Why are so many leaders so bad at their jobs?
Prompt: A president cracking under the pressure
- Hmm. It looks more like a “Reagan with better hair slowly evaporating.”
And why do we keep tolerating it?
I honestly don’t know who should be more embarrassed about this article; me for spending the time to write down something that seems so basic I feel like any reasonably bright 5-year-old could figure it out, or the legions of incompetent government officials (and corporate higher-ups, for that matter) that can’t seem to figure it out despite being “very bright people.”
Contrary to what popular media might have you think, leadership roles are not all that difficult and complex once all of the posturing and self-important swagger has been stripped away. A leader’s responsibilities generally boil down to picking a direction, to just choosing between the available options on how to address this issue or that problem — they are rarely asked ever to do the hard work to carry out the plan or make the vision a reality; they merely pick a course of action and then expect others to make it happen.
Now, I will freely confess that I am no expert on leadership; to my recollection, I have taken exactly one university-level course on leadership and have read a handful of articles and research papers over the years. I have served in minor leadership roles a couple of times, but certainly nothing at the level of running a multinational corporation or a large government.
At best, I can call myself an educated layperson on the topic of leadership.
At best.
The fact that I am a relative amateur honestly only makes it that much more frustrating to see just how poor a job so many of our pompous leaders manage to do; one would assume that people with decades worth of education and experience in leadership roles would be proficient in the very basics at least. Instead, I often feel like I have a far better grasp of the fundamentals of leadership and could easily replace a wide range of leaders — and likely do their job just as well, if not better.
At this point, we are largely numbed to the reality of sub-par policy decisions, poorly thought-out corporate actions, and the almost comically disappointing results that this produces. We have become much too willing to accept the whining excuses that our leaders now reflexively utter; they tell us that their jobs are far too difficult and complicated, that we just don’t understand how stressful it is to be them and do their jobs, that we do not appreciate just how hard they are trying — they reassure us that the piss-poor results we are getting are simply the best that anyone could possibly do.
Such claims are nothing more than stinking piles of bovine excrement, bull poo-poo if you will, a sub-par, poorly thought-out attempt at deflection to avoid responsibility. The reality is that many of our leaders, in government and business, are just plain bad at their jobs; many of these people have a track record that would leave me hesitant to trust them with my lunch order, never mind the running and administration of large businesses or public institutions.
The truth of leadership is that you are at the head of a team; you do not need to have all the answers, and you certainly shouldn’t assume that you know best or that your ideas are the right ones for the task at hand. Far too many leaders instead seem to take the attitude that they are superhumans with a special “gut instinct” that will lead them to the correct decision every time, no matter how horribly out of their depth they find themselves. Many leaders believe that they are experts in all things when far more often, they are experts in a single thing or nothing at all.
And for leaders, that is honestly ok; that’s a big part of the point I am making here; it isn’t difficult to be a leader because you don’t have to be all that good at anything. The only requisite for being a truly effective leader is to have the ability to recognize what skills or knowledge are needed to solve a problem, then find the people with those skills and knowledge and point them at the problem.
At the end of the day, this is the only actual ability needed to join the ranks of the most effective leaders in history; know your skill set, know the skill set of others, and pick the right tool for the job.
So why is it that effective leaders are so rare? Why do we keep seeing such incompetence at the top of virtually every hierarchy we build?
Again, I’m no expert, but…
I won’t pretend to have all the answers; I am well aware that plenty of academics have spent far longer looking at this phenomenon than I have and can undoubtedly offer a far more nuanced analysis.
I would simply like to point to a few fairly obvious issues that contribute to this problem; maybe if we get better at recognizing some of the root causes, we will eventually get a little better at selecting leaders that can actually do the job.
I would argue that one major factor is our culture; particularly in North America, there is an entrenched worship of individuality and a love for clearly defined hierarchies. “I am the boss, I know best, now shut up and do as you’re told” is a common unspoken policy in corporations and public institutions, and we are relentlessly hammered with messaging that encourages us to be “self-made,” to not rely on others, to be an expert in all things, somehow. These weird cultural attitudes then make their way into our leadership positions; the top brass allows their arrogance and insecurity to create an environment where any sign of uncertainty or request for help is viewed as a weakness rather than a strength.
Admitting that someone else can do better is seen as the gravest of sins; far better to pretend you are an expert and make a delightful mess of everything than allow someone else a moment in the spotlight.
This ridiculous system frustrates me to no end because it would be so incredibly easy for bosses in a wide range of fields to catapult themselves from mediocre blowhards with little real accomplishment to their names to become some of the most effective and influential leaders of our times by simply asking for help in all the areas they aren’t experts.
Not rocket science
Again, it feels embarrassing to spell out such obvious, easy-to-grasp concepts, but it seems like legions of people need to read this and realize that it is not unreasonable to ask for and expect better from those in power.
Take the example of government policymaking; most of the problems that face our governments daily are not all that complex and do not require geniuses to solve. What these day-to-day problems do require in order to be solved is simple, effective policy and legislation. Policy and legislation are, again, not insurmountably difficult things to produce; all you need is a minimum of two parties: Someone who knows how to write the needed legalese and navigate the labyrinthine masses of red tape that make up the modern bureaucracy and someone who actually understands the problems and solutions being discussed.
These two parties are rarely going to be the same person; the legalese and red tape are typically handed by government officials, individuals who are hopefully experts when it comes to policy making and are rarely very knowledgeable when it comes to anything else.
The “someone who knows what they are talking about” category is best filled by the stakeholders, experts, etc., relevant to the issue.
The disappointing failures start when elected officials forget about the second group and decide that they know what is best for everyone, that they are the only arbiters of truth, and that they are the ones best equipped to make the big decisions about topics they frequently have less-than-no understanding of.
I feel like I frequently pick on the US, or Elon Musk, so I will try using a couple of examples of something a little more local — incompetent Manitoban politicians. Our current premier, Heather Stephenson, for example, is far from what I would call leadership material; she regularly fails even to pretend to be competent — like the time she dodged a serious question by rambling about her son’s hockey game until “oops, out of time, oh darn I really wanted to answer that important question.”
Before her, we had a real piece of work named Brian Pallister. Pallister had a really nasty habit of saying incredibly insensitive and boneheaded things on a regular basis, making it clear he rarely bothered to think before speaking. He apparently also had a habit of blocking off time during the workday to sit by himself and think really hard about policy decisions and how best to govern — like some kind of king or dictator that doesn’t need to consult anyone else to make governing decisions.
At least that would go some way towards explaining why he was so incompetent; if you are going to govern how I expect a ten-year-old would, I should probably expect the kinds of results a ten-year-old would produce. When a privileged, entitled white man keeps no counsel but his own when it comes to running a province, there is no hope that things will work out well for anyone but the privileged and entitled.
You could also look to the example of our current provincial health minister, Audrey Gordon, who regularly makes “impressive” and “very smart” decisions about the province’s healthcare system — her decisions and actions tend to be counterproductive and succeed only in actively making things worse, as you would expect of someone who clearly has no idea what they are doing. It doesn’t help that she apparently doesn’t bother to read up on what is going on in healthcare in her own province.
For example, there have been a few incidents in Winnipeg recently with patients dying while waiting for care; this year, there has been a patient who died at home waiting for an ambulance and at least one patient who died at the hospital in a hallway waiting for the medical team to take over from the EMTs. The proposed solutions thus far seem to revolve mostly around improving ambulance service, providing more ambulances and EMTs, and streamlining ambulance operations. While this is all well and good, it does very little to address the actual problems that are leading to preventable deaths.
The patient who died at home did not die because there were no ambulances; they died because all the ambulances were stuck waiting at the hospital for space to open up for the patients they had already picked up.
Similarly, the patient who died in the hallway did not die from a lack of ambulances and EMTs; they died waiting for space to open up in the hospital; they died waiting for the resources and services they required to become available to save their life.
This is not a new problem either; as both a medical student and a resident, I had to perform numerous patient assessments and some early parts of patient care in the hallway; “hallway medicine” is the commonly used term, and no one enjoys it in the slightest.
Adding a fleet of new ambulances will do very little to prevent patient deaths in the future because a lack of ambulances has not been the cause of patient deaths thus far. People keep dying because the hospitals are underfunded and understaffed, many wards are old and outdated, and they often struggle with broken or poorly maintained equipment because the budget does not allow for anything better. Lack of ambulance availability has a lot more to do with patient flow problems than a shortage of ambulances.
ER and hallway deaths are almost always a case of there being no space in the wards for the patient; people die when they cannot receive the needed medical care within the needed timeframe, and the major bottlenecks to receiving care are primarily within the hospitals.
The proposed allocation of resources towards extra ambulances may succeed in making things worse; we will have more ambulances and EMTs waiting in hallways while the hospital staffing shortages remain. The money spent on ambulances could instead be put towards fixing the root cause of the issue and making things better. Instead, we accomplish nothing more than giving our health minister and her team a chance to pat themselves on the back for “good work” and a fancy puff piece to win votes in the next election.
They keep lying about the complexity
This same pattern of incompetence bred by arrogance and an unwillingness to collaborate with experts plays out over and over again all over the world in a wide range of fields. Many embarrassingly unskilled government and industry leaders struggle even to entertain the idea that there could be someone more qualified than themselves on any given topic.
A favorite example that you will see me return to is healthcare; I have a certain degree of expertise and a general lifelong interest in the subject that keeps pulling me back. Healthcare worldwide is something of a mess at the moment — Canada and many other developed nations have now been struggling silently for years as decades of underfunding and mismanagement have chipped away at the resiliency of our systems and led to increasing numbers of patients being outright failed or allowed to slip through the cracks. The Covid pandemic merely brought the dysfunction to light and showed the world how badly we have allowed our elected leaders to gut a crucial system that we will all need at one time or another during our lives.
The politicians will tell you they are doing their best, they are working around the clock to find and fix the many failings and faults, and that the problem is too big and too complex, so we will need to be patient and deal with the fact that we cannot have the healthcare we want and deserve.
Again, this is nothing more than cheap theater, smoke, and mirrors to distract you from the fact that these elected officials need to be booted for their incompetence and unwillingness to do their reasonably straightforward jobs to a minimum acceptable standard.
We need our healthcare system to work; the next pandemic or emerging threat to human health and wellness could already be just around the corner, and we have already spent far too many years sitting on our hands.
The good times are coming to an end, and the future is unlikely to be as forgiving as the recent past has been (climate change, inflation, and rising global tensions, anyone?); the time for selfish, unskilled leaders and their corruption and mismanagement of our collective resources is over. The time for greedy robber barons and corporate overlords has come and gone; if we are to have any kind of decent future, we need to change the way we are doing things, and the best place to start is by demanding far more of those who dream of being in charge.
Just imagine
Imagine the kind of world we might live in if we set higher standards for politicians and corporate executives if we rewarded them based on their actual performance rather than whatever they can steal the credit for. Imagine how well our societies might function if we made decisions more intelligently; if healthcare policy was guided by the people who work in healthcare and the people who use healthcare (patients) rather than upper-middle class lawyers and PoliSci majors with no healthcare experience and no real understanding of what using the healthcare system is like for someone without family wealth to bolster them. If the education system was run by experts in education and did not have to struggle against government underfunding and the attacks of a small but vocal minority of incredibly bigoted parents.
This mythical, better world isn’t some high-brow fantasy; it is all within our reach. It does not take much searching to find advocacy organizations that are more than happy to talk about the problems and how to solve them. It is not at all challenging to find stakeholders champing at the bit to help draft policy changes that will benefit everyone; patients and healthcare providers are almost always willing to give their time, often entirely for free, to discuss where the system is failing us, and how we can fix it.
I do not doubt that those in power will try and argue that it is simply too expensive to consult with experts on complex matters — this is just more deception and misdirection. The only real barrier to practicing this better system is the arrogance, fear, and ideological pig-headedness of leaders that refuse to see themselves as anything less than divine founts of wisdom.
A Socratic Tangent
Bear with me here because I think we can learn a little something from ancient Athens here.
Socrates got himself killed over 2400 years ago by questioning those in power, those who purported to have all the answers, and those who claimed to be truly wise; he did not ask questions with the goal of humiliating but rather to gain an accurate understanding of what these wise men claimed to know. What Socrates found, again and again, was that those who claimed wisdom and understanding rarely held either, and this has stayed the same despite the passage of twenty-four centuries.
The people in charge still vastly overestimate their competence, their ability, and their knowledge; they are just as unwilling to show real strength and leadership by asking for guidance from others, by letting others lead when they are better suited, and by being dedicated to getting the best result rather than chasing personal glory.
This is why the leaders in ancient Athens were often incompetent, it is why our leaders today manage to perform so poorly on a regular basis, and if we do not finally learn our lesson, we will have no one to blame but ourselves when we allow those at the top to lead us into a disaster we can’t escape from.
