It’s been tough at the top for the last few years. George Bush, Sarkozy, Hillary Clinton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Wendy Alexander, Menzies Campbell, Yasuo Fukuda. All have suffered tumbling polls or storm of controversy. Even Boris Johnson seems to have experienced a pretty anaemic honeymoon, compared to what he might, in fairness, have expected. Similarly, Nick Clegg. Go back a bit further, Al Gore, John Kerry, IDS, William Hague. Each time the conversation is about their personal flaws and the social changes overwhelming them, but the aggregate is that leaders across politics are subject to derailment, ridicule and toxic levels of unpopularity. Not just for Gordon Brown, but also across the world it’s raining hard on political leaders.
The way leadership is covered in politics is all about personal flaws and virtues. People are brooding, congenial, old, charismatic, charming, withdrawn. It’s a conversation that hasn’t really moved on much since the Tudor theatre, with its parade of kings and princes bearing outsized personalities. But in the business world, which has seen its own fair share of dramatic derailments, there is a burgeoning literature on leadership that takes more analytical approach. And it’s this literature that throws up perhaps the most interesting book for this year’s torrid politics: Michael Maccoby’s The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow. Maccoby’s central thesis is that the entire 20th century paradigm of leadership is being junked by a tide of social and economic changes. The very kind of leaders who flourished in the bureaucratic age that we are moving out of, now repulse and anger people, rather than generating followers. We want our leaders to be like us and we want our experts to be entertaining polemicists we use to help clarify our own views. Technocrats make us see red.
Some might ask where this post-bureaucratic business ends. It is word of the day for public services, and now leadership too? But Maccoby’s analysis gets very concrete. He says that current leaders in corporations, thereby older by and large, grew up overwhelmingly in households with a single male earner. But while some 80 per cent grew up in that family structure, only 10-20 now lives in it. They grew up in one era and now face the challenge of leading in another. In the work place, Maccoby says that managers of the industrial age ‘avoided having to understand individuals by using formulas to control behaviour. Individual jobs were formatted, results were measured, and incentives were used to motivate people who were typed according to how well they served the boss.’
Reading that reminded me of my grandfather performing a time-and-study on my grandmother as she baked a cake and then redesigning the kitchen along ergonomic lines. Maccoby adds a very interesting comment: ‘at IBM and AT&T, and the other large companies I studied in the 1970s, few managers could describe the personalities of their bosses or peers. Furthermore, top managers often put subordinates in their place with humiliating teasing, put-downs, and ridicule…’ It’s the world of Madmen. It is a world where, as Maccoby points out, the idea of leadership is deliberately confused with ideas of paternal authority. Think of stability, hierarchy, precision, expertise and measured excellence.
But now family and work look very different. The modern knowledge worker is altogether more feline. Their loyalty is lent to organisations for as long as is mutually beneficial. Their individual persona and their knowledge-set define their offering in the employment market. Their dominant relations growing up are as likely to be siblings or childhood friends rather than the immutable father-figure. Theirs is a world of networks and alliances rather than a military-style pyramid. In the workplace this is the Google model of teams forming themselves around a task. Maccoby describes this generation of followers. They are interactive, independent, ready for change. They don’t want to follow ‘autocratic, insensitive bosses’. ‘These people won’t be led by father figures, only by role models who engage them as colleagues in meaningful corporate project, ideally creating a collaborative community.’
Look! We’ve managed to talk about leadership for three paragraphs there without getting into individual personality traits. And the intriguing thing for me is how often the terms are precisely those of the political commentariat. Curiously, our press can discuss nothing but leaders, but nothing about leadership. Maccoby’s analysis has a prescription built into it. Business leaders need to be more collaborative, visionary and emotionally open with their teams. Surely that is part of the challenge facing political leaders. A challenge that is bigger than individual personalities, at that.
But politics is hedged about with things that make this shift difficult for prime ministers. Start with PMQs. It’s a small-seeming thing, and difficult to discern the effect on voter. But it brings with it the mindset that once a week the prime minister must by the uber-bureaucrat, the meddler-in-chief, bearing a lethal 10-inch ringbinder, ready to answer detailed managerial questions across the whole of a government that employs millions and 40 per cent of the nation’s wealth. Almost every domestic story becomes a political story, and every political story ends up at No 10. What does the prime minister think of avian flu, the West Coast Mainline, bin collections in Surrey, this new hospital opening fiasco, this chief constable’s remarks? Will he personally set up a summit, a taskforce, an inquiry? The pitch of hyperactivity only rises with the pitch of futility.
There are further complicating factors. We are not willing to surrender entirely the idea of a strong, paternal prime minister. This isn’t just about older voters. When there is a real crisis there is a demand for some of that good old-time leadership. Ironically Brown’s exemplary response to last summer’s string of crises may have gained him some deserved short-term popularity at the cost of reinforcing a mode of leadership that was no longer sufficient. In the US the string of crisis has been plucked and plucked by the Republicans to create a state of infant fear and desire for a strong leader. But the sustainable solution is to find a prime ministerial mode that fuses the desire for a modern leader with the capacity for a strong crisis response.
Finally on the specific challenges for politics, there is the under-noticed and wholesale importation of a Karl Rovian politics of personal destruction in the UK. Remember Ken Livingstone’s wine? Did that remind you of the incoming Republicans’ overplayed tales about the outgoing Clinton team in 2000? What about the wholesale use of the world ‘ditherer’ against Gordon Brown. Remind you of ‘flip-flopper’? Think too of the Crewe and Nantwich campaign. Personal destruction is the game for the press. This is a difficult, hazardous environment in which to extent a new type of leadership based on vision, collaboration and communication. The temptation is to become ever stronger and ever more controlling. But that’s actually the trap.
However it is not impossible. The great innovator in this is Bill Clinton. Not – probably- because he wanted to be. After all, who wouldn’t set out wanting to be a straightforward, extemporary heroic leader? He was different because he had to be. Bill Clinton kept having to come back from defeat, attack and ridicule. His mess-ups were so enormous and flagrant that he had to connect emotionally with the electorate and plead and reason with them to survive. He couldn’t brazen it out and move on. Nor, in the US system could he easily be expected to resign and be replaced by another.
So what would it look like? What would a prime minister, any prime minister, have to say to connect with the deep anger people now feel towards politics in Britain and the government in particular and then to try to move on? It would take a moment of unparalleled emotional honesty with the electorate, it would take a bonfire of the way business is done, and it would take a serious set of policy commitments coming out of it. How about this, not as script for any particular political leader, just the first that wants to make the break with the bureaucratic age and leave the game of diminishing returns:
“People in politics are looking for the fix to make people happy again, the fresh face, the good news. They are wrong to do that. Some people think all that’s wrong can be fixed by a better sales patter, a better salesman. But they are wrong.
People in Britain are right to be angry. Politics has closed off. It’s become too much a profession, not enough a vocation. It has become too much about trying to pacify and manage, not enough about working with the people.
I have dealt with the current economic troubles we are feeling the way I was brought up to deal with problems. I have worked harder, I have consulted the experts. I have written the plans and given instructions to make it better. But that’s not enough any more. I wish I could just do it all for you. I can’t.
I have learnt that the most important, the hardest lesson about becoming prime minister is humility. And humility brings hope. Because the only thing bigger than the challenges we face out there in the world is the will and ingenuity of the British people. And it’s my role not to solve the problems alone but bring that to bear.”
Of course words must be borne out by actions. A cabinet meeting in the West Midlands is a good start. But it’s just that. How about a commitment to stay out of No 10 and to conduct prime ministerial business, for much of the week, around the country? How about an explicit restatement of the leadership role as setting the vision and hiring the right cabinet, rather than being a large-volume manager? How about a prime ministerial commission with evidence on where the government has succeeded, where it has fallen short and what the new emerging problems facing Britain are – rather than defending absolutely everything the government has done? How about an economic plan that didn’t just look at government action and preaching to individuals about their behaviour, but also looked at how people can work together, how solidarity and common purpose can reduce economic risk? Finally, there is a huge imponderable question: do political parties still enjoy sufficient legitimacy in national life to select national leaders on their own?
The current conversation we are having about political leadership is far too personalised. That’s not to excuse all individual faults. But political leaders around the world are in trouble. And there’s something deeper going on. If we are not to have a permanent game of musical chairs at the top we have to work out what that is.