The West Is Facing a Followership Crisis
The greatest challenge confronting once-robust democracies is persuading people to put their trust in leaders again.
Good leaders can’t exist without good followers.
Photographer: Andy Katz/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
The West is in the throes of its most serious crisis of leadership since the 1970s. In their most recent elections, the British had to choose between disaster (Boris Johnson) and calamity (Jeremy Corbyn) while the Americans had a menu of senescence (Joe Biden) and malignity (Donald Trump). 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.”