On June 15, 16, and 17, I posted a three-part series about leadership culture. While all three focused on America’s leadership culture, the first of these posts introduced the concept of leadership culture by describing it as similar to national culture and organizational culture. Specifically, while “culture” is impossible precisely to define, it suggests shared values and beliefs, traditions and norms. Leadership culture then refers to those values and beliefs, traditions and norms that apply to relations between leaders and followers.
Leadership cultures are related to and even derivative from the larger cultures within which they are located. So, America’s leadership culture is different from Russia’s leadership culture because the U.S. and Russia are different. And, so, similarly, the leadership culture of the Catholic faith is different from that of the Jewish faith; Harvard University’s leadership culture is different from Liberty University’s leadership culture; and the leadership culture at General Motors is unlike that at Volkswagen.
Russia’s leadership culture is in stark contrast to America’s. Moreover, unlike President Donald Trump, who is in disharmony with America’s leadership culture, President Vladimir Putin is in harmony with Russia’s. Trump is a proto autocrat who leads in a democratic leadership culture. Putin is an authentic autocrat situated in a leadership culture that is authentically autocratic. So, inevitably, Trump has had a bumpy ride during his less than six years in office – recall that he was impeached twice in his first term – while Putin has enjoyed a relatively smooth ride especially given that he’s been in office for over a quarter century.
Putin is in the Russian leadership tradition, a quintessential product of Russia’s leadership culture. He is a recognizable successor to his most famous 20th century predecessors, Lenin and Stalin. And he is steeped in Russia’s more distant history – replete with its succession of autocratic czars and of similarly powerful patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church. In fact, Putin consciously fuses the two: whenever he dedicates a new statue to one of his czarist predecessors, he does so in the company of by an Orthodox priest who speaks to the holiness of the moment.
Putin’s otherwise inexplicable 2022 decision to attack Ukraine, under the illusion the country could be conquered in less than a week, was seeded in his fantasy of grandiosity. Putin was certain he could restore the Russian empire to something resembling what it was under his czarist predecessors beginning in the 17th century, and then continuing into the 20th under their successors, Lenin and Stalin.
In general, leadership cultures suggest leadership that is predictable. So, Putin has been a predictable product of the leadership culture within which he is situated. But, as always in these matters, to every rule there are exceptions. As with Trump who deviates from the leadership culture into which he was born and over which, as president, he presides.