Photo Credit: Education Week
Leadership lenses don’t have a political affiliation. This perspective through a leadership lens examines the authentic and anointed leadership styles to see why Kamala Harris lost the election. She seemed perfectly staged to win a landslide victory. What can we learn from her loss?
This is not an exercise to criticize Kamala Harris. The purpose here is specifically to focus on the dynamics of the loss. Please refrain from being critical of Ms. Harris, the person.
Ms. Harris should have easily won by a landslide. She was the Attorney General and a Senator from California, the most populous and richest state in America, and the vice president for almost four years. She had served in all three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. She was a woman supporting a key woman’s rights issue: abortion, in an electorate that is at least 50% female and women vote in larger numbers than men. She gave women and gender-equality-minded fathers and husbands an opportunity to make a statement that America does not discriminate against women. She was a person of mixed race and gave one more reason for the country to earn it’s race-blind credentials. The Harris campaign had access to limitless funds and had the support of the rich and powerful sponsors.
To understand why Kamala Harris did not win a landslide victory to become the President of the United States, let review two leadership styles: authentic and anointed leadership.
Authentic Leaders
Authentic leaders are instantly recognizable. Their walk, talk, and confidence are effortless and natural. Their voice, loud or soft radiates experience and wisdom.
Authentic leaders gain credibility through lived experience, hard-earned expertise, and a proven track record of navigating challenges. Their experience, learning, and skills are a result of their struggles to tackle problems, curiosity to find answers, and applying mentors’ lessons to their own capabilities. They have gone down the novice path, discovered the challenges, chosen alternatives, learned from right and wrong choices, won along the way, or paid the price and recovered. They know how to measure a situation, what criteria apply, and which outcomes are possible.
Authentic leaders know the risks and can see them developing before a situation gets out of hand. They have become the masters to be able to turn risks into opportunity and they do it so simply and naturally that they look like geniuses doing what others could not even imagine.
Authentic leaders don’t need to drum-beat their authenticity. They are legitimate owners of themselves, their lives, knowledge, expertise, time, and energy. They know the steps of the processes, people at all levels of work, and experts who are at the forefront of solving problems.
Authentic leaders observe and mentor those who seek to learn and advance. They are patient when possible and demanding when necessary. They are tolerant when appropriate and unforgiving when needed. They delegate when they trust the team and lead when the team lacks the expertise to execute a task. They know how to judge, and they make the decisions to match the urgency and gravity of the situation.
Examples
Authentic leaders are crusty old teachers who can see the fear in their students’ eyes when the student isn’t catching the lessons.
Authentic leaders are war-hardened soldiers who have seen the hardships and traumas of wars and can tell how the enemy will behave and which weapons will be effective before the first bullet is fired.
Authentic leaders are mothers who can tell in the first two minutes of picking up their children from school, how the day went without the children uttering a word. They can read their energy and enthusiasm as conveyed by their body language, eye contact, and the tone and timbre of the voice.
Anointed leaders
Anointed leaders are placed in key roles based on relationship, loyalty, obligation, or hope that they will deliver the results. Someone, an individual or a group who holds power, influence, or authority anoints the leader to direct people, procedure, or resources to deliver specified outcomes that match the anointers’ priorities.
The anointment bridges the gap between earned legitimacy which provides the evidence of success, and the hope and trust that the anointed leader, armed with the power and authority, and support and sponsorship will perform well and deliver the outcomes valued by the anointers.
While it is possible that an experienced and wise leader can miscalculate and come up short, by contrast, an inexperienced anointed leader can also find brilliant answers. Both kinds of leaders are entrusted to lead their teams to success. Still mismatches happen and the outcomes are clearly visible.
A wrongly picked anointed leader:
- Lacks confidence because he does not know the full scope of work.
- Gets defensive and is suspicious of the questioner’s intent when someone asks a question that lies in the leader’s area of responsibility, and they don’t know the answer.
- Sticks to a wrong decision rather than reading a shift in the terrain and adjusting course.
- Loses temper and reprimands people for subordination and challenging their authority when someone points this out that they could be on the wrong path.
- Doesn’t seek advice and is afraid to test or validate plans with mentors and other experts for the fear of being found deficient in knowledge, experience, or skills.
- Isolates and insulates himself with supporting cast who don’t question his judgment so they can profit and gain favor with him.
Anointed inexperienced leaders are rarely relaxed, generous in praise, open to dialog, or uplifting in actions. Consumed by their own fear, contorting to pretend to be what they are not, they fail to observe reality. Puffed up in false claims, they are rarely good at inspiring others to reach their potential.
The signs of failed anointed leadership include indecision, corruption, nepotism, scandals, reliance on poor advisors, and resistance to course correction.
Why did the nation not see Kamala Harris as an authentic leader?
She appeared more like an anointed, low-experience leader than one with the depth of experience, engagement, and enthusiasm that voters expect.
- She did not define herself and failed to take command of her leadership brand. When a friendly national television show host asked her, what she would do differently than the current leadership, she said “nothing comes to mind.” In trying to show loyalty to a sitting President, she came across as being dismissive of the leadership crisis being perceived as weak, out of touch, and lacking credibility.
- Her changing positions showed indecision. She had taken and reversed positions on important issues that impacted people’s livelihoods and quality of life. Top among them were fracking, border wall, and police funding. Replayed on social media channels, her changing positions projected her as an opportunistic candidate willing to say anything to win the election. In wanting to please all her sponsors, Harris did not take strong positions and defend them which was seen as lack of resolve and command needed in a commander and chief.
- She came across as a fearful lack-of-confidence candidate by not engaging with press and media to answer the questions about the economy, inflation, and immigration.
- She was seen as the anointed candidate of activists like George Soros, Hollywood’s rich actors like George Clooney and personalities like Beyonce, and wall street moguls like Michael Bloomberg, and corporate media like CNN and MS-NBC – relegated to do their bidding and dance like a puppet when her wealthy sponsors jerked the strings.
In a nutshell, Harris’s loss was a result of not being seen as an authentic leader.
- For any leader to win, authentic or anointed, the voters want to see a strong, decisive, confident spine on priorities, a powerful and clear voice on solving major problems, and commanding presence to overcome the barriers.
- The sponsors’ and anointers’ credibility, values, and roles matter in an anointed leader’s ability to win a presidential election.
- The candidate must present a clear view of relationships and boundaries with sponsors and anointers so that the voters have clarity about what they are choosing.
(This is the second article in the series of “Why Kamala Harris lost – ->Looking through a leadership lens” articles). The first can be found here.