This is an examination of business leadership — what it looks like, how it is developed and what positive impacts strong leadership can have.
It is not an article about political leadership or politics in general. However, this examination of leadership will begin in the world of politics.
There is, perhaps, no tougher leadership role than president of the United States. The approval rating of the past six presidents has hovered around 50%, and more often is below that. Only George H.W. Bush cracked 60%, according to Gallup — and he was a one-term president.
Those who run for president presumably possess the hubris to believe they have the leadership skills to take on what is a decidedly complex and, in many ways, unwinnable role.
“The presidency is a bad job, but it’s one some people will do anything to get. I never thought that reflected well on a person,” wrote Blair McClendon for The New Republic in January 2021, a day before Joe Biden began his single term in the White House.
McClendon writes that throughout history, U.S. presidents have come from a select few universities and have accumulated wealth beyond most Americans’ grasp. Many presidents have worked in the public sector for decades, spending their days surrounded by aides and other politicians who stoop lower than seemingly any self-respecting colleague would stoop to curry favor.
Presidents and presidential candidates are far removed from the American citizenry, yet they profess to be qualified for the job precisely because they understand and empathize with the daily concerns of farmers, small-business owners and stay-at- home mothers alike.
“These are the kinds of people who see a nation with millions of inhabitants, a history of nearly unceasing war, the power to extinguish all human life, and think to themselves, ‘That is a job I would like; a job I deserve,’” McClendon writes.
The More Things Change…
All of this came to mind when I heard New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein recently interview political analyst and academic Yuval Levin. Levin is an Israeli-born American conservative political commentator, the editor of National Affairs, and the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy research body that is broadly considered to be center-right in terms of its politics.
Klein, whose politics lean left, said he wanted to talk with Levin because “he’s conservative, and one of the smartest thinkers on how the government actually works that I know.”
While many have pulled their hair out over a flood of executive orders, budget-slashing departmental shutdowns and sweeping terminations of federal employees that the Trump administration enacted in its first two months, Levin is more measured about the real and long-term impacts of the president’s actions. His composure is less a result of his conservative viewpoints aligning with Trump’s policies, and more an expressed view that Trump and his team of advisors are no more competent or capable of enacting effective, long-term change than they were during the first Trump term, which wasn’t estimable in his opinion.
“A lot of what we’ve seen is actually a lot like what the first term’s first few weeks felt like,” Levin said. “There’s a lot of ambition; there’s a lot of action. There’s more than there was the first time, but there’s also a kind of inclination to chaos that I think is actually intentional. That’s part of what they’re trying to do. It didn’t really work all that well the first time, and I’m not sure it’s working all that well this time.”
To be sure, leading a team of sales reps or even an entire company is vastly different than heading the executive branch of the U.S. government. That said, many of those who voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024 stated they did so because of his business acumen and leadership skills. (Never mind that he was born on third base, has filed bankruptcy six times, and agreed to pay $25 million in a 2017 settlement with students who claimed they were defrauded by his failed Trump University.)
Politics in America finds its way into a lot of conversations these days. It seems timely to examine what makes for strong leadership and how leaders can be developed through the lens of our current president. Political viewpoints aside, are the actions of President Trump during his first four years and now in the early stages of his second term indicative of what thought leaders believe are some common and important indicators of strong leadership? Signs point to no.
1. Leaders Build a Sense of Stability
“The science is clear: people do best at work when their environment is predictable, when they have some sense of control over their immediate surroundings, when they are part of a stable set of relationships, when they feel connected to place and ritual, and when the point of their efforts is readily apparent to them.” Ashley Goodall, a leadership expert, wrote for Harvard Business Review last year. “Constant change emerges as the enemy of performance, not its catalyst.”
Goodall’s article is headlined “Creating Stability Is Just as Important as Managing Change.”
In 2021, the Brookings Institution compared the turnover rate for the last six presidential administrations. It measured departures from each president’s “A Team” (defined as the most influential positions within the executive office excluding cabinet secretaries), as well as turnover in each administration’s cabinet.
While presidential executive-level staffs are historically more fluid than executive leadership in the private sector, Trump’s “A Team” turnover during his first four years in office was 92%. The next-closest turnover rate was Ronald Reagan’s (eight-year term) at 78%. George W. Bush had the lowest “A Team” turnover rate — 63%.
Turnover among Senate-confirmed cabinet members in the first Trump administration totaled 14, according to the Brookings Institution report. The next-closest was George
H.W. Bush, with eight. George W. Bush had two and Barack Obama had three.
In a recent article written for Forbes, Nancy Adams recounts working as the chief people officer at a 250-employee organization that experienced five senior-level resignations in as many weeks. The departures came from sales, service and IT, but there was a common thread to all of them, Adams states — leadership blindness.
“This phenomenon emerges when there’s a significant disconnect between how leaders perceive their own performance and how their team members and colleagues view it,” Adams writes. “Leadership blindness isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s a silent killer of talent retention and employee engagement.”
Self-awareness is a ubiquitous characteristic that gets mentioned in discussions about what makes great leaders. “Leaders who lack self-awareness are typically missing fundamental leadership skills like effective communication, adaptability, empathy and decision-making. They tend to communicate poorly, fail to provide regular feedback or ignore different perspectives, leaving employees feeling undervalued and uncertain,” Adams states. Leaders who lack self-awareness contribute mightily to unstable environments.
2. Leaders Focus on Developing Workers, Not Firing Them
Under Trump’s direction, Elon Musk has carelessly cut staffs at several federal departments by half or more, only to turn around and try to repair mistakes by rehiring workers in key positions. There have been some serious immediate negative effects; long-term impacts have not yet been felt.
A main difference between a culture of performance and an average organization is the perception of accountability, says James Chitwood, author of “Leadership Is Not Enough.” In a performance culture, accountability is focused on helping people within the organization improve. In organizations that don’t perform as well, Chitwood says accountability is viewed as a way to identify who isn’t performing so the company can replace them with those who can.
In the 1980s, Jack Welch became a corporate leader with celebrity status while serving as CEO of General Electric. He wrote vainglorious books on business leadership, sharing strategies he used to propel GE to the most valued stock
position in the country. One of his more notable practices was having mid-level managers rank employee performance and fire the bottom 10% every year. Internal competition and a steady flow of “new blood” was good for the company, Welch reasoned.
But Chitwood argues Welch was a classically short-sighted leader who focused on the company’s stock price and basked in the fame and fortune it brought him. Welch inflicted a lot more damage than good for the company, which had to “de-Welch” the organization after his departure, according to Chitwood, and ultimately devolved into a collection of divisions that epitomize mediocrity.
“A philosophy that drives an organization to fire the bottom 10% of employees annually creates a very unhealthy account- ability environment where people will do anything to make their numbers look better. Highly competitive organizations with cutthroat environments do not motivate people to help each other improve,” Chitwood adds. “If your coworker succeeds, it could be your demise. What kind of system is that?”
Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who President Trump appointed as his national security advisor one month into his first term and then fired him 13 months later, told CBS News, “President Trump does enjoy kind of pitting people against each other.
You get used up in that kind of environment. That creates a lot of angst in people.”
Strong leaders are keenly focused on assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each team member and putting them in a position where they can be most effective. Rather than removing underperformers, consider offering training to help those who wish to improve and become valuable contributors in the long term.
Chitwood said he spent several years steering turnarounds at companies and you can count on one hand the number of people he had to fire. “I viewed it as a personal failure,” he said. He emphatically endorses a philosophy espoused by his Uncle Roy Chitwood, a longtime sales consultant and the author of “World Class Selling: The Science of Selling.” Roy said “an organization’s greatest asset is the underdeveloped potential of its people.”
“I’ve never met anyone who actually wants to do subpar performance,” James Chitwood states. “When performance starts to slip, it’s a much better strategy to say, ‘This isn’t like you. Is something going on?’ than to assume the person simply doesn’t care anymore or is up to something.
“Rather than cutting them loose and starting over with someone new, you’ve established yourself as an employer who cares — something many people feel is a rare find these days.
That employee who was impressive enough to hire on a good day will surely want to stay connected to you when they know you’ll be there for them on a bad day.”
3. The X Factor of Truly Great Leadership Is Humility
Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great,” and one of the most highly regarded authorities on business leadership in the last 50 years, states matter-of-factly that the difference between Level 5 leaders (the pinnacle in his hierarchy of leadership) and those just one level lower is humility.
“Level 5s lead in a spirit of service, and they subsume themselves in sacrifice for that,” Collins says.
It’s counterintuitive, Collins says, but level 5 leaders are typically not larger-than-life leaders who reach celebrity status like Lee Iacocca and Jack Welch. Rather, they are people who blend extreme personal humility with intense professional will. They let their teams bask in the successes while taking personal responsibility for setbacks or poor results.
Contrast that with comments from individuals who have worked with Donald Trump. “I don’t think it’s possible to quantify the size of his ego. It’s too big,” said Barbara Res, who was hired at age 31 to oversee construction of Trump Tower, and who worked in senior-level positions at the organization for 18 years.
When The Guardian spoke with 12 former employees of Donald Trump while he ran for his first term as president, the “consensus emerged of a businessman obsessed with minute detail, prone to micromanagement, who takes little interest in the diversity of his executives or the welfare of lower-level employees. Some said Trump lacks the temperament to deal with setbacks and becomes instantly impatient with those who do not support or agree with him, while remaining resolutely loyal to those who do.”
The president notoriously employs a former cable TV news anchorwoman who follows him throughout the day and whose main role is to print out news articles, social media posts and other materials that are flattering to him.
True leaders possess the confidence to make success about the team.
“Before, your mission was to generate the work. Now, however, your mission is to create and hold the container for others to generate their best work,” says Sabina Nawaz, author of “You’re the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need).” Nawaz is an executive coach who previously led Microsoft’s executive development and succession planning, advising Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer directly.
“The goal is not to burnish your brilliance, but to empower [the team] to feel brilliant. Showcasing your output may be what got you where you are, but now you need to rewire who gets showcased and what ‘output’ means. Recalibrating to focus on driving your team’s success is the critical distinction between being a standout employee and a standout boss,” Nawaz states.
4. Leaders Embrace Constructive Criticism
In a March 2023 Gartner survey of nearly 100 HR leaders, only one in five said managers at their organization are aware of their own strengths and development areas. Four Gartner directors who co-authored a Harvard Business Review article entitled “4 Reasons Why Managers Fail” reported that managers who are unaware of their own strengths and development areas are nearly three times more likely to fail as those who possess this self-awareness.
Nawaz says of all the power gaps that develop between bosses and their subordinates, the lack of a manager receiving honest feedback and constructive criticism can be most damaging. However, when an individual controls employees’ salaries, career paths, the projects they work on and other key elements of their work lives, it can be challenging to attain honest feedback from them.
Emphasizing to team members that specific and candid observations, both positive and negative, are encouraged is vital to effective leadership. President Trump does the opposite, surrounding himself with sycophants and politicians (New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently called them “bobbleheads”) who are willing to reverse positions they stated only a year or two ago to protect their jobs and avoid being the target of Trump’s penchant for retribution.
In his interview with Ezra Klein, Yuval Levin said Trump had more success in his first term when Republicans in Congress pushed back on some of his proposals and guided him to more amenable measures. There doesn’t seem to be any willingness to do that in this second term, in part because Trump has made it clear he wants no obstructions.
“The insistence on loyalty — on being part of the team — is really intense. You see that in their hiring. You see that in their
senior appointments. They’re really placing an enormous premium not on having the experience to run this department but on never saying no to Donald Trump. I think they’re going to pay a heavy price for that,” Levin said. “The sense that if I step up and say, ‘I don’t know, this one’s not a good idea,’ that I’m going to be treated like a traitor and ultimately, I’ll be out of here is very bad for decision-making in any institution or situation.”
5. Leaders Excel at Strategic Planning
A blog post on the website of the European Institute of Leadership & Management states “as a leader, strategic management is one of the most important skills you can possess. It allows you to set clear goals, develop a roadmap to achieve them, and make informed decisions based on data and analysis.”
The post lists tips for developing strategic planning skills that include defining goals clearly, setting priorities, creating action plans, monitoring progress and communicating all of this to the team.
The environment described by those who served in the White House during the first Trump administration would hardly be described as strategic. In the first week of his presidency, Trump famously caused chaos at airports around the country by issuing an executive order that closed America’s borders to travelers from some Muslim-majority countries and refugees from around the world. Vox reports “the ban was implemented four hours after it was made public, with no time for the various agencies involved in its implementation to even get on the same page about who, exactly, was banned under the executive order, much less train the field operatives enforcing it on the ground.”
The ban policies were ultimately rewritten and changed substantially to withstand judicial review.
Similar poorly thought-out executive orders were issued in the first few weeks of the second Trump presidency. He reversed massive spending freezes on federal grants and loans in the face of legal setbacks; he has enacted a dizzying series of tariff announcements and postponements on goods from Canada, Mexico and other countries that triggered retaliatory tariffs and a plunge in the U.S. stock market. In February, he proclaimed that the U.S. would permanently resettle Palestinians who were forced to leave Gaza due to Israeli military strikes and take control of the redevelopment of the territory. The latter plan caught most of the president’s senior advisors off guard.
Whether or not you agree with the politics of these policies, Levin said, the travel ban in 2017 and the sweeping funding freeze enacted earlier this year were similar in their lack of detail and the complexity of carrying them out.
“They were not thought through in practical administrative terms: ‘What’s this going to look like on the ground?’ It’s because they’re thinking about presidential power as a concrete reality and the people affected as an abstraction — when it’s actually the other way around.”
Strategic planning requires dutiful preparation, which is not one of President Trump’s strengths. Staffers and former staffers have told reporters that Trump doesn’t like long or complex documents, and generally reviews briefing documents only if someone guides him through it. McMaster told CBS he was fired soon after he tried to prepare Trump for a call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Trump rebuked him and said he’d trust his own instincts. The call didn’t go well.
“He found [preparation] to be tedious,” McMaster said.
They are Principles of Leadership for a Reason
Longstanding leadership tenets exist for a reason, just as enduring investment advice — diversify your assets, minimize costs, keep a long-term mind-set — haven’t changed in more than a century.
The best leaders understand that it’s extremely challenging, that they will make mistakes, and that they can’t do it alone. They do not seek hero status. There’s no “I alone can fix the system” inclination.
“I like to say that management is about helping people do a job, and leadership is about helping people want to do a job,” Chitwood said.
Ralph Nader said, “I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
So, we end where we began. This is not an examination of whether Donald Trump’s political views are right or wrong. Rather, it’s an examination of a U.S. president who has been elected to office twice, largely on the basis that he is a strong leader who can steer the country through changes that many feel are necessary.
Unfortunately, the evidence indicates that President Trump lacks many of the characteristics that effective leadership requires: humility, self-awareness, respect for others, a desire to lift others up and celebrate their successes, strong communica- tion skills, transparency, clarity of purpose, creativity, compassion, a willingness to own mistakes… The list goes on.
The good news is that many people — maybe you — do have some of those qualities. It’s unlikely you have them all, and that’s OK. In an article written for HBR in 2007, a team of educators from the MIT Sloan School of Management praised what they called “the incomplete leader.”
“It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader: the flawless person at the top who’s got it all figured out,” they stated. “In fact, the sooner leaders stop trying to be all things to all people, the better off their organizations will be.”
A leader’s job, they emphasized, is to build an excellent team and let them perform. Leaders certainly look for opportunities to further develop the capabilities they are weakest in, but they are comfortable relying on others’ strengths to help the team succeed.
Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, founder of Taoism, said, “A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, ‘We did it ourselves.’ ”
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