To his media pal Sean Hannity the president avowed that while Fauci was a “nice man,” he made “a lot of mistakes.”

Which raises the question of what will be Fauci’s response? I have long thought that he should quit the administration that has been so obviously opposed to everything he stands for. But, for reasons of his own, reasons that I do not agree with but do not question, Fauci has chosen to stay. Will he still stay? If yes, will he still do what Trump wants him to do? Or will he find his own voice, say his own piece, chart his own course – whether inside the administration or out?

Author’s note: For the indefinite future, all my digital articles will be short and shorter. Why? Because I’ve gotten myself ensnared in writing another book – a book that will appear after the next one. My next book – to be published in September by Cambridge University Press – is co-authored with Todd Pittinsky. It’s titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. 

Not one of our recent presidents – not Barack Obama, or George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, or George H. W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan, or Jimmy Carter – has put a premium particularly on seeming manly. Each has seemed secure enough in his manhood to take it for granted. Similarly, though they all pursued policies that could be seen to be hostile, they seemed at least to do so reluctantly. None appeared to relish their hostility, or to equate it with being manly.  

Donald Trump has been the exception to this general rule. To be seen to be manly has been all his life of supreme importance. In his adulthood it has been a running theme, whether it be vis-à-vis women, or vis-à-vis his competition in business, or, for that matter, in politics. Trump’s stance is invariably assertive. His behavior is relentlessly combative. And his language is atypically aggressive. Not for nothing does the word “dominate” dominate his vocabulary.

Trump mistakenly equates manliness with strength. The irony is by his calculation he is the least manly of all recent presidents. He is, that is, the least strong. Nowhere has this been so screamingly obvious as during the pandemic. The pandemic is the most serious public health crisis the United States has faced in over a century. Yet instead of seizing the reins, instead of taking control, the president of the United States, the federal government, abdicated control. He turned control of the corona virus crisis over to state and local authorities. In so doing he was many things. But, above all he was weak. Above all he was the opposite of strong. Above all he was anything other than the man he imagined.   

Author’s note: For the indefinite future, all my digital articles will be short and shorter. Why? Because I’ve gotten myself ensnared in writing another book – a book that will appear after the next one. My next book – to be published in September by Cambridge University Press – is co-authored with Todd Pittinsky. It’s titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. 

This is me just banging my drum. So, if you’ve heard me bang this drum before, skip this post.

Impossible to experience recent weeks without returning to a theme that I, in The End of Leadership, and Mois Naim, in The End of Power, have been playing and, certainly in my case, replaying, for almost a decade. As I put it in the book, “Followers on the rise, leaders in decline.” And, as Naim put it in his, “Power is becoming more feeble, transient, and constrained.”

This is not, obviously, to say that leadership is dead, or power is over. Rather it is to point out that the balance of power between leaders and followers is changing, and that because followers have become the more forceful, leaders have become the more threatened. It’s why leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have become more authoritarian or even totalitarian over time, not less. They know that to maintain law and order, to maintain personal and political control, they have no choice. Give followers an inch, they’ll now take a mile.       

Some stories seem small. But they are big because they are indicative. For example, the opinion page editor of the New York Times, James Bennet, was forced recently to resign after 800 Times employees signed a letter objecting to a piece he permitted to be published. Or, though more than three quarters of colleges and universities have said that students can return to campus this fall, institutions of higher education are facing a rising revolt by faculty who, because of the pandemic, have said they are unwilling to return to in-person classes.   

Other stories are, on the face of it, big. They suggest nothing less than tectonic shifts.

Case in point: Hong Kong. After more than five years of protests by Hong Kongers against the authorities in China, especially in 2019, when the demonstrators repeatedly ranged in the hundreds of thousands, Beijing, read President Xi Jinping, had had enough. Notwithstanding international condemnation, he signed a new national security law intended solely to crack down on anyone and everyone in Hong Kong who had the temerity in any way to object to his regime.  Within a day after the law took effect, the police deployed pepper spray and water cannons, and they arrested 370 people. The leader understood that to squash the protests once and for all he would have to squash his followers. Followers understood that from here on in they were forced to toe the line – or else.

Case in point: Facebook. In early June CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood firmly behind his decision to take no action against President Trump’s inflammatory posts. While hundreds of workers responded by staging a virtual walkout, they had no impact – not then. At about the same time, several CEOs of several other social media companies, notably Twitter and Snapchat, reached a different decision. They decided they would fact-check the president and curb his power to promote misinformation. By early July Facebook faced an ad boycott to which some of the world’s leading companies – from Clorox to Coca-Cola – had in short order signed on. To contain the damage, Facebook, effectively overnight, adopted a more conciliatory tone. It became clear, even to Zuckerberg, that the world had, with stunning speed, moved on. Wrote Kevin Roose on July 3 the New York Times, “It felt like a dam breaking, or the changing of a guard. Withing a 48-hour period this week, many of the world’s internet giants took steps that would have been unthinkable for them even months earlier…. Facebook, under pressure from a growing advertiser boycott took down a network of violent anti-government insurrectionists who had set up shop on its platform. Taken independently, these changes might have felt incremental and isolated…. But arriving all at once, they felt like something much bigger: a sign that the Wild Wild Web … is coming to an end.”

Case in point: Black Lives Matter.  Since the killing by the police of George Floyd in late May, have been numberless protests by numberless protesters in numberless cities and towns across the United States. It is too early to know what will be the changes long term. But there is ample evidence of some changes short term, especially in policing, from defunding the police in Minneapolis to disbanding the anti-crime unit in New York.  There is also ample evidence the demonstrations – the Black Lives Matter movement – have had wide support among a wide swath of the American people. 87 percent of black Americans, 77 percent of Hispanic Americans, 75 percent of Asian Americans, and 60 percent of white Americans – Pew pollsters found all in support. Now as before, when the powerless take on the powerful in large numbers, the powerless can and often do prevail. Now as before, taking to the streets in large numbers can and often does work.

Case in point: Mask politics. Pandemic notwithstanding, our leader effectively said no. Our leader effectively said, “no, you don’t have to wear a mask if you don’t want to wear a mask. I don’t want to wear a mask and so I won’t wear a mask.” For months his most prominent followers – such as Republican governors and senators – followed where he led. They did as he did – they did not wear a mask. In time, though, it became abundantly evident, irrefutably apparent, that even if you don’t want to wear a mask, wearing a mask is a must. In fact, to not wear a mask is bad, even dangerous behavior. Dangerous to self, dangerous to others. And so, one by one Republicans senators and governors began to peel off. These increasingly more important followers began to peel off from their increasingly less important leader. Even the most subservient of all the leader’s followers, Vice President Mike Pence, stood up to our leader, at least on this issue. After months of not wearing a mask, Pence now does, regularly. Which raises this question: What’s a leader to do when followers don’t follow?    

Author’s note: For the indefinite future, my digital articles will be short and shorter. Why? Because I have gotten myself ensnared in writing another book – a book that will appear after the next one. My next book – to be published in September by Cambridge University Press – is co-authored with Todd Pittinsky. It is titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. 

No single Republican has been more abjectly loyal to President Donald Trump than has Texas Senator John Cornyn. The president would say, “Jump!” Cornyn would ask, “How high?” As Justin Miller noted, Cornyn “mastered the art of political subservience” to the Republican Party generally and to this Republican President specifically.

But things change. Contexts change. The situation in Texas has changed. In May, Governor Greg Abbott, eager to have Texas at the forefront of Trump’s push to restart the economy, reopened the state, allowing millions of Texans to head out to everything from shopping centers to movie theaters. Alas, Abbott’s move backfired. In the last week or two Texas emerged at the forefront of the virus crisis. Since late May, the average number of newly reported cases each day has more than doubled, up to about 3,500 from 1,500. Moreover, just yesterday Texas reached another milestone: it recorded more new cases in a single day than it has since the pandemic started.

Time for an about face. Cornyn, heretofore completely craven, finally took him on, took on Trump. When the administration announced that it was ending its support for testing centers around the country, including seven in Texas, Cornyn was frightened into fighting back. He issued a statement calling for the administration to reverse course, saying that with the “uptick of cases, now is not a time to retreat from our vigilance in testing. I believe that they need to extend that federal support in Texas, at least until we get this most recent uptick in cases addressed.”

Oh really?  You found your voice, Senator Cornyn? Will you, a follower to your core, still have that voice when it comes to testing centers not in Texas but in Tennessee? When it comes to taking on Trump not out of self interest but in the public interest?   

Author’s note: For the indefinite future, all my digital articles will be short and shorter. Why? Because I have gotten myself ensnared in writing another book – a book that will appear after the next one. My next book – to be published in September by Cambridge University Press – is co-authored with Todd Pittinsky. It is titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. 

Already followers trumped Trump. They got him to change the date of his rally in Tulsa, originally scheduled for June 19^th. But since that’s Juneteenth – the holiday commemorating the end of slavery – which the president’s schedulers knew or not, Trump retreated. He announced that he would postpone his rally by one day, “out of respect for this holiday.” So much for Round #1.

Now what? Will Trump go ahead and hold his indoor rally on Saturday – despite screaming and yelling in protest from everyone who is anyone? From public health officials – who regularly reiterate what a miserable idea right now to cram 19,000 people into an indoor space – to local authorities, Tulsa officials, who dread a spike in Covid cases. Or will Trump pivot, maybe hold the event outdoors, in fear of what might happen if he proceeds as planned?

Those who attend the rally will be required to sign a statement saying that if they get ill as a result, they will not hold the president, or anyone associated with him, responsible. And yet. And yet we know that whatever the risks, whatever the costs, Donald Trump will retain his base, followers who follow where he leads.

Exactly why his base remains in his thrall remains to many a mystery. But President Trump is not the first bad leader to appeal to followers, sometimes millions of followers who have what they deem their own good reasons for remaining loyal to a leader whose virtues escape the rest of us entirely.      

Author’s note: For the indefinite future, all my digital articles will be short and shorter. Why? Because I have gotten myself ensnared in writing another book – a book that will appear after the next one. My next book – to be published in September by Cambridge University Press – is co-authored with Todd Pittinsky. It is titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. 

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In 2006 I had an article published in the Harvard Business Review titled, “When Should a Leader Apologize – and When Not.”  https://hbr.org/2006/04/when-should-a-leader-apologize-and-when-not

My longstanding interest in the question led me to pay particular attention yesterday when the nation’s highest ranking military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, issued, well, it was not precisely an apology, rather it was an expression of deep regret. He said he was wrong to have walked alongside President Donald Trump during his controversial visit to a damaged church near the White House. “I should not have been there,” admitted Milley. “As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from.”  

It was a supremely important gesture – the willingness of a man so highly placed publicly to acknowledge that what he did was wrong.

I have written before that the American military does the best job, by far the best job, of any American institution or organization educating leaders, training leaders, and developing leaders. The parade in recent weeks of top military brass saying out loud what they really think and feel about the president of the United States, who in some cases remains still their boss, is heartening. It would seem also to confirm what I wrote in my book, Professionalizing Leadership. “The evidence suggests that the military does a demonstrably better job of teaching people how to lead than its countless civilian counterparts.”     

Author’s note: For the indefinite future, most of my digital articles will be short and shorter. Why? Because I have gotten ensnared writing another book – a book that will appear after the next one. My next book – to be published in September by Cambridge University Press – is co-authored with Todd Pittinsky. It is titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy.  

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I wrote several times before about the leadership of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  Here an example: https://barbarakellerman.com/the-leadership-of-chancellor-angela-merkel/

I turn to her again then not because I ought to but because I want to. I want to because it happens that as she is winding down her tenure as Chancellor – she already announced that in 2021 she will retire as chancellor – she is at the top of her game. And what game she’s got!

• Germany has turned out a paragon among large Western democracies on how to prepare for a pandemic. During Merkel’s fifteen-year tenure, Germany’s government has been highly efficient and well-oiled. Its remarkably prompt “track and trace” response to the virus crisis spared Germany the crippling effects of the pandemic felt elsewhere in Europe – in Great Britain, Italy, and Spain, among others. Moreover, a mere six weeks after Germany’s first deaths from Covid-19, the authorities declared the pandemic under control. None of this was sheer happenstance. Germany was long prepared for an event such as this one, primarily by lavishing money on its healthcare system. Additionally, Merkel was a leader who understood science – and who deeply respected the expertise of the experts. “Before I do anything,” she said, “I need to understand what’s going on here.”  This explains why from day one Germany’s leading virologists played an outsized role in shaping the country’s policy response to the corona virus.
• After years of preaching fiscal austerity, Merkel is deviating from her past pattern. She threw her support behind a post-pandemic stimulus package that includes significant extra spending and tax cuts, as well as generous supports for business. Moreover, among her European counterparts she’s is in the lead, far in the lead. According to the Financial Times, while Germany has “changed its tune in spectacular fashion, in Europe it remains an outlier.” All of Germany’s neighbors have yet to move from funding emergency aid to funding ambitious fiscal programs intended to hasten post-pandemic recoveries.
• Finally, one of Merkel’s boldest move yet – one to save the hobbled European Union. Long known for her natural proclivity toward cautious and conservative incrementalism, Merkel recently reached a landmark agreement with French president Emmanuel Macron generously to contribute to a European recovery fund. Its purpose is to help the EU’s hardest hit members get past the current financial crisis – which was set off, of course, by the current health crisis. There is no overestimating the importance of this initiative. Whether or not the Eurozone has the capacity to take advantage of the money that’s on the table is too early to tell. What is not too early to tell is that without Germany’s (and France’s) willingness to step into the breach, and without Merkel’s (and Macron’s) readiness to step up to the plate, the EU’s time of troubles would certainly have been destined indefinitely to continue.

The incumbent chancellor has long been and remains still a remarkable exception to the general rule. She is a leader of a liberal democracy who is able at this time, in this moment, to govern wisely and well.  Says something very good about Merkel as a 21st century leader. Says something equally good about Germans as 21st century followers.

Hallelujah!!!

Donald Trump has taught the American people so much about leadership – and followership – the question is, where to begin? How to select the top ten leadership lessons from among his countless memorable morsels?

Here a first crack.

Lesson # 1. The U. S. Constitution is fragile. Such moral and legal authority as it does have is elastic. The Constitution is at least as if not more heavily reliant on the vagaries of human nature as it is on the rigidities of rule of law.

Lesson # 2. The institutions that comprise the U. S. political system are insufficiently well-equipped and inadequately caught up. They are stuck in the past, unready in the 21^st century effectively to function in a context in which, to take just a single example, technologies have changed not a little but a lot.

Lesson # 3. The power of the presidency is far greater than we generally understood. We knew that the president’s powers had expanded well beyond what the Framers had intended. We similarly knew that for reasons ranging from a bloated executive branch to a bloated military-industrial complex, the president’s powers continued to expand, even in the last half century.   What we did not understand was how much.

Lesson # 4. The executive is far stronger and the legislature far weaker than we generally understood. The reasons for this are structural, contextual, and personal, professional. It is possible that after the November election this will change somewhat – that the imbalance will be rectified to an extent. But it is equally likely that the rebalancing between the two branches – which supposedly are co-equal – will be minor not major.

Lesson # 5.  The powers of the presidency depend more than we care to think on the person who is president. When the incumbent broke past presidential patterns and shattered previous presidential norms, it did not much matter. For all the screaming and yelling, for all the stress on the system, the system stood. President Donald Trump remains still in place and so do the institutions of government – such as they are.

Lesson # 6. Presidential character seems no longer much to matter. We now know or think we do that George Washington never did cut down that fabled cherry tree.  But the story was told for a reason. It taught children they should not lie, just as we presumed that parents should not lie, and that presidents should not lie. Yet by April of this year, after some 1,200 days in office, the number of Trump’s untruths ran to about 18,000. If a measure of character is truth telling, the importance of presidential character is out the window. Or, at least, it is out the window for the many Americans who constitute Trump’s base.

Lesson # 7. Follower power is in – but it is not in everywhere. It is in, for example, on the streets. It is in, for example, at Facebook. But as Donald Trump has taught us, it is not in in Washington. At least not among the political elite. At least not among the political elite who are Republicans. It has been as astonishing as demoralizing to see the degree to which, most strikingly, Senate Republicans have been the most craven of followers. No doubt some are true believers. Equally no doubt more cannot stand Trump but have chosen abjectly to follow where he leads because they are scared for their professional lives. They are scared his tweets will bring them down.          

Lesson # 8. The American people have a limitless tolerance for dysfunction. In June 2020 we find ourselves caught, trapped, not in a single crisis, but in three crises simultaneously. A public health crisis. A financial crisis. A crisis of social – and political and economic – unrest.  And yet, here we are, slogging along unsettled and unhappy and, in some cases, many cases, infuriated and outraged. But, still, we hang in, more together than not, hoping that tomorrow will be better than today.    

Lesson # 9. Getting rid of bad leaders is hard, inordinately, almost insurmountably, hard. President Donald Trump is, in my view, a bad leader. He is incompetent and ineffective as well as immoral and unethical. But, moving him out of the White House, and moving another person in, so far has proved impossible. We did come close, or so it appeared. Trump was impeached. But he was never convicted. When push came to shove tribal loyalty trumped character and competence.

Lesson # 10. To select a political leader for a position of great responsibility who has no political, government, or military experience or expertise whatsoever, is a really rotten idea. Best to think of leadership as a profession, or even a vocation, for which a modicum of education and a measure of experience is mandatory. Anything less is to invite disaster. Especially but not exclusively if the position in question is president of the United States.

Lessons learned?

Americans are railing and America is roiling because police officer Derek Chauvin had his knee on George Floyd’s neck. Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s neck for a total of almost nine minutes, nearly three of which were after Floyd had become unresponsive. Floyd’s death was in direct consequence of the pressure put on his neck by Chauvin’s knee.    

Several people witnessed what happened. Some did something – such as 17-year old Darnella Frazier, who decided in the moment to videotape the event. Others did nothing. Others stood around and did nothing during the entire nine-minute period, including when Floyd was gasping that he was unable to breathe.

Those who stood around and watched what was happening but chose to do nothing included the three other police officers involved in the incident. These three officers were in close and up close, right next to Chauvin and right next to Floyd. They saw everything that took place and heard everything that took place – but they chose not to act. They chose to stand by and do nothing.

These three men, these three former police officers (they have since been stripped of their status), are Bystanders. Followers who are Bystanders. At least on this occasion, Chauvin was their leader. They, meanwhile, were his followers, enabling him to do what he was doing without interference or interruption.

Bystander followers “observe, but they do not participate. They make a deliberate decision to stand aside, to disengage from their leaders and from whatever is the group dynamic. This withdrawal is, in effect, a declaration of neutrality, which amounts to tacit support for whoever and whatever constitutes the status quo.*  

Imagine how differently this story would have turned out if just one of these three men had done something, instead of doing nothing. Imagine if just one of these three men had not followed where Chauvin led, but had instead intervened, yelled at Chauvin to stop, or even shoved his knee off Floyd’s neck.

Had one of these men done something similar he would have been a Follower who is other than a Bystander. He would have been a follower who refused to follow. He would have been a follower who instead of being toxic was tonic.

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*From Barbara Kellerman, Followership: How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders, (Harvard Business School Press, 2008, p. 97.)