Leadership: Top Down, Consensus or Otherwise?

We won’t know – really know – until the post-Biden Administration books are written (by Blinken, Austin, Milley, Burns et al) how the decision was made to quickly leave Afghanistan, despite the chaos that would inevitably ensue.

Did they disagree with the decision? Did they advocate against it? Did they persuade President Biden to proceed as he did? Did Biden actually want to know what they thought or, as an extremely experienced foreign policy figure, did he simply say “That’s it. Now just make it happen”? We might not ever know what really happened, even if Biden gets to write his own memoir.

How do leaders—whether they be presidents, government officials, corporate executives and lesser figures—make their difficult decisions. And perhaps more importantly, how should they? Harry Truman famously had a sign on the resolute desk that said read, “the buck stops here,” and President Biden, to his credit, took ultimate responsibility for the arguably disastrous American evacuation echoing that Truman phrase.?

However, this is about more than just who bears ultimate responsibility for a decision that went badly. This is about how he reached the decision in the first place. Yes, Truman was ultimately “responsible” for deploying the A-Bomb. But what did his subordinates tell him? Did he ask them? Was he willing to listen if they disagreed? And did his subordinates believe that if they disagreed with him too frequently, he’d stop listening to them altogether (and maybe they’d lose their places in his administration)? These are our questions as they relate to Biden and Afghanistan.??

In an recent WSJ editorial titled, “All the President’s Yes-Men,” Tevi Troy explains how President Kennedy (whose advisors failed to play devil’s advocate when he made the horrendous decision regarding the Bay of Pigs), changed his style of leadership to create a group that could debate national security issues openly—even with the President. In other words, not the kind of thing that President Trump would have embraced at all, nor something Lyndon Johnson presumably relied upon during Vietnam. Hubris is a roadblock when it comes to effective leadership. Always!

But what’s the broader message here about leadership generally?

Leaders learn. And the only way they can learn is to listen. Power, as in, “I’m in charge and don’t need to listen,” is not leadership—despite its conflation during the Trump years.

Leaders empower others. Listening and taking good counsel is a critical form of empowerment. “Yes-people” are not empowered. They are mere puppets.

The more difficult the decision one must make, the more a leader needs to be surrounded by advisors and experts who are prepared challenge ideas and provide alternate pathways to solution. An effective leader must be willing to listen and solicit divergent views. Learning and listening through the empowerment of others shifts the paradigm.

Given the current state of the world and the seeming lack of listening and empowering of advisors that characterize some great leaders, how far back do we have to go to learn from the example of the greats?

The Bible is always a good start and, sure enough, we have the example of Moses—recognized by three major religions as one of the greatest leaders in history. The truth is that if you follow the text, Moses had some extremely difficult challenges in leading the Israelites, and he rarely had any advisors to provide him with sound and wise counsel. Moses turned to God frequently, but that didn’t seem to help much either. That is, until his father-in-law, Jethro, helped him create a governing system that worked, making Jethro one of the first counselors on record.

Still, it seems Moses was the exception, not the rule. So, while we might learn from his example, history is rather sparse on the issue of empowering leaders that are willing to listen. It generally tends to skew towards the all-powerful siloed autocrat.

Take Julius Caesar, for example. He stubbornly listened to no one. He acted against the will of all. And, as we know, he paid the ultimate price. We enshrine his mistaking power for leadership in the phrase “Iacta alea est”— “let the die be cast,” sometimes rephrased to “crossing the Rubicon.” Essentially, Caesar was saying: “There’s no turning back. I’ve listened to no one and will listen to no one.”

Moses, on the other hand, took Jethro’s help—hard as it might have been for him to do so. Caesar took nobody’s. And this seems to be the way history unfolded. In fact, in 1505, Machiavelli memorialized the problem. He told leaders to open themselves to several advisors that they could trust and empower them to speak openly and truthfully in private (though never in public). He even went so far to say that the only way to protect leaders against sycophants is indeed, to empower advisors to speak freely and spontaneously on every topic, while making certain that the public would never know that the leader listened to anyone else. One guesses Machiavelli got it half right!

Jumping ahead to modern times, one of the most inspirational “listening and empowering” leaders was Nelson Mandela. He embraced the World Bank to tutor himself and his advisors on the basics of good economic policy. In doing so, Mandela was able to curb the Marxist bent of many of his close advisors and establish a market-oriented economy for South Africa, primarily because he empowered the World Bank’s leadership to speak up and show the way.

To summarize, Epictetus said it best: “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” Good leaders grasp this intuitively, e.g., Moses and Mandela. Power mongers don’t, e.g., Trump.

The issue, therefore, is not at all about a top-down or bottom-up or consensus. It’s about a leader who listens and empowers the true and honest givers of valuable advice.

The Biden/Afghanistan fiasco in the late summer of 2021 is only a starting point, an isolated episode in world history, employed here to analyze this much broader issue. Nonetheless, when the dust finally settles—and it may not be for a long while—the study of leadership will undoubtedly be advanced by learning whether the debacle could have been avoided by better leadership, or if it was simply inevitable given the current state of affairs and “listening” leadership skills.

Co-Written with Joel Cohen

My friend, Joel Cohen, a former state and federal prosecutor, practices white collar criminal defense law at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan in New York.?He is a frequent writer and author of “Blindfolds Off: Judges on How They Decide” (ABA Publishing, 2014). He is also an adjunct professor at both Fordham and Cardozo Law Schools.