Tag Archives: Leadership

Trump v. Thucydides

Today is one month and one day(!) since the inauguration of Donald J. Trump for his second term as President of the United States (US).

In that time, he delighted in claiming dominion over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and the Palestinian territory of Gaza. He has humiliated treaty allies, cuddled up to recently acknowledged enemies of the US and her (former?) allies, and threatened trade wars against friends and foes alike. He has unleashed Elon Musk on the federal bureaucracy, effectively closing congressionally legislated departments. He has withdrawn life-saving medicines from millions of people around the world and declared ethnic cleansing a US policy.

Donald Trump is stomping on the norms of US democracy. He has the constitutional pardon power in one hand and US Supreme Court protection from prosecution in the other. He is basking in the absolute power of a monarch and turning the global, rules-based order (of which the US was the principal architect) into a plaything.

Louis XIV of France (reign: 1643–1715)—the “Sun King”—owned canons bearing the inscription Ultima Ratio Regum (“The Last Argument of Kings”). It was a pun-filled reference to the idea that the ultimate recourse of a ruler is violence. He was reminding friends, enemies, and subjugates that when his laws (canon) failed, his capacity for violence (cannon) would triumph.

Political Realists see Louis’s cannons as reifying the political idea that “might is right” (MiR). That is, power and not morality ultimately determines outcomes. As they watch Donald Trump tear down democracy and attack the global rules-based order, they make coded references to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides—hero of Realpolitik and the guy who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War. It is to him the phrase “might is right” is attributed, based on a brief passage known as the Melian Dialogue.

The dialogue is a brutal exchange between envoys from Athens and the leaders of the small island of Melos—the same Melos famous for the statue of the Greek goddess Venus (“di Milo”). The Athenians explained that neutral Melos would have to side with Athens in their war against Sparta or be destroyed by the larger army of Athens. They did not prevaricate of sugar-coat the delivery of their message. And it is this exchange that has been reduced to MiR.

There are, however, significant problems with this position. First and foremost, Thucydides never actually wrote, “might is right”—not even close—and the suggestion that he did becomes a self-serving distortion used to justify ruthless power politics. Thucydides actually recorded the Athenian envoys saying, “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

To be pedantic—necessarily so—he actually wrote, “οἱ μὲν δυνάμενοι πράσσουσιν, οἱ δὲ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν.”

The nuance in translation is crucial. The standard English rendering, “The strong do what they can…” relies on the modal verb “can,” which in English (and in French with pouvoir) suggests freedom of will—the idea that those with power act as they choose. But ancient Greek had no direct equivalent to modal auxiliaries like can or must.

The critical verb here is δυνάμενοι, a participle of δύναμαι (to be able). Rather than conveying a sense of willfulness, it implies something closer to necessity—that the strong act as circumstance dictates in accordance with their power, just as the weak yield because they also have no choice. This translation reflects the broader Thucydidean theme that power operates under the constraints of ἀνάγκη (necessity).

It is tragedy rather than psychopathy that is the binding relationship between Athens and Melos. Melos, for all its appeals to justice, is doomed. It refuses to bow to Athenian demands and is annihilated. However, the fate of Athens itself is no less bleak. The logic that drives The Athenians to subjugate Melos ultimately consumes them as well, leading to their downfall in the Sicilian Expedition and, eventually, their total defeat in the war. The same compulsion that led them to destroy Melos leads to their destruction.

Thus, when “might is right” is used too quickly to explain the actions of a leader, there is a danger that political scientists give moral cover to the immoral. They fall back on relativistic notions that the whim of the caveman with the bigger club determines societal norms.

Donald Trump is not acting out of tragic necessity. He does not wield power because it has to be wielded. It appears that he does what he does because he is an aggrieved psychopath who revels in the opportunity to put metaphorical kittens in a sack and drown them.

Thucydides would not recognise Donald Trump as any of the actors in the Melian Dialogue.

There was no necessity to put millions in the path of death by withdrawing life-saving treatment. There was no necessity to propose the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. There was no necessity to threaten to take a NATO ally’s territory. There was no necessity to begin to tear down the multilateral system.

A socially and fiscally conservative leader might share many policy objectives with Donald Trump and his followers. There is no necessity, however, to reach those objectives by choosing the most cruel and destructive path possible.

Donald Trump is not a brilliant or tragically compelled leader; he is a psychopath.

Leaders can be bullies too.

Leaders can be bullies too. And their poor behaviour will infect the whole organisation.

When I hear the word “bully“, even at work, I inevitably recall the schoolyard bullies of my youth. Often with a clique of sycophants, they were the nasty kids who tried to intimidate others. Their gangs were not deeply committed to being mean. They were committed to survival. Better, they reasoned, to support a thug than get sand kicked in their faces. Or worse, become the butt-end of cruel taunts about bad haircuts.

Unfortunately, we do not leave the bullies behind when we leave the playground. Bullies grow up and find their niche in adult life. The ease with which they establish themselves in an organisation—think parasitic wasp, not butterfly—signals the workplace’s tolerance for bad behaviour.

In an organisation with a strong supportive culture, managers deal with bullying swiftly and seriously. Minor incidents are treated as teachable moments. At low levels, the strategy may be as simple as one colleague being empowered to stand up for another—to make it known there is a line in the sand. At higher levels, when bad behaviour escalates, complaints about bullying are heard, taken seriously, and investigated rather than diverted and buried.

In one organisation I worked for, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) was a well-known, old-school playground bully without the finesse one might expect from a modern leader.

One day, he wandered into my office. He didn’t like my research group’s strategy and wanted to tell me so. Dropping into a chair without greeting or invitation, he rocked back and started into me. I held my position. He became angrier and raised his voice. His reputation for shouting preceded him, and I was prepared. I had decided to match him decibel for decibel. He became louder; I became louder.

He quickly realised that we were shouting at each other and began to drop the volume. I followed suit. For about 10 minutes, the loudness of the conversation rose and fell. At the end of it, he smiled at me, said, “good chat”, rocked himself out of the chair and left. We had not agreed, but we had reached a rapprochement, and he left me to manage my own team.

I would not recommend my strategy even though it worked at the time. It can be extremely frightening to have a large adult male shout at you. It is also precisely why they do it. Unless you can cope with the aggressiveness of the interaction (and frankly, why should you?), shouting back is not going to work. It’s also unprofessional and fails to address the more significant structural issue.

Bullying was a regular tactic in my boss’s amentarium, and I achieved a temporary, personal solution that left others exposed. Because no one had ever managed his behaviour, his experience was that shouting worked. It was rewarded by compliance, and compliance was what he wanted.

Much of the leadership literature is about the qualities that one requires to “bring people along”, sell a vision, encourage engagement, (re-)align activities, and gather support for the (new) organisational strategy. The CEO short-circuited that messy business by bullying staff. Instead of intelligent workers, he wanted compliant widgets. The tactic, however, is stupid and lazy. Leaders who adopt it will lose one of their greatest assets. Disempowering staff reduces an organisation’s human capital. The short term win of reluctant compliance is offset by a deterioration of morale, the loss of good employees, and an absence of fresh perspectives. Organisations that accept bullying in leadership tacitly agree to become weaker organisations.

Bullying is also a quickly learned behaviour that obviates the need for senior staff to hone their leadership skills. If at first you don’t succeed, shout louder. Others learn the strategy, and it becomes an existential danger for the organisation.

Unfortunately, bullies in leadership are often not ranting, physical thugs and they don’t wear convenient labels. “BEWARE, BULLY!!!”. They have more polished and sophisticated tactics. The techniques can be pretty subtle and their true nature is often concealed from those who are not the targets.

When the most senior person in the organisation is a bully, who then will take action? The organisation’s Board or equivalent should step in, but this is easier said than done. The bullied staff member needs to know how to raise their concerns to the Board, and the Board needs to have the willingness to listen and act.

For a bullied staff member to complain, they have to believe it will make a difference. Unfortunately, complaining is often the employment equivalent of stretching your neck out on the chopping block. The victim needs to trust the process, and many organisations provide no basis for that trust. For managing bullies in leadership, the process should be well known, straightforward, and direct to the Board. It never entered my head to complain about my former CEO. I thought it was my problem, and I did not know of any internal processes, let alone a route to the Board. There are also, almost certainly, gender dimensions to who is bullied, how they manage it, and how seriously they are taken.

To manage bullying complaints about leaders, Board members need to be informed, engaged, and empowered to take the complaints seriously. “The Board has an absolute and unmistakable obligation to exercise oversight of workforce culture“. For NGOs, not-for-profits and other non-commercial Boards, membership is often voluntary or unremunerated. Such part-time, “not too serious” Boards can be particularly vulnerable to Directors’ and Trustees’ ignorance and lack of training. There are also disincentives for Boards to take bullying complaints seriously about senior leadership.

The CEO is usually a member of the Board and a colleague of the rest of the members. Some of the Board members will have been nominated by the CEO. Others may have been a part of the CEO’s selection process. When the CEO nominates a person to the Board, the nominee’s sense of loyalty can cloud their judgment about the CEO’s wrong-doing. After all, if the CEO nominated me, she must be OK because I’m great. When the CEO is found wanting, there may be a real sense of failure or a loss of face by Board members involved in the appointment. If a CEO is a bully, clients and the senior leadership team may question the Board’s competence and seek a review of the due diligence processes, with all the attendant embarrassment that can flow from that. All these impediments encourage Boards to obfuscate.

A quick internal process in the guise of swift action is a short-term (wrong-headed) solution to complaints about senior leadership bullying. The result is a superficial examination of the complaint that gives the Board comfort. It allows for a peremptory dismissal of the complaint and avoids embarrassment or culpability. It is easy to imagine, for instance, excusing bullying as a matter of “management style” rather than seeing it for what it is. This is wrong. There is nothing stylish about a bully. Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), superficial processes for managing leadership misconduct have a nasty habit of coming back to bite an organisation.

A better approach, which carries a higher initial cost, is to engage an external, independent party. Let them investigate the complaint. It demonstrates the matter is being taken seriously, managed impartially, and led by the evidence. It also sets a loud, zero-tolerance tone within the organisation, setting or reinforcing the organisational culture.

If there are any concerns that bullying may be ongoing, administrative leave for the CEO (without prejudice) can be applied while an investigation is conducted. An excellent example of this was the suspension of the newly appointed Director of SOAS following a complaint of racism. The suspension occurred within months of his appointment, and following an investigation, he was cleared and reinstated. Any initial embarrassment that may have been felt is washed away by sound processes.

Unfortunately, the entire premise of this piece rests on two things. First, staff must be prepared and able to raise concerns about bullying by those in leadership. Second, the Board must be trained, competent and serious about managing it. Pretty words are not enough.

Staff realities are such that it can be better to suffer in silence or leave the organisation. I have known numerous staff of various organisations who chose to go rather than complain about their toxic workplace. Until you have witnessed the pyrotechnic career collapse of those who complained and were not heard, it is sometimes difficult to understand the reluctance.

No one wants to join the ranks of the pilloried complainers. The received wisdom is to “slip away” or “put up with it”. If Boards are not prepared to hold CEOs accountable, “slip away” is sound advice—tragic and indicting, but sound.

The Leadership a-Gender — 1

After competence, are certitude, charisma and chutzpah the 3-Cs of research leadership?

An image encouraging positive thinking to overcome self-doubt. Just make sure there are no large dogs about.

When Rob Moodie was the CEO of the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth) he started a “conversations in leadership” series for the recipients of VicHealth Public Health Research Fellowships. The idea was to begin an explicit process to develop research leadership in public health, drawing us together to think about the qualities that were necessary.

There were ten of us at the first gathering; two men and eight women. Beyond the fact that it was a meeting for “future leaders”, none of us knew what it was all about. Rob went around the table, asking each of us in turn to introduce ourselves; he also asked how we felt about being identified as a future leader in public health research.

The gender divide was immediately and starkly revealed. When Rob asked Paul (the other man in the room) and me how we felt, we gave suitably immodest responses. I can’t remember our precise answers, but they would have reflected in some way on the appropriate recognition of our talent. Then the first woman spoke. She told, hesitantly, of a gnawing fear that she would be “found out”. Someone, probably sometime very soon, would realise that she was a fraud. She had no right to the VicHealth Fellowship, and she had even less claim on being a leader. Paul and I glanced at each other. Who were we to say that she was wrong? And then there was a visible sigh from the other women in the room. Each one, in turn, expressed an almost identical fear of being found out. This is a well-recognised phenomenon in the gender and leadership literature, described as, “imposter syndrome“: the fear of being found out.

Notwithstanding my bravado or Paul’s, I suspect neither of us felt quite as sure of our place as future leaders as we expressed. I know I didn’t. Nor, however, did I fear being found out in quite the same way the women had expressed. I may have worried a little about whether my performance would be good enough (was I leadership material?), but I did not experience the depth of self-doubt expressed by my colleagues. I had been invited into the room and, therefore, I had a right to be there! They received the same invitation but doubted their right.

An article in the Harvard Business Review on overcoming the feelings of inadequacy associated with imposter syndrome described individual, cognitive behavioural techniques (CBT) to help people manage the sense. If these techniques work, that’s great! The solution, however, reveals at least as much about organisational gender bias as it does about ways to overcome it. Underlying the CBT approach is not simply a view that self-doubt is misplaced, but that there is a deficit in the way a person’s brain works if they have that self-doubt. In other words, to succeed in leadership, you need to think more like me! The obverse problem, having an over-inflated and unrealistic view of one’s own excellence, is often rewarded in organisations, and the sufferer (or more likely the insufferable) is never referred to a Psychologist for therapy “because you’re not thinking right”. Having the 3-Cs of certitude, charisma and chutzpah — typically identified as leadership qualities and never as leadership deficits — means that you are thinking right.

It is worth noting that although the women expressed the fear of being found out, they had all applied for and won highly coveted VicHealth Fellowships, and they were all in that room — even with their doubt.

The researcher, Thomas Chamorro-Premuzic, suggests that many of the 3-C style traits that are traditionally associated with great leaders may in fact be emblematic of leadership weaknesses. Being quieter (a listener), more thoughtful (open to new ideas) and having some self-doubt (seeking out a diversity of expert advice) can be valuable traits in good leadership. These are traits often associated with women who are passed over for leadership positions because they have not yet had their “deficits” corrected.

There are some clearly terrible traits for research leaders to have. Being a bully, mean, harassing staff and being incompetent would be high on that list. In research leadership, raw incompetence would be unusual. The others, sadly, are not. Research organisations need methods for identifying good research leaders that do not fall back on tired tropes, and provide women fair paths of advancements. These are organisational systems issues, not individual deficits to correct. Almost two decades ago, Rob Moodie’s conversations in leadership was a gentle step in that direction: making us all ask the question, what is it to be a great leader? He never said, by I suspect that he hoped we would carry forward some insight into the leadership a-gender.

Conflicts of interest in research leadership (Part II)

(The fond farewell. When enough is enough)

When I started my research career, a research leader’s retirement was a moment to celebrate. Their lives and their contributions were recalled through their research, their papers, their PhD graduates and Postdocs. The Festschrift was often published, literally celebrating their intellectual contribution to a field. Some of those researchers truly retired. Many took honorary appointments that gave them a desk or space in their old laboratory, and access to the library and email. They might mentor junior staff or be a part of a PhD student’s supervisory team. Many continued to do fabulous, original research. Others became the departmental raconteur, recalling embarrassing stories of now senior departmental researchers who were once their postdocs. The retired research leaders were appreciated but no longer had a formal role in the organisational structure.

My experience today with research leaders approaching an age that would, before, have been the time to retire — the time that I am beginning to see on my horizon — is somewhat different. The game now is one of holding back the younger researchers, and hanging on, limpet-like, to substantive position for as long as possible. It is cast as an age discrimination issue. If I am capable, and I am performing at a high level, then my age should not be a barrier to my continued leadership role. Indeed, I have vastly more experience than junior colleagues, and it would be perverse to choose them over me.

While it is true, age need not be a barrier to the capable performance of one’s duties, it is also true that senior positions are rare, and if they are held by an increasingly ageing leadership, how will we train and develop younger cadres of leaders? Turning over leadership refreshes ideas and organisations.

I recall a radio interviewer with a well known Australian clinical researcher. He recounted how, as a junior researcher, his supervisor put him down as the first author on a significant scientific paper — a career launcher. He had not earned the spot, but the supervisor saw his potential and also recognised his capacity to influence the trajectory of a promising career. Without debating the ethics of that particular decision — it was a different time — there is little doubt that the paper launched one of Australia’s great scientific careers. Forty-plus years after those events, I have seen very capable, senior research leaders forsake their leadership role in favour of hanging on to power. They do not surround themselves with bright, eager, up-and-comers. They do not mentor and position their staff to take over. Instead, they retain non-threatening doers, many of whom will not even appear in the acknowledgements of their scientific papers.

In a post I wrote a little over a year ago I observed that in the interests of gender fairness, men had to be prepared to relinquish power. I have a similar view of intergenerational fairness. Those research leaders among us who were born in a twenty-year, golden age between about 1945 and 1965 have been extraordinarily lucky with the opportunities that we have had. In the interests of fairness and, frankly, in the interests of science, we need to know when to step away. We can still be a part of an exciting research agenda; maybe we do not need to be seen to lead it.

Perhaps the last act of truly great research leaders is to step back.