Here’s an interview of George Cloutier at American Management Services in The New York Times entitled “Fire Your Relatives. Scare Your Employees. And Stop Whining.” This guy is Howell Raines all over again. One of my favorite case studies of poor leadership is Ken Auletta’s magnificent article about Raines leadership as the executive editor of The New York Times entitled “The Howell Doctrine.”
Leaders like Cloutier always end up destroying their organizations like Raines did (he was eventually fired over the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal). They may be successful at achieving “task excellence” for a time but eventually the failure to achieve “relationship excellence” sabotages task excellence. As the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “ability may get you to the top but it takes character to keep you there.” In addition to a passion for task excellence, good character also includes the human values of kindness, respectfulness, gratitude and generosity. Relational disconnectors like Raines and Cloutier view everyone as a rival to be defeated and dominated. Character flaws such as these are usually rooted in what psychiatrists refer to as subclinical levels of the “Dark Triad” (i.e. narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathology). Leaders suffering from the these afflictions live life alone from a relational standpoint which eventually brings on feelings of emptiness, boredom and, at times, depression. Professor Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries at Insead’s Global Leadership Center described it well in an outstanding interview with Diane Coutu in Harvard Business Review entitled “Putting Leaders on the Couch.” One can only hope that relational disconnectors such as Cloutier and Raines fail early in their careers before they do much damage to themselves and others.
