Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There’s an old saying that goes, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” For most of my life, I thought it was a joke. A cheap shot at teachers, a little cynical humor suggesting that people who couldn’t cut it in the real world had found a safe place to explain to everyone else how it was supposed to work.

Lately, though, I’ve started to wonder whether I gave that saying too much credit as a joke and not enough consideration as a description of how we actually operate in the United States.

Somewhere along the way, we seem to have taken that old expression, expanded it, and turned it into an unofficial qualification for leadership. If you can’t do the job, teach it. If you can’t teach it, manage the people who do it. And if you can’t manage them, apparently, there’s always a government appointment waiting for you.

After all, if you obviously struggle with public speaking, why not become Secretary of Defense? If you have never demonstrated the ability to perform the work you’re overseeing, why not become the executive responsible for making sure everyone else performs it? And if you have no practical experience with the consequences of your decisions, congratulations! You may be exactly what somebody is looking for to run an entire department.

Welcome to the American leadership model, where demonstrated competence is apparently an optional accessory.

Now, before the teachers reading this start sharpening their pencils to correct me, let me clarify something. Teaching is a skill. A demanding one. Being able to do something and being able to explain it to someone else are two entirely different abilities. Some outstanding teachers are not necessarily the most accomplished practitioners in their fields, and some brilliant practitioners couldn’t teach a goldfish to swim.

Teaching requires patience, communication, knowledge, and the ability to recognize that other people don’t automatically understand something just because you do. Good teachers deserve respect, not a punchline.

The problem isn’t teaching. The problem is the assumption that leadership somehow requires even less competence than teaching.

I learned a very different lesson during my time in the military, particularly as a junior noncommissioned officer. The principle was simple: Never ask your troops to do something you aren’t willing and able to do yourself.

That didn’t mean I had to be the best at every task. It didn’t mean I had to know everything or pretend I was incapable of learning from someone with more experience. It meant that I needed to understand the work, appreciate its demands, and be willing to share the burden when necessary.

If I expected someone to carry the load, I had better understand what carrying that load involved. If I expected someone to perform under difficult conditions, I had better understand those conditions myself. And if I was going to hold someone accountable for a failure, I needed to understand the task well enough to distinguish between a lack of effort, a lack of training, and an impossible set of expectations.

Rank didn’t exempt me from the work. It increased my responsibility for the people doing it.

That was the point.

Leadership wasn’t about sitting somewhere comfortable, issuing orders, and then acting surprised when reality failed to cooperate with the plan. It was about setting an example, providing direction, accepting responsibility, and making sure the people under your command had what they needed to succeed.

Apparently, that lesson didn’t make it into every corporate boardroom or government office.

Look around the modern workplace. How many employees have a manager who couldn’t perform their jobs if their lives depended on it? Managers who impose deadlines without understanding the work involved, establish procedures without understanding why the existing ones exist, and demand productivity improvements without knowing what their employees actually do all day.

They measure performance using spreadsheets and dashboards while the people doing the work spend half their day entering data into the systems designed to measure how much work they’re doing.

It’s a beautiful little circle of administrative achievement. Nobody produces anything, but everybody has a report proving that productivity is up.

And when the system fails? The manager calls a meeting.

Naturally.

The people who actually understand the problem are then required to explain it to someone who doesn’t understand the work, so that person can develop an action plan to address the problem, which will eventually be implemented by the same people who understood the problem in the first place.

Three meetings, two presentations, and a dozen emails later, somebody gets promoted for demonstrating leadership.

The employees get another mandatory training module.

Government doesn’t seem immune to this phenomenon, either. In fact, it sometimes appears to have perfected it. Positions of enormous responsibility can become rewards for loyalty, political favors, or personal connections rather than opportunities to place experienced, qualified people where their knowledge matters most.

And the consequences aren’t limited to missed corporate targets or another pointless performance review. Government decisions affect national security, public health, education, infrastructure, and the everyday lives of millions of people.

These aren’t theoretical exercises. The people affected by those decisions don’t get to submit a performance evaluation of their own and ask for a different management team.

We should expect more from the people entrusted with that kind of responsibility.

I don’t expect every government official to have personally served in every branch of the military, worked in every hospital, taught in every classroom, or built every bridge. That’s ridiculous. No individual can possess all the experience required to oversee a modern government.

But I do expect leaders to understand the responsibilities they’re accepting, listen to qualified professionals, respect the people who actually do the work, and recognize the difference between confidence and competence.

Most importantly, I expect them to understand that authority doesn’t magically create expertise.

A title doesn’t make you knowledgeable. A corner office doesn’t make you a leader. And being the person who signs somebody else’s paycheck doesn’t mean you know how to do their job.

Sometimes the most intelligent thing a leader can say is, “I don’t know. Explain it to me.”

Unfortunately, admitting ignorance seems to have become a sign of weakness in a culture that rewards people for projecting absolute certainty. We have elevated the ability to sound authoritative above the willingness to learn. We celebrate people who can dominate a conversation rather than those who can demonstrate an understanding of the subject.

We confuse the ability to give orders with the ability to lead, and the ability to demand accountability with the willingness to accept it.

Which brings me back to that old saying.

Perhaps it was never really about teachers at all. Perhaps it was about our habit of making assumptions regarding who should be doing what. We assume the person who can do the work should do it, the person who can explain the work should teach it, and the person who can coordinate the work should manage it.

Those are three different skill sets, and the best leaders often possess some combination of all three.

But somewhere along the way, we began treating management as the natural destination for anyone who wanted more authority, regardless of whether they had the experience, judgment, or temperament to deserve it.

We created a system in which people can rise so far above the work that they eventually forget what the work looks like. Then they make decisions affecting the people below them without understanding the consequences of those decisions.

And when those decisions fail, they blame the people who had the least power to influence them.

Maybe it’s time to reconsider our standards.

Instead of asking whether someone looks like a leader, speaks like a leader, or has the right connections to become a leader, perhaps we should ask a few simpler questions.

Have they demonstrated competence? Do they understand the responsibilities they’re accepting? Can they listen to people who know more than they do? Are they willing to share the burden? And when things go wrong, will they accept responsibility or immediately start looking for someone beneath them to blame?

Those seem like reasonable expectations. Almost old-fashioned, really.

Then again, I’m a product of a generation that was occasionally taught that responsibility meant something, that experience counted for something, and that you shouldn’t ask someone else to do a job you weren’t willing to do yourself.

Maybe that makes me a little old-fashioned.

But I’d rather work for someone who understands the job and respects the people doing it than someone who has mastered the art of looking important while delegating everything that might expose their ignorance.

So here’s my revised version of the old saying:

Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach. Those who can lead, take responsibility. And those who can do none of the above? Apparently, they get a corner office, a government appointment, or a seat at the executive table.

And then they hire somebody competent to explain why everything went wrong.

I used to think that was a joke.

I’m beginning to think it was a job description.