Leadership Development: The Problem of CONTEXT
By Matt Richter
THIS BLOG POST FOCUSES HEAVILY ON US PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, PLEASE POST THEM IN THE COMMENTS BELOW AND I WILL ANSWER THEM.
The old puzzler goes like this: “You go into the darkened room. The person’s hands reach over the guardrail, longing for some form of contact. Whimpers turn into racking sobs. Drool dripping down from the lips. You look down and see the shriveled, bare skin of the patient’s head. You smell the icky waft of the accident. The patient’s face scrunches into that familiar sour look while simultaneously showing the toothless mouth. You feel a burst of empathy and tell the person it will be okay.”
As you read this, what are your thoughts? How do you feel about the patient? What are your impressions?
If you read this and had a visceral feeling of disgust, you aren’t alone. The overwhelming majority of people have the same feeling. If you felt disgust, I bet you assumed the patient was an old person…shriveled, drooling, icky smells, toothless, bald. Right? Now you are asked to comfort this person. Hold his hand. Hug and hold him. What are you feeling now? Don’t worry, you can be politically incorrect.
Let’s change the context. Instead of these descriptors indicating an old man, they indicate a baby. Now how do you feel about comforting this little tiny human being? Instead of icky, the kid makes you filter these descriptors as cute.
Context is everything. It is impossible to consider facts, figures, data, or anything absent context. Leadership is often discussed in terms of the innate skills, talent, and traits of the leader. In some cases, leadership discourse incorporates the relationship between leader and followers, á la transformational leadership (Burns, 1978). But rarely is leadership talked about in the context of Context. Many leadership tropes tell the story of the cast of characters, not the background scenery and events of the times. Or, textbooks provide a list of dates and events without examination of their impact on the humans who lived to experience them and internalized meaning from them, which is why history as a disciplinary filter becomes useful.
But what does this have to do with leadership development programs? And why then, is context an existential problem underlying how we traditionally do leadership development?
Good questions.
First, if the people involved, the situations leaders are dealt, and the cultural mores and customs of the times all affect how we perceive leadership, then for us to teach leaders to lead we need to fully relate to specific contexts. In other words, what we teach for one context will rarely, if ever, work for another one. Secondly, perhaps we could predict what was needed to teach, and if so, could then develop a cogent curriculum to fit that forecasted context. This does assume our predictions would be accurate, especially since we need to predict far enough out so as to actually prepare and develop our budding, potential leaders. Unfortunately, we very rarely predict correctly what situations will arise.
Just yesterday (March 19, 2023), a cursory scan of the major US newspapers had 12 banking executives and major university economics professors all predicting an economic catastrophe, a major recession, a minor recession, stagnation, minor growth, and significant growth. And the causes for each of these predictions vary all the more. We ain’t so good at predicting.
The bottom line is context dictates what knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes will be required to engage specific situations. To teach a potential leader those KSAAs in preparation, one needs to be able to discern the future.
Sure… there are indeed some transferrable skills and abilities. We might even be able to predict what those are and focus on them. But, will that be any more effective?
James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Calvin Coolidge were three American Presidents. All three were extremely well prepared and trained for the US Presidency. They had extensive government experience, as well as large-scale executive experience. On paper… they rocked! All three had objectively failed presidencies. And, until Trump, Buchanan has been identified as the worst of the worst among historians. So, training and experience don’t always yield the outcomes we expect or want. Why? Because the unexpected happens and unless one is a bit lucky, the unexpected will require behaviors, skills, and attitudes outside of the leader’s capacity in that given moment of time.
Take Steve Jobs… Steve Jobs of the mid- ‘80s, when experienced, interpreted, and perceived by employees and partners in the mid- ‘80s, was viewed differently and more negatively—a failed leader—than after his successes in the 2000s (Isaacson, 2011). Time, events, and Jobs’ ability at telling his own leadership context shaped how he was re-interpreted. One can argue he got better! He learned!! And, one could also argue the times changes, as well as the circumstances. But, even if he did grow and learn (which I am not saying he didn’t), he never attended a leadership development program.
Events and circumstance.
Take FDR…
Franklin Roosevelt would not have become the revered1 U.S. president he did without the Great Depression and World War II. Roosevelt did many great things. If you talk with people who remember his presidency, one consistency is the fireside chats—his over 30 radio addresses delivered between 1933 and 1944 (Smith, 2007). Again, context is important. There was no 24/7 news cycle. There was no TV. No Google. No ChatGPT. No visuals other than black-and-white photos that appeared in the newspaper. There were only a few magazines. There was only radio as a way to viscerally experience our government personally—and there were only a few stations at that, certainly no Fox News, Twitter, or Facebook. There were no daily attacks on Roosevelt’s policies beyond the critiques of newspaper columnists who maintained a comparatively demure demeanor next to today’s vitriol.2
When Roosevelt spoke, there was no competition and no Republican equal-time response. He had a captive and interested audience. They were listening to the Commander-in-Chief during a horrible economic depression and subsequent world war. When juxtaposed against the perceived coldness of Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt’s warmth and empathy was a bastion of comfort for millions. Ironically, those who knew Hoover personally found him utterly empathic, warm, and caring as a human being (Rappleye, 2016).
As Roosevelt acted, the myths surrounding his leadership grew. If you walked through the tenements of the lower east side in New York City at the time, many homes had pictures or paintings of Roosevelt on their walls.3 I don’t care how patriotic you are…can you imagine putting up a picture of Bush, Obama, or Trump on your wall? A few may, but really, no one does that anymore.
Or, take Lincoln…
Lincoln without Stephen Douglas as an opponent, and later without him as a supporter, would possibly have failed to even make the ticket for president in 1860. In other words, even his opponent helped determine how well his leadership played. It is unlikely for many of us to even consider the possibility that Lincoln might have been a mediocre president, but without the turmoil of the Civil War, we’d have no idea. Lincoln minus the Civil War might instead be considered in the same breath as Millard Fillmore (a mediocre president, at best). Without the war, and an enemy to respond to, Lincoln had no foil to change the course of the country. The absolute horror of the war and the devastation it imbued on a young nation was a terrifying opportunity for Lincoln from a leadership perspective. Presidents would likely never admit this crass thought, but Washington (as the first), Lincoln with the Civil War, and FDR with the Great Depression, all had tragedies to lead against—giving them the opportunity to be great. Other presidents probably have thought once or twice about what their historical legacies might have been if they, too, had the world fall apart on their watch.
Churchill was a failure, respectfully stated, until he could blast Chamberlain and go to war against Adolf Hitler. These leaders needed enemies to compete against in order to elevate their prowess and status. The greatest leadership stories are those that have some insurmountable conflict that the hero overcomes. Our three greatest US presidents, without coincidence, had that. Presidents Reagan and Clinton tried to create their narratives but never had the context of events go their way. Imagine what the highly charismatic Clinton or Reagan might have achieved given their ability for empathy against the backdrop of 9/11.
NOTE: I am not arguing that leadership always requires crisis. But, I am alluding to a future blog post where we will dig into historian, Keith Grint’s perspective (Grint, 2005) of leadership as a prescription for handling what are called wicked problems— uber, “impossible-to-solve” problems that require those in power to navigate a tapestry of complexity. But, this discussion will take place when I present what you can do with regard to developing leaders.
Back to our scheduled program…
Not all crises lead to great leadership. Why? Because events are just one part of the context. And big events do not guarantee leadership greatness.
President Carter failed against the Iranian Hostage Crisis (Rappleye, 2016). Hoover, once considered the great humanitarian, couldn’t change or affect the Great Depression in any positive way. Grover Cleveland could do nothing against the financial Panic of 1893. These presidents had neither the ability to adjust, nor the ability to tell a leadership story, of how they saved the day. None had evangelists who preached their greatness, and none have had any historians to champion them as time has further passed. However, note that since Jimmy Carter’s cancer diagnosis, recovery, and subsequent hospice announcement, there have been countless reassessments of his presidency that have been much more positive than before it (Macaray, 2015). Context and the passage of time.
It was recently announced that the mighty Andrew Jackson was going to be removed from the $20 bill in favor of Harriet Tubman on the back (USA Today, 2021). Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s book The Age of Jackson, defined for a generation Jackson’s heroic stature as the modern founder of the Democratic Party. The great man of the people. Jackson had always been viewed as a populist hero, but it wasn’t until more modern interpretations of Jackson painted him as cruel, genocidal, vindictive, and a dangerously risky person that people’s perspective of him changed. As our context—our values— shifted toward race and ethnicity, our understanding of his context shifted. (Meacham, 2008, Heidler, 2018)
So… what do we teach? What transferrable skills today, will work tomorrow? Today, all the rage is empathy… Servant Leadership is even back! Authenticity, Genuineness. They may be good behaviors and values for today. And we would like to think of them as good for tomorrow. But, are they? Do we have the agency to shape the context of tomorrow? Perhaps. But aspirations do not make effective curricula.
Could Steve Jobs have been the leader he was for Apple in a different time and place? Not likely. A more useful question is whether Jobs could have been just as great had the Newton taken off as a product and his predecessor, Gil Amelio, not self-destructed. Or if Napster had not led the way for digitizing music, indicating the possibility of an iPod (Issacson, 2011).
It is impossible for us to fully identify the causal relationship between Jobs’ success and the events that led to that success. It is too much of a reductive exercise to claim that Jobs was a great leader because he was Jobs. And it is too difficult, if not impossible, to figure out all the tiny points in history that led to his decade of greatness.
One of my heroes is the philosopher and science historian, James Burke. He is of Connections fame, that show that looked at all the networked ways in which events, items, and people at different moments in time ultimately led to a specific point we are at in the present. Watching Connections, or reading Burke’s books, is a fascinating exercise in recognizing how a simple problem of trying to cool a room in the Deep South of the United States during the malarial scares 200 years ago ultimately led us down a multi-variant path to the jet engine. These points in time form the context that leaders live and work in as they exhibit their innate traits and solve problems.
So, it is very difficult to truly understand the entirety of the context within which we work. It’s too complex! Okay. Fine. Then what do we do? How do I develop more effective leaders and provide them with agency to lead within my organization if I don’t fully understand the context I am in?
The flippant answer is, you don’t. You have to recognize your ignorance and be okay navigating the world blissfully adaptive at all times, seizing the opportunities as they arise. The same factors that have may always influenced one’s ability to lead—competency, charisma, self-determination, drive, vision, and relationships—all guide one’s ability to function within that context. Essentially, a leader is just the visiting team coming to play ball on a different field. The size of the field, the atmospherics, and the phonics all now influence how one interacts with the other team. We must consider not just the other humans, but also the non-human factors. In other words, the idea that we have control over whether one leads is a fallacy. Our potential leaders can contribute to how they react, but it is the nature of the events surrounding them that create the opportunities for leadership to occur.
We need to design development for that level of flexibility, agility, and insight.
Was Neville Chamberlain such a bad leader (Self, 2013)? Popular history says he was an appeaser and gave Europe away to Hitler. Popular history claims Chamberlain was taken in by Hitler’s charm and charisma and was weak throughout the negotiations, even if he viewed Hitler as gutter trash. This isn’t quite fair when one applies an understanding of the context to the story. England was broke. The Great Depression had been devastating. Not as bad as in the United States, but nearly as crippling. The coffers were empty, and the military was skeletal. The Navy had never been relatively that small in its history. Germany had a standing army that dwarfed England’s and had fared much better throughout the thirties as it rebounded under Hitler’s horrifying public works and policies.
Had Chamberlain not signed a treaty with Hitler, Eastern Europe would still have fallen, and England would have gone to war minimally two years earlier—well before she had time to begin rebuilding the infrastructure needed to survive a terrifying new war. Chamberlain made an unpopular decision, decried by the Tories and conservatives in Western Europe…most vociferously by Mr. Churchill. Édouard Daladier, President of the Council of Ministers of France between 1938-1940, echoed Chamberlain’s perspective. France was in no position to go to war either, and she certainly didn’t want to go to war over Austria or its Sudetenland. Daladier and Chamberlain were by no means complacent. Both worked behind the scenes to buy aircraft from the U.S., as well as other provisional items in case of war (the secret land-lease act ultimately signed in 1941). One analysis at the time claimed that the German Air Force was more powerful than British, French, and Soviet forces combined. A big concern for Chamberlain, Daladier, and Roosevelt. (Moe, 2013)
Hitler invaded Poland. France and the UK went to war with Germany. Chamberlain was soon out. Germany invaded France. Churchill was in. But England had had the time to build up to a level of defense where she would ultimately survive, yet Mr. Chamberlain has become history’s punching bag. He certainly didn’t perform perfectly. He certainly made mistakes. But, Context. Context. Context. Without Chamberlain as comparative fodder, Churchill’s courage and his audacious stance against the Nazis fail to be as striking. His leadership prowess is only bolstered because of Chamberlain’s perceived, and immediately preceding failures.
Both Chamberlain and Churchill had lifetimes of on-the-job training. Both had lifetimes of exposure to good and bad leadership. Both had great potential. Both had failed. And both, acted accordingly to the respective contexts. What possibly could a leadership development program have done to prepare them?
The concept of context fully undermines the desired consistency and prescriptions of traditional leadership development. Next post… we will delve into the validity and reliability issues of current LD… then after that, the incoherence and inconsistency of LD objectives and goals. And we will finally end this run of blog posts with a deep dive “what can we actually do” to design and conduct effective LD. So, stay tuned!
1 Since Roosevelt’s death, there have been over 12 different polls given to U.S. historians asking them to rank the U.S. presidents—incorporating the newest guy each time. Roosevelt has landed in the top three in all of them. Washington and Lincoln usually take the top two spots. See Panagopoulos (2012) for more information.
2 Conversely, the election of 1800 was so vitriolic, it would make the attacks on today’s politicians pale in comparison.
3 The Lower East Side Tenement Museum. During the tour, I was surprised to see so many photos of FDR in the apartments dating between 1932-1945. When asked, the tour guide explained the reverence the tenement residents had for the president. Especially juxtaposed with Herbert Hoover.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Yancey-Bragg, N. (2021). What to know about abolitionist hero Harriet Tubman and the effort to get her on the $20 bill. USA TODAY. January 26, 2021. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/26/harriet-tubman-twenty-dollar-bill-replace-andrew-jackson/4257038001/