Latest Breaking News
In reply to the discussion: "This Is So Unfair to Me": Trump Whines About His COVID-19 Victimhood as Campaign Flails [View all]zipplewrath
(16,646 posts)It's a long poem, but buried in there is the thought that in the end, leadership is about keeping your head in a crisis. People will actually be drawn to the person that in a crisis, stays calm and takes on the sense of responsibility for handling the crisis, freeing those around them to feel free to act without concern of being held responsible. You don't have to be the smartest, or know all the answers. You don't even have to know how to "fix" things. But if you'll just project the impression that "you've got this" people will support you and help you.
The converse is what we are seeing. In a crisis, the "leader" who starts seeking blame, looking to divert responsibility, and generally trying to figure out how to protect themselves from responsibility, will quickly find themselves standing alone with no one wanting to help. I've seen it more than once.
When I was leading a large team, something really bad happened and it wasn't clear at all that there was an answer. People were afraid of being fired. I called them all into a room and explained that, as team leader, regardless of what went wrong, if anyone was going to get fired, it was going to be me, so stop worrying. For one thing, I said, my bosses needed the people on my team in hopes of fixing this. Work the problem and let me handle the bosses. I came within days, nay, hours of being fired when one of the team members came in and showed proof that the problem was buried in a mistake by a subcontractor. One, that fortunately for me I had advised we not use. I told the team member that he had just saved my job. He looked proud as a peacock. But more importantly, the team had been working hard to find the cause, because they knew there would be a "reward" for finding it, not punishment for not finding it.
Trump could have gone on TV in early January and said what a risk we were facing and that we had to pull together as a country for the better part of a month, "to save us all" and our future. He would have sailed into a second term. But it meant he would have had to take direct responsibility for something that may, or may not, have worked.