TOUGHNESS AND LEADERSHIP -- INDIGENOUS TO EACH OTHER!

TOUGHNESS AND LEADERSHIP

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 8, 2014

A MOTHER’S CONCERN AND HOW IT RELATES TO THE SUBJECT

Sometimes ideas come to me from unsuspecting sources, and yet they kind of settle into my unconscious persistently knocking against my conscious mind insistent to be heard and then expressed.   Invariably, I cannot sleep until these ideas are reduced to words.

Toughness and leadership is such an idea.

Often, consistent with how they come to me, they are expressed in baseball terms "way off in left field," and may seem to have little relevance or relationship to the subject at hand.  The mind is a happy playground which doesn't limit its capacity to think in irrational or terms outside the confinement of logic and rational discourse.  This is such a case.

A mother came to me concerned about her daughter, now in her thirties, who had gone into a bit of a funk since a cherished large promotion she expected didn’t materialize.

The mother explained that her daughter’s co-workers expected her to get the promotion as she was ably qualified in executive skills, problem solving proficiency, keen sense of the competition, ability to rally the troops at hand to meet and exceed the demands of the marketplace, while never leaving her people in the lurch or outside of the purview of what was going on, and most importantly, she made everyone feel a part of the enterprise with no exception.

Then after this impressive endorsement, she said something that surprised me.  “My daughter’s problem since she was a little girl is that she never liked to lose, always liked to be in charge of whatever was going on, and when she wasn’t so involved, she would go off by herself until she cooled down, like she is doing now.” 

The mother had described rather eloquently the attributes of leadership, attributes no leader can be without, along with the obvious concomitant toughness of will that her daughter clearly possesses.  I needed to know more. 

The daughter had cancelled a luncheon engagement with her mother saying she wasn’t good company at the moment.  The mother asked me, “What do you think of that?”

What did I think of that?  What a question! 

Like so many things when people provoke my attention, I could write a book on what was bombarding my senses, but said instead simply, 

“Take her at her word.  She is saying she has too much respect for you to ruin your luncheon in her present mood.” 

That didn’t console this mother, so, I asked the mother to tell me more about her daughter’s situation. 

WHY WE DON’T HAVE LEADERS ANYMORE

The mother’s response was a familiar one.  The job had to be posted to operations across the corporate nation, and someone, not directly familiar with the work or its people, was chosen over her daughter.  

As a consultant, I have seen this device used often with the posting of jobs and finding them ultimately going to the preferred candidate, while giving the impression the process was open, democratic and fair.  It is one of those corporate devices that purports to getting beyond favoritism and biases, giving the impression of objectivity when little or no objectivity is involved.  The twentieth century "old boy network" has clearly not been abandoned in the twenty-first century, only now women are experiencing it as often as men. 

Meanwhile, hopeful candidates believing in "the system," confident that this is an open billing, submit their resumes in good conscience, only to have the review process prove perfunctory.

Once the mother had shared her daughter's situation, I said, 

“Don’t rain on her parade; she is made of the right stuff; had she taken this disappointment philosophically, it would indicate she was acting out of character, given what you have told me about her.”  Then I continued, 

“She will be more energized than ever to find her way to where she thinks she belongs.  She will beat the system at its own game.  So, it has always been with leaders, and she seems to have the constitution of a leader.”

A CRISIS IN CONFIDENCE?

When the mother had left, I thought about the tragic state of leadership in general, and its sad lack of toughness specifically.  

This young lady didn't cave in to the pressure, but retreated into herself until she regained her composure and could move on. 

Leaders don't wail about their setbacks.  Leaders reconfigure their stance and depend on their own counsel.  Alas, where have our leaders gone?   

Instead, we have those in leadership roles becoming spin doctors of the first rank blaming their plight on the competition, making excuses for why they fail in their leadership role, and playing on the sympathies of those dependent upon them for jobs and security.

Given this predicament, we have lost confidence in our leaders in virtually every discipline and institution from the government to the military, from academia to the religious, from commerce to industry, from the personal to the professional.  All seem "out to lunch" as the "buck never stops."

Here in the United States, we just had a midterm election of the US Congress and the US Senate.  No surprise, most of those who have won their races spent the most money, in fact in the neighborhood of a $trillion.  

We don't elect "the best and the brightest," but those who can raise (or have) the most money. Consequently, we get the US Congress and US Senate that we deserve because we devour candidates' television ads as if the Gospel.

To wit, in the State of Florida, the Republican and Democratic Party managed to spend three quarters of a billion dollars, alone.  

Governor Rick Scott spent $12.5 million of his own money on negative television ads against his opponent, Charlie Crist, during the last two weeks before the November 4th election.  This amounted to $1,200 every minute of every day up to the election.  Rick Scott won reelection.   

CEO Mary Barra of General Motors is buried so deep in operational dysfunction that she hardly knows which way to turn, much less which way is up.  Of course, she is where the “buck stops” when it has been passed from CEO to CEO for decades without a break. 

The American culture is so caught up in the game of hype that there is little evidence that anyone is taking charge, which translates into a decisive lack of toughness, that is, taking a moral stand not for political gain but because it is necessary.  

Consequently, when toughness shows its face everyone cowers in confusion or retreat.

Vladimir Putin is a lonely “tough guy” in the current firmament, and no one in the West seems to know what to make of him or to do about him.  His assertiveness, despite what the West would prefer to think, has made him the equivalent of a rock star in his native Russia.  Now, why is that?

Meanwhile, the people of the Ukraine, who are directly suffering the wrath and badgering of Putin, and are looking to the West for support receive rhetoric as no one in the West, leastwise the President of the United States, wants to challenge much less provoke Putin, or to put him in his place.

The more things change the more they remain the same. 

It seems like only yesterday that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin, during the days that led to World War Two, was busy appeasing tough minded Adolf Hitler, who bluffed his way into power, then bullied his way to marching into the Czech Republic and Austria without firing a shot, and then to conquer France in a matter of weeks.  

For this hesitation, this wishful thinking, this appeasement policy, more than 100 million people would perish in that war, most of them collateral damage caught in the middle of the carnage.

Fast forward to the 21^st century, 2014, and the Ukraine has lost Crimea, what is next? 

Americans are like this concerned mother.  Their heart is in the right place.  They want their president to be presidential, to fit their image of him and what they expect, for him not make unnecessary waves, to not put them in harm’s way, but at the same time, to be a dominant presence in the world, to not remind them that there is a world of hurt out there, not only the terrorism of ISSI, the civil war in Syria, the rabble rousing of North Korea, the saber rattling of China, or Putin’s center stage bravado.  

Americans would prefer these and a thousand other troubled spots to be confined to television’s two-minute “breaking news” captions in the comfort of their homes.  It is a fiction that could at any moment burst into a reality, a reality that demands tough minded leadership.    

It seems absurd but nonetheless true.  Americans like to think all these people looking for outside help lack inside toughness and leadership.  Were they only to look in the mirror!

If they did, they would see their lack of confidence in their president is traceable to his inclination to blame the country’s problems, domestic and foreign, on Republican intransigence when he was elected to demonstrate the toughness to penetrate this logjam. 

There are always tough minded and competent people around a president, people who can make a difference, people who have answers.  But like this young lady that was passed over for a job she deserved, they allow themselves to be stymied by the system, cowering with excuses rather than leading.  Sometimes there is an exception.

When the diplomat, George Kennan, wrote a memorandum for the State Department on what became the famous “containment theory” of the Soviet Union, his boss, Ambassador Averell Harriman stopped its circulation in the State Department. 

Kennan published it as “Mr. X” in Foreign Affairs (1947), and as they say, the rest is history.  It was implemented as a political rather than a military solution to Joseph Stalin’s expansionism during the Cold War, and prevented, as historians tend to agree, World War Three.    

Toughness is a word I define as having a center, and with a center comes a moral compass, and with a moral compass comes a resolute determination to be guided by one’s lights as instinct and experience dictates, not allowing oneself to be discouraged from that intuitive path by prevailing crowd hysteria.  It also describes leadership, a leadership that emanates from within and is not a slave to a party, profession, discipline, special interests or polls or, indeed, the established norms.  

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