It Never Ends When It Ends!

Hardly anyone speaks of the failure of the Republican Party’s organizational ‘talent management’ in the aftermath of Donald Trump becoming the President. Republicans don’t really know what to do with him because he delivered results for them. Damned if they say anything, Damned if they don’t! Sounds familiar?

- Gurucharan Singh Gandhi

A recent issue of the Economist tried to evaluate the implications for the Republican Party (the institution) in the aftermath of Donald Trump (the incumbent) becoming the President.

The following piece attempts to pick from that discussion some threads of relevance for organizational realities.

Even great organizations and those with unparalleled legacy also end up growing talent to the top job that is shocking in the immediate term, damaging in the medium term and certainly toxic in the long term.

The Republican Party (the organization) must definitely do some soul searching (if it has not already done so far) about the conditions and circumstances in which it allowed someone to rise to the top — who with every passing day does not resemble the Republican core values. There must have been something in the fabric of the organization that would have allowed this hijacking and this usurping of the narrative. Such change does not happen overnight. As the article argues, something to the effect ‘Trumpism must have begun even before Trump.’

The focus, and I think quite unfairly, has been on the incumbent. The real issue and perhaps more germane one would be to see what in the organization allowed such a phenomenon. Where did all the checks and balance go? How come the institutional culture could not prevent such an eventuality? What happened to the early warning signals, the institutional memory that usually institutions as old as the Republican Party long nurture to prevent such betrayal of the core values?