2016 Campaigns – The Key Traits of Leadership

As this is being written, 2016 campaigns for governors, state legislators, US Congress and, of course, the presidency are heading into high gear.

So far, in the presidential campaigns we have seen both serious issues and trivial issues being handled by the candidates in both serious and trivial ways (not necessarily matching the seriousness of the issue being addressed).

The media, at least the commercial media, tends to focus reporting on political races as if they were sports events rather than serious attempts by a democratic republic to elect the officials who will represent us. Articles about polling results, who has pulled ahead of whom. (Compare that to sports articles about which team is stronger and predicting who will win before the game has begun.) Articles about how much money each candidate has raised. (Compare that to salary cap issues for sports with salary caps, or how much owners are willing to spend for those with no salary caps). Articles about staff changes and who has managed to hire the most experienced staff. (Compare that to articles about which coach is leaving/being fired and who their replacement will be).

Although I am very much more interested in how each candidate addresses the major issues facing us rather than the sports reporting by the media, I realize that their answers to major issues also has a drawback in choosing our representatives. I spent 19 years as a local elected official. Even in that relatively minor position, I faced so many more issues during each four-year term than I knew I would be facing when running for election or re-election. A cursory glance at recent American history can see blatant examples of this. During the 2000 election, most commentators said the main issue was “who would you be most comfortable sitting down and having a beer with”. We were coming off a period of peace and prosperity, about a decade after the Soviet Union surrendered to freedom and free markets. Who knew that less than one year after the election the president would need to deal with a terrorist strike in New York that killed thousands? Would the voters have made the same decision in each state (the change in electoral votes from Bush to Gore in any state would have changed the election results)? It would have been valuable to concentrate on who would handle the situation better. I am not saying the result would have been different but it might have been. Similarly, in the 2004 election, while in the midst of two wars, almost nobody was speaking about the coming collapse of the US economy. Again, had that been an issue in 2004, we may or may not have chosen differently.

So in making our decisions among all the candidates for the various positions in our country, about the only thing we know is that we don’t know all the issues the winners will have to address during their terms in office. As United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously stated at a press briefing on February 12, 2002:
“. . . as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

Although frequently made fun of for this statement, Rumsfeld was completely accurate, whether discussing wartime issues or the next term of office for an elected representative.

So what is a conscientious voter to do?

I have tried to extrapolate from how a candidate deals with the “known knowns” and try to make an educated guess as to how they would deal with the “unknown unknowns.” A commentary in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer has attempted to put forward a suggested structure in our decision-making. While only referring to the presidential campaign, it can be used for any candidate for any office.

Larry M. Starr, the director of the doctoral program in strategic leadership at Philadelphia University, John Pourdehnad, a principal consultant at Systems Wisdom, LLC, and Vincent Barabba, a member of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission and a former director of the US Census Bureau, wrote a piece entitled “Voters, focus on key traits of leadership” which appears on page C5 of the newspaper and "Beyond the bravado, the key traits of leadership" in the online edition.

Their excellent definition of leadership is:
“. . .: someone who is responsible for the big issues relating to purpose, vision, and strategy. They are not just administrators, who deal primarily with operations, or managers who are generally responsible for tactics.”

The authors reviewed the studies on leadership and found that effective leaders have four particular characteristics. The authors suggest that voters ask candidates to demonstrate how they have exhibited these characteristics in their past.

The first characteristic they believe prospective leaders must have is the ability to:
“. . . demonstrate a talent for the role they are seeking, the imagination to seek creative options, and the integrity and courage to pursue worthy ends with well-considered means.”

The second characteristic that candidates should demonstrate to voters is that they:
“. . . possess relevant skills, gained from a variety of experiences, that enable them to be persuasive when a critical issue is at stake and collaborative when it is important to get buy-in or support.”

Third, the authors suggest that, since personal knowledge, although important, should not be the only information relied upon:
“Candidates should be asked to describe the ideal advisory teams they would put in place to tackle various problems. Would they assemble a ‘team of rivals’ or a team of sycophants? We need candidates who understand that being surrounded by people who won’t challenge the boss with an alternative perspective or disagreeable option is a fatal flaw when it comes to decision-making.”

The fourth characteristic that effective leaders should demonstrate is “practical wisdom.” As Starr, et al, state:
“Responding to events in a flippant or superficial way without reflection can be dangerous. A candidate for president should not demonstrate a ready-fire-aim approach to problem-solving. And candidates who demonstrate this approach, in debates or on the campaign trail, should be asked how they would avoid such behavior in the future.”

Without taking the side of one particular candidate, or even one particular party, I believe this article is a good framework for voters to evaluate all candidates, for whatever public office they are running.