Understanding Donald Trump's Leadership Style

President Trump has been labeled with all sorts of psychological abnormalities, all of which are baseless theories. The REALITY is that his natural strengths lead to his unique and powerful leadership style.

My recent research has suggested that human design includes 5 distinct components. These are Spiritual, Emotional, Logical, Physical, and Historical. These can be represented by the mnemonic, SELPH. Spiritual relates to the Soul, Emotional relates to the quality of our character, Logical relates to our Mind (and Faith) , Physical relates to our Body, and HiStorical relates to our unique areas of strength that form the basis of our personal human Story, meaning, and purpose in life. These personal strengths that support our Story can be discovered through well-developed assessment tools such as those available from Gallup’s Strengthsfinder  at https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/strengthsfinder.aspx or https://high5test.com/test/.

Gallup has identified 32 specific native strengths that humans possess in various levels. The assessment returns the top 5 strengths that impact our approach to life and leadership.

For example, my top 5 strengths are: Learning, Ideation, Strategy, Beliefs, and Connection. I describe my career as having been a Disruptive Ontology Champion – DOC. In every job I’ve ever done, starting as a young teen, I’ve promoted Disruptive innovation that sought to change the status quo in order to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability for the organization. My combination of Learning, Ideation and Strategy strengths make it possible for me to quickly see better solutions to current problems, instantly understand strategic ways to make improvements, and provide long-lasting solutions to current problems. These abilities are generally not received in a positive way by individuals in the organization that helped build the systems that comprise the current environment.

For example, on one occasion at a large gas & electric energy company, my investigation of customer billing systems discovered that gas costs were not being correctly calculated, resulting in a loss of $1.5 million per year to the company. The billing system was old and had been patched many times. Several individuals had looked at the problem and determined that the problem could not be solved without significant effort. The IT manager had written a memo to the executive leadership team that the problem could not be easily solved, and they were going to replace the entire system in 5 years, so it wasn’t worth fixing the problem. My Learning, Ideation, and Strategy strengths enabled me to propose a simple fix that could be implemented in a few hours, saving $7.5 Million over the next 5 years. My proposal caused a heated exchange between my Vice President and the Manager of IT. The VP won and directed me to fix the problem.

I met with the primary programmer and explained the simple correction to a single formula that was incorrect. That formula had been duplicated several places in the software. After our meeting, the programmer spent several hours tracing all the locations of the formula. Two days later, the code was fixed, and the problem was solved. Although I identified, proposed, and got the problem solved, generating significant money for the company, I was viewed as a problem employee by many in the organization.

 Now, to Donald Trump. Based on his amazing business career and presidential activities, I suspect that an assessment of his native strengths would reveal a similar pattern of behavior. He can quickly assess problematic situations, easily learn the details, quickly propose solutions, and strategically determine how to move forward. These behaviors are particularly irritating to anyone in the Washington DC culture who have had a hand in maintaining the status quo in the past (the SWAMP). Emotional Resistance to his leadership in an expected response to this disruptive problem-solving approach to leadership.

If you are interested in learning more about the components of SELPH developed by Dr. Reimer, please see the following Link.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/your-selph-diamond-cross-dr-dwight-reimer/

October 16, 2020

 Dr. Dwight Reimer