If the ongoing COVID-19 crisis has taught us anything, it is the critical importance of choosing the right leaders.
In the United States, US President Donald Trump wasted precious weeks during the early days of the outbreak by lulling Americans with baseless assurances. Fear of the spread of the novel coronavirus, he said, was “a hoax” perpetuated by the political opposition and its allies, “the fake news media.” He also tried to blame the preceding Obama administration for the lack of preparedness to deal with the outbreak—when it was his own chief of staff that disbanded the White House pandemic response team two years ago.
“No, not at all. We have it totally under control,” Trump said in January, after being asked if he were worried about the COVID-19 outbreak. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
At a White House news conference in February, he commented on the first cases in the US. “We’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.”
Later, even as the World Health Organization reported that the virus had infected more than 46,000 people and killed more than 1,100, Trump predicted the virus would go away on its own.
“By April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away,” he said at one campaign rally.
In the face of a dire shortage of COVID-19 testing kits, Trump also false announced that anybody who needed a test could get one.
A business psychology professor at the University College London and Columbia University, Thomas Chamorro Premuzic, observes that poor leadership choices may go unpunished or unnoticed when times are good, but bad times will expose and amplify the harmful effects of incompetent leadership.
Writing in Forbes, Premuzic says a person’s probability to lead effectively through a major crisis will largely depend on four aspects of leadership potential:
Intelligence. A vast body of academic research shows that leaders are much better prepared to confront a crisis when they are more rather than less intelligent. “The world is far more data-driven today than it ever was, so unless leaders have the capacity to be factual, reason logically, and adopt an evidence-based approach to making decisions, they will be handicapped,” Premuzic ways.
Accurate threat sensitivity. The main job of a leader is not to keep people calm and happy, but to keep them safe, and this is only be possible if leaders have an accurate sense of environmental threats and dangers, meaning they are neither under-confident nor over-confident, Premuzic writes.
Courage. The true importance of courage, Premuzic observes, will only be on display when leaders are faced with difficult choices, such as choosing the least detrimental option among many bad or negative alternatives.
Trustworthiness. The previous three qualities are really important, but they will be useless unless we can trust the leader, Premuzic concludes. “No leader will be able to handle a crisis if they have lost people’s trust, and while we are often wrong when we decide to trust leaders in the first place…, we are usually right when we come to the realization that they can no longer be trusted,” he writes.
This is food for thought after we survive this COVID-19 crisis and are asked once again to undertake the clearly crucial task of picking our leaders, tempered by the knowledge that poor leaders also appoint incompetent officials under them.
