Hypocrisy in Leadership

I find it funny that a new department chair can criticize his predecessor for polling the department members individually (calling for more meetings as always a better way to discover what the department truly believes) and then in the next breath proclaim how important he found it to poll all the department members individually about previous decisions the department discussed in depth at a series of meetings.  Why do you need to poll them individually if meetings are always better?  We already had the meeting. Which is really the better way?

Another example is taking what used to be a routine task at the first department meeting of the year to assign various departmental duties where each member could ask for various tasks and turning it into a serious of individual conferences to ask people to do certain tasks.  If you truly think everything should be in the open, why don't we discuss the tasks together as we have done for years?