A tragic tale.
I was going to write about the leadership issues facing Kevin Rudd over the proposed Resources Super Profit Tax….but a bit late now me thinks! A very sad event during the week because I personally have a lot of time for what he was trying to achieve. And I also can appreciate the personal devastation he and his family must be feeling…I think we forget that politicians, for all they might annoy us at times, are human beings as well.
The upside is that I think Julia Gillard is an extremely talented person who will do a great job. Not only has she been handed a good base of reforms on which to build but she has skills in the very areas that Kevin Rudd lacked…and which, it seems, led to his downfall. This will allow her, I believe, to successfully implement some of the reforms that Kevin Rudd was not able to.
So lets talk about the skills that Kevin Rudd lacked. I think there is a very good leadership lesson to be learned from all of this. In fact, he is almost a text-book example of some of the dangers of leadership that Heifetz identified in his book ‘Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading‘. In this book Heifetz looks at a number of things that an authority figure must do in order to lead when faced with adaptive challenges. These include things like giving the work back to the people who own it, finding partners to support you and continually sensemaking the situation you face by ‘getting on the balcony’ so you can ‘look down’ on the action. Kevin Rudd style, it seems, was contrary to these ideal. He chose to centralise control and decision-making around himself and his four senior advisers, with even his ‘kitchen’ cabinet of four senior Ministers having questionable input.
This had a number of important consequences for me. Firstly it limited his sensemaking to what his four advisers wanted him to see. There is a report in a paper today that a senior member of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) tried to get to talk to Kevin Rudd about what polling was telling them about his and the governments popularity. He only got as far as Rudd’s senior adviser, who told the ALP official to bury the polling and make sure it never saw the light of day.
The second effect of this centralised control was that, because he didn’t give the work back to the people who owned it and took responsibility for it himself, it allowed the opposition party to focus it’s attack on the Government directly onto Kevin Rudd, on the basis that he WAS the government.
Thirdly it left him vulnerable to a couple of the things that Barbara Kellerman (Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters) suggests are dangerous to leaders. The centralised control and lack of partnerships stopped him from compensating for his own limitations via some of his very talented colleagues and the gatekeeping provided by his advisers made him susceptible to hearing what they wanted him to hear and thus believing his own hype.
In the end I think this led to him being unable to, as Heifetz suggests, manage his hungers. To do this Heiftez says you need to watch the extremes (hubris vs confidence), understand your need for power and control, and be aware of your needs for affirmation and importance.
And importantly, you need to find a confidant who is going to tell you honestly and openly what they think. Central to this is knowing the difference between an ally and a confidant. An ally is a strategic alliance…a confidant is a person who has few, if any, conflicts of interest with you. So probably not a 30-something adviser dependent on you for status and salary!
In the end I don’t think that Kevin Rudd had a true confidant and, because of his centralised control, he didn’t have many allies as well. This meant that when his popularity with voters dropped he wasn’t able to appropriately recognise and respond to it. Eventually this left the ALP in a position where they felt they needed to act. And the result is now history!
A tragic tale but a lesson to be learned as well.