Why Organizations Fail

It does little good to relive Donald Trump’s latest offensive tweets (after all, you never know what he’ll send out at 3 a.m.). The truth is that Trump doesn’t use Twitter to communicate; he uses it to cyberbully a nation. The results have been toxic—respect for America is down around the world, he’s sowed seeds of doubt about the nation’s electoral process, civil servants, courts, and, of course, the media. According to Ezra Klein on Vox: “Six months into his term, Trump’s policy achievements are few and thin, but he has coarsened our politics, shown the power of shamelessness, undermined our faith in each other and ourselves, modeled behavior we would punish children for exhibiting, and implicated all of us in the running fiasco of his presidency. He has diminished the country he promised to make great.”

Trump’s bullying tactics cannot be denied. Charles M. Blow took it a step further in an op-ed in the New York Times, when he pointed out that Trump’s ongoing rants reveal exactly how he defiles the office of president.  “Rather than rising to the honor of the office, Trump has lowered the office with his whiny, fragile, vindictive pettiness. The presidency has been hijacked.

What Trump is doing to America goes on every day in organizations led by bully bosses. What really jumps out for me is how insecure they really are, hiding behind a dangerous veneer of abrasiveness. Their biggest fear is being exposed as frauds who prey on people's fear—using hate as a weapon.

Andrew Faas is the author of From Bully to Bull’s-Eye: Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire

Illustration credit: BIGSTOCK 

The Bully-in-Chief Strikes Again—Very Predictable!

Donald Trump’s behavior and beliefs constantly befuddle everyone—the news media, pundits, academic experts and the average person are constantly trying to decode what he’s really saying and what he really believes. There’s a good reason that this is impossible, which David Roberts makes crystal clear on Vox in his insightful article, “The question of what Donald Trump ‘really believes’ has no answer.”

According to Roberts, there’s a simple reason that Trump defies logic—he doesn’t believe anything.  Roberts writes:

“The question presumes that Trump has beliefs, “views” that reflect his assessment of the facts, “positions” that remain stable over time, woven into some sort of coherent worldview. There is no evidence that Trump has such things. That is not how he uses language.”

He goes on to explain that when Trump speaks, it’s to position himself as dominant in the culture’s social hierarchy.  He has no interest in, or ability to share, an exchange of ideas; he only uses language to assert his superiority. “This essential distinction explains why Trump has so flummoxed the media and its fact-checkers; it’s as though they are critiquing the color choices of someone who is colorblind,” Roberts writes.

This is also why Trump is so very predictable. There are no deeper traits; he fits the bully archetype to a T, never digressing for a moment from this persona. This is why, as I wrote on Monday in my post, “Donald Trump: Bully, Coward and Traitor,” you don’t need to be an oracle or an expert to figure out what he will do next. This is why I dedicated an entire chapter of my book, From Bully to Bull’s-Eye: Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire, to Trump as the very definition of what it means to be a bully.  And this is why I’ve been such a vocal advocate for psychological evaluation of senior executives before putting them in positions of power. That’s just as true for the C-suite as it is for the highest executive office in the land. Any company thinking of doing less should ask itself this—could you really afford to have a Donald Trump run your company?

Photo credit: Notey