Leadership lessons from California's fumbles
...or, how not to face a recall
My feeds offered up an article about the crisis of trust in my home state, California, where a public backlash to the fast-changing and seemingly arbitrary response to COVID is likely to lead to some poor outcomes.
“California Is Coming Apart Over COVID”
(One of my neighborhood favorite restaurants, taking comic exception to Gov. Newsom)
It is worth reading both as news analysis and as a clear object lesson in what happens when leaders fail in their public leadership role. This isn’t a place where I discuss politics, and this isn’t meant as a political dig – I’m truly sympathetic to the struggles of state and local leadership in the face of this crisis. But there are absolutely lessons from this that we ought to be taking in and using to improve the leadership we give and the leadership we get.
The first failure is in clearly and consistently communicating strategy and vision.
In Los Angeles and elsewhere in the Golden State, a sense of anger with seemingly contradictory lockdown orders is growing along with virus cases, which are reaching new records across the state. It’s a major reversal of fate for the first U.S. state to impose a lockdown in March, a move hailed as a success that kept the state from experiencing a surge of infections and death like what happened in New York. Following the spring shutdown, California reopened in June — only to enforce new restrictions in July. Now with the state’s ICU beds maxed out, Governor Gavin Newsom has imposed a stay-at-home order. While other states have similarly seen infighting, often at the hands of mask skeptics, the latest round of orders from state and local governments are driving a lot of Californians who might otherwise not have strong views on public health politics to question whether their leaders are making good – and fair – decisions.
Leaders work through others; they inspire and direct others to do the work an organization needs. One of the things that’s needed is for the people who are expected to do things to have a clear understanding of what’s being asked.
It's a truism in management that leaders assemble and broadcast a clear vision for their organization and its future. When I talk about clear vision, let me make a key point: there’s a clear distinction between vision and platitude.
When you express a platitude, try saying its opposite and see if it makes sense. “We will delight our customers” is contradicted by – as an example – “We will enrage our customers.” Does that make any sense at all?
Now, let’s make it a vision. “We will delight our customers by…[making and selling electric cars]” which can be opposed by “We will delight our customers by …[not making electric cars, and making diesel pickup trucks].”
A vision – like a strategy - has to exclude certain plausible and possible outcomes.
So in the case of COVID in California, a platitude would be “We will stop the spread of the virus,” while a vision would be “We will stop the spread of the virus while supporting our citizens’ needs and prioritizing support for small employers.”
We didn’t do that. And so – from the outside – state policy has looked a bit like Calvinball. I’m willing to bet that the state’s leaders didn’t mean to do that; they were reacting as best they could to fast-changing conditions and cumbersome mechanisms for decision-making and implementation (if only the state was more agile…). But because there wasn’t a clarity of vision that was shared and understood, the people at the edge – the folks who were outside the decision making circle and most impacted – felt like they were being jerked from one side to the other.
And putting up with this this requires is a high level of trust in leadership. Which our leaders in CA managed to quickly squander.
“Even though California is largely a very liberal state, I think that there is this trust deficit in which people have stopped listening to certain people,” said Tara Kirk Sell, a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “People are feeling like they’ve just had enough, and they wonder if it’s all futile anyway.”
When hospitalizations started rising again in early November, Newsom warned that he might have to soon pull an “emergency brake”that would shutter beauty parlors, wineries, and restaurants once more. Then he attended an indoor birthday dinner at Napa Valley’s famed restaurant the French Laundry — alongside the CEO of the California Medical Association. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who is reportedly under consideration by Newsom to fill Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris’s seat in the U.S. Senate, attended the same restaurant for her own “small gathering” the following night. In mid-November, despite a travel warning, at least ten California lawmakers traveled to Hawaii for a four-day conference. The topic? How to reopen states safely. And just hours after voting in favor of a dining ban, Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl was spotted in Santa Monica eating outside at her favorite neighborhood Italian restaurant.
There’s a great phrase my son taught me: “Leaders eat last.” It implies that leaders make sure their teams are fed first; a parallel is “PT with the troops” – do the unpleasant hard things visibly alongside your teams to make sure they know you’re sharing the hard things with them.
As a generalized take, most of our leadership class apparently was absent the day they taught those lessons…and here’s the result:
Protests against lockdowns have erupted outside public health officials’ homes and an effort to oust Newsom is strengthening, with half of the 1.5 million petition signatures to put a recall on the ballot already gathered.
So if we can pull a lesson from this, there are two basic and critical things that are foundational for leadership and have been missing (note that there’s a lot more to leadership than these two things):
A clear widely understood vision for the organization – that isn’t grounded on platitudes.
A sense of shared sacrifice (where sacrifice is called for) by leadership.
Are you doing these? What else do you think is required?