What We Can Learn from Bad Leaders

October 19, 2007

While the optimism of a Ronald Reagan can be highly inspirational – and even effective – as Reagan’s own presidency showed, it can also lead to simplistic ideas about who leaders are and what they can do. Reagan himself provides us with many examples. Biographer Lou Cannon pointed out one: “The president was so cut off from the counsel of black Americans that he sometimes did not even realize when he was offending them.”

People can easily accept the idea that there are lessons to be found in success stories. But it’s a mistake to assume that we can learn nothing from fallen leaders. Indeed, some leaders achieve great things by capitalizing on the dark sides of their souls. Richard Nixon – relegated by many to the realm of mere “power wielder” after Watergate –was able to inaugurate diplomatic relations with China by capitalizing on his famous paranoia. No one thought that a suspicious and obsessed Nixon would be soft on Communism! Even monsters can teach us something about how to lead people. Hitler, for example, was a master of manipulating communications.

Likewise, many a lesson can be learned from business leaders’ blunders and even from their malfeasance.Take the case of Howell Raines, the former executive editor of the New York Times. In the last several years, no leader has fallen further faster than Raines, who was forced to resign after only 21 months on the job. According to popular analysis, Raines had to go because reporter Jayson Blair committed multiple transgressions on Raines’s watch. Raines might have survived his trial by fire if only he had not had a reputation for being high-handed and callous.

No one who worked for Raines loved him; some people even considered him tyrannical. But in all the postmortems about what Raines did wrong, few people have stopped to ask what he did right. We can safely assume that a man like Howell Raines did not get offered the most prestigious job in American journalism without being prodigiously gifted. The fact is that Raines was one of the great talents in the newspaper business. He had experience and expertise (he won his own Pulitzer Prize), and he had a stunning record of accomplishment. Under his leadership, the New York Times won an unprecedented seven Pulitzers for its coverage of the issues relating to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.

Someday, when the story is dissected more dispassionately, I believe that we will find something to learn from Howell Raines’s failure. Raines was a man of first-rate functional talent – an excellent writer, accomplished editor, a man with an unparalleled news sense and knowledge of how to cover a big story. What he failed to recognize, it seems, is that expertise is only one dimension of leadership and can even be a misleading one.Rewarding only technical merit and ambition, as Raines did, leads to a distorted kind of management and a lack of checks and balances on the team.

Raines, of course, isn’t the only fallen leader from whom we can learn. On June 4, 2002, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau announced the indictment of former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski for allegedly evading more than $1 million in taxes on purchases of fine art. It was not that Kozlowski needed to shortchange the government; in 1999, his total pay was around $170 million. Rather, it was that after a remarkably successful run as a corporate leader, Kozlowski’s impudence caught up with him. Much has been made in the press of Kozlowski’s lavish purchases – his $6,000 shower curtain, $17,000 traveling toilette box, $1,650 appointment book, and his $15,000 dog-shaped umbrella stand. But there was another side to the man. For in addition to throwing a multimillion- dollar birthday party for his wife on company money, Kozlowski was a very gifted CEO whom businesspeople once talked about as a second Jack Welch. Since 1992, Kozlowski oversaw an ambitious campaign in which Tyco acquired more than $50 billion in new businesses. Indeed, the habit of successfully swallowing up companies landed Kozlowski on the cover of several business magazines, one of which dubbed him “The Most Aggressive CEO.”

Scholars should remind us that leadership is not a moral concept.

As with Raines, Kozlowski’s strengths and weaknesses were inextricably linked. A leader who was driven by a high- stakes mentality, Kozlowski showed almost no fear when taking enormous risks, a tactic that often paid off in his acquisition strategy. But that same mind-set led to excruciating misjudgments in his personal life, eventually ruining his career. Could Kozlowski have had the good side of leadership without the bad? Probably not, for most leaders have both. It is when they are unaware of their darker sides, and so fail to guard against them, that they fall from grace. Once again, the real problem is not so much that leaders have their dark side; rather it is that they – and everyone else – choose to pretend they don’t.

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Scholars should remind us that leadership is not a moral concept. Leaders are like the rest of us: trustworthy and deceitful, cowardly and brave, greedy and generous. To assume that all good leaders are good people is to be willfully blind to the reality of the human condition, and it severely limits our scope for becoming more effective at leadership. Worse, it may cause the leaders among us to kid themselves into thinking that, because they are leaders, they must be trustworthy, brave, and generous and that they are never deceitful, cowardly, or greedy.

That way lies disaster, for as we should all have learned by now, it is only when we recognize and manage our failings that we can achieve greatness – as people and as a society. Knowing that, then we can begin to explore the more interesting questions of leadership: Why do leaders behave badly? Why do followers follow bad leaders? How can bad leadership be slowed or even stopped?

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