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.… Read the rest
Intellectual Humility
What might be a good candidate for a necessary personality characteristic for leading in complex, uncertain, and ambiguous times? I would nominate intellectual humility. IH involves recognizing that one’s beliefs and opinions may be incorrect. I note its resemblance to the notion of fallibilism in pragmatic philosophy, where one acknowledges that a personal belief may be fallible.
Psychological research sees intellectual humility as independent, different, from low self-confidence and even from the general notion of humility. Intellectual humility (IH) deals with how people think about themselves and the world. One might consider it a meta-cognitive that involves how one thinks about one’s thoughts.… Read the rest
Sane Leadership
The title of Margaret Wheatley’s new book, Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity intrigued me enough to read it. Facing reality means knowing where we are now and how we got here. Claiming leadership means determining the role of leaders now. And restoring sanity means creating islands of sanity. As with her prior books, one cannot easily summarize it. Rather, I will try focus on the leadership core of her book.
Sane leadership and local leadership comprise the major threads of her leadership discourse. If I had to pick out her core focus it would be this: Sane leadership is the unshakeable faith in people’s capacity to be generous, creative, and kind.… Read the rest
Leading through Wise Reasoning
Wisdom and leading might seem an obvious pairing. However, the subject index in the Sage Handbook on Leadership (2011) identifies the word “wisdom” exactly zero times. Perhaps scholars and practitioners just assume that effective leaders are also wise leaders. Perhaps the difficulty of either measuring the concept or even having near consensus concept’s dimension prevents scholarly research on the possible link between leading and wisdom. (A good overview of these issues can be found here.) Yet most people possess a certain understanding or view of wisdom. Wisdom in this common sense often means knowledge and experience that produces a set of abilities in a person.… Read the rest
The 2016 Election through a Leadership Theory Lens
Donna Ladkin, an American citizen, currently teaches at the Graduate School of Management at Plymouth University in Plymouth, United Kingdom. I find her leadership theory, perhaps best described as a framework for analyzing leadership, very useful. She is one of my favorite leadership scholars because of the way her “leadership moment” sees leadership. This post focuses on a recently published article entitled “How did that happen? Making sense of the 2016 US presidential election through the lens of the ‘leadership moment.'”
The leadership moment framework
Ladkin sees leadership as a dynamic and lived experience, not a set of traits or behavior.… Read the rest
A Follower-Centric Approach to Trump’s Election
To the extent that leadership scholars examine Trump as a leader, followers play a significant role in studying Trump and leadership. This post continues that theme. Carsten, Bligh, Kohles, and Wing-Yan Lau analyze how Trump’s rhetoric may have attracted followers with certain characteristics.
Trump’s rhetoric and behavior leading up to his election bewildered many people. Dictionary.com added the phrase “fake news” into its lexicon for the first time largely based on Trump’s usage of that term. Some see in Trump’s election the full-blown advent of the “post-truth era.” Truth blurs into falsity and vice-versa in this era. Emotions and one’s personal beliefs become more important than hard facts.… Read the rest
Trump’s Personality Pattern and Its Implications for Leadership
A paper published one month before the 2016 presidential election described the “political personality” of Donald Trump. Aubrey Immelman had previously developed similar papers on Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and many other national and foreign leaders. I thought it would be interesting to see how well the paper on Trump fared three-plus years into his presidency.
Immelman prepared the paper using publicly available materials to develop a personality profile using the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria. Theodore Millon (1928-2014) was a renowned American psychologist who studied personality.
Briefly, Millon identifies 10 scales. A personality pattern consists of multiple scales.… Read the rest
Just Some Musings on . . . Leadership Studies Post-Trump
The readings on Trump and leadership undertaken for these blog posts prompted me to reflect on my 15 or so years of teaching leadership in university graduate programs. I determined that the topics important to examining Trump within the context of leadership did not relate well to much of the program content and readings in the leadership programs. The topics significant to examining Trump as a leader seemed not to the part of mainstream leadership studies (leadership research and leadership development programs) in my teaching experience. I am not suggesting that mainstream leadership studies do not cover these topics, just that they are more peripheral than central in my experience.… Read the rest
Are You a Caring Leader? (1)
Are you a caring leader? If so, do you care about? Or do you care for? Or do you care with? Can a caring leader be an effective leader? Is the idea of a caring leader incompatible with leading formal organizations, especially businesses? Is an ethic of care viable in our current society and polity?
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted me to examine the nature of caring leadership. Unlike other adjectives, like heroic, or authentic, or transactional, or transformational, one seldom sees the adjective caring modifying the noun leadership. Even the adjective relational, as in relational leadership, does not approach the nature of caring leadership although relationships are very important to caring.… Read the rest
Caring Leadership 3A
This is the first of several posts on caring leaders. It follows the previous post that centered on caring management. The literature on caring leaders seems more limited than the even relatively small literature on caring management. At the same time, the literature on caring leaders seems broader, less focused than that of caring management.
I have divided the post into two parts. Part A deals with caring leadership as expressed by Yiannis Gabriel. Part B covers my attempt to use Gabriel’s paper to determine how Trump’s followers may view him as a caring leader.
Care and leaders
To an extent, the issue of a caring leader connects with the issue of a moral leader.… Read the rest
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