Is it just me or is there a similarity between bad leadership and climate change? By this I mean in both cases is widespread agreement they exist, are real. But, in both cases our capacity to address the problem, the threat they pose, is so limited that meaningful change has been, continues to be, impossible.
Climate change is at least being discussed. It’s on the agenda, a matter of public policy in many if not most countries around the world. Still, our individual and collective capacity meaningfully to take it on so far has been too little and too late. Human nature is such that climate change remains – and is likely to continue to remain – a frightening problem with no solution.
I now think of bad leadership in the same way. It’s not as if we’re in denial. Though our definitions of what constitutes bad leadership differ – a problem of itself – people do not disagree it exists, and they do not disagree it is, or at least it can be, a threat to the general welfare. In fact, ironically, we’re obsessed with bad leadership, be it who we see as our bad boss or our bad president. Still, for all the bitching and moaning about bad leadership our ability to take it on usually is no match for the task at hand. We have a hard time coming to grips with bad leadership – and an even harder time doing something about it.
Consider the case of Lebanon. Beirut was once known as the “Paris of the Middle East.” In recent years, however, the city, the country, have been in free-fall. This past week the World Bank issued a report that described Lebanon as being in crisis, as being on the precipice of becoming a failed state. Key pillars of the political economy have disintegrated. Basic services have collapsed. The level of political discord has been debilitating. And there has been a massive brain drain, leaving the poor and middle class behind, victims of what happened.
Did this calamity come about of its own? It did not. It was in direct consequence of bad leadership. According to the World Bank Lebanon Economic Monitor: “Lebanon’s deliberate depression is orchestrated by the county’s elite that has long captured the state and lived off its economic rents. This capture persists despite the severity of the crisis – one of the top ten, possibly top three most severe economic collapses worldwide since the 1850s.”
It is not as if the Lebanese people have been passive in the face of the catastrophe. As recently as October were massive protests, one of many in recent years, in this case leaving six dead. Still, public outrage has come to naught, the people too weak and divided effectively to challenge a leadership class riddled with corruption.
There are exceptions to the general rule. Bad leaders – bad people in positions of authority – are sometimes held accountable. Recently, in a courtroom in Germany, two perpetrators of crimes against humanity from another Middle Eastern country, Syria, were found guilty. But verdicts like these are a drop in the proverbial bucket. In fact, in another grim irony of history, the chief Syrian culprit, the man mainly (though by no means solely) responsible for more than a half million Syrians dead since 2011, and more than half the country’s population displaced, President Bashir al-Assad, has not only been left personally unscathed he is being politically rehabilitated. As a scholar from Syria recently noted, writing in the New York Times, “In June, the World Health Organization appointed Syria to its executive board. Interpol readmitted Syria to its network in October. Algeria and Egypt have pushed to reinvite Syria to Arab League membership, and other Arab nations have gestured toward a rapprochement with Mr. al-Assad. And throughout, Mr. al-Assad’s relationship with Iran and Russia appears to have deepened.”
Is it that our memories are short? Is it that in time realpolitik supersedes the dictates of our conscience? Or is it simply that all too often we are, or we feel we are, as helpless in the face of evil (bad leadership) as we are in the face of danger (climate change)?
Clearly I refer not just to bad leaders in the Middle East but to bad leaders everywhere. In business as in government, in the United States as elsewhere in the world. Just yesterday former President Donald Trump flat out admitted that what he wanted after his defeat was for Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election, which by all objective accounts was free and fair. Trump confessed, in other words, that his intention was to stage a successful coup. A successful coup against the U.S. government, a successful coup against the U.S. Constitution. In the history of the United States leadership has not been worse than that.
This is not the first time I have lamented our collective inattention to bad leadership. For years I have charged the leadership industry specifically with benign neglect of precisely this sort. The question is at which point does the neglect become other than benign? At which point will we be individually and collectively responsible for our refusal to deal with the dark side?