Failed Leadership

Krzysztof Kasianiuk, Bohdan Szklarski, and Olaf Żylicz

Some questions appear universally pertinent regardless of the domain the failed leadership is considered:

•Is failure just a flip side of success? In other words, do all leaders who do not achieve success become failed leaders?

•Is failure chiefly a product of poor application of “prescriptions” for success which advisors recommend? Is failure measurable? What criteria have we got for measuring the scope/”size” of failure? To what extent the measures of failure can be objective?

•If failure is an evaluation who is entitled to pass that judgement? How reliable are the ratings? Do we trust the public opinion polls or journalists? How much do we trust the historians and other scholars? How much time should pass for historian’s ratings to be “objectified?”

•Is failure contextual? How big part in defining failed leadership do leader’s cultural, social and economic circumstances/contexts play? To what extent can failure be attributed to zeitgeist influences?

•Is failure a cumulative concept/phenomenon?? Do smaller failures somewhat tend to add to one another, eventually leading to the final perception of a leader being a failure?

•Is failure recoverable? Can a leader escape definition as failed leader when one achieves success after failure? Does success erase failure? What conditions must exist for such “erasure” phenomenon to take place.

•Is failure a temporal problem? Do leaders who experience failure at some moment of their career tend to remain failed leaders later, even when they achieved some success? How long does the perception of failure usually last? What does its “staying power” rest upon?

•What do we attribute “failure to:” policy/decision/single case or to overall evaluation? Must a sort of policy failure precede the perception of overall failed leadership?

•How does the axiological dimension relate to failure? Are leaders who pursue evil goals automatically failed leaders? What if a leader deliberately engages in corrupt, dishonest practices and succeeds in misleading followers Does it make him or her a failure when the goals are realized? Is Madoff a failed leader? Under what circumstances does leadership acquire an axiological dimension, if it does?

•Is failure a comparative concept or can leaders be “failed” without being compared to predecessors or followers who attempted similar goals or faced similar circumstances? What referent points we tend to use when in naming a person or his or her behavior a failure?

•In perceptions and evaluations of observers, can a leader fail partially? How much failure in one domain tends to overshadow successes in the others? May some kinds of failure, e.g. in the moral domain, easily erase judgments of successes in the others?

In order to avoid us being overtly theoretical, let us consider the following examples as illustrations of the complexity of the issue of failed leadership. Each of the cases not only warrants a number of questions from the preceding list but answers to them will not produce a simple conclusion (a few more detailed and comprehensive cases are provided later in the following chapters) Instead, these cases clearly suggest that leadership failure should be studied as a multidimensional, multilayered, and multidirectional concept. Thus, a diverse methodology should also be applied. In particular the measures of failure should also avoid simplicity

Examples:

Richard Nixon considered an overall failure, at mid-point of his presidency was reelected with one of the greatest landslides in American history. He also received highest praise for “opening China” in 1971. China took great advantage from that opening and instead of being relegated to the third league of autarkic and isolated powers embarked on a path to rapid economic development which in 2020 is one of the major threats to American global power. So, was Nixon’s China policy a success or a failure?

Margaret Thatcher left office in the state of disrepute and declining support, chiefly as a result of the failure of her poll tax plan. Does that failure overshadow the overall ratings as a very successful leader often even in the eyes of her opponents?

Similarly, does Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s failure to “pack the Court” in 1937 detract from his overall undeniably favorable evaluation? The case of court packing is even more distressing since the President failed in an attempt to increase the number of Justices on the Supreme Court bench to achieve a body which would (as it was assumed) serve his interests, represent his ideology. Thus, the Supreme Court reform, if successful, would have signified a supremacy of the Executive branch over the Judicial one and would have undermined the core values and principle of American democracy – the system of checks and balances.

Charles de Gaulle resigned from the office of the President of France immediately after his constitutional reform package failed to garner support in the referendum in April 1969. The list of his legislative and other political and military successes is very long and it is reinforced by the very favorable symbolic connotations, not the least of which was “saving the honor of France” during the Second World War. Is his failure in the referendum in any way a proof of his failure as leader? Perhaps in the context of the moment – the 1968 surge of protests – the failure of his policy proposal demonstrated his weakness as a leader, yet his overall ratings both by the public and historians/experts remain very high. Winston Churchill faced a similar defeat in 1945 when his compatriots failed to return him to primeministership even before the end of the war, during which he earned a reputation as strong and successful leader.

Bernard Madoff, Enron leaders (e.g., Kenneth Lay) or other con artists who achieved success misleading, manipulating, cheating people and those sinister outcomes were their goals, should they be considered failed leaders?

Is Jim Jones a successful leader because he managed to lead over 900 hundred people, 909 to be precise, to a collective suicide in Jonestown in Guyana. Is the staggering number of his followers taking on their life with cyanide a proof of his success as persuader and cult leader or is it an ultimate mark of failure?

Contemporary Poland is struggling with evaluations of Lecha Wałęsa. Relevant social discourse ranges between treating him either as a national and international hero who was instrumental in bringing East European communism to an end or as a morally failed political authority due to his alleged clandestine cooperation with communist secret services, on the other?

Each chapter in this volume tries to make reference, to different degree, to the dimensions of failed leadership proposed above. Some of these links are highlighted in the following chapters descriptions.

Chapter 1 “Flying Saucers and Leadership,” provides a critical account of the concept of leadership. It reveals that the leadership concept fails to induce knowledge about human experience and its sources. It is also one of these concepts which “constrain social action and discussion.” The author shows this from variety of perspectives – including the error of misplaced attribution and empirically-centered scientific mode of inquiry. Therefore, thee consideration clearly show contextual and social entanglements limiting reliably measure leadership and manifestations of its failures.