Hubristic Leadership and Trump (1 of 2)

The media most prominently mention narcissism as Trump’s key personality characteristic. I will discuss this topic in a later post. Although Trump’s narcissism influences the way he leads, I think the hubris personality characteristic best explains Trump’s leadership. Unlike narcissism hubris does not have a common, clear definition. Hubris, however, has enough clarity to allow its use in connection with leadership. Hubris also has some similarity to two other concepts found in the leadership literature, core self-evaluation and intuition.

The research literature sees hubris as an acquired personality disorder characterized by recklessness, contempt, and lack of attention to details. This disorder becomes manifest in the holding of largely unfettered power. The leadership literature suggests that the key elements of hubristic leaders are (1) over-confidence, (2) over-ambition, (3) arrogance/lack of humility, and (4) pride.

Hubristic leadership is associated with contempt for the advice of others, which often becomes evident in resistance to criticism. This set of characteristics leads hubristic leaders to make over-confident and over-ambitious decisions and judgments and to have a propensity to risk taking.

Over-confidence means the leader overestimates the likely positive outcomes of future events. This leader overconfidence joins a faith in his or her ability to achieve the desired outcomes. Hubristic leaders’ sharpened degree of overconfidence contains an overestimation of their abilities, over-precision of their beliefs, and over-placement of their performance relative to others.

Hubristic leaders tend not to perform well in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments. They tend to use simplistic formulas for managing that are based on past successes. Often the actions taken by hubristic leaders tend to crystallize. In other words, hubristic leaders repeat actions that they believe have led to past successes. Consequently exercise shallow strategic thinking.

The reliance on past successes when confronted with complex and uncertain environments leads to an overemphasis on intuition. Intuition often benefits leaders in high velocity situations. But when combined with an overestimation of one’s capabilities it often minimizes the importance of strategy formation, evaporates a concern for detail, and promotes recklessness. In the private sector this tends to result in misguided strategies, overambitious plans, and overreliance on growth and debt; if cash is not readily available for their decisions, hubristic leaders find new, usually debt-based, financial resources. Hubristic leaders often fail to recognize the real causes of bad performance and are prone to opportunistically falsify information to cover mistakes – if they recognize their mistakes.

A sense of power leads hubristic leaders to substitute cognitive simplification and intuition for an effort-required processing of information. The hubristic leader’s propensity for risk taking occurs for two reasons. The hubristic leader overestimates the likelihood of success. Also, he or she exaggerates the anticipated gain and minimizes and misunderstands what is required for the implementation of grandiose plans.

Hubristic leaders often show a large gap between the confidence of their judgment and the accuracy of their judgment. They tend to ignore viewpoints that conflict with their own convictions and ignore negative evaluations from others, which further dampens the feedback given to them.

They often do not have a good grasp of reality, which is usually accompanied by progressive isolation. Their arrogance and need to maintain their status lead them to be rather vengeful in their desire to confront, defeat, and humiliate those who they see as rivals. This arrogance and desire to confront and defeat can lead to high-risk and destructive behavior. Because of their excessive pride, hubristic leaders constantly need to have their successes be recognized by others. This positive feedback widens the gap between confidence and accuracy of judgment.

Hubristic leaders possess a disproportionate concern with image and presentation.Their belief in their own uniqueness requires them to be admired by others. They give more attention to enhancing their self-image in the short run and are not afraid of failure. Their high self-exultation and belief in their importance are especially significant If they are thin-skinned. Being thick-skinned often becomes necessary to withstand public scrutiny and criticism. Failure and bad outcomes tend not to diminish hubris. Facing a crisis actually can further increase their hubris.

Hubristic leadership can be especially problematic for two reasons. One, some characteristics of hubristic leaders match characteristics often associated with desirable leadership strengths, especially regarding heroic and charismatic models of leadership, such as charm, charisma, bold self-confidence, persuasiveness, and grandiose visions. Second, when the adverse consequences of hubristic leadership become visible, it is too late to intervene and turn things around.

The leadership literature suggests several precursors or upstream [*] indicators that may facilitate or intensify the development of hubris. These include

•  the individual’s belief that organizational success is due solely to the individual,
• media praise that generates a sense of importance in the individual to the point where the individual believes he or she is a larger-than-life celebrity,
• a predisposition toward narcissism,
• a sense of exemption from the rules to which others comply,
• hyper-inflated core self-evaluation in regard to self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, emotional stability, and internal locus of control, and
• a socially constructed sense of confidence (that is a belief that others recognize and pay homage to his or her self-confidence).

Comment

Each of us can judge whether the Trump one knows reflects most if not nearly all the characteristics described above. To me, the following are particularly important in my judgement regarding his hubris (in no particular order):

• the importance he attaches to his personal image and how he is presented (which manifests itself in the adoration given to him by Fox News and the energy he gets from the applause he receives from his political base during rallies),
• his lack of attention to and understanding of policy detail and the actual consequences of policy,
• his contempt for others and need to humiliate others (which I would paraphrase as “the only defense is a very aggressive personalized offense”),
• restlessness and impulsive action,
• an excessive reaction to personal and political events,
• his arrogance, pride, and lack of humility,
• a seemingly excessive belief in the power of his intuition (especially for someone who has no government or complex organization experience, whose background was transactional real estate development and more recently in marketing and branding), and
• his lack of empathy. I think all of these have been almost continually visible so far in his term of office.

For me, the most dangerous aspect of Trump’s leadership behavior is the way he deals with another hubristic leader and the one whom he seems to believe is his primary competitor, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. While he seems to embrace Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and Philippine’s Rodrigo Duterte, both of whom I think are hubristic leaders, Trump’s relationship with Kim Jong-un is at times competitively antagonistic. One should be concerned about the possible consequences of the competitive and humiliating interaction these two hubristic leaders sometimes publicly display to one another. Hubristic leaders usually find it very difficult to self-regulate when they are threatened and under duress.

The next post in this particular blog series will focus on the guardrails that may be effective in lessening the damage that can be caused by hubristic leaders.