This week’s election provided valuable lessons in corporate leadership, along with riveting viewing.

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Howard Levitt: Why companies should look to hire Trumps not Harrises Back to video

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I have seen too many Kamala Harris types hired into leadership positions in recent years. They have all the right buzzwords (too many) and stand for politically correct principles, but radiate insincerity. And they are ineffective, substituting virtue-signalling for strategy. That same assessment could also be made of our prime minister, who is facing the imminent repudiation by the voting public that Harris just received.

In the case of one client, rather than creating a strong workplace culture, an HR head filled the company’s employees with such a sense of entitlement that they began dictating to management who should fill what roles and organized en masse whenever they disagreed with the company’s direction, resulting in corporate paralysis.

Contrast that with president-elect Donald Trump. He is now unopposed in his party. His former opponents, either reconciled or swept away and rendered irrelevant.

More important is the support he commands from the majority of voters. They see his disdain for political correctness, sarcasm and brashness as the perfect retort to a system which disenfranchises them. What the Democrats characterized in their attacks as dishonesty and corruption, they perceive as authenticity. What the Democrats assailed as lying, his supporters viewed as clever hyperbole or amusing BS’ing.

As Peter Savodnik characterized it in the Free Press, the Democrats had become “platform surfers building their social media audiences on the backs of the very people they claim to bleed for: marginalized people, birthing people, Gazans, whoever.”

Trump stood not for the Democrat’s politically correct policies of the day (i.e. equity over merit, open borders, trans extremism, climate alarmism) but for stopping illegal immigrants from taking their jobs, protectionism, rebuilding manufacturing jobs, fighting inflation and the opioid epidemic, stopping a rising China, ending the housing crisis and reducing the financial drain of foreign conflicts. These were the issues most voters cared about. And those Trump voters included in large numbers the very equity groups the Democrats curried favour with. After all, they too share these interests and find oppressive wokeism alienating.

They did not see Trump as a liar in part because they saw more fundamental dishonesty in his opponents, particularly when they declared an obviously senescent Biden to be fully competent, anointed Harris rather than electing her despite her unpopularity and weak performance as vice-president.

Once the candidate, they saw her excessive giggling and indecipherable word salads whenever asked a question. Her rallies were filled with celebrities but devoid of policy. And when asked how she would govern differently than Biden, she had no answer, while declaring herself the “change candidate.” Voters quickly perceived her as disingenuous and undeserving. She did not even appear at her own election night party. She made it easy for Trump to characterize her as the “other” that voters were rebelling against.

“This is the revenge of the regular old working-class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to,”  CNN’s Scott Jennings declared on election night. “They’re not garbage, they’re not Nazis, they’re just regular people who get up and go to work every day trying to make a better life for their kids, and they feel like they have been told to just shut up when they have complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives.”

What a message!

These are the same workers who occupy our companies and much of their class rage comes from how they have been condescended to and treated at work.

So what lessons flow from this for corporate leaders.

1) Be authentic. People sense inauthenticity in their bones and will never trust or warm to you, let alone be loyal to a leader who is not authentic.

2) Understand your employees, their concerns and motivations and try to apply that to creating your workplace culture and in developing your incentives.

3) Don’t adopt a script that you think is appropriate if it is not true to your personality. You wont be good at applying a different voice than your own.

4) Consider the winning themes of the Trump campaign, enumerated above, and use them to motivate your workforce.

5) Understand your particular employees’ backgrounds, their economic, religious and cultural situations, and use that to understand what will motivate them and what will offend or estrange them.

I had a good friend and client, Jim Shaw, who knew these lessons. He was very different from most major corporate Canadian leaders: direct, opinionated, forthright, ruthlessly honest, tough, secretly compassionate and very much enjoyed a good time. When he passed away, legions of heartbroken employees, past and present, came from everywhere to stand outside in the Calgary sub-zero cold, making a parade for the funeral procession. He had learned the lessons that Trump has just imparted before he even taught them.

Howard Levitt is senior partner of Levitt LLP, employment and labour lawyers with offices in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. He practices employment law in eight provinces and is the author of six books, including the Law of Dismissal in Canada.

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