[October 04, 2014] A theme sometimes expressed here at theLeaderMaker.com is that leaders will occasionally allow emotion to dictate the direction of their decisions. This can have disastrous effects on the organizational mission. Senior leaders emotionally fixated on a topic may not be able to look past legitimate options in the decision-making process. They may also handicap staff members who work for that leader. That is essentially the charge that Leon Panetta has made of U.S. President Obama and his foreign policy team.
Leon Panetta, Obama’s first CIA director and his second Defense secretary, writes in the book Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace, that President Obama’s inner circle lacked a sense of urgency about finalizing a deal with Iraq’s then-Prime Minister al-Maliki1. Panetta makes this charge in the context of a rising Islamic terror threat in the Middle East. I can personally attest that in 2011 the Iraqis wanted an agreement for U.S. forces to stay. Yet, the U.S. diplomatic team working the deal misunderstood the Iraqi culture of negotiating. Among senior military officers it was clear that U.S. representatives did not want to deal with the Iraqis.
Eventually this was used by the White House as a pretext for pulling troops out of Iraq. Of course, we did not know that at the time but were suspicious of the negotiators. It was as if the U.S. government had let the Department of Defense and military forces dangle in the mineshaft of uncertainty. At the time we thought the White House representatives were simply naive. Their lack of purpose and directionless negotiations were a turn-off to the Iraqi senior politicians. Senior Iraqi military officers involved told me that they couldn’t figure out what the U.S. position really was but that an agreement was going to happen … at the last possible moment in time. This was an Iraqi tactic to extract concessions from the U.S.
While there is no proof to the charge made by Panetta, he does have credibility. I had the pleasure of talking with Secretary Panetta about Iraq during a visit to the Pentagon in 2012. While he did not discuss the direction of President Obama, he did talk about the difficulties of senior leadership and how easy it is to have ideological blinders that hide options from decision makers. This is the main point here. Ideological blinders can be emotional filters and influence our decisions in unpredictable ways, usually in a very bad way.
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