Who might you wonder? Eric Adams, who, since January 2022, has been Mayor of New York, which, despite not because of Adams, remains one of the world’s great cities.
In my book, Bad Leadership: What It Is, Why It Happens, How It Matters, I identified seven different types of bad leadership. Adams checks several of the boxes.
Here, however, I’ll keep it simple. Essentially bad/good leadership runs along two axes: one a continuum from ethical to unethical; the other a continuum from competent to incompetent. Adams is both unethical and incompetent. He reflects badly on himself, on his followers, and on the city that, unfortunately, he still leads.
At the end of last year Eric Adams already had the lowest approval ratings of any mayor in New York City’s history. And that was then.
Now we know more about how bad he really is. Specifically, we’ve been aware for some time that he was incompetent. That with him at the helm the city has foundered on housing, on immigrants, and on post-covid recovery, among its other chronic problems. We’ve also read, repeatedly, about Adams’s unfortunate personal life, in which he seems much to prefer partying with unsavory cronies to other forms of recreation.
But what we have only recently begun to understand is how deeply corrupt is apparently the administration of Mayor Adams. To be clear, so far no one, including the mayor himself, has been charged with a crime. But what we do know now is that on his team was a cadre of characters who are targets of four separate federal investigations. Just yesterday New York City’s Police Commissioner resigned, Edward Caban admitting that “the news around recent developments has created a distraction for our department.”
Never when a leader is bad is it a small thing. When a leader of a major metropolis is bad it’s a big thing – and a sad thing. Which raises the question, again, of what to do when a leader is bad.