Author: Barbara

As a colleague and I tirelessly point out, followers have always been important, and in the 21^st century they are more important than ever before.  Ira Chaleff (author of the widely read book, The Courageous Follower) and I have found that to study leadership without studying followership is impossible. And that to be a good leader without having good followers is equally impossible. (Of course, the converse is also true. Bad leaders depend absolutely on bad followers.)

While we have made some progress demonstrating to others the significance of this finding – a few decades ago the word “followership” was not even in the lexicon – progress has been painfully slow. We have got to the point where Wikipedia cites followership as an “emerging area within leadership that helps explain outcomes.” But by and large people remain obsessed with leaders and leadership to the exclusion of followers and followership. Even the International Leadership Association, a professional organization with which Chaleff and I have been associated for years, generally treats followership as an insignificant stepchild, to be marginalized or even ignored.

Setting aside the countless ways in which follower power impacts the public sector – #MeToo being just one recent screamingly obvious example – its impact on the private and nonprofit sectors is equally great. A single case in point: subordinates rating their superiors.

When I first walked into a classroom I was expected ultimately to assess the performance of my students. The idea that they ultimately would assess me was inconceivable. Yet now websites like ratemyprofessors.com are not only ubiquitous, they are powerful. Student evaluations of teachers frequently play a critical role in determining teachers’ professional trajectories.

Glassdoor.com is similar. The idea is for information to be openly shared with anyone and everyone, at any level, thereby enabling power to be more equally distributed. Among Glassdoor’s features is information on salaries, reviews of office environments, ratings of companies, and assessments of CEOs based on how many people approve of the company’s leadership. According to a recent article in The New Yorker, Glassdoor’s website now posts thirty-three million reviews of more than seven-hundred thousand companies in almost two hundred countries.

If this isn’t a consequential change I don’t know what is. If this isn’t evidence of follower power I don’t know what is. If this isn’t follower power at the expense of leader power I don’t know what is.

In the US #MeToo became a movement of social and political consequence in effect overnight. However, replicating this phenomenon elsewhere in the world will be difficult or even impossible, at least for the foreseeable future.

China is an extreme case in point. Notwithstanding the ideology of equity, women in China are by and large second-class citizens. As reported recently in the New York Times, sexism and workplace discrimination are rampant; laws on harassment and even rape remain vague; employers don’t typically even investigate complaints of harassment or abuse; and men by and large are protected from charges of wrongdoing because they are the ones in positions of power and authority – in government and business.

Moreover, because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) now fears no one so much as activists – as followers who fight – it has become in recent years extremely censorious. Which explains why in the case of #MeToo, the Party, the government, is going all out to hobble the campaign, to  block the use of words and phrases that might incite, and to delete online petitions that call for others to join the cause. Chinese officials have gone so far as to warn #MeToo activists against speaking out, “suggesting that they may be seen as traitors colluding with foreigners if they persist.”* In short, the CCP is not taking #MeToo lightly. It is not kidding around.

Precisely because the effort to stifle dissent in China is so strenuous, it’s remarkable that dissent manages nevertheless to break through. Still, I harbor no illusions. History is kind for a time – sometimes a long time – to governments ready and willing to clamp down. Which is why none of us has any idea of  how long it will take for male leaders in China to bow to female followers in China.  What we do know though is that someday they will.

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*https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/world/asia/china-women-me-too-censorship.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=28C3832733675C697D29D8B64CCF0ABD&gwt=pay

Andrew Sullivan uses the phrase “the taboo topic of nature” when writing about men’s natural sexual preferences and proclivities. I’ll use it when writing about women’s natural maternal preferences and proclivities – a topic that’s equally taboo. It’s taboo, for example, to suggest that a woman’s being a mother (especially of babies and young children) interferes with a woman’s being a leader. Or even that when it comes to the exercise of leadership, being a parent intrudes more on women than it does on men.

The suggestion that parenting is the same for women as it is for men is ludicrous. It flies in the face of everything we know about animal behavior. It flies in the face of everything we know about human behavior. And it flies in the face of everything we know about physiology, specifically the difference between the male body, which cannot carry or feed the baby, and the female body, which can, and does, first carry the baby and then feed it.

If being a mother is even remotely responsible for why women don’t lead – that is, for why women lead only in stubbornly small numbers – then nothing would be as important to closing the leadership gap as providing mothers with more help caring for their young. However, for American mothers especially, it’s still a steep hill to climb.

There are two obvious problems. The first is that the United States remains the only one among industrialized countries not to mandate paid parental leave. To be sure, more employers are starting to provide parental leave benefits, and more employers are expanding the leave benefits they already have.

This, however, raises the second problem. Research shows that mothers who take parental leave have better mental and physical health, and that their babies do as well. But, it’s not at all clear that taking time off from work is professionally advantageous, particularly if you’re on the leadership track. In other words, among all but the most enlightened employers, parental leave, especially if it’s relatively extensive, can and often does interfere with professional advancement.

There are reasons why even in the most enlightened countries and cultures on the planet the discrepancies between men and women in this regard remain huge. For example, Swedish couples receive 480 days of paid (at about 80%) parental leave. But while parents are encouraged to split their time off from work as equally as possible, it doesn’t happen. Fathers receive only about 27 percent of parental benefits; mothers receive the rest, about 73 percent.

Ask yourself why this is. Then ask yourself whether paying parents to quit the workplace for protracted periods of time is the best answer to a question far knottier than it seems – especially when it devolves around women and leadership.

The fertility rate is down. But a greater percentage of American women are mothers now than a decade ago. Currently 86 percent of U.S. women ages 40 to 44 have at least one child!*

The increase is especially striking among two groups: first, women who never married; second, women with advanced degrees. It appears that what previously were considered barriers to becoming a mother, are now perceived differently. In fact, the biggest increase in motherhood in the last twenty years is among women with a higher education.  Among women with doctorates or professional degrees, some 80 percent now have a child by age 44, a significant jump from two decades earlier.

At the same time, so far at least, the number of women in leadership roles remains strikingly low. This applies across the board – to women in business, in politics, and in the non profit sector. Which again raises the question of why. Why, given the reduction now in gender bias, given the various supports now available to women, and given the emphasis now on achieving diversity, do leadership roles remain so elusive to women?

Could it be that there’s a connection between the two? That precisely because more women now are mothers, many of them single mothers, for them the exercise of leadership is not a priority? Or, at least, not a priority when their children are young? Not a priority precisely during those years when ascending the leadership ladder is most likely?

We know full well that the U.S. lags in family friendly public policies. We also know full well that U. S. companies remain stingy when it comes to parental leave. At the same time, we similarly know that Sweden, as much as any place on the planet, strives consciously and deliberately for gender equity. Yet even in Sweden, the number of women in leadership roles is meager. Not nearly as meager as in the U. S., but, still, meager. In 2014, only one in ten CEO positions in the largest 1,050 Swedish companies were held by women.

Which returns us to a point I made previously: that being a mother, especially of children and adolescents, and being a leader, is not generally a match made in heaven. The fact is that more educated women who now leave work are in their late 30s and early 40s – precisely because they are having babies later in life. This makes the match between motherhood and leadership even more fraught.

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*https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/upshot/the-us-fertility-rate-is-down-yet-more-women-are-mothers.html

A recent column by Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal about the prospect of Oprah Winfrey running for president was titled, “The Perfect Candidate for Therapist in Chief.” The title says it all. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in Winfrey’s history that qualifies her in any conventional sense to be president of the United States. Rather she has been, first on her long-running eponymous television show and then beyond, a first-class listener, a fabled survivor, and an iconic earth mother. What she has not been, even for a single day, is enlisted in the American military or embroiled in American politics.

On the one hand no surprise. Neither George W. Bush or Barack Obama brought to the White House extensive political education or training.  And Donald Trump famously, infamously, had exactly zero directly relevant experience and exactly zero directly relevant expertise. In other words, the American presidency has already been sullied. We have already assumed that leadership, even, or, especially, presidential leadership, is something that can be exercised without much or even any leadership learning at all.  So why not Oprah?

Winfrey for president says far less about her than it does about us. About how we the American people have got to the point of thinking of leadership as akin to a hobby, as something that can and perhaps even should be exercised without any previous practice whatsoever. It’s an astonishingly low bar we’ve set, partly because we’ve set it primarily for leadership in politics, not for leadership in business, not for leadership in the military, and not for leadership anyplace else.  Mary Barra, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors, is 56 years old. Not only did she start working at the company at age 18, it’s well known that her father was a dye maker at GM for almost 40 years.  One of the reasons then that this woman got this job – a first in the auto industry –  was that GM coursed through her veins. The company was in her blood.

Makes sense. What does not make sense is that America’s chief executive is conceived of as radically different from GM’s chief executive. What’s required for the second – experience and expertise – should be required also for the first.

I’ve just returned to the U.S. after a week working in Beijing.

Let me reiterate some conventional wisdoms, confirmed by my own observations.

• Everything you’ve read about China in recent years seems right – and then some. It is fast becoming the powerhouse of the 21st century.    
• The state is increasingly intrusive and oppressive. Even a tourist can feel it, see it. Every Chinese person with whom I had an honest conversation confirmed the observation. But, so far at least, the Chinese people are willing to trade individual freedom for collective strength and relative prosperity. How long this overriding acquiescence will last is uncertain. But for now it appears entrenched.
• Xi Jinping is the most powerful single figure in China since Mao. He feels strong enough to have dared in the last year to accrue to himself a level of power and authority typically associated not with authoritarian leaders, but with totalitarian ones.
• Curiously, for China is anything other than communist in any traditional sense, the ideology of Marxism, Communism, is being vigorously and rigorously revived. Once again, the Chinese Communist Party is becoming the primary instrument of state control.
• Xi intends to be strongman not only within China, but without. He, the Chinese, have a strategic plan that is far more ambitious than anything Americans can even conceive of. The Chinese are investing heavily in places such as distant Asia and Africa, which within the next decade will bestow on China unrivaled global influence.

China Daily is an English language newspaper published in China. It is considered to be state-run.  On one of that days I was in Beijing, January 12, the front-page headline was reminiscent of nothing so much as Pravda, for decades the main state-run rag of the Soviet Union.

The headline read, Xi Urges Strict Party Discipline. The text that followed, reprinted here in part, speaks for itself:

Highlighting the importance of governing the Party with strict discipline, Xi required the whole Party to maintain the authority and unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee, intensify the fight against corruption, and strive for a better “political ecology” in the party.

It is a must to uphold and enhance the Party’s comprehensive leadership in the process of governing the party with strict discipline, Xi said, adding that it is fundamental to maintain the authority and unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee.      

The Party should focus on capacity-building for its long-term governance and the building of its progressiveness and purity to ensure that the CPC becomes a Marxist political party that always walks in front of the times, supported by the people brave for self-revolution and standing the test of all challenges, Xi said.

A few days ago, a front-page NY Times headline read, “Under Trump, a Once Unimaginable Presidency Becomes a Reality.”  Written by the estimable Peter Baker, the article argues that Trump has “transformed the presidency.”

According to Baker the list of transformations is long, including among others:

• Trump’s different from virtually all previous presidents who never spoke immoderately not to mention outrageously.
• Trump’s different from virtually all previous presidents who never kept on the side a profit-making business.
• Trump’s different from virtually all previous presidents who never attacked institutions they oversaw (the F.B.I and C.I.A, for example).
• Trump’s different from virtually all previous presidents who never waged war against members of their own party and even their own cabinet.
• Trump’s different from virtually all previous presidents who never appealed to Americans’ basest instincts on race, religion, and gender.
• Trump’s different from virtually all previous presidents who never rattled the nuclear saber.

The list goes on. The key question though – to which the definitive answer is at the moment unknowable – is whether the changes to which Baker alludes are authentic transformations or simply aberrations? In other words, will the changes that Trump made prove permanent – in which case they are transformations? Or will they prove evanescent – in which case they are aberrations?

One could argue – and I do – that the behaviors that Trump is evidencing in the White House will prove not to be transforming at all, but simply aberrant. In fact, I predict that with every new revelation related to his overweening unfitness for the presidential office will come a heightened aversion to repeating our electoral error. I am predicting, in other words, that the next American who is elected president will be the anti-Trump. The antithesis of the man who currently sits in the Oval Office in both his style and substance.

Peter Baker is an estimable reporter, all right, but on this one he’s wrong. Trump will prove not to be an agent of change. He will prove a deviation as well as a deviant.

The worst American leader of the year is not an American. He is a Russian. He is Vladimir Putin.

As his startling success on American soil made clear, Putin was not bad as in “ineffective.” He was bad as in “unethical.” The havoc wreaked on Americans by Russians operating in bad faith is difficult to calculate. But in 2017 it became clear that it was massive. Moreover, it’s not over. The detritus of the damage done stinks still – and it will well beyond even the 2018 election. Putin has rendered America’s political system a body blow from which, best case scenario, it will take years to recover.

Putin’s prowess is finite. Ironically, he did not get what he most wanted – lifting of sanctions against Russia. Moreover, in his own country, his high popularity is, to an extent, an airy artifice, pumped up by thwarting and threatening his opposition.  But Putin is a past master at playing a weak hand. (Russia’s economy is about the size of Italy’s) Which is why, from an American perspective, the damage he does is as daunting as dangerous.

In recent months, the following became clear:

• The Russian government ensnared Donald Trump in a convoluted and corrupt relationship for years.
• The Russian government interfered with the 2016 presidential campaign from its inception to its conclusion.
• The Russian government put its thumb on the scale for Trump and against Hillary Clinton.
• The Russian government continued to influence Trump even after he moved into the White House.
• The Russian government manipulated President Trump to the point of his being a patsy for President Putin.
• The Russian government does what it can where it can to sow dissent in liberal democracies.
• The Russian government does what it can where it can to assert itself in ways contrary to American interests.
• The Russian government uses new technologies to play old tricks.
• The Russian government reflects a history and ideology different from that of the American government – and it acts accordingly.

The Russian government and Vladimir Putin have been synonymous for almost two decades. Which explains why – from an American perspective – Putin’s presidency has been punishing. I’m betting, by the way, that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. That only in 2018 will the full effect of Putin’s power become evident.

Writing about the genesis of his novel, The Plot Against America, the great Philip Roth wrote, “All the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy. We are ambushed, even as free Americans in a powerful republic armed to the teeth, by the unpredictability that is history.”

The Plot Against America was counterfactual, an imagined scenario in which Charles Lindbergh, the great aviator and American hero who happened also be to be a rigid isolationist and committed white supremacist, had been elected president of the United States. It never happened, of course, but it was not inconceivable. During the 1930s and ‘40s, Lindbergh was, as Roth put it, “a socio-political force” to be reckoned with.

Still, when The Plot Against America was originally published, in 2004, it seemed far-fetched. Now, though, not so much. Now with Donald Trump in the White House has been a war on truth. Now with Donald Trump in the White House has been a diminution of the US as leader of the liberal world order. Now with Donald Trump in the White House has been a surge in bias and bigotry. Now with Donald Trump in the White House has been a degradation of the national discourse. Now with Donald Trump in the White House has been corruption at the highest levels of government. And now with Donald Trump in the White House has been an assault on the most venerable of American institutions.

I include on this list the press. Not incidentally, in fact ironically, it is the press – purported perpetrator of “fake news” – that I hereby designate “good leader(s) of the year”! More specifically, if Trump does not demolish our democracy, we will have the New York Times and the Washington Post to thank first and, arguably, foremost.

The importance of their investigative reporting during 2017 is impossible to overestimate. The Times and the Post have led the way in giving us the information we need, the ammunition we need, to protect ourselves against authoritarianism, maybe even totalitarianism. Of course, this fight is by no means over. America’s democracy remains under threat. Trump is not only a narcissist but a pugilist, which is precisely why 2018 threatens to be unusually nasty and singularly dangerous.

But there is evidence that we can continue to rely on – though not obviously to the point of complacency – these two venerable newspapers, both of which have long played storied parts in American journalism. Moreover, even now, when old media have been existentially threatened by new media, both the Times and the Post continue to enjoy the incalculable advantages of protection by their owners. In the case of the former, the legendary Sulzberger family; in the case of the latter, billionaire Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013 and promptly gave it an infusion of fresh cash.

In 1971, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote the following, referencing publication of the Pentagon Papers. “Far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly.” Good Leaders of the Year indeed – then as well as now.

Roth must be relieved. Not completely or permanently. But, at least, partially and preliminarily.

First, some definitions.

Sexual suggests instincts and activities associated with physical attraction and, or, intimate physical contact.

Professional pertains to a profession and, or, to an occupation for which payment is received.

Harassment refers to insults, indignities, and intimidations that are prolonged and, or, repeated.

Second, some clarifications. Not all harassment perpetrated by men on women is sexual. Some instances of harassment, in fact most instances of harassment, are professional. They do not involve physical attraction, on either side, or intimate physical contact.

Professional harassment involves insults, indignities, and intimidations  that relate to work for which payment is received. Professional harassment is, I should add, not confined to men who inflict harm on women. Gender plays a role in harassment – but it is by no means the only determinant. Fact is that countless women are treated badly in the workplace not by men, but by other women.

The Financial Times recently featured several articles on women at work. For example, on December 18 the paper had a piece titled, “Third of Female Asset Managers Suffer Sexual Harassment.” The term “sexual harassment” was used repeatedly, throughout the article. But, at some point another term was used, synonymously, which was “sexist behavior.” But, of course, though “sexual harassment” and “sexist behavior” can be the same thing, they are not necessarily. Which is why sexual harassment can be subsumed under both sexist behavior and professional harassment, but sexist behavior and professional harassment can subsume many other sorts of insults, indignities, and intimidations as well.

For example, women in the workplace often report being somehow made to feel inadequate. They often report being excluded from, or diminished, during collective conversations. They often report being “mocked” or “stonewalled” at meetings. They often report being shut out of activities set up mainly with men in mind, such as partying or golfing. They often report being taken less than seriously if they are mothers than men who are fathers. And they often report endemic misogyny tantamount to a hostile workplace environment.

Would that the problems that beleaguer women in the workplace were limited to sexual harassment! Which is, of course, not to diminish the pain inflicted by sexual harassment. Rather it is to point out that it, sexual harassment, is but a single manifestation of a much larger problem – pervasive, insidious professional harassment. It’s a problem from which few women have been exempt – most assuredly not me.