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In their most recent elections, the British had to choose between disaster (Boris Johnson) and calamity (Jeremy Corbyn. The new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is not a patch on the previous one, Angela Merkel, whose own reputation is being revised downward.
The European Union has a legitimacy-sacking weakness for choosing its presidents from the ranks of machine politicians such as Jean-Claude Juncker and Ursula von der Leyen.
The most impressive politician in Western Europe, Emmanuel Macron, has just had his wings clipped, losing his majority in parliament, with parties led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, on the far left, and Marine Le Pen, on the far right, making substantial gains.
Companies are acknowledging the shortcomings of the leadership class by clearing out their C-suites. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. notes that 668 US CEOs left their posts in the first four months of this year, the highest January-May figure since the firm began tracking monthly CEO changes in 2002. The same problem afflicts the nonprofit sector. "We've been around for 26 years," says Gayle Brandel, the CEO of PNP Staffing Group, an executive search firm that specializes in the sector, "and I haven't seen anything like this."
What can explain this general crisis? The great management guru Peter Drucker liked to point out that it was impossible to understand leadership without understanding followership. The crisis of leadership is also - and perhaps primarily - a problem of followership. "Followers" often simply refuse to follow: Millions of people resigned during the pandemic in order to retire early or work for themselves, while millions more are ignoring stern injunctions to return to the office. Or else they make it clear that they will only follow if they are given a hefty raise.
Surliness is frequently mixed with angry hostility. Politicians are treated as devils incarnate. CEOs are mocked for pronouncing pieties about ESG while pocketing supersized salaries. Asked why he was abandoning journalism for politics, Boris Johnson replied that they don't put up statues to journalists. These days the public is in the mood for tearing down statues rather than putting them up.
Leaders have traditionally used two devices to secure the loyalty of potential followers - deference and competence. In the deference-based model, the people followed their betters because they were born to rule. They possessed the blue blood of true aristocrats or the blessing of G od ("the rich man in his castle/the poor man at his gate/G od made them high and lowly/and ordered their estate," as the 19th century hymn has it). In the competence-based model, followers respect their leaders because they have superior knowledge or skills - they defer to them on condition that they can get things done.
The deference-based model has long since collapsed. You would be hard-pressed to find a monarchist who would justify Prince Andrew's conduct toward Virginia Giuffre. But in collapsing it has left a residue of resentment toward anyone who claims to be better than regular people. Now the competence-based model is under strain.
Everywhere you look, "so-called experts," as Michael Gove, a prominent Tory politician called them, are having trouble doing the job we set them. Central banks' failure to control inflation is only the most recent in a string of failures that includes stoking the bubble that burst in 2008. Airline CEOs preside over airport chaos and flight cancellations while supermarket CEOs struggle to fill the shelves.
The collapse of these two models of leadership is reflected in figures about the decline of trust, figures that are at their worst, in the rich world, for the United States but which are also moving in the wrong direction in high-trust societies such as Sweden. In the 1960s most Americans trusted big institutions to do the jobs assigned to them - some 77% said that they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time. Today these figures have all collapsed. Business leaders vie with journalists and elected officials for the wooden spoon of the least trusted group.
The collapse is reinforced by the combination of the polarization of politics and the rise of new media. The right demonizes the left (and vice versa) on an ever-wider range of subjects, which now includes issues once above politics such as national monuments and vaccination policy. Replacing gatekeepers, the internet broadcasts the ravings of nutters as effectively as the measured words of experts, if not more so. How are followers to follow when one half of the leadership class accuses the other of being traitors and when fake news mixes merrily with real news?
The most obvious result of the crisis is that it's getting harder to get things done. The New York Times, the Guardian and, currently, the Washington Post have all been convulsed by painful and time-consuming internal struggles as journalists take it upon themselves to discipline their fellow scribes, often in internal chat rooms but sometimes on Twitter, for alleged sins of one sort or another. An exasperated article in the Intercept, a left-wing website, claims that "the progressive advocacy space across the board," from abortion-rights advocates such as Planned Parenthood, the Guttmacher Institute and Pro-Choice America to environmental pressure groups such as the Sierra Club to social justice groups such as the ACLU, Color of Change, Movement for Black Lives and the Human Rights Campaign, has "more or less effectively ceased to function" because of internecine squabbles, most prominently between managers and workers.
"My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95% of my time on internal strife," said one activist. "Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battle in play," noted another. "The toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it - callout culture, cancel culture, whatever - is creating this really intense thing," said a third, "and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one's able to talk about it, no one's able to say how bad it is."
The crisis is also introducing a new power relationship into the heart of organizational life - leaders are becoming stars and followers fans. Populist leaders are more like a cross between pop stars and sports heroes than old-fashioned politicians: They adopt exotic personas, hold rallies in giant stadiums and devote their time to excoriating the enemy.
The same dynamic is spreading to business. Elon Musk has a hard core of fans - known as Musketeers - as well as nearly 100 million followers on Twitter. "He can tell the future for me and you/He's got a nose for knowin' what to do," sings one fan, Jim Ocean, in his composition, "The Future Smells like Elon Musk." CEOs increasingly make crowd-pleasing pronouncements about contentious social issues such as racial justice and trans rights.
Yet the record of populist politicians suggests that this is a dangerous model. The flip side of having fans is that you have anti-fans who will do everything they can to make your life a misery. Political stars find it more difficult than old-fashioned leaders to deliver concrete results: Trump's presidency ended in disgrace, while Johnson is struggling to hold onto his job after 148 MPs, or 41% of his party, voted that they had no confidence in him. They also become prisoners of their fans - if they fail to deliver "madder music and stronger wine," they can be dumped for someone who will.
Musk's high-profile bid for Twitter has earned him a lot of enemies, particularly in the Democratic establishment, without so far producing tangible results. CEOs' general flirtation with popular causes has annoyed conservatives, most obviously in the case of the Walt Disney Co. in Florida's debate over sex education, while sometimes turning them into prisoners of activist groups.
Persuading people to put their trust in leaders again will be the work of decades, if it is possible at all in an internet-driven world. Policy makers need to focus on increasing social mobility rates, proactively searching for talent in every corner of society. The relations between "leaders" and "followers" are being progressively poisoned by a growing sense that the people at the top of organizations belong to a discrete ruling class that, as well as lacking roots in the wider society, looks after its own members.
Organizations need to focus on their core functions rather than sprawling into secondary issues: Central banks should focus on controlling inflation rather than addressing climate change or advancing diversity. Sprawling outside your core remit is dangerous at the best of times since it involves both diluting institutional attention while also raising unrealistic expectations. Sprawling when you are failing to execute your core function is a guarantee of a crisis of legitimacy.
"To be trusted institutions must be trustworthy," the Hoover Institution's John F. Cogan and Kevin Warsh write in a bracing new essay, "and to be trustworthy institutions must be competent."
In the shorter term, leaders can do several things to make "followership" more palatable. Pick your battles carefully: Trying to force people back to the office if the data demonstrate that they can do their job equally well at home is foolish. Devolve as much operational decision-making to people in the front line, in line with Colin Powell's dictum that "the commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong unless proved otherwise."
Break down the walls between "leaders" and "followers" by giving as many members of the team as possible a temporary role as leader. This has the beneficial consequence of showing the rest of us what leaders must put up with.
Above all, give more recognition to the role of "followers." Business schools put on innumerable courses on how to be an effective leader. How about a few on how to be an effective follower, particularly given that all leaders, however spectacular their careers, will have to spend some time taking orders. Companies gear their reward system to managers, as if telling people what to do is intrinsically worth more than, say, inventing a new product or solving a technical problem. How about linking reward systems to value-added rather than spans of control?
Calling for better followers doesn't have the same rhetorical ring as calling for better leaders. But if we are to address the crisis of authority paralyzing the West's politics and spreading, with worrying speed, to the business world, it is just as vital.
Previously:
• 05/25/22: The 1970s had a big bright side, too
• 05/10/22: Young Americans aren't as woke as you think
• 05/04/22: The furor facing Disney in Florida is a warning that capitalism won't regain its legitimacy by alienating
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Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously a writer at the Economist. His latest book is "The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World."