Leaders and the Responsibility Gap
In the wake of the disastrous, American-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, President Kennedy took the blame. "There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan," he told the nation. He said that he did not wish to evade responsibility, "because I'm the responsible officer."
This may be refreshing, but accepting responsibility for mistakes is rare among leaders. In a September 2019 Pew Research poll, 79 percent said that Members of Congress admit mistakes or take responsibility for them "only a little or none of the time." Similar results (above 50 percent) were reported for leaders of technology companies, journalists, and local elected officials.
Headlines confirm polling data. The #MeToo Movement unmasks sexual abusers who retreated behind non-disclosure agreements that cloaked their behavior in enforced silence, enabling them to deny wrongdoing. The Sackler Family sought to evade personal and criminal responsibility in the opioid crisis, admitting no wrongdoing while trying to keep substantial parts of its wealth from any settlements. The owners of the dive boat, Conception, on which 34 people died last September, did not even wait for the funerals before submitting a legal filing aimed at limiting their liability to lawsuits. Corporations routinely pay fines, sometimes in the hundreds of millions, in settlements that allow them to deny they were at fault.
A society that permits avoiding responsibility for wrongdoing pays a price. Irresponsibility can become a social contagion. Why admit responsibility when others do not, especially when those others reap benefits or fail to pay a sufficient price? A society which cannot fix responsibility destroys the trust essential to the social capital that greases the gears of business and politics. As trust and social capital decline, so does belief in our system of government, capitalism, collaborative effort, economic health, and personal well-being.
Irresponsible leaders pass on the costs of their mistakes to others. Politicians who build their popularity on the back of blaming others for their own mistakes pass on the costs to future generations in failed policies, programs, and public cynicism. Bankers and business leaders who privatize gain but socialize the costs of irresponsibility, through taxpayer bailouts or higher prices, leave bills for average Americans to pay.
In America, organizations can sometimes be held legally liable but too often not the leaders of those organizations. The law that allows them the freedom to act should not shield them from the consequences. Too many escape their damaging failures with golden parachutes when they should be led out in handcuffs. The failure of DuPont executives to prevent illness and death connected to Teflon, recently chronicled in the feature film, Dark Waters, is a stark example of this problem.
What constitutes irresponsibility may sometimes be difficult to determine, but it is not a matter of law alone. Too much irresponsibility hides behind "what I did was legal." Just because no law is broken does not mean a leader, public or private, has acted responsibly. Responsibility exists in the moral universe - even if the law protects it. Injustice is not so hard to see, even if the halls of justice cannot touch it.
Responsibility is a habit. It requires cultivation, which means it must be practiced and rewarded. This is especially true because accepting responsibility may run contrary to how one sees her or his self-interest. Responsible behavior is also an investment. It may have short-term costs but it promises long-term gains. A society's leaders who think only in the short term have a warped balance sheet of their obligations.
When leaders evade responsibility, just societies must find ways to affix it. We should focus more attention, at earlier ages, on character education before people ascend to leadership positions. Professional training, codes of conduct and appropriate legal and regulatory safeguards should be more consistent and enforced once people are in leadership positions. Public humiliation and shame through greater public transparency is also necessary. For that, we need mechanisms that prevent private sector leaders from hiding behind non-disclosure agreements and no-fault settlements. For public officials, we need ways to hold them accountable after they leave office, which is often when the impact of their failures surface. Legal remedies, including criminal penalties, should also be created and more widely used.
After Kennedy's public acknowledgement of responsibility, he set in motion a plan to find out why he had erred and what he needed to learn. In doing so, he took responsibility not only for his failure but for the command of his coming decisions. The result of that learning was his performance in avoiding nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Taking responsibility, he demonstrated, is not only a way to accept the consequences of one's past mistakes but the first step in preventing future ones.
Photo Credit: Marcus Spiske-Unsplash.com
