I recently took an HR leadership training, where I learned the three key rules of leadership:
- Be authentic
- Bring out the best in others
- Accept criticism as a gift
How would that translate to the presidency? I asked Enrique to explore, back before Hillary’s crushing defeat. Here’s what he wrote…
TRUMP
BEING AUTHENTIC
Depending on how you see things, authenticity is a quality that Trump has in excess–or practically not at all.
On one hand, he’s pointedly uninhibited about regurgitating every thought that crosses his mind, without a thought of its consequences, harm or accuracy. If failure to have a filter is a sign of authentic demeanor, few match his guileless character.
On the other hand, he’s an admitted fudger and flip-flopper, too keen on inflaming lowest-common-denominator passions to bother getting his facts straight or smoothing the seams of his logic.
“I play to people’s fantasies,” he once said. “I call it truthful hyperbole.”
If it were possible (and it is not) to analyze the personality dynamics of this campaign with coldly academic rigor, Trump’s flip-flops through the years would seem to flatly refute notions of authenticity. On the issue of abortion, he has said he is “very pro-choice” and later, “I’m pro-life.” When it comes to guns, he has said “Look, there’s nothing I like better than nobody has them” and “[I] fully support and back up the Second Amendment.” Even in terms of political leanings, he is no more reliable: “I probably identify more as Democrat,” he said 10 years before winning the Republican nomination.
Then are the times he just flat-out lies–or at least misremembers his facts.
Some analysts, however, have noted a remarkable dynamic at work that seems to bolster Trump’s authenticity among his followers. When the mogul blurts yet another disparaging remark–calling Mexicans murderers, calling a woman a “fat pig,” suggesting that a female journalist’s aggressive questions must be due to “blood coming out of her whatever”–supporters tend to see these controversial moments as proof that he is courageous enough, true enough to his own beliefs, to speak his mind despite the forces of “political correctness.” He is bravely channeling their anger at a political machine that seems to forsake them, and consequently strikes them as the only candidate with the moxie to take on that machine.
“There is something emotionally authentic about him, even though he is full of shit,” says one supporter.
“Arrogance for Trump has a little bit of a positive thing in that people believe that he believes that he can do something,” Julie Hennessy, a clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, told the website poetsandquants.com, “and people aren’t sure that the other folks, on the Republican side or the Democrat side, are sure they can do things.”
BRINGING OUT THE BEST IN OTHERS
Here again, the evidence is muddled, but the preponderance seems to indicate relatively little regard for bringing out anyone’s best, unless it directly benefits his own high regard for himself. Concern for team members is not something you can really claim when you are renowned for naming everything you own after yourself — casino, golf course, skyscraper—while uttering not a peep for the thousands who also worked to make these things a reality. This speaks more of narcissism than nurturing.
Even in his acceptance speech, Trump seems averse to the notion that big problems are best solved by empowering those who are willing to help: “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he said of the balky political area, “which is why I alone can fix it.”
It’s shown again and again through the campaign, the brawn-beats-brain he-man-ism that America saw in his TV show, and saw again as Trump fired his own campaign managers.
Instead of enlisting and encouraging others to join in his cause, Trump blithely assures them, again and again, that “he alone” has the solution. “I will give you good results,” he promises supporters worried about national security. “Don’t worry how I get there, okay? Please.”
Still, at the same time he is discounting their role and disregarding their potential, Trump surely gives his supporters renewed hope that someone is speaking about their concerns, that they have gained a power through him.
Experts have also said that he embodies the “directive” aspect of leadership skills, using an inspirational vision to lead others. Leaders who use this “directive approach” are known for using energy and excitement to get people committed to their vision. “Trump does this exceptionally well,” writes Thuy and Milo Sindell, principals of Skyline Group International, a leadership coaching firm. “Even his campaign slogan, ‘Make America Great Again,’ urges people to look toward an improved future.”
While Politifact deems only 15 percent of Trump’s claims to be mostly true, his campaign has been largely successful, Entrepreneur magazine writes. “His strategy targets raw, emotional appeal. He uses triggers to motivate the audience to rally around causes, and his stage presence is all energy.”
ACCEPTING CRITICISM AS GIFT
Again, as seen purely through the media that he claims to despise, Trump shows little inclination to accept criticism, much less use it to his benefit. He speaks on as protesters who don’t share his vision are roughed up and ejected from campaign events, and has vowed to retaliate against Republicans who withdrew their support after his comments about groping women were made public.
A view of Trump’s mindset can perhaps be seen by considering the men he admires—authoritarian Russian leader Vladimir Putin chief among them. Indeed, his praise for Putin has struck many as resonant with an innate respect for authoritarian leadership styles, and an aspiration to emulate them. He bullies the press. He bullies the protesters. He bullies beauty queens and disabled journalists alike.
And, after election, he vows to turn mere bullying into force of law. He has frequently refused credentials to news organizations that displease him, including the Washington Post, Politico and Buzzfeed, and has threatened to do the same to the New York Times.
“One of the things I’m going to do if I win,” Trump said about the media, “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”
And again, it’s an approach that repels some, but also inspires those who feel the bitterness of being left behind, who long for a strong man–even a “strongman”–to make right their betrayal by faceless forces. As writer John Avlon put it in his Daily Beast column: “In times when people feel out of control—for example, when the forces of globalization are shaking every old tribal certainty—some folks gravitate to the guy who is strong and wrong. They are soothed by tough-guy theatrics that divide the world into us against them. They think that the bullying bluster of self-styled strongmen makes them great leaders. They mistake heat for light.”
In the hands of his supporters, the aversion to criticism is accepted and enforced. During an “ask-me-anything” session on Reddit, Trump’s moderators (who routinely refer to him as “God Emperor”) vigilantly expunged challenging questions from the session. Sure, no probing or challenging questions or even mild criticism made it onto the thread.
HILLARY
BEING AUTHENTIC
After the Democratic National Convention, viewers were asked what one word they associated with Hillary. The No. 1 choice was “liar.”
Attempts to refute or confirm such notions will both be met with ample evidence.
Critics of Clinton’s sense of authenticity would point to the many policy shifts she has made in recent years, including gay marriage, immigration, energy policy and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, giving rise to many claims that she is a crass political opportunist.
Critics could also detail her apparent tendencies to follow polls on issues instead of leading the push for change because of heartfelt convictions. Examples include fracking, NAFTA, wall street reform, gay rights, and higher education finance reform.
Then there’s the now-legendary story of how Elizabeth Warren thought she had convinced Hillary to oppose an effort that would make it far harder to get out from under credit card debt by filing bankruptcy. Warren remember Hillary vowing: “Professor Warren, we’ve got to stop that awful bill.”
Then, Hillary voted against the consumers, and for the banks. She had just been elected as New York senator, and her constituents now included the powerful banking and credit card industries.
Critics contend that she has taken so much money from Wall Street that her claims of cracking down on their financial shenanigans are laughable. The recent leak of speeches she made to big Wall Street executives did nothing to refute that notion.
In one of the speeches, she seemed apologetic about the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, telling the executives that political realities made it impossible to oppose it. “If you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it’s all the fault of Wall Street, you can’t sit idly by and do nothing.”
At the same time, the agenda of the Democratic Party platform—the agenda she claims to be ready to champion—calls for breaking up the biggest financial institutions and prosecuting illegal behavior on Wall Street.
The speeches seem to confirm, according to Newsweek, that “there are two Hillarys: one a lifelong populist, the other a wealthy striver who really doesn’t understand the working class.”
When Clinton prepares to answer a reporter’s question, there’s a split-second pause when you can almost see her imagining, in floating cartoon bubbles above her head, the worst-case headline that a candid answer could yield, and then pitching her reply in the least-objectionable terms.
People see Hillary as tied to the current government — specifically, the Obama administration — so while voters across the spectrum see Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as outsiders, Hennessy says, Hillary is seen as the ultimate insider.
Yet it is fair to wonder if Clinton learned the lesson of the health-care disaster too well, whether she has so embraced caution and compromise that she can no longer judge what merits taking political risks.
It is hard to square the brashly confident leader of health-care reform—willing to act on her deepest beliefs, intent on changing the political climate and not merely exploiting it—with the senator who recently went along with the vote to make flag-burning a crime.
She is largely perceived as competent–not warm or charismatic. But if Clinton were to display the warmth and charisma that are characteristic of Sanders and Trump, it’s possible that people would perceive her as less competent. “If she’s too warm and too nice, [voters] will go, ‘Oh, she’s too motherly. She doesn’t have the stuff to be a leader,” Antonakis said. “She’s damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.”
BRINGING OUT THE BEST IN OTHERS
In her 1995 China speech, in which she declared: “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights,” the staid United Nations delegates pounded their feet. “It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food or drowned” simply because they are born female, she continued, and “it is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution.”
After the speech, women dressed in traditional garb from various nations poured over an escalator to try to touch Mrs. Clinton, who wore a powder pink suit. Tens of thousands of workers with nongovernmental organizations who were not allowed to attend the conference, gathered amid a downpour and the heavy security in Huairou, 30 miles outside Beijing, to hear Mrs. Clinton deliver a version of the speech.
She set records for travel while leading the State Department and used every trip to empower the women of the 112 countries she visited. She made gender equality a priority of U.S. foreign policy. And she created the ambassador at large for global women’s issues, a post charged with integrating gender throughout the State Department.
She is credit with championing laws that improved the health of millions of children
One spring Wednesday, a few months into the term, Senator Sam Brownback’s turn came to lead the group, and he rose intending to talk about a recent cancer scare. But as he stood before his colleagues Brownback spotted Clinton, and was overcome with the impulse to change the subject of his testimony. “I came here today prepared to share about this experience in my life that has caused great suffering, the result of which has deepened my faith,” Brownback said, according to someone who watched the scene unfold. “But I’m overcome now with only one thought.” He confessed to having hated Clinton and having said derogatory things about her. Through God, he now recognized his sin. Then he turned to her and asked, “Mrs. Clinton, will you forgive me?” Clinton replied that she would, and that she appreciated the apology.
Every senator invariably emphasizes the disparity between what they thought she would be like and what they saw when they actually met her, and some of her husbands staunchest conservative foes have become her allies
At the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver, Clinton was able to convince most of her supporters that she supported Obama–and they should as well. “I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for the young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?”
Clinton hasn’t explicitly said that a female president would bring the kind of qualities — consensus-driven, compassionate, helpful, nurturing — that we typically associate with female leaders. But she overtly hinted at them, talking about how women on both sides of the aisle worked together, how she’s built relationships and how she hoped, if she ran, that she could bring red and blue Washington into a “nice warm purple space.”
Known worldwide for encouraging women to achieve their goals, her strong advocacy for women could be said to do much to bring out best in everyone. She has developed an admirable ability to face adversity, get knocked down and bounce back–Bill’s troubles, defeat of health care, defeat in 08 (and defeat in 2016).
Often ridiculed and doubted for her “Listening Tours,” Clinton used the stories she heard from her constituents to guide her legislation as a senator, ultimately making progress on the problems she was told by community members, from opiate addiction to student debt.
“You hear people say, ‘She’s so different in person,’” says Podesta. “That’s what they’re finding so appealing. When people don’t know her well and they encounter her, people are taken with the fact that she is interested in them.”
ACCEPTING CRITICISM AS GIFT
It took great self-awareness for Hillary to face adversity and bounce back from her failure to win the presidency in 2008, and she used this self-knowledge to reposition her campaign and approach, winning the respect necessary to receive her party’s presidential nomination in 2016.
Health care initiative’s epic collapse is said to have devastated her personally, but she went on to become force in senate.
At press conferences where senators routinely jockey for prominent position before the cameras, Clinton routinely steps out of the spotlight and defers to her colleagues.
Clinton’s staff often talks of her “power to convene—her ability as “Hillary Clinton, former first lady of the United States,” to bring together almost anyone and instill a desire to please her and feel part of a great enterprise.
Here’s one person’s description of meeting H:
“She walked into the room like she was meeting her girlfriends,” Capland recalls. “She exclaimed, ‘Hi, I am so happy to be here!’ It seemed authentic. She was more personable, kinder, and more approachable than I ever would have imagined.
It adds up to a leadership style that is referred to as “The Feeler” — someone who considers building relationships a top priority.
There’s also a risk for Feelers of taking things too personally, experts say.
Finkelstein says she employs an exhaustive, thorough process before coming to a decision, often involving multiple advisers and experts—and often requiring a great deal of time.
“I think she doesn’t think she knows everything,” he continues. “I don’t believe she’s very intuitive, obviously as compared to Trump, but just in general, and as a result, she likes to collect data, likes to analyze, likes to call in experts and different people, and in the end, [she] ends up being very confident about her decisions and doesn’t back down from those decisions. She has that tenacity that many people have talked about.”