A Lack of Prudence, a Crisis in Leadership

By Randall Smith. But first a note from Robert Royal: We're starting to close in on our targets for this fundraising campaign but we need a bunch more of you to act immediately. You don't want to see me beg. Do you? Now for today's column... Ignoring bottlenecks, multiplying touchpoints, creating information silos. These are widely discussed practices that result in organizations becoming more bureaucratic, less efficient, and more likely to fail. If, like me, you need some help with this vocabulary, here are the accepted definitions: Bottleneck: A point of congestion in a workflow that creates a backlog. Touchpoints: Points of contact between customers and delivery of service. Information silo: When information is compartmentalized and not easily communicated across different departments or individuals within an organization. These are also common practices among America's managers and university administrators. As a professor of theology, I don't read business books - I prefer Augustine and Aquinas - but even I know about bottlenecks, multiplying touchpoints, and information silos, so why don't so many highly remunerated managers of American institutions? From Good to Great is a best-selling book on business management. The story written by most managers should be called From Good to Mediocre - and then Gone. The addendum would cover "How to Bankrupt Your Institution, put Employees out of Work, and Walk Away with a Bundle." We are facing a crisis of leadership. Too many managers of institutions are highly paid and barely competent. Too many boards of directors are asleep at the wheel, allowing institutions for which they are responsible to drift and fail. A whole class of managers is protected from failure by the system. They are rarely fired, even when clearly incompetent, and when they do lose a job, they often receive the kind of healthy severance denied to blue-collar workers. Often, they "fail up" and land a better position elsewhere where they can continue doing poor work. One soon recognizes on search committees, for example, that many institutions are simply passing around their failed, second-rate managers to other institutions because most search committees are looking for people "with experience." Chancery offices are too often staffed with priests who couldn't be trusted with a parish assignment but who, because of this management "experience," later become candidates for even higher office. Principals of bad schools were often poor teachers who took some "academic management" classes. These aren't leaders; they're managers. Bad ones. I was once invited to attend a business school presentation on what the students would propose as "consultants" to a non-profit organization. Perhaps they thought that, as a theology professor, I would be against "profit." But I'm with Pope Saint John Paul II who wrote in Centesimus annus: "The Church acknowledges the legitimate role of profit as an indication that a business is functioning well. When a firm makes a profit, this means that productive factors have been properly employed and corresponding human needs have been duly satisfied." It amazes me how often "profit" in the sense identified by the pope is less a factor in business than personal aggrandizement, rent-seeking, and the pointless turf battles of people who shouldn't be anywhere near a leadership position. What I saw in these presentations were students taught to think of business problems as something to be treated with new branding, different marketing, alternative financing, and the shifting of responsibilities, as though business problems were all a matter of shifting entries on a spreadsheet. No one said a word about the people who work or the people for whom the work was being done. No one drilled into their heads my wife's basic motto: "The answer is always people." What does the Catholic Church have to offer in this time of crisis? One answer would be to recover the wisdom of a true leader like Pope Saint...