That night, U.S. voters exercised their voice. The voice was angry.

I do my best to stay away from discussing Politics but not from thinking and speaking out about leadership.   The night Trump won the U.S. presidential election, I was unable to fall asleep. I turned over and over in my bed thinking what the lessons were.  I was not shocked by the outcome, but had hoped that a demagogic rhetoric with touches of truths would not prevail.  I naively thought that the kind people I know and care about would see through the, sometimes, cruel language Trump was using to get his points across.  I had the expectation that a nation of people that I admire for its resilience in face of adversity would not be convinced by a campaign that poised the U.S. as a weak nation.  The campaign, however, resonated with most.  The bits of truth were sufficient to touch the chord of frustration that has been festering since the 2008 financial crisis and boiled into anger throughout the campaign months.   That night, U.S. voters exercised their voice. The voice was angry.

Anger does not make things better, but it does give us comfort.  This was a comfort that voters needed to feel so they could begin setting their sites towards a brighter future after feeling economically displaced over the last 8 years.    Voters angrily blamed their economic displacement and vulnerability on different possible causes: immigration, free trade agreements with other nations, a broken health system or lack thereof, a gradual increase of terrorism in U.S. soil, a political system that is detached from those constituents it represents, a government that is too intrusive and costly.  The understanding of these possible causes was superficial but the reasoning resonated deeply.  The bottom line is that voters were economically worse off. Job creation had been weak, economic recovery slow and growth meek, opportunities for high school and college graduates limited.  The income gap between the middle class and the wealthy widened significantly.

I wanted to distill several leadership lessons.  From a leadership competency point of view, Trump won because he: a) set an agenda of “making the U.S. great again” (not minding that the U.S. is a superpower and a great nation on many fronts); b) boldly entered the political scene positioning his persona as a creative, “out of the box” thinker and doer; c) identified causes that would resonate with voters as a show that he selflessly cares about their plight; and d) communicated repeatedly his intent.  As a seasoned negotiator, he underscored Clinton’s shortcomings to voters. Clinton’s inability to connect with the common person and her not-so-transparent passage through the “corridors of power” were enough to make her not credible among the “folk”, as Trump like to call voters.    

Trump’s leadership, thus far, is circumstantial.  It has not been about the person. It has not been about Character Leadership.  If his leadership is not circumstantial, the verdict is yet to be determined…at best. Honesty has been disguised behind a barrage of inflammatory accusations. Courage has been positioned as the ability to high-handedly attack anyone or anything that gets in the way of the “agenda”. Vision has ben masked by an inaccurate defined “agenda”.   People Alignment has been achieved by shifting blame to “symptoms ” instead of both addressing the fundamental cause of the main issues and empathizing with people’s need to flourish.   Trump is a consequence of our inability, as a society, to deliver well-being and to place the interests of the common good before our own. As a society, we have failed to show Character Leadership, a leadership based on values.  We have the opportunity to show this by following Hillary Clinton’s example of courage and grace during her Concession speech, and upholding the U.S. Constitution by accepting our new President.