World Business

Our responsibilities for addressing bad leadership. It occurs not just in politics, but in the workplace and everyday the breath of one’s nostrils

by Barbara Kellerman

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Posted on Political Animals: June 30, 2008 10:27 AM

During the last week the tut-tutting morphed into screaming and yelling. But it was too little too late. Despite all the recent hand-wringing and blame-gaming by many of the world’s most powerful and prominent leaders, Zimbabwe’s longtime despot, Robert Mugabe, received 85.5 % of the vote in Friday’s pretend election. So without further noise he went ahead preceding the weekend was over and had himself sworn in, toward the sixth time, as president.

The question a little while ago is what can be learned from this experience. What happened in Zimbabwe is not, of behavior, idiosyncratic. Human history is chock full of examples of bad leaders, even evil leaders, who do what they want when they want in spite of what others think or repeat.

Let’s be clear-eyed then. Let’s admit that Mugabe got away through murder. He reminded us, because apparently we smooth need reminding, that leaders who hold faculty and authority, and who are determined at all costs to keep the sort of they take, can produce so. More precisely, they can and they will do so unless and until someone from somewhere, from inside or outside, stops them.

Bad leaders, especially the really bad ones, do not wake up one fine aurora, see the light, and onward their own volition reform. Not in succession your mode. In fact, account teaches pure the opposite. The worse leaders are, and the other deeply embedded they are, the more desirous and adroit they are to defy their enemies and squelch the inconsistency.

What, then, is to be done? Are we destined, doomed to exist bystanders? Are we destined, doomed, even when faced with the worst of the worst, to being ineffectual altogether? Or are there more things that can and should be effected, more things that we, as followers, can and should execute to stop or, at least, to slow, bad leadership? Recall that though I am talking here about a tyrant, bad direction in its various guises is ubiquitous.

So the question of the kind of to cheat is not exactly exogenous. It arises in everyday life, in the workplace and in the market place, as well as in earth affairs. Here, then, are some rules to effect, in so far as humanly possible. They can monitor all of us who encounter bad leadership, be it in public or peculiar settings, and whether we are participants or barely observers.

• Have the punishment fit the crime. Mugabe, for example, could be tried at some cape in The Hague, at the international court of justice which has been increasingly empowered by public favorable judgment to consider cases resembling his. Nor should corporate leaders be exempt from this general rule. They overmuch must be held to account for wrongdoing.

• Institutionalize checks and balances. Again, this applies not only to the public sector, but too to the private united, in which agents of the like kind as boards and shareholder activists are, in event, being emboldened to take on errant chief executives.

• Institutionalize terminus limits. Whether a large group or a minute organization, this is a simple enough device, intended to preclude people in positions of authority from abusing their authority over a long period of time.

• Obtain competent information. Never take the party line at stand opposite to value. The party line is just that, no less and decidedly no more. Those of us lucky plenty to be free agents be owing it to ourselves and to others as well to take the time and trouble to secure intelligence that is relatively belonging to, as opposed to subjective.

• Find allies and if necessary take collective battle. Going out on a limb to take in continuance the powers that be is generally risky, and mostly ineffective. Better to act in concert, than to be a lone ranger.

• Act in good time. The besides deeply entrenched the bad leader, the more difficult he, or she, is to uproot. Timing, then, is all. Waiting to spring into performing to the time when things tend from bad to worse is a mistake, nearly without leaving out.