A Presidential Leadership Lens: Thinker or Feeler

Left vs. Right. Socialist. Moderate. Dem. A useful lens: Thinker. Feeler.

Our electoral choices, driven by candidate self-selection, have increasingly been reduced to those people who wear the thickest of skins!

This presidential campaign bears it out . . . with one exception I will save for last. My broad-sweep examples:

• Trump is ready to name-call and go toe-to-toe with anyone.
• Warren "has a plan" for everything and as with Hilary, men whisper to me that she "scares" them.
• Bernie's policy positions like Warren's are compassionate, but his style is to come out in fierce attacks on capitalists who are all "greedy."
• Buttigieg kisses his husband (who Pete says is the the big feeler in the family), and
• Klobuchar attacks Mayor Pete as a nerd who's "memorized a lot of talking points."

There's not a warm, huggy, love-to-have-a-beer-with-them character in the bunch.

Many of us who work in leadership and the workplace know the power of Myers-Briggs* to help us find balance between recurring, personality opposites. The most commonly referenced dichotomy is between introversion and extraversion. In my analysis of the political world it is thinkers - over feelers - who predominate; those who naturally prefer to evaluate and decide based on objectivity. They are cool. Ready to attack ideas; it's not personal; think engineers, lawyers, etc. By contrast, feelers are those who prefer to evaluate based on empathy, compassion and harmony. Too often, they opt out of, or are driven out of the arena. These women and men who seek harmony are rejected as "too soft," or they simply never enter what we illustratively describe as: the fray, the battlefield, or the arena, the last a place where gladiators killed hand-to-hand, face-to-face. Cory Booker's messages of love and unity fell flat early on. He never got traction. Who's left?

There is a special 'thinking-vs-feeling curse on women, as pollster Celinda Lake and others have long proven. Hilary, whose prowess has always been her cutting legal mind and fearlessness, was not cast as "hurt by" and "loyal to" her husband, but as a cold-hearted scheming strategist. Many Rs and Ds, women and men, similarly fear and castigate Nancy Pelosi for her cool directness - tearing up the state of the union speech and talking down to the President. Kamala Harris' early rise was perhaps a little too "aggressive," as she went after Joe Biden. Women have the near-impossible double-whammy that they must be seen as competent and likeable. And this double-whammy hits especially hard, because in this age, you have to be strong just to survive. The brutal attacks on Marianne Williamson and the withering SNL shots at Klobuchar and Warren have exploited this vexing dilemma: if you don't look tough you can't be "strong," while if you look too tough you're an unelectable shrew.

The irony in all of this, is that it feels like America could use a heart-centered leader like never before. We could use some heart when it comes both to addressing issues and also to starting a process of healing this divided country. Issues like the coronavirus, rising suicide rates, mass homicides in theaters and schools, the enduring hostility to people of color and women, and the heartbreak of refugees cry - all out for a leader who cares. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had that natural capacity to make you feel their care, as they spoke not just for themselves but for all of us as Americans. And as much as we have said this for decades now, America itself is so deeply divided and could use more listening, more unifying, more kindness.

I have cast my absentee ballot for Joe Biden. I say this not solely, but in no small part because I believe he is the only feeler and the only healer (left) in the field. He's the only guy who is wired to be so caring or foolish with his time - as one inclined to be a Thinker might opine - that he would make a second visit to Emanuel AME church after the president and the cameras had left to worship in the church where people had been gunned down by a white supremacist. If you would like to look at the election through a different lens - or if you would just like to see what a feeler looks like, or just want to be inspired as a human being - take a look at Biden at a town hall in South Carolina. A pastor asks him about stuttering and his personal story and Anderson Cooper follows up. It's worth a watch.

Let me be clear. One of the damaging misuses of Myers Briggs is to think an introvert can't extravert or in this context that a thinker can't feel. That is wrong. And perhaps I have misjudged when I conclude the other candidates naturally prefer thinking. Let me state unequivocally: all these candidates have head and heart. Yet we can see that at least one has a natural and long-developed capacity not to lead with being overwhelmingly analytical, thoughtful and tough, but to innately bring kindness, empathy and pursue harmony.

Sometimes the small things are a window into the big things. My wife has played the parts of Sarah Palin and Elizabeth Warren in debate preparation with Biden. Twelve years ago, when my wife was at debate prep, she took a break to call our oldest child who was turning 18; Joe asked for the phone and personally wished Connor a happy birthday — and dispensed sweet advice about life and love. This year, when my wife's father passed away and Joe was campaigning in New Hampshire less than two weeks before the primary, he called her on her cellphone to share his condolences.

For my part, I think there is a wisdom that comes from that kind of heart. It's a wisdom I think America could use right now. God forbid this pandemic spreads, but if so, then how much more important will it be to have a steady, unifying, and yes loving hand at the wheel?

What say you?!

* A note for the Myers Briggs critics who subscribe to the Big 5 (or OCEAN), as many academics do: What I am saying in terms of the Myers-Briggs schema which speaks of thinkers and feelers is largely true if you think of these candidates in terms of the Agreeableness scale in those tools.