So much has been written in the past 24 hours about Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s ill-advised interview with Rolling Stone that it’s hard to find anything original to say about it. Because there are lessons here for anyone concerned with leadership and reputation, I’ll make the attempt.
Leaders must set the tone
If I heard the leadership team of a client company talking openly and disparagingly in the CEO’s presence about competitors, customers, investors or other stakeholders, I would question their character and sanity. I also would assume the CEO condoned or encouraged such behavior and had an insufficient appreciation for the reputational risks it entails.
The qualities necessary for leadership can bring leaders down
Photo: U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Mark O'Donald/NATO
The high degree of self-assurance most leaders possess can blind them to unreasonable risk. Because they are accustomed to being in control, they sometimes assume they will remain in control in all circumstances, and that others will have as high an opinion of their actions, capabilities and motives as they do themselves.
Only a blindly confident general would invite an anti-war reporter from an anti-war publication into the command tent and expect everything to turn out OK. Either that or a general who knew exactly what he was doing and did it for reasons of his own, as yet unexplained.
Our culture has become very good at destroying leaders
The non-stop news cycle, the increasingly opinion-driven and confrontational nature of journalism and our fractious politics – combined with the very real challenges we face as a nation, at home and abroad – make for a very difficult operating environment for leaders. We are adept at chewing them up and spitting them out for transgressions real, imagined or invented. They are vilified, ridiculed, hounded and harassed – in the media, in Congressional committees, by TV comedians and on Facebook and Twitter.
We’ve seen this phenomenon at work with several consecutive U.S. presidents, business leaders and now, an important and by all accounts dedicated and accomplished military leader.
Sometimes leaders deserve to be removed from leadership positions because of the mistakes they’ve made, and that may be the case with Gen. McChrystal. But the fact that we go after them with such zeal and ferocity strikes me as something relatively new and disturbing.
We’re great at tearing leaders down, and not so great at discovering, developing and supporting them – even though we need capable leadership in business, politics and policy, now more than ever.
Tags: General Stanley McChrystal, reput