Dear Russ,
On the International Leadership Association listserve messages about our failure of leadership in responding to the Katrina disaster have been on target, and the whole episode of Katrina should make the most fervent great-person leadership advocate rethink that whole paradigm. Clearly, Bush has been the United States' most visible adherent of the great-person leadership model, and I think that there is ample evidence to indicate that it has not worked in his administration. The Katrina episode is only the worst of many other examples that could be given.
Someone wrote that some leadership experts would call what happened in the Katrina disaster or even what should have happened as a result of the Katrina disaster "management." Since I have been one of the strongest advocates of distinguishing leadership from management, I would like to offer my opinion on that subject.
Succinctly, I think that it is a case where leadership should have happened and didn't. The response called for leadership defined as "an influence relationship among leaders and collaborators who intend significant changes that reflect their mutual purposes." This is the only kind of approach to leadership that would have worked in responding to the Katrina disaster. There were (and are) multiple agencies involved (governmental and nongovernmental) with specialized expertise who could have come together and agreed upon significant changes in disaster relief that reflected their mutual purposes quickly and effectively if a collaborative approach had been initiated at the very beginning and even before the catastrophe.
What happened was primarily management with George Bush interested in other things so he delegated the relief activities to FEMA, which had to follow the bureaucratic guidelines of Homeland Security. Other agencies geographically closer to the problems of the Gulf region were more or less helpless because they were told by the great person to emphasize relief from terrorist attacks and their National Guard troops and resources were depleted since they were fighting a war in Iraq.
Volunteer agencies and private individuals (with money) from various states chose to do relief activities that violated the bureaucratic guidelines whereas the state and local governments seemed to be paralyzed by the federal directives. This is all fairly simplified as I can't write long paragraphs on these issues, but I hope that the readers get my major point. Collaborative leadership would have been very effective but was not done. Management was done but was ineffective in the attempts to follow standard operating procedures facing such a great catastrophe.
Finally, I would like to comment on the comparison to the massive leadership relationship that happened in Mumbai and the lack of any such relationship in New Orleans. Highlighting social capital theory as espoused by Putnam and many others is quite valid, I think. Many social capital theorists have been commenting on the intractable problems of race and poverty and the lack of community structures and cultural norms as persuasive explanations for poverty, discrimination, and health problems in a country as rich as the United States.
Clearly, many of the people that stayed in New Orleans to ride out the hurricane were financially poor, poorly educated, and lacked personal efficacious. One major characteristic would be that many of them relied on public transportation. Many of them lived in communities that were disenfranchised, had limited resources, with few structures and bonds that reflected modern notions of community effectiveness. It doesn't help that New Orleans and Louisiana have a documented history of corruption and machine politics that elevated visible charismatic "leaders," while deals were made in the back rooms and oil company board rooms.
It has been suggested that the social capital in Mumbai that was in evidence after torrential rains was lacking in New Orleans. But the main difference between the two examples is that New Orleans is below sea level and when the levees broke, there was nowhere for the water to go but to the areas where the urban population lived. So, this was not just a very serious hurricane, the whole area was flooded up to the second floor of most buildings in a deluge kind of scenario.
I know of seven religious persons (white, educated, moderately wealthy, and with cars) who road out the hurricane (in two different institutional shelters) so that they could be of help to other people after the hurricane stopped. That was not very smart of them when a category 5 hurricane was headed directly at the city, but they were altruistic in their motivations. After the hurricane, they were sheltered, were all uninjured and were in no immediate danger, but they became victims when the levees broke. They had supplies (mostly on the first floor), which were then contaminated, the shelters that they had organized were all under water, they had no ability to communicate with anyone, their cars were useless, and so they were unable to be of any help to anyone, not even to themselves. They sat around and were eventually evacuated by boats and left the city, frustrated and quite unhappy.
Evacuation seems to be the major response to hurricanes now. I know people who took twelve hours on Thursday (the hurricane was on Sunday) to get 40 miles to a relative's home where they are still living two weeks + after the hurricane. Imagine what the roads were like on Friday and Saturday, 24 hours a day. So all the moderately wealthy and some moderately poor people got out, and most of the people that remained were poor or reliant on public transportation (which was not organized to get people out of town).
In a situation such as New Orleans, massive volunteer activity is not possible as most of the people who would volunteer were out of town, and those who remained had prepared for post-hurricane activities, not deluge relief. Clearly, this was a situation for the government to pour massive resources and personnel to help alleviate the suffering of the people who got caught in government shelters and were up on their roofs waiting for rescue. Fixing the levees was not a job for massive volunteers. They wouldn't have the slightest idea of how to do it. Feeding thousands of people and giving them water was not possible for volunteers whose homes and institutions were under water and who didn't know they would need boats to feed the hungry and give water to the thirsty.
This was truly a very unique situation which demanded very innovative and collaborative plans and programs to get relief to the people unwittingly caught in this disaster. The United States governments (federal, state and local), nonprofit agencies (religious and secular), and the citizens do not have a conceptual framework of leadership to use that would facilitate innovative plans of relief in such situations. Our governments, agencies, and corporations are peopled with persons, high and low on the organizational chart, who believe fervently in a great person saving us, not only in catastrophes but in every day living. The 400+ million dollars that we spend on leadership development every year in the United States were useless in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and will be useless in helping to solve many other intractable problems facing the United States and the world in the 21st century. It is time for the leadership community of scholars and developers to stop having fun and get deadly serious about our contribution to our society and the world.
Joe Rost