As a business leader, you have a brand – and that brand is you

The roll-out of Obamacare has become a clinic on bad leadership. Anyone who wants to lead or is in a position to evaluate leaders can learn any number of lessons from the events of the last few weeks.

I've written previously about the poor management of the healthcare. gov website development and launch. I won't belabor that topic here. What I'm more interested in now is the actions of people in leadership positions that erode their status as leaders.

When you are a leader, you are constantly under the scrutiny of those around you. They listen and watch and draw conclusions. They take the sum total of what they see and hear and they decide if the leader is the real deal, someone to be trusted and followed.

Like it or not, as a leader you have a brand and the brand is you.

Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, has been especially effective in undermining her own brand. First, she kept assuring anyone who asked that the healthcare. gov website would be ready to go on schedule. Her consistent message was, "Don't worry. Be happy." When happy talk is closely followed by a disastrous outcome, the brand of whoever was doing the happy talk takes a hit.

She followed her happy talk with a demonstration of being opaque where transparency was needed. In her testimony before Congress, she continuously ducked questions about how many individuals had signed up for insurance through the federal exchanges. She claimed not to have valid data and then kept repeating that her department releases data only monthly, so everyone would just have to wait until November.

The claim of having no data is ridiculous. What leader, poised to launch federal insurance exchanges in 36 states, would not have a dashboard or giant thermometer in his or her office with daily results posted? What leader, if the website couldn't produce accurate data, wouldn't mobilize his or her minions to get on the phones to the insurers and get the numbers?

Her claims weren't credible, and for leaders, credibility is everything. She dealt the final coup de grâce to her leadership brand with the standard phony Washington, D.C., mea culpa.

Why is it phony? She said, "Hold me accountable" and apologized. We all know what that means - nothing. Unlike most of us in the real world, she won't be fired, demoted or sent to the Siberian regional sales office. She won't have to make big changes in her management approach. She'll write a book.

The phony mea culpa is the mirror image of a real mea culpa which, at the Cabinet level, is, "I take full responsibility for what has happened and therefore I have offered my resignation." People don't look up to leaders who say they take responsibility without any consequences or changes.

Not to be outdone by his subordinate, President Obama got into the act and diminished his brand in very similar ways.

He expressed outrage. "Nobody is madder than me," he said. But as is increasingly the norm for him, his statements of frustration seemed to place him out of the line of responsibility. His words and body language made him appear disconnected. People want a leader who is in the loop and doesn't act like he or she is out of the loop when things go wrong.

In more recent days, the president's repeated claims that "If you like your insurance plan you can keep it, period" have proven to be false, as millions of people receive cancellation notices. Instead of taking ownership of the falsehood, the president tried to lawyer it, explaining that perhaps his language could have been more precise. In doing so, he gave birth to a credibility problem.

When you finish a sentence with "period," whatever you said better be true with no parsing, tweaking or lawyering, or your leadership brand is in trouble. It might have been OK to be misinformed, but he wasn't misinformed. He knew that policies would be canceled. The damage to his brand is reflected in his 41 percent approval rating in the Nov. 4-10 Gallup poll.

Those of us who want to lead effectively must build a leadership brand.

Credibility is one key element of that brand. Credibility flows from a combination of honesty and a reasonable degree of transparency. People want leaders who tell the truth and who they don't believe are hiding things. Credible leaders don't use happy talk, and they state simple truths.

People also want engaged, accountable leaders. They want leaders who are in the loop, even when things go badly - leaders who take responsibility and admit they are not up to the task or who make significant changes in their approach and style to rebuild the leadership brand.

When you are a leader, you are constantly under the scrutiny of those around you. They listen and watch and draw conclusions.

Richard Randall is founder and president of management-consulting firm New Level Advisors in Springettsbury Township, York County. Email him at info@newlevel advisors.com.