Day 44 Parentless Children; or, A Dearth of Leadership

“When things aren’t going smoothly for President Trump, his go-to move is to change the subject to topics that cheer his supporters and drive his critics into paroxysms of outrage.” When my mother used to use this same technique at my childhood dinner table, my brothers and I dubbed it the Look, There’s Haley’s Comet Defense. She was brilliant at it.

“Choking off legal immigration is just one aspect of the administration’s longstanding agenda that’s being cast as a pandemic response. In the midst of the crisis, the administration has plowed ahead with non-Covid priorities that, in more normal times, most likely would have met with fierce pushback.”

Okay, I get it, we’re distracted.

From repealing environmental regulations to firing any voice of reason, oversight, or accountability, our leaders are not leading by any stretch of the imagination.

As Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff, memorably opined during the 2009 financial meltdown, “Never allow a good crisis go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.”

The pundits are wringing their hands over the loss of U.S. exceptionalism. I tend to think of this word as meaning I am the Exception to the Rule in the sense that, well, yeah, there’s a worldwide pandemic for which we do not have a vaccine, but I, I am invincible so I can go to Florida for beach blanket bingo and I won’t get sick. That’s not the kind of exceptionalism that the pundits are lamenting.

Their kind is the notion that the United States of America is the wealthiest, and therefore, the most powerful country in the world. Their exceptionalism is about how the U.S. is an exception because we’re so much bigger and better that the ordinary rules don’t apply.

“This is perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking for Washington to lead.” “And in the United States, it [the pandemic] has exposed two great weaknesses that, in the eyes of many Europeans, have compounded one another: the erratic leadership of Mr. Trump, who has devalued expertise and often refused to follow the advice of his scientific advisers, and the absence of a robust public health care system and social safety net.”

Trumpism is the most exceptionally exceptional exceptionalism of all.

Bette Midler just used a hashtag on Instagram that I’d not seen before: #Covidiots.

That’s it!

“There is not only no global leadership, there is no national and no federal leadership in the United States,” said Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development. “In some sense this is the failure of leadership of the U.S. in the U.S.”

Not really, Mr. Hausmann. It is a failure of leadership of the U.S. in the U.S. in every sense.

Opinion columnist Jennifer Senior writes “If We’re Giving Trump a Show, We Should Give Biden One, Too. The president is hitting the virtual campaign trail every night.”

She starts with: “Let’s drop all pretenses, shall we? The president has decided he’s had enough of running the country and is running full time for re-election instead.”

Mx. Senior recommends giving Joe Biden equal television time. “He should be holding press briefings modeled on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s: facts followed by next steps followed by testimony from experts followed by a response to Washington followed by a heartfelt articulation of people’s feelings, all rendered in PowerPoint haiku.”

I’m not convinced that equal coverage for the implicit Democratic nominee is enough honestly.

Here’s what might do it:

Leaders, genuine leaders, like Andrew Cuomo, like Anthony Fauci, like Gretchen Whitmer, like you, like me, speaking truth to power.

As Opinion columnist, Thomas Friedman put it the other day, “We Need Great Leadership Now, and Here’s What It Looks Like.”

“In times like these, leaders either grow or swell—they either grow out of their weaknesses and rise to the level of the challenge or all of their worst weaknesses swell to new levels.”

I won’t say it. Because I don’t have to.

“We have never had a simultaneous global leadership stress test like this—one that is testing leaders from the schoolhouse to the White House and from city halls to corporate suites. Everyone will be graded.”

Let’s just skip the current mid-semester report card, shall we?

Oh, except for one small note from the teacher: Donny doesn’t play well with others.

So, what does a growing leader look like?

The short answer is: like you, like me.

Mr. Friedman called “my teacher and friend Dov Seidman — who is the founder and chairman of both the ethics and compliance company LRN and the How Institute for Society, which promotes values-based leadership.”

Well, there’s the first departure from the same old curriculum. Values-based. Real leadership is values-based. Oh, but you have to know what you value in order to act upon your values, don’t you? And winning isn’t a value.

Mr. Seidman nails it. “Because leadership in so many different levels and spheres has never mattered so much all at the same time—teachers, principals, presidents, school superintendents, hospital directors, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors, media and parents. And everywhere these leaders turn they face vexing moral issues and trade-offs. That’s because what started as a health crisis exploded into a humanitarian crisis and then quickly became an unprecedented economic and unemployment crisis. And now it’s also a moral crisis, forcing leaders to balance saving lives and saving livelihoods.”

So first and foremost, “Great leaders trust people with the truth.”

The whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them God.

Second, “[T]hey make hard decisions guided by values and principles, not just politics, popularity or short-term profits.

Values, principles. Both require self-examination. If you don’t look within, you cannot lead.

Third, “[T]rust is the only legal performance-enhancing drug. Whenever there is more trust in a company, country or community, good things happen.”

Trust is an earned commodity. It ensues naturally from truth-telling and decision-making based on values.

Here we come to the parentless children which comprise the American body politic. We are motherless, fatherless, parentless. Lost, at sea, without leaders who are trustworthy.

The lack of trust in those who lead is the number one cause of despair in our world today. The cure for despair, quite literally hopelessness, is hope.

Fourth, as Mr. Seidman avows, “The true antidote to fear is hope, not optimism. Hope comes from seeing your leader lead in a way that brings out the best in people by inspiring collaboration, common purpose and future possibilities.”

In the face of great fear and, its result despair, we do not dare to hope because we cannot allow ourselves to be inspired by untrustworthy leaders.

“It takes hope to overcome great fear and meet great challenges. People do, of course, appreciate good news and optimism from their leaders, but only if it’s grounded in reality, facts and data.”

And quick as you can say Professor Snape, we are back to Truth, but this time, with a capital T.

Mr. Friedman reminds his friend, “I once asked you what you thought was Nelson Mandela’s greatest leadership attribute, and you said ‘humility.’ Why?

“In addition to truth and hope, what people actually want in a leader, even a charismatic one, is humility. ... Humble leaders actually make themselves smaller than the moment.”

Humility is the one characteristic required for anyone to admit they don’t know something. Once upon a time, I asserted that ‘I don’t know’ are three of the most powerful words you can say. It’s what I learned in undergraduate school, actually. “I don’t know, but I can find out.” These days, I can probably find out in less than a minute.

“They know that they alone cannot fix everything. So they create the space for others to join them and to rise to do big things—together.”

Here is a vital alignment. True leaders know that there’s only an us, and that includes themselves.

“The strongest local leaders will be the ones who collaborate with others and, at the same time, are exceptionally clear about their plans, brutally honest about the risks, utterly specific about the behaviors they’re asking of us, constantly searching the world for best practices and totally transparent about the technologies and data they want to collect to track our movements and contacts.”

Another vital component to leaders: transparency. Few people say this, but what that really means is giving up manipulation for the sake of personal agendas.

Mr. Friedman posits, “This virus has triggered a global pause. You once remarked to me: ‘When you press the pause button on a computer, it stops. But when you press the pause button on a human being, they start—that’s when they begin to rethink and reimagine.’ Is this such a moment?

“In the pause we have the opportunity to reflect on all that this tragic pandemic is revealing about ourselves and our society. A pause can lead to a new beginning, to a reimagination of how we want to live differently—less unhealthily and less unequally—in the future.”

Here is the value of a true leader: the ability to pause, self-reflect, and reimagine.

“Emerson said, “Now we need to save people, but in what you call the A.C. era—After Corona—it will be about how we serve people differently—with a tighter connection between human needs and economic progress and between our environmental needs and economic prosperity.”

Once again, back to the basic function of a leader: to serve.

Remember the vision of that leader I invoked earlier? He looks like you. She looks like me. They look like us.

Here’s the list laid bare. When you encounter a leader, ask yourself is the leader ...

Growing?
Truthful?
Values-based?
Trustworthy?
Hopeful?
Inspiring?
Humble?
Collaborative?
Transparent?
Imaginative?
Serving?

And when you encounter a situation where your leadership is required, ask yourself if you are being ... that exact same list.

Not surprisingly, whether you like their politics or not, the Disney Companies have a stellar reputation as a company to work for. They coined the word imagineers. The definition is “a person who devises and implements a new or highly imaginative concept or technology.”

Beloved leader, yes, I mean you, fearless or not, we are all called to be leaders in this time of dread and loss. We are called to be nothing less than re-imagineers because only if we re-imagine a new and better world will we undo the rudderless caprice that is masquerading as leadership now.

Let’s start to serve one another today.

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com

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