It is easy to see the leadership failure of governments throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Naming it is harder.
That is why so many of us were horrified to see the United States overwhelmed, first by COVID and then by indecision. World health experts named the U.S. as most prepared of any country. So how did we fail so badly?
We could see that there was a problem. Just not entirely what it was.
Two of the biggest, and easiest culprits were the public’s mask hesitancy and conflicting guidelines from the CDC. But these aren’t the sum of problems. They are symptoms of it.
The biggest problem wasn’t that one person or agency screwed up. It wasn’t any one decision. Nor is it that that the US population is ridiculously divided.
It is the mass avoidance of responsibility. Everywhere.
The president had responsibility that he didn’t hold. This put more pressure on the civilian administrators to do their work and his. When they neglected some of their responsibility, the states had pressure on them to handle it all. So they were holding their own responsibilities and the federal government’s.
The whole thing cascades and multiplies.
Every time an official said “It is up to _____ to do what is right” is a time they gave their own responsibility to the person below them. And now they have a greater burden.
When the president didn’t take responsibility, the responsibility for the CDC doubled. When they relied on states to do the heavy lifting, the responsibility on governors tripled.
And it kept going.
County and local officials bore even more responsibility. That they passed on to the local businesses. Each time saying “You decide whether or not we stop the spread”.
And, of course, Congress remains totally AWOL.
Cascading Responsibility
We spent a lot of time talking about mask mandates and lockdowns as if these were questions exclusively of local authority. And we did this precisely to avoid thinking about the collective failure of responsibility to coordinate a collective response to a collective problem.
A pandemic is not a me problem. It’s a we problem.
Our obsession with individual rights clouded our judgement. And where the bulk of responsibility lies.
And virtually none of that responsibility lies with a service worker asking you to please wear a mask.
But what responsibility does lie with us is our willingness to tolerate when leaders refuse to lead.
Year Two
In this, COVID Year Two, we are in the world created by leadership failure. Division exists that likely would not have existed. That this particular vaccine hesitancy is based purely in partisanship is measurable.
Owning responsibility where it resides is easy when everyone is on the same page.
And when you are at the bottom of the chain, owning all of the responsibility? You really only have three options:
- Do what everyone else did and skip on responsibility. Hope someone else will do it.
- Be the one who does it all, reinforcing the idea that leaders don’t have to lead at all for the trains to still run on time.
- Do what’s yours and let everything else go.
Being appropriately responsible and owning what’s yours isn’t easy. In fact, it may be the hardest weight of the three. It is also the one we most need from each other.