1A. Immature Leadership: President Trump?

Peter Milhado, an American psychologist, identified about 10 years ago characteristics of men who never grow up. First, I will summarize what he describes as their key attributes. Subsequently, I will explore Theo Veldsman’s view of immature leadership. The reader can determine the extent to which these analyses describe Trump and help to explain the nature of his leadership.

Milhado’s puer aeturnus

To Milhado, a puer aeturnus believes masculinity is vitally important. This sense of masculinity must be won by struggle, by taking a stand, overcoming inertia, deciding and acting more by gaining muscle and competence in the world of men. Masculinity must be taken, actively formed, it is not given. Milhado sees men-children as narcissists who are drawn to women who flatter them and do not disturb their narcissistic self-image. But the fascination for such women eventually vanishes and the man-child moves on to the next woman who will provide what he needs. Thus the man-child tends to wander through sexual relationships with many women. Many men-children are attractive, even charming, but this is a veneer that usually hides a sadistic streak that quickly strikes, a strike that is often made towards women. Milhado suggests that the more charming a man-child is, the more brutal and colder becomes his shadow side.

Milhado says that the primary pursuit of a man-child is ecstasy, usually at the expense of everything else. The man-child is impulsive and impatient with a low tolerance for frustration. He is threatened by self-discipline, patience, duty, endurance, and the acceptance of limitations. For a man-child there is no standing still, no tolerating of conflict with his position, or for solving problems. He always must be moving to where the action is and has little capability for reflection – action always trumps reflection. He cannot handle well tasks that require long preparation and training and can work only when in a state of enthusiasm. Nor can he well address routine, boredom, or tediousness.

The man-child sees himself as a bringer of meaning. People must adapt to him because he finds it near impossible to adapt to others. Although he sees himself as a bringer of meaning, he rarely rolls up his sleeve to get the meaning work done; others must do the work. He has inflated feelings of superiority accompanied by arrogance and defiance. Because of these inflated feelings he usually encounters difficulties at work and in relationships. A man-child usually becomes a victim to his impulsiveness and self-destructiveness.

Milhado recognizes that there can be a positive side to the man-child. His willingness to take risks and spontaneity can be helpful but if and only if he can harness his energy consciously and ethically.

Veldsman’s immature leader

In 2018, Theo Veldsman, a professor at the University of Stellenbosch Business School in South Africa, contrasted mature and immature leaders. He sees leaders as having to take an arduous journey in which one experiences uncertainty, unpredictability, and ambiguity, before one can become a mature leader. He calls this life-long journey “a ripening” that varies in degree based on life events, experiences, exposures, relationships, and interactions that a person processes in terms of sense-making and meaning-giving. A mature leader is one who experiences a wide variety of these life events, some positive, some negative, and some destructive, and effectively processes these events. Veldsman defines leadership maturity as a leader’s ability to engage consistently in relevant, productive, and uplifting ways with Self, Others, and the World. In each of these three relations, he discusses what it means to be an immature leader.

With respect to Self an immature leader tends to

• Possess excessive self-confidence because he must protect himself from what he finds unacceptable about himself and/or must prevent others from uncovering his weaknesses, which would thereby value him less or even exploit his weaknesses.
• Overemphasize his strengths because he finds his weaknesses unacceptable, which may make him overuse or inappropriately deploy his strengths. Because he is at war with himself, he is moody, unpredictable, impulsive, and even irrational.
• Be driven by his own narrow, short-term interests, needs, and desires that he frequently puts first because of lack of self-insight. He is concerned with how things suit him. He focuses on the concrete, tangible, petty, and unimportant. He finds external influences, demands, and requirements threatening because of his insecurity. He cannot give credit to others and their contributions because it would reduce his stature and put him in a poor light. Most of the time he acts defensively and reactively.
• Project himself as omniscient, omnipresent, and fully in charge of everything always. Because he cannot find security in himself, he seeks security in external things like status, power, position, wealth, and possessions and
• Be closed to learning. He takes on the role of leadership to prove something to himself and/or others and/or to achieve his own ends.

With respect to relations to Others an immature leader tends to

• Be cold, distant, formal, restricted, and elitist in his interpersonal spaces. Persons enter his personal space on strict terms and preconditions set by him and then only by invitation. Persons allowed into his interpersonal space are treated as if they are all the same, most often as being inferior to him. He rarely gets involved in teams or teaming.
• Have little self-insight into his impact on others and, in any event, such impact does not matter at all. Followers must take what is dished out to them. He also has little insight of the impact of others on him, which makes it difficult for him to understand why he responds to the way he responds in reaction to others’ conduct.
• Have superficial, static, short-term, and task-based interpersonal relationships. The personal circumstances of others is not his concern – they are simply and solely work colleagues who must get a job done regardless of circumstances. Persons are valued only for the contributions they can make to his personal agenda in terms of his interests, desires, and needs.
• See his followers in terms of what he wants to achieve through them and not with them. Followers must pursue his egocentric agenda and interests. His followers must execute their responsibilities in achieving the goals he prescribes.
• Overload his followers with unreasonable, unrealistic workloads in order to keep them out of his way or he must make them feel incompetent or insecure in ways that resonate with his own feelings of incompetence and low self-confidence. He always turns excellence into uncompromising and unattainable perfection.
• Not take any accountability for the decisions and actions of his followers. When failures or mistakes occur, he hunts for scapegoats, and if that is not successful, he blames circumstances beyond his control. He is a great rationalizer.
• Have discussions and conversations that are one-sided with only his opinions being voiced and dominating. He is unopen to the views and opinions of others. He uses his authority to impose his thinking and decisions on others, overriding all opposition and resistance. His views are the only views because he is all knowing. Persons that oppose or criticize his views are pushed aside, ignored, or worked out of the organization.
• Be opportunistic, inconsistent, and unpredictable in his decisions and actions. Given his uncertainty and insecurity, and feeling of being threatened by others, he unpredictably moves between choosing his own view or that of others with little rational, logical explanation and justification for his choices.
• Frequently fold under pressure, especially to stakeholders who can promote or undermine his personal agenda. He is vulnerable to pressure because he has no firm personal vantage point and/or is not unconditionally committed to a strong personal value system. He often clings stubbornly to an inappropriate position against all evidence. His values are often deliberately vague, leaving others unclear about what is acceptable or not. Consequently, a gap often appears between his talking and his walking. Thus, he is seen as unreasonable, untrustworthy, a bad role model, and unethical.
• Attract and nurture passive, dependent, compliant, and non-critical followers who follow him merely for what he can do for them. His leadership is held ransom by his followers because he needs followers if he is to be a leader. He often eliminates, sometimes mercilessly, his opponents.

With respect to the World, the immature leader tends to

• See himself above and separate from the World. The World is in his service and for his use. The immature leader sees the World as fragmented in stand-alone silos, with each silo analyzed and dealt with separately.
• Regard big picture thinking as estranged from reality, too theoretical and abstract. He cannot distill any embracing, holistic, or integrated patterns. For him, the World consists only of stand-alone linear relationships.
• Feel threatened and overwhelmed by increasing variety, interdependency, complexity, change, ambiguity, and seamlessness of a changing World. He makes the world predictable and manageable by seeing the world in a black-white classification of everything. Facts and rational thinking must fit into this simplified dualism; he must oversimplify.
• Emphasize the maintenance of the status quo or at most incremental, transactional change. He sees radical or transformative change as uncertain and unpredictable, as too risky. Otherwise, the World becomes unmanageable.
• Focus on himself, the short-term, the here-and-now as well as on concrete goals, plans, results, and benefits. He has a pure transactional leadership stance that tends to ignore the future and any adverse impact on current and future generations. He sees the world as everyone for himself or herself – a Darwinian survival of the strongest and fittest come what may – no more ultimate or greater goal or purpose exists or is considered.
• Have an absent or underdeveloped ethical compass and conscience. Whatever works or offers personal benefit is right, good, and important.

Comment
Milhado and Veldsman come at this topic from different backgrounds. Milhado is a practicing psychologist who often references another American psychologist, James Hillman (1926-2011), who studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich. Hillman’s major line of study focused on the fantasies and myths that shape and are shaped by our lives. A key element of his writing dealt with the senex (the older man, disciplined, controlled, responsible, rational, and ordered) in counterpoint to the puer (the eternal boy who is forever young and whose emotional life remained at the adolescent level – unbounded instinct, disorder, intoxicated, whimsical). Milahdo based his comments on Hillman’s analyses as well as his own practice. The concept of puer has been popularized, and perhaps vulgarized as well, as the Peter Pan Syndrome. Milhado limits his comments to men and believes that the primary cause of an immature man is a very adverse early relationship with his father.

Veldsman’s academic background covers philosophy and work psychology. In his academic and in his consulting work he focuses on the psychology of work (industrial psychology) and the management of people. His work on immature leadership is part of his broader work on toxic leadership – the dark side of leadership. His research leads him to believe that 30% or so of leaders are toxic. Unlike Milhado, his comments tend to cover both men and women. Veldsman believes toxic leaders affect individuals as well as organizations. His stance is that toxic leaders can be successful in the short term (they can “deliver the goods”), but over the longer term destroy teams, organizations, and institutions.

The reader of this post can come to her or his own conclusions about the applicability of Milhad’s and Veldsman’s analyses to President Trump. Milhado wrote well before Trump’s interest in becoming president and I have no sense that Veldsman ever refers to Trump in his commentaries. Nonetheless, I find their analyses highly applicable to Trump.

The next post will focus directly on the concept of the “eternal boy” and Trump. What may be of special interest in the next post is an effort to explain why Trump elicits strong and continued support from 30% to 40% of U.S. voters and 70% to 85% of self-identified Republicans.