American View: How do Winter Storms Unmask Incompetent Leaders?

Management

One of the best methods I’ve found to accurate judge the leadership qualifications of another person is to observe how they justify risk acceptance. For decades, business gurus, journalists, and shiny-suit consultants have insisted that a person’s leadership skills can be inferred form the confidence they project.

The more confident they act, the more people will trust that their “leader” has things under control. I disagree. I say that if you want to know who a person really is, watch how they act when you put them under stress. Force them to make decisions and accept the consequences of their actions. Real character is revealed when the chips are down.

We’ve had a chance to see this play out locally thanks to a winter storm that effectively shut the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex down from 30^th January through 2^nd February. Temperatures stayed annoyingly below 0 C, freezing the rain, sleet, and snow into sheets of ice that effectively paralyzed non-emergency traffic for most of the work week. It was too slick to reach your car, let alone drive it anywhere … assuming anywhere was open for you to drive to.

I was lucky; the only part of my workday that the storm impacted was my habit of reading the local newspaper over breakfast (the one paper I had delivered was frozen under a sheet of ice). Beyond that, nothing; my remote work gear worked fine: my iPhone, computer, and internet connection were all fine. I didn’t need to go anywhere. Ever since the Big Freeze in February 2021, we’ve kept extra food, water, and (most importantly) coffee around for storms like these. Mail delivery, trash pickup, and other neighbourhood services shut down, but that was little more than an inconvenience.

Unfortunately, my mate Heinrich wasn’t so lucky. Normally, he works in the admin building at a huge industrial site, scheduling transportation for supplies and products. In theory, 90% of Heinrich’s job could be performed remotely; his physical presence in the office isn’t strictly necessary, save for face-to-face meetings that unsnarl complex problems.

Once he knew that an ice storm was in-bound, Henrich should have tossed his company-issued laptop in his bag and headed home with his supervisor’s and his site chief’s best wishes. Should have.

I wouldn’t be sharing Heinrich’s story if things had worked out the way they should have.

If this comes as a surprise, welcome to American View! The home of dour workplace culture stories told by a snarky Texan.

First and foremost, Heinrich’s company laptop was completely useless. He dutifully checked it before leaving work on the last clear day. No matter what he did, he couldn’t authenticate into the poorly maintained PC. He had no instructions as to whether he was logging in locally, into an AD domain, or into his usual virtual desktop the way he would using on the thin client at his desk. There were no instructions, troubleshooting steps, or vetted processes for him to follow. He tried to report the problem to his site’s only IT worker … who had left work early without ensuring that her colleagues’ gear was functional before the storm hit.

In an ideal world, that useless PC shouldn’t have been a deal breaker. In a pinch, Heinrich should’ve been able to pull another company PC, log into it to at the office to synch his profile, and then use the borrowed machine to remote in for the rest of the week. Nope! His company doesn’t maintain any stock of contingency gear.

Still, Heinrich might not have needed to take home his useless brick of a laptop if his company had a robust and tested remote access solution for their VMs.

They don’t ... as far as anyone at Heinrich’s company knows. There are no published methods for “remoting in” to the company from a personal device. No stie to download the necessary VPN and VM software. No two-factor authentication solution. Heinrich has a home computer and broadband connection that he could’ve used … but his company made no effort to prepare for such a contingency … even after two years of pandemic lockdowns that set the mark for how corporations should best manage major disasters.

All this meant that Heinrich was effective unable to work remotely during the worst of the storm. He was required to commute the 33 kilometres each way over ice roads while the Texas Department of Transportation was begging everyone in the community to stay the hell off the roads unless their trip was absolutely necessary. Heinrich could take his chances on the ice or take personal leave.

It’s the classic “terrible boss challenge” … Since you’re damned no matter which bad choice you make, agonizing over which bad choices to accept gnaws at your soul.

This is how we get to a “leadership qualifications” test I mentioned at the top of this column. Other friends of mine work for professional, experienced business who took the ice storm seriously. Their Business Continuity or Crisis Management groups rationally assessed the risks and convinced their senior leadership tier to either suspend operations or else shift to fully remote work for the duration of the crisis. Their organisations made announcements on Monday the 30^th making it clear that their workers shouldn’t attempt to drive into the office until the ice had cleared. Their leaders publicly took responsibility for any potential degradation of services, making it clear that such negative outcomes were an acceptable price to pay to shield their workers from unnecessary – and potentially catastrophic – risk on the icy roads.

Heinrich’s company, however, doesn’t have a BC/DR or Crisis Management team. His outfit relies solely on local site leaders to make “the call” about how to respond to local emergencies. For an under-resourced business, that makes some sense … Empower the person with the most authority and the greatest visibility into the risk environment to decide what to do. Unfortunately, Heinrich’s senior site leader is a craven, career minded, smarmy [bleep] weasel: a person who only cares about productivity metrics and revenue numbers … not about people.

This meant that Henrich was put in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t position by his site leader. He wasn’t given any official instructions on what to do. “Management’s” position at his company was to “use your best judgment,” delegating the risk acceptance decision down to the employees themselves. If the employee spent their meagre “personal leave” hours to avoid driving in, then any lost productivity that arose from that employee’s absence could be blamed squarely on them since they were taking “un-forecasted” leave and hadn’t arranged for anyone to cover their shift. The employee could then be fired for having a “poor work ethic.” If, instead, the employee “chose” to drive to work on the icy roads and got in a wreck, well that was their decision to accept the risk. The company never told them to do that and wouldn’t take any responsibility for the worker’s medical bills, car repairs, or lost wages (assuming they lived).

As I told Heinrich over a virtual coffee, his site chief’s refusal to make a decision irrefutably revealed their incompetence: from my perspective, his site chief is a contemptable coward, unworthy of respect, trust, or loyalty. They failed to prepare for this crisis by investing in necessary remote work gear. They failed to have IT resources prepare what little gear they did have before the storm hit. They failed to coordinate an orderly shutdown of their site ahead of the storm so that customers and suppliers could shift their operations out of the affected area. They failed to set clear expectations to supervisors and department heads for safeguarding workers’ lives in the likely event that the roads were too icy to support a normal commute.

They failed to communicate their plans or decisions throughout the organisation. They failed to do … anything, really. The site chief simply kept silent, presumably hoping that everything would sort itself out without any blowback if they just turned a blind eye to the crisis.

“I can’t be held responsible for the evil that happened on my watch if I never personally saw it happen, right?”

“That’s cowardice in no uncertain terms,” I said. “As such, you owe the company and the leader that embodies the company the same loyalty and fidelity that they’ve shown to you: none whatsoever. Take your leave. Stay home. If the company implodes because of your absence, on the site lead’s head be it; it’s not like you work in a hospital where someone might die if you fail to accept the risk. If you attempt to drive in and get in a wreck, that spineless worm isn’t going to do a damned thing for you. More importantly, nothing irreversible will happen in the world because your site lost a day of productivity. Some customers will get their box of widgets a few days late. Big freaking whoop. That’s nothing compared to the loss of a human life.”

I feel I can accurately judge the leadership potential of others by observing how they justifies risk acceptance. Refusing to accept responsibility for your own risk decision is an admission of incompetence! It doesn’t matter how “confident” you sounds when you’re talking bollocks. A person like Heinrich’s site boss is not a leader. They’ve demonstrated zero leadership qualities in my opinion. More the point, they’re made it clear that they shouldn’t be trusted with authority over human beings. Put them back in a staff role where their lack of moral courage can’t hurt anyone.

I submit that if you want to demonstrate your leadership qualifications, take full responsibility for your decisions. Decide what level of risk you’re willing to accept under the authority invested in you and live with the consequences of your decision. Live your judgment even when – especially when – you decide wrong. Make your priorities clear and unambiguous, especially when it comes to people’s wellbeing. Don’t just act like a leader … be the leader that your people deserve.

Fortunately, Heinrich agreed. Before we parted, he concluded that his job wasn’t worth his life and burned three days of personal leave. Good man. I don’t if there will still be a job waiting for him when the roads clear, but what’s important is that he will still be around. The local economy is booming.; Henrich can always find a better job … so long as he’s alive.

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