The Presidential Leadership Project

Honest
Forward-looking
Inspiring
Competent
_________________________________

I have to disagree with Mr. Posner about what people want in a president.

After all, it seems as though Senator Clinton’s a sure shot to become the Democrat candidate, but does anyone think Senator Clinton’s honest?

People may like her, people may vote for her, people may elect her, but I think those same people are willing to just allow her to slide along as her husband slid along, on the knife-edge of criminal or immoral behavior.

The electorate doesn’t care about honesty.

Credibility as an attribute of a candidate for office, seems to be needed by appearance only. So often I have read polls about how a candidate is liked or admired, but when the same persons who said they admired/ liked the elected official or candidate, are asked about issues the picture becomes confused.

When a candidate’s/ official’s positions or policies are polled, independently of their names, the results can be completely different. The same people who would vote for the candidate they like, would never vote for their policies or programs.

How is that explained? Is credibility confused in the mind with like-ability, or feeling good, the way marketers make us feel good just before they drop their product in front of our eyes? If we feel a good about a person, do we trust them, do we believe them? Should we?

Mark John Hunter
Alpena, Michigan

Good observations, and supported with content. However, the credibility of leadership extends to worldview and ideology issues as well. Effective political leadership depends on the kind of credibility that is respectful of different points of view, yet properly disciplined with regard to principles and intentions. When candidates manage much of their discussions around populist mantra, with little substantive material, and weasel talk, more discerning voters and followers will seek more. More substance, more discourse and more grounding. There is no question that appropraite optimism plays into the puzzle. And “presence” is a real factor in the leadership zone.

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I found Mark John Hunter’s comment quite intriguing, and it raises a central point about Presidential and all other leadership: People are not rational.

As a leader myself I find this quite frustrating, and it’s easy for me to empathize w my clients when they ask, “why don’t people just do their jobs?” and “we’ve presented the facts over and over, how can people still be asking for more communication?”

Jim’s 4 attributes touch on this dilemma, and for me the real “acid test” is in his first question: “How much do I trust this person?” He then goes on to tie trust to honesty, and I think this misses the heart of the issue.

Honesty, as many commentors have pointed out, is not the real driver of trust. My organization teaches that trust comes from four Cs:
- Competence
- Consistency
- Commitment, and
- Caring
Only the first one is “rational” - the others are all about emotion. Trust is a FEELING - not an idea. And feelings are not governed by intellect. Feelings arise from a primal connection, from the core of the brain where we’re constantly analyzing threat and opportunity - fear and hope. Leaders who are cut off from their own emotions and from the emotions of their people can’t access these core drivers. They are “wooden” or “mechanical” and we don’t trust them. Yet leaders who are “emotionally present” feel real, we have an emotional response which pulls us.

Anyway - thanks Dan for setting this up, great opportunity to consider what is truly important to us, and thanks Jim for a great kick-off article!
- Josh

Joshua Freedman, COO
Six Seconds, The Emotional Intelligence Network

Thanks, Joshua Freedman. I so agree: people are not rational! It’s all well and good to imagine and say that we want specific qualities in a leader, but then, according to recent research, most will vote for the candidate who smiles and conveys confidence (even if they’re scumballs!)

What good is it for an elite few who participate in this blog to identify the characteristics of an ideal presidential leader if the voters are going to vote for some candidate who’s practiced smiling a lot? This is how the USA became the laughingstock of Europe when we elected a B movie actor to be president because he could smile and look confident even if he didn’t understand a lot of fine points and implications about how to manage the federal bureaucracy, budget, relations with other nations, etc., for the good of all in the long run!

And what about the research of Marcus Buckingham in _The One Thing You Need to Know… about Great Leading_? If a person can paint a vision for the future, one that lots of others will buy into and invest themselves in, then they’ll be a great leader.

As for policies and positions, we all know they can change with new information, as they should. We vote for a person, not a platform and hopefully, not for or against one party or another.

…or so I believe.

I think that most people in this country look for those four qualities in their leadership, but they get them confused with many other attributes. Another common confusion was brought up by Mark who said many people like an individual but would never approve of their policy.

I agree that trust is one of the most major influences. I think a lot of people in this country vote based on whether or not they believe they can trust an individual. A lot of that is believing whether or not they connect with the people on a personal level.

Thanks for starting this discussion.

I would be interested in knowing if the 25 years of research also did post-election follow-up to see whether the stated qualities voiced by potential voters turned out to be the same qualities they voiced about the candidates they actually voted for in the election.

Thanks.

Thoughtful - inciteful.
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For the last twenty-five years my coauthor and I have been asking: “What do you look for and admire in a leader?”

I would be really impressed if for the last twenty-five years Kouzes’ coauthor and himself had been told by people “you are what I look for and admire in a leader”. I mean, personally, I think anytime you ask that question that should be the answer you are seeking: yes, you. Otherwise, the time would be best spent asking yourself and only yourself, and spending your research to make sure you are capable of answering it the best possible way you ever could. I mean, these two other ways of selecting leadership benefit the individual instead of “passing the buck”, even if that buck is passed en masse. Weren’t democracy and capitalism supposed to benefit the individual, first, autonomously?

I don’t have personal problems with Kouzes’ intent: he obviously wants us to know how to select a leader. I do find some problems with the details of Kouzes’ processes, claims, basic assumptions and conclusions.

The results… do not significantly vary by demographical, organizational, or cultural differences.

I think when you have a set of data or information, and I mean information here in both the communicative and quantum sense, then “differences” are a conventional matter of where you set your bar of entropy. Illustration: you measure the coastline of England with a mile-long ruler, you get one measurement of its length; you measure again with a foot-long ruler, you get something several times the size. Not to invoke Heisenberg, but perhaps if Kouzes was looking for specific differences as mentioned, he would have found them after all. Maybe sociobiology needs to be hedged aside for the sake of quantum social interaction? Okay I made that last one up.

Mind you that this research spans 25 years, so this is not some fad.

I do have mind, though, that this short period of time is expected to strike me as somehow monumental in characteristic.

I think something could be said about the squat nature of Kouzes’ suggested brilliances…

“Honest”: Why don’t we ask for “conclusive”? Honesty should be a given, and its absence should be a disqualifier. Saying that people simply want honesty is like saying you expect to get a fair shake in the market — true, but what does everybody getting a fair shake have to do with competition, which strives to earn your favor while fairness is a basic assumption? If all Americans want is to “not get cheated any more”, that’s just an indicator of what a sorry state they are all in. What kind of jackal prides the Americans on being in such a depressed state? And runs a platform of being “at least honest” and thinks that’s such a hot shot? Good grief! If a person is being quite honest but doesn’t manage to conclude upon a point, or offer us a conclusion that we can weigh for ourselves, then what’s the point of their honesty? What dumb luck we’d have if that’s all we needed, was honesty! We should expect that honesty to be leading us somewhere, therefore, we should expect our leader to be conclusive.

“Forward-looking”: As opposed to having their head stuck where or their neck twisted how? Are we to assume, as well, that Americans are merely “stuck in the past” or something and only want to be relieved of their burdensome traditions? What about our constitution and how it’s been denigrated and all but desposed of for several generations now? Weren’t those who left behind the original intent of this country not “forward looking”? Why don’t we ask for “visionary”? “Yes, you’re looking forward, but so are most of us”, who find any worth or value in ourselves and the rest of this world: so while you (and we) are looking forward, furthermore — what do you see?

“Inspiring”: Inspiring is neat. “Cool”. Formed of a suggestion to reach a relatively higher point. But there are periods in American history where unrealistic ideals have left populations depressed, after they strove, and strove, and strove for them and didn’t manage to succeed in their goals. We can’t hope to achieve something that’s unrealistic, but if post-depression confidence artists taught us anything, it’s that if you’re “inspired” enough, you might be persuaded to do practically anything, even to buy life insurance from a man who owns nothing but a suit and a shiny car and offers no more credentials than a letterhead and a business card. Hitler’s SS were deeply inspired, religiously, politically, and in many other ways. Weren’t they? And look at them now — where are they now? They really lost, big time, especially in the competition for being tolerably logical and humane. We can reach as high as we want sometimes and not get anywhere; but boy were we inspired. Why don’t we ask for “logical”? This would also offer a hand to lift up that little “honest” and bring it along as well: it’s rather impossible to be truly logical and yet dishonest. Logic would offer us the support of our own convictions, if they are worth keeping, and also direction towards what’s obviously best.

“Competent”: Any lever-pulling is “competent” for their lever-pulling job, agreed? But not necessarily intelligent enough to design the lever or the mechanism it controls. I’m not saying they should rewrite the constitution, but there are heaps and heaps, literally gobs of neo-socialist experiments that have gone awry, and could all use some fixing.

Consider the SEC’s declaration that the NYSE is “a fast market”, therefore not requiring oh-so-much regulation as they were formed to maintain over it. Is that just a cop out? The “fast market” moniker (and looser regulations) have stuck, so does not that denote “competence”? SEC officials aren’t losing their jobs over basically throwing their hands and giving up — that denotes “competence”, I’ll vouch for it.

Or consider public education: the industrialists and neo-socialists got together to prove Marx’s assumption — that a person’s social worth is inherently within their industrial product — can work for Americans, or namely, can work Americans into the grips of industrialists, ensuring them a steady supply of blue-collar workers for generations to come. And yet our industries are moving overseas? How has public education not failed?

There are so many neo-socialist experiments that should have ended, and classic socialist/federalists like Jefferson perhaps would have dismantled them by now, considering the federalist opinion that the brink of tyranny had already reared its ugly head short of two decades after the founding of the Union.

Eisenhower warned us not only of the “military-industrial complex” but also of the “educational-research complex” (sorry if any researchers are offended). We obviously haven’t taken any of that seriously, considering how most of the governmental problems that have made newspaper headlines in the last dozen presidential administrations have been directly the result of one of these two complexes. How can a nation so incompetent, to have a direct warning and not to heed it one bit, really be looking for “competence” in its leader? Did Kouzes put a strict enough control on his research-experiment in order to determine whether (a) he could say for sure what “competence” is or (b) whether his research only discerned “competence” along very specific, context-dependent lines or whether a general, overall “competence” was qualified? If the answer to both (a)&(b) is “yes”, then the question is, what does “competence” have to do with anything if neither the people nor the leader are intelligent enough to do something with that competence?

So, why don’t we ask for “intelligence”, not mere “competence”? Competence comparitively rates somewhere near cognizance. It’s nice that the president is expected to be awake, but at work on time, doing something, and being effective are long hauls compared to rubbing your eyes and having coffee.

* Conclusive
* Visionary
* Logical
* Intelligent

Why don’t we ask for it?