Thread: POTUS Manager or Leader

It depends on where we are and what we need at the time. In 2008, with the executive branch broken, we needed a manager. In times of war, we need a leader.

Why do the two skills have to be mutually exclusive? One might argue that a great manager must inherently be able to lead, and that a great leader must be able to manage.

Originally Posted by RDK

Assume that you have two choices to vote for, neither of whom is objectionable to you. This could be perhaps in a primary where the policies of each candidate are about the same.

One choice is a great manager that is he is a technocrat who can handle the management duties of the office very well, but has the leadership ability of a garden slug.

The other choice is a great leader, someone who you would willingly follow to hell and back just because he wanted a temperature reading. However as a manager he sucks the big one and would most likely lose the map.

Who would you pick the leader or the manager?

Personally I’d pick the leader because you can always hire a good chief of staff to keep the mechanism of the office running but a true leader is something that has all too long been lacking in many western societies.

As examples Kennedy and Regan were great leaders. Johnson and Nixon were more the manager type.

Well let's see.

Johnson - gave us the Great Society which is bankrupting us.

Nixon - "I am not a crook"

Some examples you give there about what a "manager type" gives us.

Why do the two skills have to be mutually exclusive? One might argue that a great manager must inherently be able to lead, and that a great leader must be able to manage.

They don't have to be, but sometimes they are. Leadership is very big picture, management is about details as well as the big picture. Leadership is something people are generally born to do, management is something one learns. So there have been a lot of great leaders who lose because of the details(for want of a nail, an entire kingdom was lost), and there are skilled adminstrators who can't inspire or motivate anybody.

People who are able to motivate others may better work in advertising. I wouldn't follow someone just because his smile is bright and his flatteries reassuring... and thinking of government as a gigantic ad firm is not exactly what one could hope for.

But then if they have the same policies knowing that they delegate to supposedly competent staffs, why would someone manage better than another ? I'll just suppose, which is risky, that the manager type is less likely to lie to me - because of his blatant failure at communication - than the leader. For the tiny bit of power they hold they better know what they do but if that person is just meant to appear and deliver a message, let's take a sexy woman for the sake of it.

Of course the good answer would be both but due to my education I'll always prefer "logos" over "ethos".

The importance of a leader comes in when the public has to be rallied to a cause, such as a war.

I have read somewhere that the reason the chief executive is called a president (one who presides) rather than a stronger term, such as "Leader" or "Protector" or "Dictator" is that the president is supposed to manage the government, but not make laws or decrees. The title "Commander in Chief" refers only to the military aspects, but he is not "Commander" of the people.

Originally Posted by RDK

Assume that you have two choices to vote for, neither of whom is objectionable to you. This could be perhaps in a primary where the policies of each candidate are about the same.

One choice is a great manager that is he is a technocrat who can handle the management duties of the office very well, but has the leadership ability of a garden slug.

The other choice is a great leader, someone who you would willingly follow to hell and back just because he wanted a temperature reading. However as a manager he sucks the big one and would most likely lose the map.

Who would you pick the leader or the manager?

Personally I’d pick the leader because you can always hire a good chief of staff to keep the mechanism of the office running but a true leader is something that has all too long been lacking in many western societies.

As examples Kennedy and Regan were great leaders. Johnson and Nixon were more the manager type.

I would prefer to have a manager because I think the leadership role is with congress. The executives job is to approve and execute the laws. Not to decide what the laws should be. I would prefer a George Washington over a FDR.

Originally Posted by adaher

Why do the two skills have to be mutually exclusive? One might argue that a great manager must inherently be able to lead, and that a great leader must be able to manage.

They don't have to be, but sometimes they are. Leadership is very big picture, management is about details as well as the big picture. Leadership is something people are generally born to do, management is something one learns. So there have been a lot of great leaders who lose because of the details(for want of a nail, an entire kingdom was lost), and there are skilled adminstrators who can't inspire or motivate anybody.

Hmm, I'm not sure that I agree. I think that this is part of a myth that Western society tells itself. A great leader is an individual who is able to understand a tactics and strategy. A great manager never gets bogged down in micromanagement and knows how to delegate and work from a strategic level while being mindful of the tactics. The two skills very much go hand-in-hand.

It's like the skill of followership. So many of us forget that one of the most important skills we need of our leaders is the ability to understand when they need to NOT be in charge, and to lead by being a good follower instead.

This president is neither a manager nor a leader.

Not necessarily...

In the "manager" commentary we have "technocrat". I won't pick up on technocracy but that can be interpreted as a theoretician, someone associated with the theory (and the theory only).
That could mean someone totally disconnected from reality. The kind to take ten years running a river dry to cross it.

Not that the leader wouldn't, he can be equally blind but in a more "practical" way. That would be the cavalry trying to impress Napoleon by drowning in "War and Peace".

At least when a leader fails he does it with style.

Fascinating themes here, I've been going off for awhile how Obama's burden is that we hoped he'd be the visionary from the campaign, but we must settle for reality, which is that the country needed a good manager to stabilize things and see us through the darkness.

I think John Stewart even said it, that he was elected as a visionary, but has governed as a functionary.

I'm thinking Bill Clinton married both notions perfectly.

I don't know which one I'd pick. I think maybe the electorate was fooling itself into believing this President could do the visionary thing, but with everything crumbling around him and inheriting what is now the longest war in US history, the best this guy can do is manage the country back to sanity like Gerald Ford did, who didn't rock the boat too much and gave the Oval Office a simple decency and respect again.

I find that the Republicans do a better job of electing leaders rather than managers. From the top down, they've got bimbo candidates who speak in 4 or 5 word slogans, and that's that, while the Democrats get managers in there who end up losing everybody with endless back-and-forth and rhetoric and micro-managing. Just look at the health care bill. The GOP would have never let that just float around in debate-land for over a year.

The time we live in calls for good management, and in that respect, Obama has molded himself into that quite well, whereas with Bush, we got the feeling that the job was so above his head that others were doing it for him.

Obama hasn't spent any time on management. He's spent all his time on legislation, as if he's still in the Senate. While he was working on health care, the Minerals and Management Service was failing to inspect oil rigs.

There's also been no attempt to find savings in the budget by eliminating inefficiencies in the executive branch. Bill Clinton put Al Gore in charge of that right from the start and Gore saved the country $40 billion over the next eight years. Given the extreme waste and inefficiency of the Bush administration, Obama and Biden should be able to find $100 billion of savings.

But it's just not a priority, actually making the government work well. They want legislation. They are Senators. That's how they think.