Stay Calm and Carry On!
Op ed by Haney Hong
Last week just before Thanksgiving, we rendered departure honors for yet another official in the Defense Department as former Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer left office. While his resignation (or firing) probably triggered some to believe we have a leadership crisis in Washington, the truth is that America has followership problem.
Folks in the media have already described this latest rapid departure as another example of a crisis of leadership in the Trump Administration. As expected and on cue, there were the pundits who excitedly defended the president and reiterated that his appointees serve at his pleasure. They say there’s no crisis in leadership – just another day upholding the Constitution.
The core issue is, whether we have a crisis of leadership or not, there’s one thing for certain: we have a followership problem. Instead of freaking out about our leaders, we all just need to calm down and look in the mirror for a second. We all are citizens who have followership responsibilities.
Now you might be asking: what is followership? I’ll suggest we avoid the academic mumbo jumbo but suffice it to say that most of us probably have an idea of what followership is, especially the good kind.
We’ve all been followers behind other leaders at our workplaces -- even CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have bosses called a board. And whether we work in a blue or white collar job, we all have our own senses for who are the good team players and who are the bad.
America just finished the Thanksgiving holiday, and we’ve all seen good and bad followership in our families at home. For those who are leaders in families, you’ll understand me when I say that I hope my family doesn’t sit politely at the dinner table because they were forced to do so. We want family to be polite because everyone appreciates intrinsically why that’s important for family bonding.
We’ve all seen that when there are bad team players at work or the awkward family who disrupts holidays, leaders cannot lead effectively. There are, at best, too many hiccups when followers don’t follow well, and in the worst case scenarios, sabotage.
All of our elected and appointed leaders at the national level -- from President Trump to former-Secretary of the Navy Spencer and from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to former-Secretary of Defense Mattis – get chronically interrupted in their attempts to lead us forward. They get stopped by us the everyday citizens, the followers.
Regrettably, this interrupted leadership due to bad followership is even happening at the local level, too. I can see as the head of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association, the local watchdog-plus-municipal think tank, that school superintendents can’t get their jobs done as their teachers strike outside the classroom. We can’t build housing and slow price growth in one of the most expensive parts of the country because there is opposition of one flavor or another on every single project out there.
Now I’m not saying that all our leaders are doing the right thing – but maybe we can give them a chance first?
It’s fair to say that we are all struggling to be good followers because the world is moving so fast. We can barely keep up with what is going on – I’m a Navy Reservist, and I heard about Spencer’s departure through the press and social media faster than the Pentagon could send a notice out. And when we can barely keep up, we just do the fight or flight thing we’ve evolved to do. Like Rebecca Costa said in 2010, we scream opposition to what we don’t understand, or we let beliefs take over our thinking without facts to back them up.
Instead of using the brains that our maker gave us to try to keep up and to choose fight or flight, let’s use our brains to recognize when we need to take it easy. That means not jumping directly on Twitter and attacking Spencer if you support Trump or attacking Trump if vice versa. Or in reference to other current affairs, it means not screaming about supporting or opposing impeachment hearings. It means waiting a moment and letting leaders try leading, even if you think it’s a mistake.
The biggest problem we actually face is us and how nutty we can get as followers. Maybe with all the seasons greetings soon to come out, we can all just calm down a bit.