How did I get here? I read Barbara Kellerman’s Enablers: How team Trump flunked the pandemic and failed America (2021). Kellerman has taken us to this place before in The end of Leadership (2012) and Professionalizing leadership (2018) but I’ve never felt such a strong push to abandon the study of leading. After having participated in a conversation with a small international gathering of leadership scholars and practitioners earlier today where I raised the question of why we keep talking about “leaders” and was immediately pushed to justify my position, I say it’s time to flip the conversation. The next time someone asks me to justify why we should pay more attention to followership and leadership as a continuum of active participation, my response will be, “First, let’s talk about why you believe that spotlighting leaders is so important and why, after several decades of intense study of leading and cultivation programs to support leaders, we can document so little progress in improving the quality of leadership for our world?”
Kellerman’s new book doesn’t really explore leadership to any great extent and she quite often puts “leading” and “leader” in parenthesis, drawing attention to the possible misappropriation of the terms. Instead, her focus is on Donald J. Trump’s conduct during the first six months of 2020 when COVID-19 was creeping onto the world stage and the Trump administration was denying or discounting its influence in every way possible. How did Trump do this, one might ask? He did it with the sometimes passive, but mostly active, support, encouragement, acquiescence, and yes ENABLING of those around him.
A fascinating repeated paragraph at the beginning of each chapter that profiles the role of different individuals or groups reads, “… specifically, as it pertained to the pandemic – during the period January through June 2020. Each was in some way directly involved in how the president managed America’s worst public health crisis in over a century. Each, then, was an enabler, a follower who allowed or even encouraged Trump to engage in, and then to persist in behaviors that were destructive.” It read like a lawyer presenting the prosecution’s case in a criminal proceeding with Kellerman indicting: the Vice President and Cabinet; Senior Advisors; Senators, Governors, Media; and Medical experts. There were very few within these ranks who resisted, who stood up to and challenged Trump; it took all of them to perpetuate the ruse of Trump leading effectively in a pandemic war, a premise embraced among Trump's conservative base to this day.
This is a book for every citizen to read and, especially, for every leadership scholar and educator to absorb. A great deal of the evidence Kellerman presents is public record, and now being analyzed more deeply by the Senate Judiciary Committee and other groups. Kellerman does a masterful job of putting the pieces together, dissecting the roles, and recounting the chronology of early 2020. I won’t ruin the fun of the book by quoting further because one has to read it to actually get the full impact of what Kellerman tells us. She describes how Trump prepared for what he could not have known would happen, and wished had not happened. The job of preparing for such a period of incompetence at such a dire time was polished over many years of Trump’s business dealings, his lies, his manipulations, and his base narcissism. As Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks often reminded us, the best strategy for Trump was to “Let Trump be Trump” and he was – why would anyone be surprised?
It’s time that leadership scholars and educators face the reality that we are not making progress when such a graphic example as Donald J. Trump’s Presidency, with such dramatic lack of preparedness and temperament, is laid open before us. It wasn’t just about Trump, it was about the legions of others who enabled him to take the U.S.A. to the brink. I pray the Kellerman’s book is a best seller and that we will learn from this very difficult case. We must honor and cultivate active followership that complements shared leadership of people trying to make the world a better place to live instead of continuing to glorify individual "leaders" who take us down destructive paths that put all at risk.
