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In arguing for a systemic approach to leadership – one that invariably involves 1) leaders, 2) followers, and 3) context, as opposed only to leaders – I never diminish the importance of the leader. Leaders obviously matter.

However just yesterday were two seismic events in American politics evidencing once again that to fixate on leaders at the expense of followers – at the expense of everyone else – is to misread how history happens.

First was a semblance of closure in Charleston, when President Obama delivered his eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of nine African-Americans killed a week earlier in an historic Charleston church. The events that followed the killings were as dramatic as unforetold. They swirled around the symbolism of the Confederate flag, which came overnight to be seen as offensive to the point of intolerable. Across the south political leaders joined to insist that it was time for the flag permanently to come down.  And across the country business leaders joined to insist that it was time for the flag permanently to be removed from the nation’s shelves.

How did this happen? Did the governors of South Carolina, say, and Alabama, simply wake up one morning and have a change of heart? Or did they in the immediate wake of the shootings call for the elimination of a symbol that many had long perceived as racist? They did not. They did not on their own have a change of heart, and they did not immediately after the shootings call for the flag to be taken down. Nor for that matter did the CEOs of companies such as Walmart, Amazon, and Google act on their own, out of a sudden impulse to do the right thing by refusing to sell Confederate flag merchandise.

No, what distinguished this moment in American history was not any leader but a group of followers, the victims’ families, who first charted the path toward forgiveness and redemption, toward peace and love not war and hate. By setting a tone of reconciliation in the immediate aftermath of the Charleston killings – “I forgive you and have mercy on your soul,” said the daughter of one of the victims to her mother’s killer – the families of the slain set the tone for everything subsequent. It was they, followed by the people of Charleston, who changed the nation’s history in a way that will forever be seen as significant.

Yesterday’s second event demonstrating the importance of followers not just leaders was, of course, the Supreme Court ruling that same-sex marriage was now legal in all 50 states. To the naïve it might seem that the five Supreme Court justices who came down in favor were leading the nation on equal rights. But anyone who knows anything at all about history knows that these five justices were not leading at all, they were following. They were following the American people, the majority of whom now believe that gay men and women should have the same right to marry as straight men and women. And they were following gay rights activists, who started organizing in earnest in the 1980s, and whose cause since then has steadily gathered momentum.

On the surface yesterday was about an impassioned eulogy delivered by the nation’s chief executive. And on the surface yesterday was about a transforming ruling handed down by the nation’s highest court. But only on the surface. Scratch beneath and you will find that both were in consequence of ordinary men and women doing what they believed to be right.

 

 

 

A couple of weeks ago, the president of Cooper Union, Jamshed Bharucha, announced his resignation. Whatever the circumstances surrounding his particular presidency, the fact is that like other American leaders, in the 21^st century leaders of American colleges and universities are having to navigate choppy waters.

In the old days presidents of institutions of higher education were removed from the exigencies of everyday life. They were sheltered by what then was the cloistered nature of the academy, and by the expectation that their leadership would be exercised primarily in the intellectual realm, not in the rough and tumble world that was beyond the ivory tower.

Now though that’s different. Just like other American leaders, leaders of colleges and universities are having to suffer the indignities of being closely scrutinized; are having to cope with constant demands from various constituencies; and are having to immerse themselves in the worlds of cash and commerce from which previously they were exempt.

The numbers tell the tale. In 2012 the average tenure of a leader of an institution of higher education was 7 years. Just six years earlier it was 8.5 years. In the Philadelphia region alone, during the three year period 2011-2014, 16 out of 36 four year colleges and universities saw either the exit or arrival of a new president.

The fact that leaders in higher education are not exempt from the pressures on leaders more generally testifies to the importance of the larger context within which leaders – and their putative followers – are located. The academy is no longer an armor against the larger forces that make leadership in America so difficult now to exercise.

 

Unlikely it may seem. But it is not. In the second decade of the 21^st century leaders emerge from the strangest of places. And in the second decade of the 21^st century leaders inhabit the most improbable of bodies – in this case that of a pretty and petit 25 year old, who makes her living singing.

Taylor Swift has chosen to use her platform constructed of fame and fortune to change the way the world works, or has. She has taken on, in quick succession, both Spotify and Apple, to try to oblige them to pay their artists what she thinks, or, more precisely, what they think they deserve. Apple caved virtually immediately, tweeting Taylor, “we hear you,” and agreeing to pay artists for their music even during the three month trial of its new platform, Apple Music.

But the point is not that a single company – even arguably the most powerful in the world – bent to Swift’s will. The point is that she is making a stunningly strong case for artists, insisting that they be paid for their wares just like everyone else.

Swift is as eloquent on the subject as she is forceful. In taking on Spotify she wrote in a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for….Music should not be free.”

And in 2015, in taking on Apple in a letter posted to her Tumblr page, Swift wrote that Apple’s policy was “shocking, disappointing and completely unlike this historically progressive company.” She went on to assert that she was by no means speaking only for herself – which presumably is why, in a New York minute, Apple reversed itself.

Swift is in a singularly strong position: she is a spectacularly successful singer. What makes her a leader, however, is that she has capitalized on this success. She has used it to create a change that many deeply believe long overdue.

 

 

I am always struck by the persistence and pestilence of bad leadership. It’s an endemic epidemic – a social disease for which we have no cure.

But some weeks seem worse than others, the last was one of them. Four examples – two of Callous Leadership and two of Evil Leadership.

In my book, Bad Leadership, I defined Callous Leadership as follows:

The leader and at least some followers are uncaring or unkind. Ignored or discounted are the needs, wants, and wishes of most members of the group or organization, especially subordinates.

Don Blankenship was, is, a callous leader. As a recent article in the New York Times documented, he ruled his business, Massey Energy, with an iron fist. (Link below.) He micromanaged to the point of demanding production updates from Massey Mines every 30 minutes. He fired those who worked for him without an apparent second thought. He was capable of behaving brutally to those beneath him, subordinates who ran afoul of exactly what he wanted. He was “quasi-dictatorial” in his overall management style. And, the evidence strongly suggests, he cut corners. He cut corners at the expense of the safety of those in his employ.

He will have his day in court – an opportunity to rebut the charge that in his efforts to minimize costs and maximize profits he bears responsibility for an explosion in a West Virginia coal mine that cost the lives of 29 men. Whatever the outcome of the legal proceedings there is this: the 2010 disaster was the deadliest in the coal mining industry in 40 years.

If Blankenship were alone or even in the small minority, no big deal. He would be an anomaly. The problem is that he is not. Callous leadership is endemic, and it is stressful, and it is bad for our health. A professor at Georgetown University, Christine Porath, reports that in 1998 a quarter of those she surveyed said they were treated rudely at work at least once a week. In 2005 this figure rose to nearly half; by 2011 it was over half. (Link below.) Bad behaviors by bosses include interrupting, being judgmental, failing to pass on important information, talking down to people, and neglecting the niceties. The point is this: bosses can be nice or at least reasonably civil at no great cost to themselves. Their frequent failure to do so is, however, costly to us, in the quality of our lives and our health. Being treated badly by bosses on a regular basis stresses our immune systems, and puts at risk our physical as well as psychological well-being.

In my book Bad Leadership I defined Evil Leadership as follows:

The leader and at least some followers commit atrocities. They use pain as an instrument of power. The harm done to men, women, and children is severe rather than slight. The harm can by physical, psychological, or both.

By almost any measure Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is an evil leader. In fact, the International Criminal Court has indicted Bashir on charges of genocide. Trouble is that he continues to elude capture, that his brutality goes on unabated, and that catching him and bringing him to justice appears low on everyone’s list of priorities, including the president of the United States. Just last week Bashir openly visited South Africa, and then flew back to Sudan before anyone could be bothered to hold him on the genocide charge. In other words, Americans along with everyone else lack the will to stop a leader who has been bad to the point of being evil.

Finally, there is this simple statistic. Nearly 60 million people – half of whom are children – have been driven from their homes by war and persecution. This figure, recently released by the United Nations, is unprecedented. It is that large. To what can we attribute these numbers if not to bad leadership – and bad followership? To leaders and followers – from Activists to Bystanders – who encourage this to happen, enable this to happen, allow this to happen?

Obviously it is an outrage. Less obviously it is a mystery. It is a mystery that over the millenniums we have managed effectively to eliminate a host of physical diseases. But we have not managed even to examine the worst of social diseases – bad leadership.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/business/energy-environment/the-people-v-the-coal-baron.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/is-your-boss-mean.html

 

 

 

 

My most recent book – Hard Times: Leadership in America – was published last October by Stanford University Press. The book explores the impact of context on leadership and followership. Beginning February 3, I started posting in this space excerpts. They appear here in the order in which they appear in the book.

“Our perception of corporate America in the second decade of the twenty-first century is in large part a consequence of what happened in and to corporate America in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Beginning with the ignominious collapse of Enron in 2001, American business has seemed ever since somehow, somewhat tarnished. One could, in other words, make the argument that it never fully recovered from this particular debacle, from the failure of a famously high-flying energy company previously thought virtually impervious, or from the criminal convictions of corporate officers previous thought virtually invincible….. While most Americans did not closely track [the] various corporate collapses [during roughly this same period], they did catch the whiff of failure, of greed, of corruption. They did understand that like some of their most vaulted political leaders…some of their most vaulted business leaders were other than what they were cracked up to be. Most were mere mortals and many had been, were still, overpaid and overpraised.

The recent financial crisis did not change our opinion or help the situation. Corporate debacles ‘scorched’ the global economy, with the IMF calculating that they resulted in total bank losses of about $2 trillion. They also led to a ‘collapse of trust in business.'”

 

I’ve not blogged in the last week or so – still the world spins on its axis.  Leaders and followers dance, sometimes the one leading and the other following, sometimes the other way round.

Some recent reflections on the proceedings:

Michelle Obama

During her six and one half years in the White House, I have not generally been impressed by the First Lady. She has seemed both stymied and suppressed, a 21^st century woman of considerable accomplishment who, for whatever reason, reverted back to a 20^th century type – a First Lady who busied herself with woman’s work, such as eating well and being physically fit. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but she was muted in her concerns, more decorous than determined. Moreover, as I’ve written before, she did precious little to help her husband, to compensate for his introversion by helping to grease the wheels of Washington.

In recent weeks, however, Michelle Obama seems to have found her voice and her cause. Several times over she spoke to newly minted graduates, especially women and minorities at home and abroad, in a fierce but compassionate voice, urging them on no matter the odds against them. At Tuskegee University, for example, the historically black school, she described her early days on the national stage: “As potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of … questions and speculations….Was I too loud or too angry or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?”  Each time over she was eloquent and inspirational, making palpable connections between herself and her audience. As importantly, each time she seemed at least to embrace the role of a leader who could get others to follow her difficult but finally famously rewarding personal and professional path.

James Billington  

When I was a graduate student at Yale in the 1970s, Billington was an intellectual idol. Author of The Icon and the Axe, a formidably impressive cultural history of Russia, he was widely considered one of the nation’s leading literary lions. It was no surprise, then, when in 1987 President Ronald Reagan nominated him to be the 13^th Librarian of Congress, one of the nation’s leading literary posts. It is a position that Billington, now age 86, still holds. But he has become in his dotage an embarrassment, testimony to the folly of permitting a leader to remain a leader for nearly thirty years.

Turns out that Billington has presided over what is widely agreed now to be a colossal mess – the New York Times described “a series of management and technology failures at the library that were documented in more than a dozen reports by government watchdog agencies” (6/11). So whatever his previous accomplishments, the evidence is that the length of his tenure has damaged his own reputation and, much more importantly, the institution that he claims to cherish.

To be clear: Billington agreed finally to resign only because of pressure from other people. Even at his advanced age, and with the evidence mounting against him, he resisted leaving, telling an interlocutor only a week or so ago that he had no intention of retiring and that criticisms of him came only from rivals and disgruntled former employees. A delusion. But the fault is not his. If we allow anyone to remain in a leadership role for nearly thirty years, we enable them, which puts the blame for what goes wrong on our shoulders, not theirs.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn  

His saga has been, simultaneously, sordid and sad. It has also, to all appearances, just concluded. After four years of tortuous legal wrangling both in France and in the United States, the man who once was presumed in line for the French presidency was cleared in a French court of all the remaining charges against him.

Both at home and abroad Strauss-Kahn ran into trouble because of sex or, more precisely, because of his apparent sexual proclivities. He has been accused of rape, of assault, of pimping, and of engaging in “unnatural practices.” He has been ridiculed and scorned, and banished (at least for the time being) from the polite societies in which for decades he freely traveled. His wife – (very) rich and famous in her own right – finally divorced him. And in four years he has aged ten years. A recent photo of him arriving at a French court shows him looking haggard and old, at least in comparison with the sharp and dapper figure that he cut not long ago.

Strauss-Kahn is nothing if not clever. But he is also, simultaneously, a fool. Assuming for the sake of this discussion that he did not deserve time in prison, there can be no question that for many years he did participate, on something resembling a regular basis, in “sex parties” held in several cities in several countries. While the French have long been known for being tolerant and even blasé about the private lives of public figures, times change. The culture has changed – especially women’s willingness to remain mute about such matters – and the technology has changed. The very idea that in this day and age Strauss-Kahn could count on keeping his lascivious private life indefinitely private is absurd. Neither we nor he should be surprised by the fact that in short order Strauss-Kahn morphed from a man who was widely esteemed to one who was widely mocked. Fact is that in the 21^st century followers are famously fickle.

 

Being president ain’t what it used to be.

Being president of a college or university is no exception.

Which is why another president of another institution of higher education just bit the dust. The beleaguered president of Cooper Union, Jamshed Bharucha, finally had enough. He quit. Or, maybe better put, his followers had enough. They pushed him out. Either way, his position became untenable.

More on “hard times” for leaders in higher education in the next few days.

 

 

Good news out of Turkey!

In today’s national election, the oppressive, repressive president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suffered his biggest setback in 12 years in power. Voters have just denied him his overweening ambition: to rewrite the constitution to establish himself as an all-powerful president. (He was prime minister from 2003 to 2014, and has been president since then.) To be sure, Erdogan’s ruling party won a plurality of the vote. But it lost 8 percentage points since the last election. And the existing numbers are not likely to be sufficient to form a government without entering into a coalition.

In some ways the results of the Turkish election resemble those of other recent ones in Europe, in which followers, voters, have trounced their leaders. In Poland, in spite of President Bronislaw Komorowski’s alliance with the centrist party that has successfully governed the country for the last eight years, he was beaten by a young, right wing upstart, whose main appeal seemed that he was other than the incumbent. Recent elections in Spain and also in Scotland suggest a similar trend – in which voters, especially younger ones, assert their right to be heard either by throwing the incumbents out of office, or by in some other way upending or threatening the status quo.

In Turkey this same voter restiveness is an inordinately welcome development. For anyone with any interest in democratic governance, what’s been happening in Turkey in recent years has been downright disheartening. So Erdogan’s comeuppance is cause for celebration … at least for now.

 

So far there are nine declared Republican candidates for President of the United States:

• Ben Carson
• Ted Cruz
• Carly Fiorina
• Lindsey Graham
• Mike Huckabee
• George Pataki
• Rand Paul
• Marco Rubio
• Rick Santorum

So far there are six waiting in the wings:

• Jeb Bush
• Chris Christie
• Bobby Jindal
• Rick Perry
• Donald Trump
• Scott Walker

So far there are two standing by:

• John Kasich
• Rob Portman

This means that as of this writing some 16 men and one woman genuinely believe, or are making believe that they genuinely believe, that both of the following are true: first that they are inordinately well qualified to be President of the United States; and second that on November 8, 2016 they have a reasonable chance of being elected President of the United States.

If all of them genuinely believe that they are inordinately well qualified to be President of the United States, and if all of them similarly believe that on November 8, 2016 they have a reasonable chance of being elected President of the United States, then at least some of them are delusional.

As to those who are making believe that they genuinely believe that they are inordinately well qualified to be President of the United States, and that on November 8, 2016 they have a reasonable chance of being elected President of the United States, they are debasing not only themselves but the office to which they claim to aspire. The perceived rewards of running without a snowball’s chance in hell of winning are further damaging an already damaged brand: leadership in America.

In the leadership literature – and in the English language more generally – there is a visceral loathing of the word “follower.”  It is associated with being weak not strong, with being passive rather than active, and with being a loser as opposed to a winner.

Nevertheless, in English, “follower” is the obvious antonym of “leader.” Though most of the experts continue to shy from the word – preferring to use synonyms such as constituent, stakeholder, or subordinate – I continue to believe that “follower” is a useful, even necessary, designation.

To be sure, as I use the word, to label someone a follower is not to imply that they follow at every turn. To the contrary: just as leaders don’t always lead, so followers don’t always follow. They sometimes they go their own way, chart their own course. This then is my definition:

Followers are people without any obvious sources of power, authority, or influence. They therefore usually – though not always – fall into line. They therefore usually – though not always – go along with the prevailing norm.     

According to this definition, when he blew the lid off the National Security Administration’s surveillance programs in 2013, Edward Snowden was a follower. Until that moment he was without any power, authority, or influence whatsoever. That he has been able to exert such a great impact on America’s political system – whatever the future of the various provisions of the Patriot Act, for the moment some have expired – is further evidence that leaders are anything other than all-important. Followers matter – and so do the contexts within which both leaders and followers necessarily are embedded.  Whatever you think of the change that Snowden created, it is testimony not only to follower power, but to the 21^st century technology that in this case enabled it.