He delivers great speeches. He paints a vision. He can mediate, motivate, consensus build and compromise.
But what we don’t know is whether Barack Obama is tough enough to enforce the difficult decisions he is laying out for the country.
Leadership expert Michael Watkins, writing in his blog on Harvard Business Publishing, wonders whether Obama is really the best type of leader for a turnaround.
Watkins says his own research on power transitions shows that leaders entering a situation where storm clouds are still on the horizon requires a much different leadership style (the “steward”) than what is required in the Obama situation, where the storm has already broken (the “hero”). Writes Watkins:
“In turnarounds, the situation demands heroism, by which I mean a visionary, charismatic, and often-highly directive form of leadership. Think of Shakespeare’s King Henry the Fifth at the Battle of Agincourt sprinting forward, sword in hand yelling, ‘Once more into the breech, dear friends.’ Think too of Henry’s willingness to execute the traitors who opposed him.”
Does that sound like the Obama style? Watkins wonders.
“Does our new President have the heroism within him to force (yes force) the nation to swallow some very bitter medicine? Because he strikes me more as a steward than a hero. This is potentially a big problem because consensus-building-on-steroids simply isn’t going to cut it.”
Another look at Obama’s early challenges comes from Barbara Kellerman of the Harvard Kennedy School. While Watkins sees Henry the Fifth as role model for the current challenge, Kellerman thinks a master juggler might be a better analogy.
“The most obvious leadership skills President Obama will need to demonstrate are a sense of clarity and purpose, and the ability to sort through competing demands, both domestically and internationally. The multiplicity of decisions that he’s going to be required to make immediately is possibly unparalleled. So above all, he will be asked to be reasonably calm in the face of particularly critical and tense times. That suits him very well because he happens to have a calm nature, but at the same time he will need to convey a sense of urgency.”
As Obama rolls into the second week of his presidency, how do you think he is doing as a leader? Where is he strong, and where might his leadership style be lacking?
