977: What Makes Leaders Bad—and What You Can Do About It–with Dr. Barbara Kellerman

Pete Mockaitis
Barbara, welcome.

Barbara Kellerman
Well, thank you, Pete. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for asking me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom, and I thought it’d be great if you could maybe kick us off with hearing a tale of maybe the most wild case of bad leadership you have witnessed or heard about through your work and research in the workplace.

Barbara Kellerman
Well, Pete, if you know my work, it goes back on bad leadership, in particular, to a book I wrote or an essay. At first there was an essay I wrote called “Hitler’s Ghost: A Manifesto,” which was me arguing that, what I call the leadership industry, which is my field, all kinds of experts on leadership, whether in corporate leadership or political leadership, mainly corporate leadership, that my colleagues in the leadership industry were not paying any attention to what I call the dark side of leadership, the painful side of leadership, the egregious side of leadership.

But in the book that grew out of that, which came out about 20 years ago, which is called Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, I developed seven different types of bad leadership. Those types of bad leadership are important because they range from the ineffectual, all the way, in awfulness, to evil.

So, it really depends on which type of bad leadership are we talking about. Obviously, if we’re talking about evil leadership, which I define as someone who inflicts pain, literally physical or psychological pain, on his or her followers, that’s obviously a different case in point as somebody who is, dare I say, simply ineffectual.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so I guess I’m interested in terms of, let’s go with evil, in terms of in the workplace, you say, “Whoa, so you think your boss is bad, check it. This is what full-blown bad looks like.”

Barbara Kellerman
So, I would say that the word evil as I define it, and again I developed and identified the types in the book, it very rarely applies to the workplace because it implies a kind of malevolent intent, which I don’t think we find that often in the workplace. In the workplace, I talk more about something called callous leadership, leaders who are thoughtless, mean, or unkind, not thinking carefully about the other, or leaders who are explosive, who lose their tempers too quickly.

Alas, it’s one of the mysteries of the human condition to me because it would seem to me that it would be in the interest of most leaders and managers to keep those who report to them relatively happy as opposed to unhappy.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve often wondered, that’s one of my top mysteries of humanity, it’s like even if you are purely self-interested, and truly care not a wit, about your fellow human being, you’re still better off not being a jerk. You adjust, you get farther, you achieve more of your ends if people can tolerate you and, generally, are fine interacting with you.

Barbara Kellerman
I completely agree with you, Pete, but I would say it especially applies to, let’s say, the United States of America in the third decade of the 21st century, when the issue of talent retention, holding on to people that you think are really important to your enterprise, to your mission, to your purpose, that becomes really top of your list of priorities.

So, it is often in one’s self-interest, apart from the graciousness of being decent as opposed to indecent to other people, it is in one’s, as you imply, in one’s self-interest, in the corporate interest, and almost always in the interest of the task that needs to be accomplished to keep people, if not wildly happy, at least from being miserably unhappy.

Pete Mockaitis
That checks out. So, with all that said, can you lay it on us, a tale that was particularly shocking in terms of bad leadership at work?

Barbara Kellerman
I think I’m going to take a slightly different example, a man, because he’s so extremely well-known since, even since, though he’s now dead, a man by the name of Jack Welch.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Barbara Kellerman
Who, of course, was one of the legendary corporate leaders of all time, the company, which many of your listeners will know, is General Electric, and it’s an example, I would not exactly call him a bad leader, particularly a prototype of somebody who’s awful, but he was known, very well known, and much admired for being lean and mean. And that, of course, meant letting a lot of people go.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember the nickname Neutron Jack. He would evaporate, make the people disappear, but keep the buildings and equipment.

Barbara Kellerman
Exactly. But I will tell you why I, in particular, think that history has proven him not to be a particularly good leader, even setting aside the point that we’re just making. So, Jack Welch was on the cutting edge of what I referred to earlier as the leadership industry. And you probably know this, Pete, that GE, again, was on the cutting edge of corporate training. They had a campus in Crotonville, New York, and it was well known, again, at the forefront of the leadership industry.

The irony of that, though, and it addresses what I am known for, I dare say, for better and worse, which is a kind of skepticism, if not even cynicism, about the leadership industry, which professes to teach people how to lead wisely and well, and I’m not sure we have an enormous amount of evidence for that. But setting that aside for the moment, the Crotonville campus was an example of something that didn’t work.

Because, as I hardly have to tell you that in recent decades, now it’s somewhat recovered under CEO Larry Culp, but for decades General Electric went from being the icon of American industry to being one of the fall guys of American industry, and Jack Welch’s successor failed absolutely to not only help the company thrive, but he succeeded in plunging it straight downhill.

Pete Mockaitis
And there, what do you believe are some of the particular behaviors that were so destructive and may have led to GE’s demise?

Barbara Kellerman
I don’t know that I would use that language, Pete, that it was particular behaviors, I think it was just a kind of hubris that assumed that, “You know, the way I teach leadership, it’s guaranteed to succeed.” As I suggested a moment ago, we have not a great deal of evidence that the way leadership is taught, whether within organizations, whether within business schools, schools of public administration, our criteria for measurement are rather meager.

We’re dealing here with human beings, not widgets, so it’s hard to measure the success of a leadership program, a leadership course, a leadership institute. And I would say that hubris was the main problem with Jack Welch and his legendary leadership training efforts.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, then could you maybe give us some examples of how hubris translates into some of the things they did and said that were problematic?

Barbara Kellerman
Well, again, I want to be careful to distinguish between being bad, or to use the word you just used, “problematic” and not being good enough. In other words, I’m not saying that what was done at Crotonville was bad. I’m saying that the successes that were touted were in scant evidence and are in scant evidence.

And I’ve taught many leadership courses, although I don’t tell people I teach how to lead, I tell them I teach about leadership, which is actually two different things, that when somebody takes a leadership course, whether mine or anybody else’s, and then they’re questioned at the end, or there was a kind of review, “What did you learn? How was it?” typically, the answer is, “This was a great course. I learned so much. It’s amazing. I’m a different person.”

But, in fact, in the real world, we don’t really have brilliantly successful ways of assessing the long-term impact of what most leadership courses, programs, centers, institutes, etc. actually accomplish. So, it’s a quick and easy sell, “Buy my book and you too can learn how to lead,” “Take my course and you too can learn how to lead better than you’re leading now,” “Follow my seven easy steps and you too can succeed,” I would argue that’s not as brilliant to sell and brilliant to buy as people generally like to believe.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then I’m curious, from your perspective, having looked at a lot of things and having a lot of skepticism for a lot of promises, have you seen any bright spots and what makes them bright?

Barbara Kellerman
In a book I wrote called Professionalizing Leadership I argued that leadership learning should, much, much more strongly than it currently does, resemble learning how to be a physician, learning how to be a lawyer, learning how to be a teacher, learning how to be an engineer.

In other words, I argue that we need to take it more seriously, that we need to think more like some of the sages from the past, whether it’s Plato or Confucius or Machiavelli, which is it takes a long time, if not a lifetime, to learn how to lead.

And if you’re going to, again, emulate what the professions do, becoming a doctor, becoming a lawyer, you will realize that what I break down into a three-step process. First, it should be, in my view, leadership education, which is developing an intellectual understanding of what leadership and followership entail. Just like in medical school, one of the first courses that you take is anatomy. They’re not going to let you slice into a human body until you have learned, been educated about the anatomy of the human body.

So, it is with leadership. I believe first step should be leadership education. Second step should be what I call leadership training, which is where you develop the skills required to lead in your particular context. By the way, I’m going to deviate again because I want to stop at context. So, I can be a great leader in one situation but a lousy leader in another. So, I always talk about the importance of context, which is something we can return to if you like, but I’ll go back for a minute just to the three-step process of what I call professionalizing leadership.

Step one, leadership education. Step two, leadership training, learning the skills and talents that are required for your particular job or task in your particular organization, or situation, or circumstance. And step three is what I call leadership development, which is like adult development, which means, again, lifelong learning. You cannot get an MD in 2024 and presume that that medical degree, no matter how great the medical school, will stand you in good stead five, 10, not to speak of 15 and 20 years hence.

If you’re a physician or you’re a lawyer, you must take continuing education courses. You must take courses that keep bringing you up to date on what good medicine and good science entails. And so, it should be with leadership. There is no reason to assume that if I take a leadership course or a leadership training or a leadership program in 2024, there will be nothing new to learn in 2029, not to speak of 2034.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then digging into your book, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers tell me, any particularly striking or surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you made here?

Barbara Kellerman
I would say they’re all surprising and counterintuitive, which is to say that our tendency, and this is the human condition, again, we’re not talking here widgets, we’re talking about human beings, which complicates the situation infinitely. The surprising thing is how passive we are when we have a bad leader or manager.

Now, again, let me go back, because on one level it is not surprising. Sometimes it is costly and sometimes it is risky to take on a superior, let’s say we’re talking in the workplace, to take on a manager or a leader, or whatever language we want to use, and it’s much easier for us to simply, even though we may dislike it or even become stressed out about it, which is not uncommon in the workplace, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, sometimes we just decide to put up with it, that it’s easier to put up with it than to try to figure out how to take it on.

The problem with that, as the title “Leadership from Bad to Worse” implies, unless we take on bad leadership, again, however defined, many different ways, relatively early in the process, it’s almost certain to get worse. In other words, bad leaders, probably like bad people more generally, don’t wake up one fine morning and say, “Golly gee, I’ve been bad. I’ve been not nice to my subordinates. I really ought to be a nicer boss. I ought to pay more attention to their well-being. I ought to care more about how they feel on the job. Silly me, I’ve not been behaving very well.”

What that means is that the only way then to get these people to change is in some way to intrude on, interrupt the process. Sometimes that’s an exogenous force, something that happens from the outside. But more often than not, it is unfortunately the subordinates that need to take on the issue and need to think through, “If there’s going to be any change for the positive, how can this be done, tactically and strategically, in a way where I don’t end up cutting my own head off, that is cutting off my nose to spite my face?”

So, I would say the issue of the reluctance to look at bad leadership and try to figure out how to stop it from getting worse, that to me is on one level surprising. Although, again, I hasten to add, on another level, really quite understandable.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Barbara, this is fascinating. So many things are sparking up for me here in my brain. One is the movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” in which he sings the song, “Someone should do something.” You know, it’s that passive sense. It’s like, “I don’t like this. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s risky. I hope something changes.” But often, to your point, it just doesn’t.

I’m thinking, you might get a kick out of this example. We had a senior executive at a, I don’t want to name names here, at a major organization that teaches leadership, Barbara. And there was another…

Barbara Kellerman
We’re going to move on, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
…senior executive who, I guess, went through a startling number of assistants, maybe six, very quickly. And they were getting the recruiters, the headhunters fired up to hire a seventh. And then before they did so, it was a peer, a fellow executive said, “Hey, you know, I’ve noticed, and I want…” And so, he sort of demonstrated how to give this feedback well.

It’s like, “Hey, I want you to understand my intention is only to serve you and to help you out here. I’ve noticed that six people have left, and there’s been a lot of sort of comments or themes associated how your behavior has been perceived as pretty disrespectful and demeaning.” And so, boom, there it is. And sure enough, like, that’s hard to say, and nobody did.

Barbara Kellerman
And you’re talking about peer-to-peer.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, exactly.

Barbara Kellerman
You’re not even talking about subordinates to superior.

Pete Mockaitis
It was peer-to-peer, but that’s what it took. It took someone to sort of shake them up, to provoke the status quo, and sure enough it worked. At first, he was very upset, but then he took the feedback to heart and said, “Okay, I guess I can kind of see your perspective, and I guess I will behave differently.” And they had a good outcome, so that’s really cool.

So, yes, it does take something, and I think often, if there’s not a brave someone somewhere, it will just continue. What’s that famous quote? “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for the good people to do nothing,” Edmund Burke.

Barbara Kellerman
Yeah, that is a famous quote and it’s very much what I believe to be true, although I’m always very careful, Pete, as I suggested a minute ago, to not blame the, you know, I don’t want to blame the victim, I don’t want to blame the subordinate, because often people need and want to hold on to their jobs. Often people are really quite scared of doing that. It is, of course, as your example suggested, easier if it’s a peer as opposed to a subordinate.

But in the book, Leadership from Bad to Worse, I have examples of exactly that, including in the corporate sector, how, unless it is stopped, it almost does get worse. And one other comment on that is it’s much easier to stop it early in the process. When you start noticing somebody is not behaving well, however we want to define that, it is easier to say something, to do something earlier on.

The longer bad is able to take root, rather like a plant, the deeper those roots go and the harder it becomes to uproot them. So, without taking the plant analogy too far, I think you get the point that the longer this goes on, and the more entrenched everybody becomes, the more difficult and, indeed, sometimes often painful it is to upend what’s going wrong, to change it.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And it just makes the conversation itself harder, like, “How long has this been going on? Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” That’s tricky.

Barbara Kellerman
Exactly. By the way, if I can add one other thing here, Pete. I mentioned in passing earlier that my interest in leadership is matched every bit by my interest in followership. So, what do I mean when I use the word follower? As you may know, if you’re in the leadership field, and your listeners will know who are familiar with the leadership literature, that’s a kind of loaded word, follower, because it presumes among other things that followers always follow, which is not actually how I define the word.

Followers, most of us, by the way, generally follow. We are socialized to follow. We’re rewarded by our parents, by our teachers, by our bosses, if we’re good followers, meaning relatively obedient most of the time, again at home, in school, in the workplace. If we disobey too much of the time, that’s not good. But in order to understand the leadership dynamic, the dynamics of power, and the dynamics of authority, and the dynamics of influence, it is impossible to understand them if you focus only on one half of the dyad.

You cannot have a leader without at least one follower, and I have argued now strenuously for several decades that, therefore, the understanding of what happens, let’s say, in the workplace, it is impossible to get it by looking only at the person or persons at or near the top of the hierarchy. It is important, equally important, to understand why everybody else in the workplace is behaving the way they do.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, that makes sense. You mentioned tactically, strategically responding. I definitely want to spend some time on that. But first maybe you could clue us into what are some of the telltale signs we should look out for? Like, what’s truly bad versus something I just kind of don’t like and doesn’t jive with my personal preferences?

Barbara Kellerman
So, the word bad, Pete, is inordinately interesting. So, it’s childlike, right? “You’re being bad,” says a parent to a four-year-old. Conversely, “Oh, what a good little boy,” or, “What a good little girl.” So, when I wrote the book “Bad Leadership,” I wrestled with that, “How do I define bad? What does that mean to be bad? Is there a better word in the English language than bad?”

You earlier used the word, for example, toxic. Well, not all bad leadership is toxic. There’s a lot of bad leadership. Toxic, of course, means poisonous. There’s a lot of bad leadership that is not poisonous. It’s just bad. But it’s not so bad that it is toxic. And I was interested, and I remain interested, in what I call the universe of bad leadership, all kinds of bad. A little bit bad, a lot bad, evil bad, as I said earlier, but not so bad too.

So, I not only developed the seven different types of bad leadership, to which I referred earlier, but I also defined bad, or bad to good, if you will, along two axes. And these axes have stood, dare I say, the test of time. There are two of them. You can think of them as intersecting if you want. So, one axis is from effective leadership, which is, needless to say, good leadership, to ineffective leadership, which is, needless to say, bad leadership. It’s better to be effective than it is to be ineffective.

The other axis, again, very simple, but simple is good when we’re talking about such complicated subjects. The other axis, the second axis, is not effective to ineffective, it is ethical to unethical. So, a leader is presumably better if he or she is ethical than if he or she is unethical. Now, to go to your question, since I’ve defined these as two different axes, one is ethical to unethical, the other one is effective to ineffective, you can even understand intuitively that one can be along a continuum.

So, sometimes, really very ethical, but sometimes, and this is again the human condition, not uncommon. For example, lying. We, generally, think that lying isn’t so great, but lying, we have a higher tolerance for lying now than we did, and most leaders lie a little bit. Some leaders lie a lot, and people don’t seem to mind necessarily. But that’s what I mean about two core components of being bad, being good. One, again, ethical to unethical, the other, again, effective to ineffective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. Well, so then, in a way, that can surface things pretty clearly, like, “Oh, this guy who’s really a jerk and screams and pounds his fists a lot, he’s kind of getting some results in terms of folks hop to and do what he says, and do what he says quickly, and work long hours, and make stuff happen.” So, in a way, that’s effective, at least short term, but it doesn’t feel ethical in terms of dignity and respect and kindness and the golden rule sorts of things.

And so, that’s kind of handy. It’s like, “are we generating results, effective and ineffective? And does this seem to violate the world’s wisdom traditions about the dignity of the human person and treating others the way you want to be treated?” that’s more on the ethical, unethical side of things.

Barbara Kellerman
I cannot support your point enough, Pete. Muddling those two criteria for being bad or good is a big mistake for just the reason that you say. It is really possible. I mean, lots of people didn’t like working for Steve Jobs. He wasn’t adorable. He wasn’t always nice to people who worked for him, but he was, as you say, incredibly effective, brilliantly effective, a genius at being effective as a leader.

By the way, this lesson was taught to me very early in my career as a so-called expert in leadership. When I was giving a talk, I was still a young scholar, and I said something about Hitler being a bad leader, which I thought was self-evident. But I remember to this day, somebody standing up in the audience and objecting to what I said for exactly the reason that you just said.

That person pointed out, and I’ve learned my lesson since then, that, again, I’m not assuming your audience are not experts on German history, but the truth about Adolf Hitler is that between 1933, when he first came to power, and 1939, when the Nazis marched into Poland, he was a brilliantly effective leader.

He was an extremely good leader between ’33 and ’39, if you define good, again to the point that you just made, Pete. If you define good as being effective, he was a good leader between 1933 and 1939. Not ethical, but very, very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s a handy framework we got there in terms of “What kind of bad am I looking at?” And so, let’s say, we see on either side, “Yup, we got an ineffective leader here,” or, “Yup, we have an unethical leader here,” what are some of the strategic or tactical steps we should take if we find ourselves in that position?

Barbara Kellerman
So, one of the reasons I’m interested in followership is because of what in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a phrase particularly associated with the women’s movement, was called consciousness-raising. Raising our consciousness about the possibilities, in this case, of action. So those of us who are employees, or subordinates, or ordinary people working in a group or large organization, whatever it may be, tend not to be aware of the possibilities that we might actually be able to act in an effective way, be agents of action.

So, if you talk about strategy, it’s one of the reasons I’m so big on followership. It’s one of the reasons I would wish in a perfect world that good followership, how to be a good follower, would be taught every bit as much as how to be a good leader, because ordinary people need to understand their own agency. If we don’t get the fact that we may not have power and we may not have authority, and, by the way, I distinguish, as some of your audience may have picked up, I distinguish among power is one resource, authority is another resource, influence is the third. So, I distinguish among power, authority, and influence.

So ordinary people, that is, workers in a large organization or even in a smaller group, subordinates, whatever you want to call them, may not overtly have much power or overtly have much authority, but that doesn’t mean that they need to think, or that we need to think of ourselves as being without agency. So, consciousness raising about the power, you can call it follower power if you want, that, to me, is step one.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, once we have that awareness, what are some of the best possible moves?

Barbara Kellerman
Well, I’m always leery of putting people in bad situations. Whistleblowing, for example, has rather a romantic note to it, “Oh, my God, so-and-so’s a whistleblower. How great is that? They opened a can of worms at work and it deserved to be opened. Thank goodness somebody had the courage to do that.” In fact, in real life, it’s quite dangerous to be a whistleblower.

There are books on, if you’re going to be a whistleblower, you want to be a whistleblower, you better know the law. You better be sure of the financial resources you have because your agent, your organization, your company might sue you. So be careful. So, step one is to be careful. Step two is, in general, do not act alone if you can possibly help it. Step three is to start at the lowest level of action.

So, to use an example that you used a few moments ago, you said one peer came up to another peer, one boss to another boss, one manager to another manager, and said, “You know, you’ve lost six assistants in the last whatever,” let’s say it’s 12 months. “You might want to take a look at how your assistants are feeling, about being your assistants, about your attitudes and behaviors toward them.”

So again, “How do I do this at the lowest level?” which would be presumably a simple conversation, possibly between the subordinate and the superior, friendly, cordial, trying to raise issues that have perhaps nobody’s raised before, or to do it in a way that the superior can actually hear. Step four, five, and six is, at certain points you have a choice. Are you willing to risk your position, possibly even your job, assess your costs and your benefits. Don’t be dumb, even if you want to upend bad, however defined. Be careful, be aware of your own self-interest. Do you really need the job? Or is your talent sought elsewhere? And are you willing to lose your job over your intervention or over your action?

If you are not, you better assess your risks. You better be careful. But again, if at all possible, do not act alone. Get allies and consider tactically what your various venues are for possibly saying something and doing something. And that could include everything from several of you going to the person who is not acting the way you wish, to going around the person, possibly to a peer, possibly to a superior. So, there are all kinds of ways of doing it, but I never, ever want to make it sound simple, and I never, ever want to put people at risk professionally if, in fact, they can’t afford, literally or figuratively, to be at risk.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Barbara, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Barbara Kellerman
Well, I guess the last thing I’ll say, Pete, is that although our conversation has focused on the workplace, the work I do, I think of it as trans-sectoral. It applies as much to the public sector as to the private sector. It applies as much to Western Europe as it does to the United States. And, in fact, what’s interesting about our field, if I can assume you’re in my camp of being interested in these issues of leadership, is that for all the differences between, let’s say, Americans and Argentinians, or Americans even and Canadians, there are profound similarities in the human condition.

In the end, we’re all human beings. We all relate to power and authority and influence in similar ways, and that’s worth bearing in mind as we focus on the differences among us. It is, in this field, perhaps the similarities that are the most striking.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Barbara Kellerman
One of the courses I taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and it’s arguably my favorite, is a course called Leadership Literacy. So, there is a great literature on leadership where people have thought about these issues since time immemorial. I earlier mentioned the names of Confucius and Plato, but if you simply go to some of our own, and by that, I mean American founding documents, such as the Federalist Papers.

Men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison. These men thought long and hard about the issues that you and I are surfacing. So, one could do worse than to go back to some of the classics of what I call the great leadership literature, of which I’ve just given you a small sample.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear yourself quoted back to you often?

Barbara Kellerman
I hear that people are happy to have me surface subjects such as bad and follower. Those are the ways, as I said earlier, that I distinguish myself most from my colleagues, and people are relieved to hear a discussion, an honest discussion, of how to tackle bad, again, however bad is defined. People are relieved, eager to hear about their own possibilities for exercising influence even in large organizations.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Barbara Kellerman
I’m available on email. I have a website and I am, by the way, a regular blogger. I’m also on LinkedIn, so happy to connect to members of your audience. And I can be found easily, if somebody looks hard enough, and I have many, many books on leadership and followership. They’re mostly available, of course, on Amazon. So, if people are more interested, I’m sure they can find both me and my work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Barbara Kellerman
Become aware of your own potential influence on the people and on the situation within which you find yourself. And becoming contextually conscious, conscious of your own role, it is amazing. It is amazing how that empowers people to act.

Pete Mockaitis
Barbara, thank you. I wish you many pleasant encounters with good leaders.

Barbara Kellerman
Or effective ones with bad leaders, right? Either one or the other. Thanks very much, Pete. Good to talk to you.