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

PERSISTENCE PAYS OFF
Try, try and try again

It was Winston Churchill who once enjoined an audience to "never give in; never, never, never give in," and he knew whereof he spoke. Churchill spent the 1930s in the political wilderness, warning of the need to rearm against the Nazi threat, and was treated as a bit of a joke by smaller men.

Michael Mandelbaum of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University says resistance in the face of adversity is a key quality in a leader. He cites Thatcher, whose sheer bloody determination saw off a hostile intelligentsia, a party that sometimes treated her with all the condescension the British once reserved for clever women, and entrenched interests that fought her economic and social reforms. Before he became Prime Minister in 1996, Australia's Howard had been turfed out as leader of his own party, and when asked if he might ever lead it again, he said such an event would be like "Lazarus with a triple bypass." Howard then went on to win four general elections.

Wirth praises Ban Ki-moon for the same quality of persistence. The U.N., Wirth says, gets dumped with the problems that great powers can't solve, like nudging the regime in Burma into improving its miserable human-rights record or bringing peace to Darfur in southern Sudan, where bitter fighting raged for years. The U.N. had long been unable to come to any consensus on how to handle Darfur, with deep divisions in the Security Council about whether and how to send a peacekeeping force there. Wirth praises Ban's diplomatic skills in finally getting Security Council approval for a joint U.N.--African Union peacekeeping force for the region.

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
Leadership means you don't duck when things go wrong

Young or old, handsome or plain, quiet or loud--the surest way to win followers is to convince them that when the going gets tough, you won't run and hide. There's a reason Harry Truman's White House desk sign, the buck stops here, has entered presidential mythology.

But my favorite example of leadership as responsibility is a memo that was never sent. The day before the D-day landings in 1944, Dwight Eisenhower--not much obvious charisma there--sat down and wrote a short message that would be made public in the event that the next day went horribly wrong. "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold," Ike wrote, "and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone."

That's leadership.

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