Wanted: A Leader, Not Someone Electable

January 4, 2008

By Warren Bennis and Tom Freedman

Amid the horse race-like coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, with its focus on questions of electability and likability, it’s worth considering which candidate would make the best president and leader. At the end of the day, we won’t be having a beer with the president, just as Americans didn’t with Washington or F.D.R., but we will depend on him or her to be a great leader. American history offers some clues about qualities that tend to show up in our greatest leaders. Here’s a scorecard on what to look for:

The Crucible

Great American leaders share an almost universal characteristic of having undergone a life-changing crucible, an experience that tested and transformed them into the leaders they became. These are often traumatic events that might have destroyed them. Harry Truman had not been notably successful as a businessman, or anything else, before serving as a young officer in the U.S. Calvary during World War I. But he found his destiny on a French battlefield when his horse was shot out from under him. Nearly crushed, Truman was pulled from underneath the broken animal with a new sense of himself. Like Truman, our next successful leader will likely have experienced something unusual that makes him or her aware of possessing the strength to lead others.

Experimentation

Our next great leader is likely to be an experimenter who draws on the ideas of many different people. As a result of F.D.R.’s adaptive capacity (the same quality that allowed him to reinvent himself after contracting polio), he was able to launch dozens of innovative social programs and initiatives, discarding those that failed and proposing new, better ones in their place.

Perhaps because they have the confidence of someone who has already been tested, great leaders generally like to collaborate. Talent, not loyalty, is the ultimate requirement for working alongside such leaders. Abraham Lincoln was an inspired practitioner of this tough-skinned type of leadership. As Doris Kearns Goodwin points out in Team of Rivals, Lincoln filled his cabinet not with loyalists, but with his most gifted political opponents, convinced that only they could help him save a nation torn apart by civil war.

Optimism

Great leaders tend to be optimists, purveyors of hope, not negativity.

America’s banking system collapsed only hours before F.D.R. delivered his first inaugural address. Instead of using that catastrophe to underscore the worsening plight of the nation, Roosevelt offered a rebuke to fear. Ronald Reagan brought a similar contagious optimism to his second presidential race, with its theme of “Morning in America.”

Our major social movements have also been energized by positive leaders. Not long after an African American teenager was beaten to death for whistling at a white woman, Martin Luther King Jr. chose to emphasize not vengeance or separatism, but a shared dream of social justice. King’s ability to share that expansive vision was a key to his ultimate success.

Timeliness

Is it coincidence that we have generally gotten great leaders just when we needed them? In the past, leaders have emerged in our nation’s toughest times. During the Revolutionary War, a tiny America of four million people produced at least six future stars.

The present is arguably a time of such necessity. We are threatened by those who would kill us and a global economy that is changing faster and with more opportunity and insecurity than ever before. In the last decade, fissures have appeared in every major institution in American life: government, churches, the military, nonprofits and business.

More than two-thirds of citizens think our country is headed in the wrong direction.

Politics

But the last essential quality of a great leader is politics. Practical politics and necessity produced every one of our last great leaders. Idealism is not enough. Washington, Lincoln and F.D.R. were great politicians.


The final question is one that only the leader will answer: Can I take my skill, experience, confidence, and willingness to experiment to go beyond my own electability and actually lead? It’s the answer to the most important question the nation needs to know.

Warren Bennis is Distinguished Professor of Management at the USC Marshall School and a noted scholar on leadership issues. He is co-author of Leadership for a Lifetime, recently reissued in paperback, and the recently published Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls. Tom Freedman, president of Freedman Consulting LLC, was senior adviser to the president in the Clinton administration.