No Charisma? Don't Worry, You Can Still Be a Leader

(L-R) Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Angela Merkel.

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REMEMBER WHO AND WHAT YOU LEAD
Different situations require different styles

Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. Secretary-General, was subject to a bitter attack in Foreign Policy magazine recently for "frittering away influence" at a time when "global leadership is urgently needed." But Tim Wirth, president of the U.N. Foundation, argues that Ban's critics miss the point. The U.N., Wirth says, is not a vertical institution but a horizontal one, with 192 nation-states acting as shareholders. Ban can't tell the U.N.'s members--or even its agencies--what to do. He has to negotiate and coordinate, find a consensus. He manages to do that, Wirth says, by "keeping his own sense of ego out of the line of fire." Ban himself expresses pleasure that he has been able to lead the U.N. to take climate change seriously. But he is much more comfortable talking about his role in terms of "bridging the developed and developing countries" than in the straightforward language of leadership. (See pictures of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.)

When leaders understand the nature of their followers, they can get away with an awful lot. My friend Beppe Severgnini, a columnist at Corriere della Sera, says Italians forgive Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's many--how shall we put this?--lapses in judgment because they think, He's one of us. Berlusconi, Severgnini wrote this year, is "not only Italy's head of government, but the nation's autobiography." By contrast, when a leader gets out of sync with her followers, all the brilliance in the world doesn't amount to much. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher found that out in 1990, when her colleagues in the British government and Conservative Party simply got tired of the endless drama over Thatcher's European policy and dumped her.

THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS IS OVERRATED
A good speech may get you on YouTube. But that's all

A speech by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, it has been said, is a natural remedy for sleep disorders. During a raucous debate on a vote of confidence in the Indian Parliament last year, Singh's closing speech was so subdued that it was drowned out by the opposition. Singh folded up his notes and just submitted the rest of his remarks for the record.

Still, he won the vote and then a sweeping victory in India's general elections this year. It isn't Singh's speeches that win him followers; it's the fact that first as Finance Minister and since 2004 as Prime Minister, he has led India through a series of radical economic reforms that have made the world's largest democracy also one of its fastest-growing economies--and protected the poor too. It's Singh's actions that have changed tens of millions of lives for the better, not his words.

Helmut Kohl could relate. In the 1980s, Germans used to make fun of their Chancellor for his thick Rhineland accent and stumbling speeches. But when more-elegant and eloquent statesmen were dithering after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Kohl seized the moment. He propelled East and West Germany to unification within a year, while others thought that unification, if it happened at all, was a distant prospect. It was Kohl's decisiveness that made him a leader, not his honeyed tone.

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