"You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!"

When the winds die down from this season’s hurricanes and the examination of where disaster management failed, I hope we won’t overlook the complex but crucial issue of how to give bad news to key people. Newsweek (Sept. 19) described President Bush as so resistant to hearing bad news that he remained largely in the dark about one of America’s worst catastrophes until people had already died. We are told that aides feared to interrupt his vacation because “Bush can be cold and snappish in private”; that “aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president,” and that even his top people would rather have someone else tell him bad news.

Then there was Leo Bosner, who tried to warn FEMA about the potential horrors of Hurricane Katrina via multiple e-mails to superiors. Here again there was failure. Whether the message or its medium was insufficient, or the people receiving unwilling to stick their necks out, another opportunity to save lives was lost. There are limits to every method of communication. In Bosner’s case -- and in retrospect – the warning e-mails should have been coupled with loud and insistent phone calls and face-to-face demands for action. But what worries me more than the selection of an inefficient medium of communication is an ineffective leader receiving the message.

In the first case, fear of upsetting one of the most powerful men on earth meant that many people perished. Most of us have known this type of boss. Impervious to all but what they themselves wish to hear, they cause their organizations and people to suffer. For them, high status carries the right to be arrogant, even abusive, to diligent people hired for the very purpose of keeping them informed. In time, they come to operate in a hermetically sealed atmosphere of flattering info-bites. And too many practiced courtiers let them get away with it.

I wrestled in my book It’s All Politics with the question of how each of us, and the entities for which we work, can develop political compasses to assure that destructive politics don’t rule in crisis situations. A sound political compass informs the individual or organization of the point at which such tactics of advancement as intimidation, information hoarding, feathering of nests, poisoning of wells, and – dare I say it – the blame game are unacceptable.

Courage can lead to political suicide, but sometimes letting the status quo remain intact is immoral. Surely we can find other jobs. In the case of disaster, political courage is crucial. Not only must we expect it, we must be intolerant of purported leaders who surround themselves with sycophants.

It may be pleasant to be told you’re always right, but it’s a lie. We need leaders who know how to listen and who refuse to allow negative politics to permeate the culture of government. If you want to run a private business that way, to the extent people aren’t endangered, that’s your problem.

If you’re running any part of the government that way, then it’s our problem. If you don’t have the guts to listen to people with whom you disagree -- if you can’t learn about impending disaster without killing the messenger -- if you have come to believe that you’re above human error then, elected or not, you are indeed no leader.