“The prime
minister of UK, United Kingdom, yesterday told me, I’m meeting with my team to
make a determination.
“I said you don’t
need to meet with your team, you’re the prime minister, you can make your own,
why do you have to meet with your team to find out whether or not you’re going
to send some minesweepers to help us or to send some boats.
“I said you don’t
have to meet with your team, it’s the same thing here.”
-Donald Trump
I believe in a concept called team leadership. This is a
form of leadership that emphasizes guidance, motivation, and inspiration. Team
leadership is inclusive, not dictatorial. It does not rely on any one individual
and instead focuses on a leadership group that contributes to common goals and
management philosophies. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a leader at the top who
makes the final decisions; it just means that the leader doesn’t depend only on
him- or herself to be the sole source of knowledge or experience in making decisions.
It means that everyone on the senior leadership team has a voice and that
everyone involved should take their input seriously and thoughtfully. In the
end, it means that we are stronger together than we are separately.
That’s why I find Trump’s comments above so offensive and so
revealing in terms of current events. Here’s a guy who thinks he doesn’t need
anyone else’s input, who thinks leadership is just making decisions and expecting
everyone around him to figure it out and conform. I’ve worked for bosses like
that, and I know they’re fairly common in the corporate world. Every time I’ve
been witness to this kind of blithe indifference to anyone else’s point of
view, it invariably ends badly.
No one can be an expert in everything. The world is too
complicated and too interconnected to proceed as if one-word answers and simple
thinking can solve every problem or accomplish every goal.
There is a concept called the law of unanticipated
consequences, dating back centuries, that proposes that purposeful decisions almost
always result in consequences not intended or foreseen. The catch is that these
consequences are not unforeseeable. What it means is that leaders making
decisions that impact others have a responsibility to think their decisions
through to the end, to make a good faith effort to anticipate the consequences
as much as possible. Particularly with regard to world leaders, it means that
impulsive or spontaneous policy decisions should be avoided because the results
of such decisions can very quickly spiral out of control.
The best way to anticipate consequences is to gather
together groups of experts in different fields. Because no one can be an expert
in everything, it’s important for leaders to identify their own shortcomings
and make a deliberate effort to recruit advisors whose own fields of knowledge
can compensate. I am not a truck mechanic, for example, so if I find myself
running an organization that has a fleet of trucks it becomes important for me
to have someone in my professional circle who is a truck mechanic and
can compensate for my lack of knowledge. If I’m not a cook, I need someone with
that skill set to run my kitchen. If I need repairs done on my buildings, I
need someone with a construction background to oversee it.
But this president doesn’t think that way. He openly wonders
why a leader needs to consult anyone before making decisions. He thinks
leadership consists of making demands and then watching everyone scramble to accommodate
them regardless of how they affect other priorities. In short, he sees
leadership as a dictatorship, something not to be questioned or challenged.
For anyone who has studied the Constitution and the independence
of the thirteen North American colonies, that’s an unamerican as it gets.