The heartbreak of failed leadership

Having served in the Navy as long as I did, I learned a few things about leadership.  I remember receiving an intense hands-on tutorial on the subject in my early enlisted days.  I have the direct authority of front line superiors to thank for those valuable lessons.  Some of those mid grade and senior NCOs and officers had years of experience at getting results, acceptable and not so much, from subordinates with varying levels of skill.  In my commissioned days I was taught styles of leading in formal week-long seminars with names like Intermediate Naval Leadership.  I have had both the pleasure and misery to serve under superiors who were leaders by example, some inspirational and some not.  I have also suffered under the dereliction of immediate shop supervisors who were leaders in name only, individuals who sought to serve self before anyone or anything else and whose results underscored their priorities.  The most educational times I had were the few temporary situations in which I found myself with no front line supervisor at all and was left to my own direction.  From that I learned that when you have a clearly defined objective and at least one functional idea of how to achieve it, it generates much less internal angst.  It especially alleviates the pressure of succeeding if you don’t have to depend on the performance or character of anybody else in the process.  When in command of a group with multiple members who may not share your same common values and goals or worse, have their own agendas, this buffer against that sense of angst vanishes as you find yourself accountable for the performance of the weakest follower.  For better or worse, this does not make the person in command any less accountable for the ultimate results of the orders carried out by their charges.  Try as you may, very few if any excuses for failure are acceptable.  Military authority structure functions on a system of accountability and failure to carry out lawful orders and/or to successfully execute the command mission are often met with unpleasant consequences.  At the very least there is no praise or reward bestowed upon the one in command for unacceptable results.  The unpleasantness often will eventually trickle down the chain of command however, the buck really does stop with the person in charge as their record will in some way reflect it.

My Naval career began forty years ago this month with my required eight weeks of recruit training.  It was there in Recruit Company 906 at Recruit Training Command, Naval Training Center San Diego that I learned in the first person what it means to follow lawful orders issued by senior enlisted men and fellow recruits appointed over me.  The best lesson that I learned early on, seemingly by osmosis, was that one must be able to take an order before one can issue an order.  In my early enlisted career I was never the one in charge but that principle of accountability to authority was always ever-present.  It wasn’t until later in my enlisted service that I was truly subjected to substandard leadership, a supervisor to whom I was accountable but who had an air and sense that the all the rules did not apply to him and he was somehow not ultimately responsible for anything in his span of control.  After that experience, it would be fair to say that I do know what bad leadership resembles.  It is very like pornography, I cannot really describe it but I know it when I see it.

As I sat reflecting fondly on my Navy enlisted and junior officer days, I suddenly realized that all that leadership training I received all those years ago becomes very pertinent in the context of our current life and times at both the state and national level.  In my military and civilian professional careers I have served under the leadership of wide range of management styles.  From autocratic to pacesetter to laissez-faire to managing-by-walking-around, I learned early it is not that difficult to follow directions.  However, if one is going to follow then one must have a leader.

An effective leader will be willing to accept ultimate accountability, to take upon themselves the risk to succeed or to fail and to assume all responsibility for any and all failure of their own doing and those serving under them.  Such an individual is willing to admit failure when appropriate, painful as it may be to do.  Leadership is a position for which one is groomed.  It may come with a learning curve as does every other occupation involving multi-dimensional dynamics, but repeated failures will reveal function at a level of one’s incompetence.  The most effective leaders I have seen had the best results by making it known from the outset that they would tolerate no excuses, their own or those of anyone else in their organization.

Conversely, the most ineffective leaders I have seen never seemed to have a dearth of excuses or scapegoats for their failures and less-than-favorable leadership results.  Nothing was ever their fault and all the people around them were to blame for not being perfect.  It is no accident that we are enduring the most egregious sort of mismanagement at the highest level of government, both federal and state, at this time.  When one party has control of all levers of government and its members have all means to fulfill the mission of their elected or appointed office at their disposal, they have no excuse for failure.  When the majority leadership of the Congress fails to meet the deadline for shutdown of the federal government, blaming the minority party for the failure does not define competent leadership.  The current occupant of the White House certainly wasted no time in blaming the minority party in the Congress for making him look bad over the recent shutdown.  The blame game is not confined to inside the Beltway.  Under that big dome at NE 23rd and Lincoln in Oklahoma City, the latest revenue proposal known as Step Up Oklahoma went down to defeat in the Oklahoma House.  It failed muster for the required 75% endorsement by a dozen or so votes.  Of the thirty-five legislators who voted “NAY,” eighteen of them were Republicans.  In spite of this and in spite of the fact Democrats in the Oklahoma Legislature control nothing, they are the ones on whom the majority party seeks to lay the blame for the proposal’s failure.  If the majority  leadership is going to authorize, endorse or accept ideas written into legislation by members of their own party, they should have the wherewithal to be able to sell it to enough people in their own caucus to ensure its success.  They should also demonstrate the intestinal fortitude to accept complete responsibility for its failure.  Such action may taint their popularity among their voter base but they at very least would gain a degree of ironclad respectability.  A willingness to accept responsibility for failure as Captain of the Ship is a hard thing to not admire.

Looking back on all of this, from the whole of my career in the Navy to my civilian employment experience, I can conclude that leaders are not born but are made.  Even though a person may possess strong alpha-male characteristics, all of them I have seen still have to muddle through a trial and error period before reaching desired goals.  Charisma may be  a useful quality in a political campaign, however, charismatic leadership guarantees nothing.  With regard to those elected to lead our state and federal government, if this is the best leadership we can elect then it is a real and true disappointment.  I was going to list all the failures of top level elected leadership but at this point it is simply too long to detail here.  As leadership failures mount, I fear the long term consequences to the state and to the nation are going to be crippling and difficult to reverse.  I vividly recall the deep feeling of consternation settling over me when I came to realize the people in charge of my longest tenured civilian employer had no formal leadership training.  I am having that feeling of internal dysphoria yet again.  Every time I hear about the elected leaders of our respective levels of government I am forced to think about the consequences of their failures, which are as real as they are perceived, except now they not confined to my sole personal interests.  The party in power of both Oklahoma and the U.S. Congress has for the past decade and a half operated on the principle that the only accountability required is that of the ballot box.  We are running out of time for these failed leaders to get it right, assuming doing the right thing for the state and nation is their true intention.  This coming Election Day we must all hold those in power accountable for failure.  It is my hope that all majority party incumbents experience their final failure on Election Night with a resounding defeat.  Bad results should never be rewarded.