News Journal: Basic management skills elude our tycoon president
For the next few hundred words, let’s forget all else that can be said about the Trump administration and concentrate on just one key aspect of it. He promised us he would run the government like a successful business. How is he doing as a manager?
Columns like this are relatively short. Books on management are long. But let me take just three universally acknowledged traits of a good manager and look at how President Trump is failing to apply them.
Disclaimer: Trump received a bachelor’s degree from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where I got my M.B.A. Maybe he missed some of the courses on management I took, but every one of them stressed the need of every successful manager to exercise self-discipline. That means establishing long-term goals and a detailed plan of how to meet them, getting the team you lead on board and making sure they are not distracted by inevitable setbacks and side issues.
That is a pretty good description of how previous presidents have managed to get major legislation through Congress and established long-term foreign policy objectives.
I cannot think of a public official in my lifetime who has shown less self-discipline than our president. One day he celebrates the House healthcare bill as a great achievement, the next he calls it mean. For months he says Russian interference in the last election is a hoax and then, suddenly, it happened and was Obama’s fault. He calls NATO obsolete, then embraces it, then refuses to acknowledge its most important article. His tweets show a complete disregard for anything he may have said in the past. They may be true or (more likely) untrue, but in total betray an absolute indifference to consistent policy goals.
That isn’t just the opinion of the opposition party. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove, the former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, complained that President Trump “lacks the focus or self-discipline to do the basic work required of a president.” He went on to say, “His chronic impulsiveness is apparently unstoppable and clearly self-defeating,” and ”Mr. Trump may have mastered the modes of communication, but not the substance, thereby sabotaging his own agenda.”
A second attribute of all good managers is the ability to learn from their mistakes. President Ronald Reagan summed it up nicely when the said, “Now, what should happen when you make a mistake is this: You take your knocks, you learn your lessons, and then you move on. That’s the healthiest way to deal with a problem… You know, by the time you reach my age, you’ve made plenty of mistakes. And if you’ve lived your life properly — so, you learn. You put things in perspective. You pull your energies together. You change. You go forward.”
When Donald Trump admits a mistake, it is major news because it has happened so rarely. Google “Trump: ‘I never said_________’” and you’ll find dozens of examples of him denying previous statements that were caught on tape. Does he care? Seemingly not. Why? Perhaps one reason is, as he said a couple of months ago, “We just can’t make mistakes, so we don’t make mistakes.”
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No, you can’t make this stuff up. But that brings me to my third attribute of good managers: support for subordinates. If you are going to manage others successfully, they have to trust you. You can criticize them in private. But you are asking them to help you reach goals you defined, and they have to know you will have their backs when things get tough.
The reason “we” (Trump’s royal we, meaning “I”) don’t make mistakes, it seems, is that he is surrounded by people who do nothing but make mistakes. Has any press secretary ever been more publicly humiliated than Sean Spicer? Reportedly seething at Jeff Sessions’ decision to recuse himself in the Russian investigation, Trump had Spicer refuse to say that the White House had confidence in his own attorney general. Has that ever happened to any previous attorney general?
President Trump not only publicly criticizes subordinates, but in many cases acts as if they do not work for him. Take the infamous 6:30 a.m. tweets blasting his own Department of Justice, as if he were a private citizen and not the President of the United States: “People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” And “The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.”
Put yourself in the place of one of the Justice Department lawyers working on the immigration issue. The president you are working for is openly attacking you and damaging his own case. How motivated do you think you would be after those tweets?
President Trump has proved conclusively that he is a terrible manager. There are no indications he will ever be anything else. The chaos he has created with his lack of management skills shows no sign of abating. His closest White House aides, seemingly the only people he trusts, are either family members or ideologues with no previous experience in government.
What we will be doing as a country for the foreseeable future is testing the strength of our democratic institutions. Will they be strong enough to sustain us? All I can say at this point is, I hope so.
Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware.
