Charlie Baker's Leadership

OpEd in MetroWest Daily News. March 1 2015.

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/article/20150228/Opinion/150226405

It is no longer on line. Here it is:

The Governor Of Massachusetts

 

Martin G. Evans

Professor Emeritus, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

 

[450 words]

 

It is during a crisis that leaders show their mettle. Governor Baker has failed that test. His errors have been of omission and of commission.

 

He failed, as Governor Patrick did before him, to understand what was going on several levels down under his jurisdiction.  He did not find out the problems of the T by talking to General Manager Scott until those failures were blasted across the headlines of every newspaper in the state. Deval Patrick had similar problems in the lower levels of the Health Portfolio and the Family portfolio.

 

The leader needs to get accurate information from the lowest levels of the organization. It is very difficult to do this. For several reasons. First, direct subordinates may try to buffer their boss from bad news. Second, at each level of the organization, members in the hierarchy interpret information, and even recognize it, in a form that suits heir own purposes. That may not suit the purposes of those at the top of the organization who are interested in strategic and political issues rather than the technical and administrative issues that lower members of the organization focus on.. The Governor has only recently talked to  Scott of the T and the managers of the firm contracted to run the Commuter trains. He tried to justify this by saying that he wished to abide by the lines of command. What nonsense, lines of command are suitable for control in simple,  stable, placid environments not the crisis situation that we faced before the first big storm.

 

In his public appearances, the Governor has excoriated the T and the Commuter rail system. That is wrong. A true leader never tears a strip off his subordinates in public.  If necessary, that is always done in private. In addition, he did it on the basis of little inside information. He had not talked to the principal actors in the drama yet. Scott of the T showed how out of touch the governor was when she described the heroic workers of the T shoveling snow, thawing out frozen switches with blow-torches, and digging out trains, buses and bus stops on over 700 miles of bus and above ground train routes; in a typical day there are over 2000 scheduled subway trips carrying 650,000 passengers, and over thirteen thousand bus trips carrying about 360,000 passengers..  She demonstrated an under-appreciated role of leader: being an umbrella, to prevent the crap from on high falling on your people.

 

Leadership expert, Warren Bennis, has argued that effective leaders learn from the crucible of crisis. Let us hope that Governor Baker is a quick study.; so far he has been a miserable whiner.