Congress and Leadership
July 28, 2011
I used to work for a company that did annual employee surveys. The questions revolved around conditions at the company as a whole and how employee’s felt about their managers individually. The results of the survey yielded a score, the highest being 100. Each year managers anxiously awaited the results of their survey because, if you got a individual score of lower than 40, you were considered to be ‘critical’ in leadership skills and if you didn’t improve, your job was on the line. I mention this because, after witnessing the absurdity of the debt ceiling negotiations this past week, I decided to look up the most recent congressional approval rating. The results I found would have put them way below the ‘critical’ rating at my former company. For the first 7 months of 2011, the average approval rating for congress, according to a Gallup poll, was 20%. Another poll I read stated that just 8% of voters think congress is doing a good job.
The employee survey came to mind because of the difference I see between congress’ reaction to their bad survey and management reaction to a bad survey at my former company. When a manager received a critical rating there, they were sent to all sorts of leadership re-training classes, monitored for several months by the Human Resource department and eventually re-surveyed in the hope that they had improved enough to get a score higher than 40. If they hadn’t, they could be demoted from management or, in some cases, fired if it kept happening. The reaction of congress to their bad rating seems to be indifference. Nobody there seems to care that the voters, whose taxes pay their salaries, think they are doing a bad job. Interesting! Whereas critical managers at my old company worked hard to improve their standing with their workgroups, congress just goes about their business by virtually not doing a thing to improve. This past month was the most egregious example of how bad congress can be. Instead of compromising in a deal to raise the debt ceiling so the US does not default on it’s obligations and the country’s bond ratings aren’t lowered, the 2 parties in congress go back and forth blaming each other and using scare tactics to make their points. The ‘recovery’ waivers, the stock market goes down putting people’s 401K funds in jeopardy (at least for the people who still have them) and the unemployment rate stays high because companies are not hiring. It’s pretty mind boggling actually. The frustrating thing is that, unlike my previous company where you were held accountable for a survey indicating poor leadership skills, there doesn’t seem to be a thing that can be done about congress. The American people sit and shake their heads about the dysfunction in Washington, but nothing seems to change. Much of this is our own fault and there are two reasons for it. First, a very small percentage of the American public actually votes and those that do keep re-electing the same idiots who get to Congress and won’t compromise. If they don’t elect the same person, they seem to elect someone even more set on not giving an inch in the rhetoric they’ve put out there. Second is apathy. Most Americans are so apathetic that they don’t think anything will change so they don’t try to change it.
Meanwhile Congress ‘fiddles while Rome burns.’
It’s time to wake up, pay attention and as they say here in New York, ‘throw the bums out’ when they put their own parties interests above those they represent. In other words, fire them for poor leadership skills.