Leadership: Warts And All

October 10, 2007

We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once wrote, to explain the unfounded optimism human beings display. Good stories make the world more bearable. Inevitably, therefore, we want to tell – and be told – stories that make us feel better, even if that means that we don’t get as complete a picture as we need.

People who study leaders have fallen victim to this instinct in a big way. In the leadership literature of the past several decades, almost all successful authors have fed into their readers’ (and perhaps their own) yearnings for feel- good stories. Just reflect on some of the best sellers of the last 20 to 30 years: Thomas J. Peters and Robert H.Waterman, Jr.’s In Search of Excellence; Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus’s Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge; John P. Kotter’s A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management; and Jay A. Conger and Beth Benjamin’s Building Leaders. Although a few authors have recently taken exception to the blind belief in the inherent goodness of leadership – notably Sydney Finkelstein in his book Why Smart Executives Fail and What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes – most of the hugely successful scholars argue, often with passion, that effective leaders are persons of merit, or at least of good intentions. It almost seems that by definition bad people cannot be good leaders.

If most leaders were worthy people, it would be easy to understand why we accentuate the positive. But the reality is, of course, that flawed leaders are everywhere. In corporations, overweening personal ambition and greed have driven many a CEO to run afoul of the law. In the last couple of years alone, scores of powerful and successful executives have been indicted for financial wrongdoing of various kinds. Think of Andy Fastow of Enron and Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco. Even homemaking diva Martha Stewart has joined the ranks of the indicted. As the New York Times wryly quipped, it now “takes a scorecard to keep up with corporate scandals in America.”

Of course, corporations don’t have a corner on the market in bad leaders. Politics is replete with the most extreme of examples. Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot come immediately to mind: all power-mad and evil but nonetheless highly effective as leaders. These extreme cases aside, stories about the failings of more reasonable public officials litter the newspaper headlines. Consider Peter Mandelson, a member of Tony Blair’s cabinet, respected both for his political skills and his understanding of public policy. In 1998, Mandelson was forced to resign from the cabinet after it was revealed that he had accepted an improper loan of £373,000 to help buy a swanky home in London’s Notting Hill.

And, certainly, it doesn’t end there. Accounts of the “wayward shepherds” in the Roman Catholic Church, as one journalist put it, continue to mount. To name just two of the highest profile examples: In 2003, a grand jury alleged that Roman Catholic authorities on Long Island, New York, had long conspired to protect 58 “rogue clergymen” from facing charges of sexual abuse. And in Boston, no fewer than 86 people filed civil lawsuits against John J. Geoghan, the convicted child molester who was later murdered in prison. Again and again, the suits alleged Cardinal Bernard F. Law, archbishop of the Boston Catholic Archdiocese for 18 years, returned Geoghan to parish work although Law had evidence that Geoghan repeatedly molested boys.

It is impossible to deny that bad or at least unworthy people often occupy and successfully fill top leadership positions, and it is high time leadership experts acknowledge the fact. For, contrary to the expectations of these experts, we have as much to learn from people we would regard as bad examples as we do from the far less numerous good examples we’re presented with these days. Is Martha Stewart’s career as a successful entrepreneur any the less instructive because she may have once sold some shares on the basis of a tip-off? Does Law’s gross negligence on the issue of child abuse negate the fact that during his years in Boston he effectively managed to balance his traditional view of the church with progressive positions on discrimination and poverty?

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.