The details of mental capacity
What qualities does one need to be a good leader? Prudence Gourguechon discovered that it’s not easy to find definitive answers to that question.
Although there are volumes devoted to outlining criteria for psychiatric disorders, there is surprisingly little psychiatric literature defining mental capacity, even less on the particular abilities required for serving in positions of great responsibility. Despite the thousands of articles and books written on leadership, primarily in the business arena, I have found only one source where the capacities necessary for strategic leadership are clearly and comprehensively laid out: the U.S. Army’s “Field Manual 6-22 Leader Development.”
That makes sense. They really need to know.
The Army’s field manual on leadership is an extraordinarily sophisticated document, founded in sound psychological research and psychiatric theory, as well as military practice. It articulates the core faculties that officers, including commanders, need in order to fulfill their jobs. From the manual’s 135 dense pages, I have distilled five crucial qualities:
Trust
According to the Army, trust is fundamental to the functioning of a team or alliance in any setting: “Leaders shape the ethical climate of their organization while developing the trust and relationships that enable proper leadership.” A leader who is deficient in the capacity for trust makes little effort to support others, may be isolated and aloof, may be apathetic about discrimination, allows distrustful behaviors to persist among team members, makes unrealistic promises and focuses on self-promotion.
I assumed before I read the paragraph that “trust” meant the trust of others in the leader, but no, it means the leader’s ability to trust other people. That’s very interesting.
Discipline and self-control
…The disciplined leader does not have emotional outbursts or act impulsively, and he maintains composure in stressful or adverse situations.
…In psychiatry, we talk about “filters” — neurologic braking systems that enable us to appropriately inhibit our speech and actions even when disturbing thoughts or powerful emotions are present. Discipline and self-control require that an individual has a robust working filter, so that he doesn’t say or do everything that comes to mind.
Aka impulse control aka self-inhibition. It’s that prefrontal thing that takes so long to develop.
Judgment and critical thinking
These are complex, high-level mental functions that include the abilities to discriminate, assess, plan, decide, anticipate, prioritize and compare. A leader with the capacity for critical thinking “seeks to obtain the most thorough and accurate understanding possible,” the manual says, and he anticipates “first, second and third consequences of multiple courses of action.” A leader deficient in judgment and strategic thinking demonstrates rigid and inflexible thinking.
The fourth is self-awareness, aka knowing one’s own faults.
Empathy
Perhaps surprisingly, the field manual repeatedly stresses the importance of empathy as an essential attribute for Army leadership. A good leader “demonstrates an understanding of another person’s point of view” and “identifies with others’ feelings and emotions.” The manual’s description of inadequacy in this area: “Shows a lack of concern for others’ emotional distress” and “displays an inability to take another’s perspective.”
It’s not all that surprising, really, since a leader by definition has to interact with people. An engineer can do without empathy, but a leader not so much.
So, Trump is, officially, the Anti-Leader. Always suspected that was the case, but it’s good to have that from an authoritative source.
As YNNB says. Apart from the constant ‘he’, that’s a really interesting summary. I’ll look forward to reading the whole document (I work in an organisation that could do with developing new leaders to replace the current crop nearing retirement age).
I found the ‘judgement and critical thinking’ section especially interesting. How do you know a person has those skills? Well, by testing them. That’s the point of Basic and also Officer training. See how people respond and how that response develops over time. Judgement and critical thinking don’t just appear fully formed overnight. Now bring that into a political context. Success at business or in the military might suggest a person could be a good leader. Or not.
This is why traditional paths to political leadership have involved people stepping up from local dog catcher, to county councillor, to mayor, to some higher level of responsibility to the ultimate leadership. It’s a way of testing people out in progressively more challenging environments to both up-skill them and to allow their fitness for exercising the judgement and critical thinking skills to be evaluated.
Just because we’ve all grown sick of the back-room deals, self-glorifying behaviours and stasis of modern politics does not mean that the basic practice of development and mentorship is wrong. It just means that the ultimate vision of why the Government exists and what is expected of it has been corrupted.
It doesn’t matter what field you look at, parachuting an ‘outsider’ into a leadership role seldom works out. Whether that is putting a supermarket CEO in charge of healthcare, a politician in charge of a construction company or a property developer in charge of the largest and most complex government on earth makes no odds.
Rob,
The Westminster system should be better at filtering out the deadheads, since PMs and ministers are usually promoted from the ranks, rather than ‘parachuted in’ like Trump. Apparently not, if the example of Thresa May is considered. Another dysfunction of modern politics is that effective opposition leaders sometimes are not suited to leading a government.
RJW, indeed. Except that we do still get the parachute types. May, I think, represent someone who has come through the ranks, but got her shot at the big job more by a quirk of circumstance than anything else.
The closest I can think of to a parachute was our immediate ex-Prime Minister John Key. He was wildly popular for a lot of understandable but bad reasons. His background was as a banker and he was hand picked to be ‘the next Prime Minister’ while national were in opposition. Even so, they made him slum it in Parliament as a backbencher for two years before being promoted to Finance Spokesman, then assuming the leadership two years later. He won the next election and stayed on till he resigned as PM in late 2016 and from Parliament early this year.
While I disagreed strongly with his politics, at least he served some sort of apprenticeship and he was populist enough in a very moderate country to temper the worst of the excesses of some of his colleagues.
I’ve never seen someone just appear, as twoscoops did.
re. trust. A good leader has to trust the next tier to do their jobs with minimal oversight otherwise the leader ends up micro-managing the organisation. That might work for a small business with very frw employees, but it’s a recipe for disaster in large businesses, armys and governments.
Control freaks like Trump create chaos within the ranks, and that’s no way to run a burger bar, let alone a country.