REMEMBER that incompetent boss you used to have? He was a
good guy and all, but he just couldn't make decisions or prioritise.
Perhaps worst of all, he tried to make everyone happy,
resulting in almost everyone being angry or confused or both. And remember how
long it took management to move him out – and how aggravating that was?
Of course, at the time you sort of understood why the Bigs
had promoted the guy in the first place, and why they held out hope for so
long. He'd been a superstar salesman. Best the company had seen in ages.
But in the end, it turned out that all the things that made
him great as an individual performer made him lousy as a people manager.
It happens all the time at work. A brilliant engineer
promoted to run R&D. A gifted reporter elevated to editor. A cutting-edge
scientist made head of the lab. First cheers. Then, after a bit, confusion
about organisational direction, mixed signals about values, hurt feelings left
and right and, eventually, chaos.
Look, in business, some people can really knock it out of
the park in their current jobs. They just can't lead.
Smart companies get that reality. In fact, most have learned
the hard way that actually being a great leader involves unique skills that
even the most promising candidate for a leadership job simply may not possess.
But do the American people get that reality, too?
You have to wonder. Because there's an awful lot of noise
out there right now about campaign styles. President Obama has a reputation
built on his soaring oratory, while Mitt Romney, clearly no fan of crowd
scenes, can't seem to get through a week without an awkward (or worse, foot-in-mouth)
moment.
The president really knows how to run for office, the
pundits note. Romney – not so much.
As if it matters.
It doesn't, of course. Just as in business, in politics
being very good at one job (like delivering well-written speeches from a teleprompter)
doesn't necessarily make you very good at the next (like leading the free
world).
What voters need to do right now is stop focusing on stump
skills, or lack thereof, and start fixating on which candidate will be the
better president once the campaign is long over. They need to stop asking:
Who's more appealing on TV? and start asking: Who's got the right stuff to get
America working again?
Yes, in some part every person's answer to that question
will be driven by the issues – from healthcare to taxes to energy policy. And
in this election, the ideological divide is stark indeed, with Obama supporting
government centralisation that borders on European-type socialism and Romney in
favour of decentralisation, state and individual rights and free market
capitalism.
Stark, too, is the difference between the candidates'
leadership styles.
Over the past three years, Obama has taken a sort of
divide-and-conquer approach, amassing a list of enemies that would make Richard
Nixon proud – bankers, healthcare insurance providers, oil companies, wealthy
taxpayers, Congress and, most recently, the Supreme Court.
Surely his supporters must think this particular tactic is
effective, but there can be no denying that the country is more polarised than
when Obama took office.
Without doubt, Romney is not the model leader (his apparent
lack of authenticity can be jarring), but he has a quality that would serve him
well as president – good old American pragmatism. Perhaps that's the
businessman in him.
Or perhaps you just learn to do what you've got to do when
you're a GOP governor in the People's Republic of Massachusetts or the man
charged with salvaging the scandal-ridden Salt Lake City Olympics. If Romney's
long record suggests anything, it's that he knows how to manage people and
organisations to get things accomplished without a lot of internecine warfare.
Look, Obama may be a great campaigner and Romney (to date)
somewhat the opposite. But neither man is running to be campaigner-in-chief.
In politics, as in business, the leader's job needs to be
filled by a leader, and no effective leader, regardless of ideology, keeps an
enemies list.
- Reuters
* Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years
and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer
University. Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former editor of the Harvard
Business Review.