Good Leaders Seek The Truth – Trump Fires The Messenger

Forbes

3 days ago

Donald Trump continued to deliver a master class in bad leadership this week with his firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, following the release of a disappointing jobs report.
Accurate, unbiased, and unfiltered data is the fuel that good decision-making runs on, and there is no more important job a leader has than making good decisions.
Consider two historical examples: Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler.
Both men spent a lot of time in their respective bunkers during World War II, and those subterranean headquarters spoke volumes about their respective leadership styles.
Fortunately for posterity, the British government preserved the Whitehall bunker that served as Churchill's headquarters exactly as it was at the war's end – right down to the half-smoked cigar in the ashtray on his desk. I first visited what are officially known as the Cabinet War Rooms in 2014. What struck me as I wandered through the narrow, dimly lit hallways was the sheer amount of information crammed into this small, heavily fortified space. The walls, including those of Churchill's bedchamber, were covered with maps and reports. They showed everything from the current position of Allied forces in every theater of the war to the number of V-2 rockets striking London each week.
Those missiles and the Luftwaffe bombers that preceded them may have forced the prime minister underground, but the reams of data that covered the walls of his bunker and the tangled telephone and telegraph lines snaking through the labyrinthine structure made it clear he never stopped scanning the horizon for new insights and information.
Churchill's bunker may have been sealed behind stout blast doors, but it was hardly a vacuum. Rather, it was a nerve center that sucked in information and ideas from around the world, giving the prime minister the intellectual ammunition he needed to help save the world from fascism.
The Soviets quickly destroyed Hitler's Berlin bunker after capturing the city in 1945 to prevent it from becoming a fascist shrine. However, they did take a few pictures before blowing it up, and the contrast those photographs reveal is striking.
Yes, there were a few maps on display in the conference room. But most of the walls, including those of Hitler's private chamber, were bare concrete – unadorned except for the odd piece of looted artwork. Hitler surrounded himself not with charts and statistics, but with icons of Germany's glorious past captured in oil paint like insects in amber.
When Hitler's generals intruded with the increasingly dismal news of the outside world, he would rail against them, denouncing them as incompetent, and ridiculing them in one of his infamous tirades.
I spend most of my time teaching business, government, and military leaders how to make better decisions in today's complex and uncertain world. What I teach is called Red Team Thinking, and it is based on a methodology first developed by the military and intelligence community. I first learned decision-support red teaming at the U.S. Army's Red Team Leader Course at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, and one of the first lessons I was taught there was that you can't red team in the Führerbunker.
That is why dictators like Hitler always fail in the end – because to be a successful leader, you need to hear bad news, disconfirming information, and uncomfortable truths. You also need to consider different viewpoints and perspectives.
Good leaders do not run away from the truth; they seek it out like a bloodhound on the trail of an escaped convict.
When you fire people for telling you the truth, your subordinates will stop quickly learn to keep their mouth shut – or worse, distort the truth so that it matches what you want to hear.
As a leader, you need to surround yourself with people who are willing to tell you the truth, no matter how hard it may be to hear. You need to surround yourself with people who will tell you when you are wrong. You also need to surround yourself with people who think differently and offer different perspectives for you to consider because as Gen. George S. Patton famously observed, 'If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.'
The goal of red teaming is to ensure that leaders receive this valuable input so that they can make the best decisions possible. That is what the Army's red teaming school taught us how to do. That school was closed by President Trump earlier this year.
As I said, you can't red team in the Führerbunker.