Colin Powell on Leadership
Category Archives: Blame
Trump considering suspending funding to WHO
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President Trump said Tuesday that he would consider placing a hold on funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), expressing grievances with its handling of the novel coronavirus.
“They missed the call. They could have called it months earlier. They would have known, and they should have known, and they probably did know,” Trump told reporters at a White House press briefing, suggesting the WHO failed to sufficiently warn the global community about the virus.
“We’re going to be looking into that very carefully, and we’re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO,” Trump continued. “We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it, and we’re going to see. It’s a great thing if it works, but when they call every shot wrong, that’s not good.”
Pressed later by a reporter on whether it was a good idea to put a hold on funding during a global pandemic, the president clarified that he was considering suspending funding to the WHO.
“I’m not going to say I’m going to do it,” Trump said. “We will look at ending funding.”
The United States is the largest contributor to the WHO’s budget. The president’s fiscal 2021 budget request proposed slashing funding to the WHO, a body of the United Nations responsible for international public health, from $122 million to about $58 million.
The president said the WHO seemed to be “very biased towards China” and accused the organization of disagreeing with his travel restriction on flights coming in from China. He suggested the organization was blind to the extent of the outbreak in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, where the virus originated.
The WHO said in early February that widespread travel bans that interfere with international travel and trade were not necessary to prevent the spread of COVID-19, days after the Trump administration announced it would restrict travel coming into the U.S. from China. It did not take particular issue with the president’s travel restriction.
“They actually criticized and disagreed with my travel ban at the time I did it, and they were wrong. They’ve been wrong about a lot of things. They had a lot of information early, and they didn’t — they seemed to be very China-centric. We have to look into it,” Trump told reporters.
When a reporter asked Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to answer a question on the WHO, Trump interjected before he answered, saying Fauci “respects the WHO, and I think that’s good.”
“But they did give us some pretty bad play-calling,” Trump said.
The remarks, expanding on a critical tweet he sent earlier Tuesday, come amid growing criticism among conservatives of the WHO’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. Some have accused the organization of leaving other nations unprepared for the virus.
Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) last week called on WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to resign, after reports emerged that the U.S. intelligence community had concluded China underreported its count of coronavirus cases. McSally accused the WHO of helping China conceal the extent of the outbreak.
Trump has faced criticism for at first downplaying the threat from the coronavirus, and his administration has been scrutinized for early delays in testing that hampered the overall response. Trump has often pointed to his early action restricting travel from China as a sign his administration was quick to confront the outbreak.
Ezekiel Emanuel, a special adviser to the director general of the WHO, was critical of Trump’s remarks on the coronavirus at the end of February, saying he found much of what Trump said at his first press briefing on the domestic virus outbreak to be “incoherent.”
Cartoon – Shared Leadership Today
Decentralized leadership raises questions about Trump coronavirus response
The rotating cast of officials appearing behind President Trump to detail the government’s response to the coronavirus are leading to new criticisms that they reflect a scattered approach from the White House that too often leaves states fending for themselves.
Top Trump administration officials say the appearances by a broad range of administration officials shows the “all of government” undertaken to combat the coronavirus.
But some current and former government officials see a disconnected strategy where it can be unclear who’s in charge of what or whether there is a coordinated long-term plan.
The shifting assignments and addition of officials with unclear responsibilities have contributed to the inefficient distribution of key supplies, those officials argue, which has been exacerbated by Trump’s insistence that the federal government merely play a supporting role for states.
“The approach that’s been taken at the White House with respect to critical inputs – protective gear, testing kits, ventilators, reagents, skilled personnel – there has never been a clear plan,” said Steve Morrison, director of Global Health Policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“And the alternative has been a very haphazard patchwork approach that has gone from overpromising and underdelivering multiple times and left the states on their own,” added Morrison, a former Clinton administration official.
In recent days, more than a dozen administration officials have appeared behind Trump at the daily briefings.
Attorney General William Barr rolled out new drug interdiction efforts; Defense Secretary Mark Esper spoke about the military pitching in while retaining combat readiness; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin touched on economic relief for businesses; senior adviser Jared Kushner outlined partnerships with the private sector; and top trade adviser Peter Navarro elaborated on the use of the Defense Production Act.
A White House spokesman rejected criticism that the effort has been disconnected. He identified Vice President Pence as the person in charge of coordinating the entire response, and listed dozens of actions taken by the administration that include travel restrictions, disaster declarations for states and funding for businesses and families impacted by the virus.
“As both the President and Vice President have said, this is a locally executed, state managed, federally supported response to a global pandemic,” deputy press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement. “Every level of government needs to deliver solutions and that is what we are doing in partnership. During these difficult times, Americans are receiving comfort, hope and resources from their President, as well as their local officials, because this is an all-of-America effort.”
The White House has shifted responsibilities as it scrambled to get its arms around the magnitude of the pandemic, which Trump downplayed for January and most of February.
The White House created a coronavirus task force at the end of January, putting Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar in charge.
Trump tapped Pence in late February to oversee the federal response as it became apparent the virus was spreading domestically. Within days, Pence was identifying himself as the leader of the task force, pushing Azar aside and adding officials from across the government to help steer the response effort.
In the weeks since, Azar and Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have been largely absent from public briefings, and the CDC has stopped holding its own briefings for reporters even as the public health crisis worsened.
Kushner made his first appearance in the briefing room Thursday, where he elaborated on the work he’s done to facilitate the supply chain at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to try and get ventilators and other equipment out to states in need.
The president’s son-in-law has drawn scrutiny for his increased portfolio in responding to the virus given his lack of medical background. But Kushner rejected the idea that he is operating a “shadow task force.”
“I would just say very simply — look, the president asked the vice president to run the task force. The vice president asked me to assist,” Kushner said. “I’ve been serving really at the direction of the vice president, and he’s asked me to get involved in different projects.”
FEMA was put in charge of organizing the response to states, but only in late March, forcing an agency typically tasked with targeting relief toward a region reeling from wildfires or hurricanes to quickly grasp the logistics of responding to a nationwide pandemic.
But Kushner and some of his allies have set up shop with FEMA to mobilize the private sector. While officials describe the effort as well intentioned, it has further clouded who was responsible for getting desperately needed ventilators and personal protective gear to states facing shortages.
Trump put Navarro in charge of managing the Defense Production Act to push companies to produce essential supplies. And while Navarro spoke at length about that effort from the White House on Thursday, Trump has been the one needling companies like General Motors and 3M on Twitter and invoking the act to ramp up manufacturing of masks and ventilators.
“There have been so many iterations. Who’s in charge has been a constantly evolving item,” said one government official who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
That has been a particular point of frustration for states. Governors in both parties have pushed for the federal government to use a stronger hand in leading the process of procuring equipment so that states aren’t forced to bid against each other. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) last week urged Trump to be more like Tom Brady than a backup quarterback.
But Trump has been adamant that he views the federal government’s role as secondary, going as far as to blame states who failed to foresee the pandemic for their own shortages.
“Remember, we are a backup for them. The complainers should have been stocked up and ready long before this crisis hit,” Trump tweeted Thursday. “Other states are thrilled with the job we have done. Sending many Ventilators today, with thousands being built. 51 large cargo planes coming in with medical supplies. Prefer sending directly to hospitals.”
Kushner adopted that tone on Thursday when he chided state leaders for not having a full accounting of their supplies before suggesting the national stockpile wasn’t intended for states to use.
Trump’s criticism of states; preparedness for the pandemic may be difficult for some local leaders to swallow, given the president was still comparing the death toll from the coronavirus to the flu and automobile accidents as recently as two weeks ago.
The president has adopted a more somber tone in the past week as the White House rolled out grim projections that show hundreds of thousands of Americans could die from the virus even with strong mitigation measures.
But public health experts and former health officials have expressed skepticism that Trump is thinking far enough ahead to address the supply chain and medical problems the virus will pose in the weeks and months to come.
“There is a basic playbook for how to deal with an epidemic,” said Thomas Frieden, who served as CDC director during the Obama administration.
“You have the incident manager, they control the response, they are aligned with political leadership. They tee up the decisions to be made, there are policy decisions to be made,” he said. “I don’t see that happening. That makes me really worried. I don’t see us thinking a week, two weeks, a month ahead.”
Ike on Leadership
Cartoon – Making Snap Decisions
Cartoon – I finished the Project Plan
Great Leaders Are Thoughtful and Deliberate, Not Impulsive and Reactive
You set aside the first hour of your day to work on a strategy document that you’ve been putting off for a week. You haven’t been disciplined about getting to it, but you’ve had one crisis after another to deal with in the past week. Now, finally, you’ve carved out 90 early morning minutes to work on it.
First, however, you take a quick peek at the email that has piled up in your inbox overnight. Before you know it, you’ve used up the whole 90 minutes responding to emails, even though none of them were truly urgent.
By the time you walk into your next meeting, you’re feeling frustrated that you failed to stick by your plan. This meeting is a discussion with a direct report about the approach he’ll be taking in a negotiation with an important client. You have strong views about how best to deal with the situation, but you’ve promised yourself that you will be open and curious rather than directive and judgmental. You’re committed, after all, to becoming a more empowering manager.
Instead, you find yourself growing even more irritable as he describes an approach that doesn’t feel right to you. Impulsively, you jump in with a sharp comment. He reacts defensively. You worry for a moment — and rightly so — that you cut him off too quickly, but you tell yourself that you’ve worked with this client for years, the outcome is critical, and you don’t have time to hear your direct report’s whole explanation. He leaves your office looking hurt and defeated.
Welcome to the invisible drama that operates inside us all day long at work, mostly outside our consciousness. Most of us believe we have one self. In reality, we have two different selves, run by two separate operating systems, in different parts of our brain.
The self that we’re most aware of — the one that planned to work diligently on the strategy document and listen patiently to your direct report — is run by our pre-frontal cortex and mediated through our parasympathetic nervous system. This is the self we prefer to present to the world. It’s calm, measured, rational, and capable of making deliberate choices.
The second self is run by our amygdala, a small almond-shaped cluster of nuclei in our mid-brain and it is mediated by our sympathetic nervous system. Our second self seizes control any time we begin to perceive threat or danger. It’s reactive, impulsive, and operates largely outside our conscious control.
This second self serves us well if a lion is coming at us, but the threats we experience today are mostly to our sense of worth and value. They can feel nearly as terrifying as those to our survival, but the danger we experience isn’t truly life-threatening. Responding to them as if they are only make things worse.
It’s in these moments that we often use our highest cognitive capacities to justify our worst behaviors. When we feel we’ve fallen short, we instinctively summon up our “inner lawyer” — a term coined by author Jonathan Haidt — to defend us.
Our inner lawyer is expert at rationalizing, avoiding, deflecting, dissembling, denying, disparaging, attacking, and blaming others for our missteps and shortcomings. The inner lawyer works overtime to silence our own inner critic, and to counter criticism from others. All this inner turmoil narrows and consumes our attention and drains our energy.
The problem is that most organizations spend far more time focused on generating external value than they do attending to people’s internal sense of value. Doing so requires navigational skills that most leaders have never been taught, much less mastered. The irony is that ignoring people’s internal experience leads them to spend more energy defending their value, leaving them less energy to create value.
In our work with leaders, we’ve discovered that the antidote to reacting from the second self is to develop the capacity to observe our two selves in real time. You can’t change what you don’t notice, but noticing can be a powerful tool for shifting from defending our value to creating value.
A well-cultivated self-observer allows us to watch our dueling selves without reacting impulsively. It also makes it possible to ask our inner lawyer to stand down whenever it rises up to argue our case to our inner and outer critics. Finally, the self-observer can acknowledge, without judgment, that we are both our best and our worst selves, and then make deliberate rather than reactive choices about how to respond in challenging situations.
To improve your capacity to self-observe, begin with negative emotions such as impatience, frustration, and anger. When you feel them arising, it’s a strong signal that you’re sliding into the second self. Simply naming these emotions as they arise is a way to gain some distance from them.
Also, watch out for times when you feel you’re digging in your heels. The absolute conviction that you’re right and the compulsion to take action are both strong indicators that you‘re feeling a sense of threat and danger.
In our work, we provide leaders with small daily doses of support — reminders to pay attention to what they’re feeling and thinking. We’ve also found it helpful to build small groups that meet at regular intervals so leaders can share their experiences. A blend of support, community, connection and accountability helps offset our shared impulse to stop noticing, push away discomfort, and revert to survival behaviors in the face of perceived threats to our value. A good starting place is to find a colleague you trust to be your accountability partner, and to seek regular feedback from one another.
Finally, it’s important to ask yourself two key questions in challenging moments: “What else could be true here?” and “What is my responsibility in this?” By regularly questioning your conclusions, you’re offsetting your confirmation bias — the instinct to look for evidence that supports what you already believe. By always looking for your own responsibility, you’re resisting the instinct to blame others and play victim and focusing instead on what you have the greatest ability to influence — your own behavior.
A deceptively simple premise lies at the heart of this deliberate set of practices: see more to be more. Rather than simply getting better at what they already do, transformational leaders balance courage and humility in order to grow and develop every day.
Cartoon – Finished the Project Plan
Cartoon – Focusing on the Larger Goal
HENRY KOTULA 