Leadership, Management and Command in the time of the Coronavirus

By Keith Grint, Emeritus Professor, Warwick University, UK and Founding Editor of Leadership

Few people like to hear bad news, especially from their leaders in bad times, when we all seek solace and comfort. But telling people good news is easy, even (or especially) if it isn’t true; while telling people things they need to hear that they would rather not, is much more difficult, and therefore a more important test of leadership. In Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, the bad news is that the new public baths have been poisoned by the local tannery, just as the tourist season is starting, (this, of course, is the frame for the 1975 Spielberg movie “Jaws”). In the play, the hero, Dr Stockmann, fails to persuade his brother, the mayor, to close the baths and is then shouted down at a town meeting for trying to persuade the people that they have an unpopular but necessary duty to perform; they call him “the enemy of the people.” This is the opposite of telling people lies that keep loyal followers happy.

In our own Coronavirus times, the equivalent problem is represented by both Johnson and Trump beginning the response to the threat by denying its potential significance and ignoring their own advice about social distancing and wearing face masks. But here’s the thing: even democratic leadership isn’t necessarily about popularity. It’s about doing what is right, even if that means sacrificing your own popularity and career, and that means making decisions that are trade-offs, not win-wins. And confidence is not the equivalent of competence, nor does repeating mantras about ‘following science’ help, when the science is so uncertain and provides possible scenarios, not deterministic futures. There are times for optimism and times for realism, and sometimes the quest for popularity undermines the importance of being realistic rather than over-optimistic, or the opposite: refusing to explain the long-term strategy because it might frighten the population.

We can perhaps understand the role of leadership better if we situate the whole Coronavirus issue in the Tame/Wicked/Critical problems frame originally formulated by Rittell and Webber in 1973 (see also Grint, 2005). Tame Problems can be complicated, but they are solvable through standard operating procedures and are the remit of experts, this is the land of Management. We might put the testing of Covid-19 in this category – we know, theoretically, how to do it, as long as the kits and experts have been made available. Wicked Problems are complex, may not be solvable, but might be ameliorated with a collective response, so the job of Leadership in these circumstances is to mobilize the community, often to address issues they would rather not contemplate. In this category, we could put asking communities to self-isolate and help each other when food and medical supplies are scarce – and no-one quite knows what to do. Critical Problems are crises that need commanders to coerce their followers into line to avoid a catastrophe – ordering schools and business to shut for the foreseeable future would be an example of this decision-making.

In effect, if we get the wrong decision mode for the problem that we are facing, then we are likely to make it worse: hence indecision about what to do and seeking collective ideas when the virus is already upon is, is to adopt Leadership when Command is required. Likewise, ordering businesses to close without understanding or caring about the wider impact upon the community in the absence of state provided income, is to confuse the importance of collaborative Leadership with the apparent decisiveness of Command. But you can be decisively wrong unless you have taken advice from experts on what will happen next. And ignoring those medical experts – while listening to the self-interests of those with fortunes at stake in a flailing economy – is just as likely to lead to chaos.

And the role of Command is to take the tough decisions when groups and individuals persist in anti-social and illegitimate behaviour at a time of crisis. It is self-evident that coercive legislation, in and of itself, is unable to change people’s behaviour. There have always been, and always will be, errant individuals that flout rules designed to protect majorities or minorities, but that isn’t the role of such legislation. As Martin Luther King suggested in a speech on December 7, 1964 in London, “It may be true that the law can’t change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.”

References

Grint, K (2005) Problems, Problems, Problems: The Social Construction of Leadership’ Human Relations 58 (11): 1467-1494.

Rittell, H. and Webber, M. (1973) ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning’ Policy Sciences 4: 155-69.

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