Since his downfall in June, journos have been on the hunt for the moral in Kevin07’s demise.

Richard Farmer, writing for Crikey, summed up one convincing line of attack when he laid the blame at the foot of the erstwhile PM’s “presidential, almost dictatorial, dominance of decision making with the concentration of power in his Prime Ministerial office; [and] almost pedantic concern...about process...that led to innumerable reports and enquiries”.

Other journos weren’t quite so diplomatic in their assessment of Rudd’s fall from grace. Helen Trinca and staff writers from The Australian compiled an extraordinary collection of damning anecdotes from public servants, business leaders and Labor insiders about Kevin’s time as Prime Minister.

According to this report, what Rudd lacks in intuition, social skills, flexibility and consultative prowess, he makes up for in dithering procedural incompetence, spite, anger and delusions of grandeur. (There is no suggestion that Rudd is not very intelligent; just that he is so puffed up with awareness of his own cleverness that he is incapable of recognising the same quality in anyone else. He is also, the report concedes, sometimes very kind, even when cameras aren’t rolling.)

It is difficult not to feel some sympathy for a man who gets to read public deconstructions of his own abrupt demotion that reflect on the early death of his father and then pose such questions as whether “Kevin07 was part of an extended coping mechanism for a boy who found life hard to navigate?”

It is also difficult to understand what could have possessed an Australian Prime Minister to act as he did. After an aeroplane carrying 9 Australians flying in to walk the Trail went missing in PNG, for example, Rudd ignored advice from the PNG government about the impossibility of there being any survivors, ignored the appropriate actions already taken by Australia’s High Commission in PNG, and launched his own over-the-top rescue mission, coordinated from the Lodge in Canberra. According to Trinca, senior government officials found him there at midnight, in shirtsleeves, plotting the rescue route over a topographical map of the mountain ranges in which the plane was lost. Why did he do this? Because he had walked the Kokoda Trail himself.

You can imagine how this roll-your-sleeves-up-and-do-the-dirty-work way of operating would feel virtuous, even humble. No job too small for this PM! You can even imagine, underneath the absurdity and egoism, that such micromanaging was motivated by compassion and goodness of heart, by a desire to make the biggest difference he could in what was undoubtedly a difficult time for some Australian families. But as the events of June showed, rolling-up-your-sleeves-and-doing-it-all-yourself hasn’t worked out for Kevin Rudd in the long term.

This, suggests RTWMatters General Manager Cheryl Griffiths, is the key lesson we can learn from his ousting.

“He tried to do everything himself, and that just doesn’t work. It can be hard to delegate when you feel responsible for getting a job done properly, but if you try and do it all on your own, you not only miss out on good ideas, you also miss out on loyalty. People like to feel that their point of view matters and that they’ve contributed. I don’t think Rudd took that into account.”

There’s also the issue of trust, so essential in RTW and, as it turns out, the Labor Party. Karen Maley at the Business Spectator reports that in the days preceding Gillard’s coup “Labor MPs...were outraged by reports that Rudd’s chief of staff, Alister Jordon, had been sounding out backbenchers to determine the level of support for him, and to assess whether there was any move afoot for a challenge.”

This indirect way of tackling conflict won Rudd no friends, and by some accounts lost him the loyalty of the woman closest to his jugular, if not his heart: Julia Gillard.

Then there’s the matter of Rudd’s very public love affair with process—but what kind of process? You might remember that, at the beginning of 2010, RTWMatters revised our New Year’s tattoo from “People over Process” to “Process Serving People”. (Ah, the wonders of modern body art!) Here is another RTW lesson, courtesy of Rudd: the difference between process that serves people and people who serve process is a very, very important one.

Following Rudd’s demise, public servants have vented to The Australian about Rudd’s penchant for paperwork. It’s not so much that they resented the extra work this required of them; it’s that he gave no sign of engaging with, or even reading, the fruits of their labour. Not only is this morale-obliterating, it is also, the employees having moved from in-house bitching to public complaint, very embarrassing for Rudd.

This, says Dr Mary Wyatt, is one symptom of a poor workplace culture that leaders often fail to anticipate.

“Yes, the boss sets the flavour of organisational culture, and employees can suffer when the boss gets it wrong. But usually, it is not only the employees who suffer: the organisation as a whole does less well than it could, and there are often personal and professional costs for leaders too.”

From the factory floor to the office with a view, we are all influenced by the policies, processes and personalities that make up our working environment. As our now-ex PM demonstrated, not even those at the very top are immune.