I’ve written about good and bad leadership many times over the past ten years, mostly as relates to a workplace setting. It’s clear to me that bad leadership has a major impact on how employees view their jobs and their career prospects. Bad leadership is narcissistic leadership; leaders who are most concerned about what their employees can do for them, rather than the other way around. Narcissistic leaders are not interested in serving their company or their employees; they are interested in serving themselves. That can define a lot of modern workplaces; one need only take a look at the hefty bonuses given to crappy leaders at the expense of loyal hard-working employees who will never in their lifetime see a fraction of the amount of money that some of the bad leaders rake in. Many of the bad leaders make a mess of one workplace, only to then move on to the next one that is waiting to welcome them with open arms. They are not or cannot be held accountable for the chaos they leave behind, which I think is wrong, especially in public sector workplaces but also in private ones. Your reputation as a destroyer should follow you and hinder you from getting a new leadership position.
Most employees who have been treated poorly do not want to
stay in their jobs; unfortunately many do, either because they cannot afford to
quit without another job waiting for them (not always the case) or because they
have lost the necessary confidence to seek other positions. The latter is not
talked about very often, but it is important and an absolutely decisive factor
in whether or not an employee actually gets a new position. Nowadays you have
to market yourself to the nth degree, and if you don’t have the confidence to
do that due to constant harassment or badmouthing by bad leaders, you’ve lost the battle
before you even started fighting.
Bad leaders should be fired, pushed aside, frozen out, or
ignored. However it happens, they should have their power stripped from them. Unfortunately this
rarely happens. But if you work in a workplace long enough, you can be witness
to the karma effect, as in, karma is a bitch. Time heals all wounds, as is
often said, and it does. What doesn’t kill you does make you stronger. But time
often wounds all heels, and that is a good thing for the heels and for those who
have been mistreated by them to see, even though it involves the downhill slide
of once-deemed-important leaders into a deserved oblivion. No one will miss
them or care about them, and in fact, workplaces can begin to really thrive again once they are gone.
And that brings me to the presidential transition in the
USA. A transition from a bad leader to a (hopefully) better one. Biden is at
least a decent human being, something that cannot honestly be said about Trump.
Decency is a good start in my book. If Trump is at all decent, I haven’t seen
evidence of it, and I would need to see the evidence before I can change my
opinion of him. But he is absolutely not a good leader. I have said it many times before;
he squandered the wonderful opportunity he had as a non-politician to really
lead the country into a different future, to implement policies and ways of
doing things that could have had good effects and lasting change. Instead he
chose to dabble with the alt-right, with white supremacists, with haters and
bigots, with conspiracy theorists, with the fringe elements that were enabled by
him to slither out from under their rocks into prime time. America got a good
look at what lives in its underbelly, and it is none too pretty. If you think
it’s cool that the underbelly exists, then you must be prepared to live with the consequences.
I for one do not think it’s cool that an American president sanctions racism and
white supremacy, yells at reporters, makes fun of the disabled, or acts like a spoiled brat on the
world stage. I am praying that the era of narcissistic leaders is coming to an
end; it has reigned in politics and modern workplaces for far too long. We need
a long era of leaders who are willing to serve their constituents (the whole
USA when it comes to politics) and their employees when it comes to workplaces.
I cannot see how the world will move in a better direction without such leaders
to guide us. We must demand good behaviour of our leaders, and they must listen
and act accordingly. And if they don’t, we must get rid of them until we find
leaders who fit that bill. Anything else is to choose destruction of the values
that most of us cherish.
