Good Leaders Don't Always Need a Vision

Op-Ed, Financial Times June 24, 2013 Author: Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor Belfer Center Programs or Projects: International Security

Leadership is not just about inspiring but concerns creating and maintaining institutions Are leaders with transformational objectives and an inspirational style better than leaders with more modest objectives and a transactional style? We tend to think of Woodrow Wilson, John F Kennedy or Ronald Reagan as more impressive than Dwight Eisenhower or George HW Bush. Leadership experts often dismiss transactional leaders as mere "managers". That is a mistake. Transformational leaders provide inspiring goals that can help overcome self-interest and narrow factionalism. They summon broader energies among followers. Groups and nations that are rent by factions can benefit from a Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela who raise people's sights to a common cause. But when Mao Zedong rallied the Chinese around the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the result was millions of unnecessary deaths. Yet the leadership theorist James McGregor Burns celebrated Mao as a transformational leader in his seminal work in 1978. Two centuries ago the newly independent American colonists had a transformational leader in George Washington. Then, they invented a different type of leadership when James Madison and other transactional leaders negotiated the US constitution. Madison's solution to the problem of conflict and faction was not to try to convert everyone to a common cause but to overcome division by creating an institutional framework in which ambition countered ambition and faction countered faction. Separation of powers, checks and balances, and a decentralised federal system placed the emphasis on laws more than leaders. Even when a group cannot agree on its ultimate ends, its members may be able to agree on means that create diversity without

destroying the group. In such circumstances, transactional leadership may be better than efforts at transformational leadership. One of the key tasks for leaders is the creation, maintenance or change of institutions. Madisonian government was not designed for efficiency. Law is often called "the wise restraints that make men free" but sometimes laws must be changed or broken, as the civil rights movement of the 1960s demonstrated. On an everyday level, whistleblowers can play a disruptive but useful role in large bureaucracies, and a smart leader will find ways to channel their information into institutions such as an ombudsman. An inspirational leader who ignores institutions must consider the long-term ethical consequences as well as the immediate gains for the group. Good leaders design and maintain systems and institutions. Well-designed institutions include means for self-correction as well as ways of constraining leaders' failures. As a former top legal officer of General Electric put it, a leader needs to create an institutional framework where "the company's norms and values are so widely shared and its reputation for integrity is so strong that most leaders and employees want to win the right way". Poorly designed or led institutions can also lead people astray, as the case of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reminded us. The guards were reservists without special training who lacked supervision and were given the task of softening up detainees. It is not surprising the result was torture. The moral flaws were not simply in the prison guards, but also in the leaders who failed to monitor a flawed institutional framework. Good leadership is not merely inspiring people with a vision, but involves a capacity for creating and maintaining institutions that allow both effective and moral implementation. As I studied the presidents of the 20th century, I discovered that some of the best, such as Franklin Roosevelt, were transformational in style and inspirational in objectives, but some such as Eisenhower and Mr Bush were primarily transactional. Consider the contrast between Mr Bush and his son. The father eschewed what he called "the vision thing" as president, while the son proclaimed that he would not "play small ball". Yet the father had one of the best (in both the sense of moral and effective) foreign policies, and the son

had one of the worst records as president in the past half century. The son was transformational but we did better under the transactional father. Leadership experts and historians should consider this difference before they assume the superiority of transformational leaders. The writer is a professor at Harvard university and author of 'Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era'