Whether you like it not Donald Trump won the presidency and is now the leader of the free world. I’ll admit that I have had reservations about him from the beginning for many reasons one being the way he treats people that have done business with him.
I think people overlooked some of the red flags because he was an experienced executive that people thought could come to Washington and make quick progress on significant issues facing our country. However, his first few months have been an utter disaster from a leadership perspective which had led to nothing short of chaos.
Let’s look at Trump’s five leadership failures as lessons in what to avoid if you are in a position of leadership.
1: No strategic plan
The strategic plan is your guide to your company goals and the map of how to reach them. It reminds you where to put your resources–human and financial–and what is tangential to your goals, so you stay on track. It helps you communicate to your staff and customers where you are headed and why.
Candidate Trump campaigned on a handful of policy priorities, yet President Trump has not developed a strategic plan to support reaching any of those goals. Instead, Trump’s policies and his focus waivers daily, leaving his staff and Congress in a reactive rather than proactive mode.
Lesson: When no one knows the plan, it makes it hard achieve anything meaningful. The more you plan, the more proactive and less reactive you can be. His style over substance way of running the executive branch leaves advisors left to try and create policy based on the president’s tweets not on his philosophy or objectives.
2: No matter what I do, it’s your fault
It is the leader’s job to ensure that team morale is high, that each team member knows what is expected and that the team can function together to implement the strategy and policies of the organization.
What have we learned from President Trump? If policy implementation goes awry, blame the staff. Micro management and internal diatribes result in rock-bottom morale, in-fighting, and power plays at the cost of communication, policy implementation, and success in general. In Trumps, organization chaos thrives.
Lesson: No one is going to work for you and be loyal to you if you blame them for everything that goes wrong. It’s why the White House is having a hard time filling high-level positions. Be honest, straight forward and loyal to your people and they will do the same for you.
3: Confused communications or, the losing the message in an avalanche of chaos
Communicating is a key leadership tool typically viewed as an afterthought. Developing the right goals and plan comes first, but then successful implementation depends on how well the goals and plan are laid out for staff and customers.
One-hundred-forty characters do not offer the opportunity to communicate a policy–just a headline. Tweets at all hours, unvetted by staff, written in a decidedly unleader-like voice, and that repeatedly attack people and the fourth estate fail to build support or allies or move forward any agenda.
Chaos reigns among the President’s communications staff. His communications director is gone. Saturday Night Live’s spoofs underscore the in-fighting and inability to create relationships internally or with the White House press corps. The briefings that should be a bully pulpit to push his goals forward instead they just confuse the public and policymakers.
Lesson: Chaos is not productive and does not work in moving a company or a government forward. Staff, customers, and suppliers need stable leadership. Chaos does not instill confidence.
4: Alienating allies
We live in a global economy with 24-hour media coverage and world markets in different time zones. Wars destabilize some markets and threaten our safety. All this makes it necessary to stay in sync with allies to ensure security, as well as policy and economic success.
Trump has attacked our neighboring nations with whom we trade billions of dollars in goods and services. He has threatened corporate leaders and is hostile to the education community. His actions on the environment alienate allies and, most agree, hurt the long-term economy which will depend on renewable energy. Mixed messages on the NATO alliance bucks advice from those members of his staff with the most knowledge in this area and mystifies U.S. allies.
What happens if we in the U.S. need the assistance of our friends and allies?
No company operates in a vacuum. Leaders must think ahead about outsourcing, suppliers, consultants, marketing–and ensure that their reputation and relationships thrive to be successful in the 21st Century. Our country is no different. We need our allies not only to help keep us safe but to ensure economic prosperity.
Lesson: Relationships in many cases can make or break your business. Alienating and threatening your customers and your key allies is not artful and not how deals are made.
5: Cluelessness or an intentional lack of understanding about the environment in which you operate.
An essential tool as a leader is knowing your industry, your competition, and the global environment in which your company strives to maintain its edge.
The U.S. president runs one branch of three in a nation of laws laid out in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. A natural tension exists among the three branches of our federal government. A leader can overcome this natural tension by building positive relationships, clearly communicating their plan, and ensuring that other stakeholders understand the vision and the direction.
Trump’s continued personal attacks and whining in public against constraints, against competitors, or against staff communicates to the world that you do not understand the universe in which you operate. Worse, it is almost impossible to make progress towards goals when you don’t know the issues, and you are uninformed, and you don’t do your homework.
Lesson: Don’t be uninformed because that is when you make terrible decisions. Secondly, don’t make things up and try to pass it off as truth. If you do no one will believe you, and without credibility, you can’t lead.
Leaders take note: in Trump, we have a living lesson on what not to do as a leader.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.