Obama vs. Clinton: Leadership Styles

Obama vs. Clinton: Leadership Styles: "Viewpoint February 8, 2008, 6:08PM EST text size: TTObama vs. Clinton: Leadership Styles"

His approach of visionary leadership is appealing but risky. Her health-care reform managerialism already has been proven ineffective

The virtual dead heat in the Super Tuesday Democratic primary is being attributed by the punditocracy to the absence of any significant policy differences separating candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The two nonetheless have drawn clear distinctions between the ways in which they each propose to govern the nation, and those differences sound a lot like a rehashing of past debates about opposing styles of corporate leadership.

Senator Clinton (D-N.Y.) argues that the role of the President is not only to provide visionary leadership outward from the Oval Office to the nation and the world but also to control and direct the federal bureaucracy downward to ensure that policies are carried out faithfully and effectively.

In sharp contrast, Senator Obama (D-Ill.) declares he will do the chief executive's job by focusing completely on providing leadership vision, judgment, and inspiration. As for controlling the agencies that would report to him, he says he will delegate that responsibility. He pledges to stay above the managerial fray and, instead, hold agency heads fully accountable for the performance of the bureaucracies in their charge.

On one level, these visions seem to reflect a Carteresque tendency to micromanage (Clinton) and a Reaganesque organizational nonchalance (Obama). But each candidate is actually putting forth a well-reasoned philosophy of leadership, and their distinct approaches have implications for their respective abilities to deliver on the changes the majority of the nation seems to desire. From the vantage point of a business school professor, what is particularly striking is that the two candidates clearly articulate competing theories of leadership that have been the focus of much scholarly research over the last several decades; what I'll refer to as the "managerial" and "transformational" approaches.

Textbook Exercise
As Clinton reminds us, she has actual experience in the practice of the former. As head of the health-care reform initiative during her husband's first Administration, she conducted a near-textbook exercise in managerialism. She closeted for months in the White House with an impressive team of technocrats who thoroughly reviewed all the relevant data about the U.S. health-care system, analyzing various and opposing views about what should be done to improve its performance, and bringing forth a highly detailed national health-care plan. In assembling that complex plan, the technocrats included ideas from numerous, conflicting ideological and professional camps, assuming what they each would need to have in the plan in order to support it.

But instead of building a consensus for change, this exercise actually created deep dissatisfaction among all the relevant constituencies needed to enact the proposed legislation. By deciding what these players required without involving them in the process, the technocrats built resistance to the very changes they proposed. The result: gridlock and, subsequently, a dozen years of a worsening health-care crisis.

It is noteworthy that while claiming the mantle of experience, Clinton has not spelled out what lessons she learned from this lost opportunity. Based on the detailed policy positions the wonks on her campaign staff have put forward on every conceivable national issue, it would appear that she is still of the managerialist persuasion.

That's not surprising. After all, managerialism was, until relatively recently, the dominant school of thought in the corporate world as well. Influenced heavily by the quantitative techniques developed by Robert McNamara's Whiz Kids at the Pentagon and Ford Motor (F), it was promulgated at the nation's leading B-schools and, in the 1970s and '80s, led not only to the wide-scale practice of management science in business organizations but also to the creation of large, centralized planning staffs and the top-down leadership methods known collectively as "change management."