Tony Blankley of the Washington Times (motto: Companies owned by religious cults don't need federal bailouts) offers the most trenchant and disturbing analysis of President Obama's nascent leadership style that we've seen to date.
In sum, since taking office, the President has dealt with four items he describes as high priority: Cabinet selection, incarceration of terrorists, economic stimulus and bipartisanship. In each he has shown lack of attention to detail and extreme delegation to the point of disengagement. None has gone well. All leave observers wondering whether the President, who has no record as an executive, can lead something big.
For us, Blankley's most disturbing observation is that the Obama White House has 130 senior staffers, a number double the usual in recent history. When everything is important or a priority or a crisis, nothing is. When every special interest is placated with its own person at the top, no one is at the top.
The Carter Administration was rightly pilloried for Mr. Carter's paralyzing micromanagement. Reagan was a notorious big-picture leader who could state his priorities succinctly on an index card. His effectiveness was the consequence of his ability to focus laser-like intensity on those priorities and ask every staff member what relationship any project had to them. His notorious failure, Iran-Contra, was a consequence of growing disengatement in details. His great victories came as a result of his effective guidance of priorities like tax cuts, reduced domestic spending and increased military spending, through a Democrat-Party controlled Congress, through selective, effective personal engagement in his highest priorities.
The executive's optimal involvement in detail is never exactly clear, as these poles show. Obama obviously tends to the Reaganesque in terms of personal engagement. But what he clearly doesn't have is Reagan's powerful sense of what is important and tireless will to see those priorities through. That deficiency may leave the Republic with a President who is the worst of both tendencies, a Democrat Grant or Harding.
4 comments:
... and now I'm depressed ...just kidding ...except for the part where I'm depressed
I, for one, am shocked, just shocked. Who would have thought that someone with so little governmental experience and no executive experience would have trouble running the largest organization in the free world?
Distributive models of leadership such as Mr. Obama's are commendable and can be effective but they require the appointment of highly competent followers who often have skills and personalities drastically different from the leader's.
If Obama's leadership style is distributive and if his personality is one that prefers to address the big picture (conceptual skills) and ignore the details, then he had better pick people for leadership positions in his administration who are obsessed with the details. I don't have a problem with a president who is not a detail person as long as those around him are detailed oriented people.
So far this does not appear to be the state of affairs in his administration. Obama seems to have a bunch of non-detail people around him also. Tim Geithner's (sp?) presentation last week was an example of this. He looked like an 18 year old college student who put together his speech for freshman public speaking three minutes before class started. I think he had written down on a napkin.
Obama needs to understand his leadership style and then arrange his administration appropriately by choosing people who are different from him in both talent and personality.
President Obama would do himself a favor by reading up on the attraction-selection-attrition framework. You can read about it online but it basically states that leaders have a natural tendency to align themselves with people who have similar personality traits as they do. In the long run those within the administration (organization) who do not exhibit these similar personality traits leave. This leaves behind a homogenous group incapable of dealing with diverse and complex problems because they lack the knowledge base and perspective necessary to them in their full capacity. In other words the administration will become narrow minded! Leadership is often about building self-directive teams made up of people with divergent views and talents.
Nice post. I am pleased at YOUR attention to detail in this entry (contrary to Obama's).
What I find ironic about our new executive officer is that he has very detailed explanations to the press (or maybe we should label them his filler list) about his buck shot agenda, yet cannot seem to focus on principled government. And I agree with another commenter--I am depressed.
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