This will be my last post on bad leadership – for the moment. I will use it to pose ten critical questions that remain, however, to be answered. I have long lamented the fact that by and large the leadership industry avoids the subject of bad leadership. It is so focused on the promise of leadership development – on the promise of growing good leaders – that bad leadership, bad leaders, are effectively sidelined.
This is not to say that bad leadership is a subject more generally avoided. It is not. We hear and read stories about bad leadership all the time. There are, moreover, countless books and articles about bad leadership and, yes, films and plays about bad leadership. But nearly without exception they tackle the subject on a case-by- case basis. Articles here about how bad a leader is Mark Zuckerberg. Articles there about how bad a leader is Boris Johnson. Books here about how bad a leader was Kenneth Lay. Books there about how bad a leader was Joseph Stalin.
This though is different from looking at bad leadership generically, as a thing to be explored and addressed of itself. There are numberless lists of what it takes to be a good leader. Which traits? Which skills? Which dispositions? Which behaviors? There is no equivalent for bad leaders. Other than my own typology – see my previous post – there is very little on bad leadership qua bad leadership.*
Which brings me finally to questions that linger. This list is not, obviously, complete. It is intended only to indicate how long and tortuous the path still ahead. Still, notwithstanding “long,” and notwithstanding “tortuous, ” it is a path that remains, in my view, to be taken.
- How should bad leadership be defined?
- Does “bad” refer to being unethical, or ineffective? Or, does it necessarily refer to both? Is it possible to have a leader who is good along one of the two all-important axes (effective/ineffective), and bad along the other (ethical unethical)?
- What do we do with our differences of opinion – with the fact that my bad leader might be your good leader?
- What about bad leadership do we most need to know? What should be at the top of our research and teaching agendas?
- What are the roles of country, culture, and context in understanding bad leadership? Are conceptions of bad leadership in China fundamentally different from those in the United States?
- Similarly, do our conceptions of bad leadership change over time? Do we think of bad leadership differently now from how we did at the turn of the last century? How about the turn of the century before that?
- What about bad followership? How important is bad followership to bad leadership? Does the answer to this question depend on the situation? Or is there an absolute rule that applies to the relationship between leaders and followers, in particular when the leader is bad?
- If followers do matter, should we try as hard to develop good followers as good leaders?
- Does bad leadership happen suddenly, effectively overnight? Or is the process sometimes, or even often, slow, insidious precisely because it is incremental?
- If leaders are not angels, how do we stop them from getting to the point of being bad?
- If leaders already are bad, how do we stop them from getting worse?
———————————————————————————————-
*To this rule there are handful of exceptions. See especially Jean Lipman-Blumen’s book, The Allure of Toxic Leadership (Oxford, 2005), and, a more recent volume edited by Anders Ortenblad, titled Debating Bad Leadership (Palgrave, 2021). It should also be noted that in the extensive literature on Nazi Germany are some important books on bad leaders – and bad followers.