Leadership Crisis and Covid-19

The coronavirus crisis is highlighting the enormous deficits that we have in terms of leadership and public management throughout the world, in general, and in Spain in particular, which is the case that I know first-hand. There is not yet enough perspective to draw definitive conclusions, although some lines of work and general ideas are arising, such as that the countries governed by women, small and decentralized, are obtaining better results than the larger countries, governed by men with a strong tendency to a centralized power. I exclude China from this comparison because it is a country with serious deficiencies in democracy, civil rights, and respect for the environment. China plays by its own tricky rules and is by no means a base for comparison. At least this is my opinion.

On the other hand, I do not want to unfairly underestimate the enormous difficulty of the situation that our politicians have to face, a very complex situation of which there are no close references and therefore everything that is done and decided is new and subject to error and learning. Those of us who are in the business world know that any new project is subject to errors,  and that in a learning process through several iterations the desired result is achieved. This process requires methodology, time and patience, aspects that in a crisis like the Covid-19 have not been available.

Nor do I want to discuss the professional capacity of people who are engaged in politics, and I accept, as a work premise, that this capacity is similar to that of any other field of professional activity in any of our complex societies of the 21st century

For this reason I am not going to refer to the possible errors made, which I consider to be totally excusable, acceptable and normal in a highly complex process, but rather to the way in which the decisions that lead to these errors are made.

People make decisions based on a balance between our technical competence, based on our previous experience and our character (like the character in a film or a novel. The character we play in our life. In ancient Latin “ personae”, mask).

The character is a mental structure, largely unconscious, that is created in childhood, around the age of 5, by internalizing (and identifying with) the social models, mandates and beliefs that society, in general, and the school system and our family, in particular,  instill in us through a system of conditional rewards and punishments. The character is an artificial mental structure, which psychologists call the ego and which in the Hindu tradition call Maya.

The opposite of the character is authenticity (genuineness), understood as an adjective that defines the person who tells the truth, accepts responsibility for their feelings and behaviors, is sincere and consistent with themselves and with others and who acts with generosity, compassion and total dedication and commitment for the common good, rather than for the immediate and concrete interest of his character.

All of us constantly move along a continuous line in which on the extreme left is total authenticity and on the opposite extreme is the entire character. Maturing in life involves a journey from the highest level of activation of the character, with all the ambitions and selfishness of adolescence and youth, to a life of greater authenticity as adults. And, everybody in his own life, is more or less aware and more or less active in managing this process, which in the spiritual traditions they call liberation.

 To make it simple, authenticity is based on truth, generosity and commitment, the character is based on the estimation of personal cost and benefit.

If we return to the field of politics, we could classify our current representatives in this fictional continuum that I have defined. To help the reader with an example, there would be Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela at one end and Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the other.

In our current days, the great problem of politics, and consequently of the administration of public affairs, is that the politicians who reach some power are people with a huge lack of authenticity. Politics has become an exclusive game of characters, totally artificial, based on electoral calculations, of power games, of irreconcilable friends and enemies, of a partisan and lying press and of fake news supported by the power structures.

Someone will tell me that this has always been the case and that today we have much more democracy and freedom than our parents had. And it is true, but when citizens strive to achieve higher levels of authenticity, responsibility for civil rights, preservation of nature or committed social work, the supposedly spectacular movie, that our "leaders" want to show us, becomes a totally disappointing series B production.

The problem with the mistakes committed in managing the Covid-19 crisis does not come from the lack of capacity of the governments nor from the lack of dedication or hard work, it comes from their enormous lack of authenticity. Politicians operate in a cheating and lying frame of mind that they are not even fully aware of.

By the way, if women score better than men in this crisis management results, it is because they are much more authentic.