Review of Barbara Kellerman’s Bad leadership: What it is, how it happens

‘The human animal resembles the baboon,’ says Kellerman. She argues that leadership and coercion are not unrelated and that without checks and balances, ‘power is certain to be abused.’  Contrasting this picture of an aggressive alpha male with the observation that most current academic studies on leadership have an optimistic bias, she offers a reminder that, ‘People in a state of nature are not, in the usual sense of the word, “good”,’ and urges a more intentional study of the dark side of leadership.

Based on her analysis of hundreds of case studies, Kellerman develops her own typology, listing seven distinct categories of bad leadership: incompetent; rigid; intemperate; callous; corrupt; insular; evil, which she illustrates with eye-opening accounts of well-known bad leaders. She then prescribes some best leadership practices, designed to constrain such baboon-ish behaviour.

For Kellerman, ‘bad’ means either ineffective, in the sense of ‘fails to produce the desired change’ or unethical, or both. She extends a broad definition of unethical to include violating ‘common codes of decency and good conduct’, emphasizing one of James MacGregor Burns’ principles, that ‘Ethical leaders put their followers’ needs before their own. Unethical leaders do not.’  This permitted range of meaning is more suggestive than Lubit’s dictionary definition of ‘breaking rules’, allowing Kellerman to address many all-too-recognizable leadership deficiencies, the more serious of which may be best explained in Transformational terms, as failures in inspiration; empowerment; trust-building; or seeking the ‘greater common good’.

However, by her own admission, both the ineffective/unethical distinction, and her own seven-fold typology are open to argument. She defends the pragmatic usefulness of these categories, but the lack of any theoretical underpinning remains a key weakness.  Lubit’s study of toxic managers and subordinates seems stronger in this regard, attempting to explain defective character traits in psychological terms and proposing emotionally intelligent responses appropriate to each related toxic behaviour, but it falls down in treating individuals in isolation.

Kellerman does at least succeed in demonstrating that followers are frequently implicated in the sins of the leader. She abandons the simple trait model, recognizing that leadership – good or bad – is better described, as Northouse would have it, as, ‘a transactional event that occurs between the leader and the followers.’ She urges us to: Resist the dominant model – the leader-centred model – and embrace a more holistic one. Leaders should be looked at only in tandem with their followers.

However her case studies remain at a descriptive or, at best, diagnostic level, and the closing sections for each (entitled ‘The benefit of hindsight’) merely restate what went wrong, stopping well short of explanatory power. After a detailed account of Bill Clinton’s inadequate response to the Rwandan genocide, Kellerman concludes that, standing by and doing nearly nothing while eight hundred thousand people were being slaughtered in three months’ time was not acceptable.

Kellerman’s analysis of Bad Leadership is a straightforward and sometimes fascinating read and her categories of badness do provide a useful framework for talking about leadership problems.

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