Crises exist to test who the real leaders are. During the present crisis, as people lose confidence and anxiety grows, two leaders stand out, in the media at least: President Obama and his most vocal antagonist on the right, Sarah Palin. This might seem like a radically unequal contest. A sitting President versus a woman who served for half a term governing a state with a population smaller than any major American city? But leadership has always been considered mysterious, and one never knows.
To clear up the mystery, I began teaching CEOs and other top corporate officers in a business school course, “The Soul of Leadership.” It was a daunting challenge for me and also for them: “soul” isn’t a word frequently heard in the boardroom. But voices on all sides cry out for the kind of leadership that does two things: first, fulfill the needs of the group, which can be as small as a family or as big as a nation. Second, bring meaning and values back into everyday life. Corporate leadership has a reputation for being divorced from both goals. It wasn’t hard to find forward-looking people who wanted a change, even before Wall St. greed and excess began to paint a picture blacker than anyone was prepared for.
So, can the mystery of leadership be explained and taught? I believe it can, and to prove the point, the following acronym summarizes what it means to lead form the soul:
L = Look and Listen
E = Emotional Bonding
A = Awareness
D = Doing
E = Empowerment
R = Responsibility
S = Synchronicity
To keep this interesting, let’s examine each factor as it applies to Obama and Palin, spotting their strengths, weaknesses, and potential downfall.
L = Look and Listen
Successful leaders have sharp antennae. They are aware of their environment and sensitive to change. Despite their own strong opinions, they don’t become enclosed in a cocoon but keep tuning in to what others think.
By this standard, Palin and Obama are strong contenders, because they both owe their meteoric rise to the same thing: sensing a shift in the public mood that offered them an opening to lead. But both have drawbacks in this department. Palin is headstrong and self-directed. She knows what she knows, and she’s not about to change. Obama’s flaw is the exact opposite. When you meet him, he already knows your position and has examined it before you have a chance to speak for yourself. In both cases, people don’t feel listened to.
E = Emotional Bonding
Successful leaders make the whole group feel understood and cared for. They don’t stand aloof and apart. They put in the time to establish real relationships. This is most of what it means when we say a leader has the common touch — not that they sink to the lowest common denominator but that they empathize with universal feelings.
Obama and Palin are hugely successful on this front, too. Their followers feel an intense emotional identification. Neither one arouses indifference. But as before, their flaws are the opposite of each other. To some, Obama feels like an elitist who cannot empathize with common hardships. Palin feels like Jesse Ventura, a scrapper whose emotional range doesn’t extend beyond resentment and feisty defensiveness. Obama makes some people feel left out. Palin makes some people feel insecure.
A = Awareness
Good leaders are more aware of a situation than anyone else around them. They have expanded their consciousness, which gives the group security, because if a leader is unaware, the options for action are too few. Awareness includes openness and creativity, too.
Obama can be faulted on several fronts, but not here. He has an expanded awareness that extends in every direction, but most especially into the future. Palin, however, is deficient here, since she stands for the reactionary impulse that wants to stand still, go back, or preserve the status quot. The contest is between “Yes, We Can” and “America is great already.”
D = Doing
Leaders must have a vision, but nothing will materialize without action. Being action oriented is also the only way to meet people’s needs, since needs never go away and are constantly shifting.
Needless to say, Obama and Palin are constantly on the go, and they do what they need to forge ahead. But Obama’s “let’s fix everything” activism unsettles millions of people, while Palin’s actual program for the future is muddy.
E = Empowerment
Leaders don’t just grab power — they spread the power to the whole group. They pull off the difficult feat of making others feel stronger as they follow.
This may be the one area where Palin seems to outmatch Obama. She fuels people’s anger and resentment, which excites them into a state that feels less helpless and frustrated. Everyone has a need to feel hopeful and in control, and Palin communicates that she is in touch with that need, very personally. Obama wants to make people feel empowered by fixing the bad things in their lives, but his intention hasn’t yet connected. He seems in control and successful but cannot impart that to people who feel insecure and anxious. It’s a major obstacle in his presidency.
R = Responsibility
Good leaders step up to the plate and take responsibility for every decision they make. They don’t shirk burdens, even when the weight should fall on others.
Here we find a drastic difference between Obama, who if anything takes responsibility for too many things, and Palin, whose maverick status allows her to roam the landscape without being tied to any responsibility. As the result of stepping away from her governorship in Alaska after only two years, she left the impression of being self-serving and indifferent to her elected responsibilities. This will prove a major hurdle to reaching higher office.
S = Synchronicity
Synchronicity is usually defined as meaningful coincidence, but a good leader takes it much farther: he is in the right place at the right time. Successful corporate leaders often say that the biggest ingredient in their rise to the top was luck, but this is really shorthand for synchronicity: using circumstances to the best possible advantage.
It would be hard to imagine two better exemplars of this value than Obama and Palin, the one elevated to the Presidency after a single term in the Senate, the other snatched from total obscurity into the national spotlight. Both are so spectacular at being in the right place at the right time that a certain backlash has set in. Palin looks like an opportunist; Obama looks like the pet of privilege. Only time will tell if either one reaches the highest station of synchronicity, which is to blend personal destiny with a major historical role.
I hope this exercise gives room for thought. In future posts we’ll look in more detail at what leading form the soul means.
(To be cont.)
Published by San Francisco Chronicle