Stable genius or malicious idiot?

How two simple leadership ingredients make a powerful difference.

The presidential elections in the USA loom closer through the confounding fog of a pandemic, social upheaval and intense political division.  Even now, citizens of the most powerful country in the world are exercising their right to choose their leader, as many of us bystanders and onlookers in other countries intensely debate who might be the right choice.  

Whilst I cannot objectively evaluate who is the better candidate from a values point of view – disclosure: I do not share Donald Trump’s values and world view – I am qualified to comment on who might make a more effective leader.  That is because I have been studying, practicing, teaching and coaching leadership intensely for over 30 years.  

If I were to distil everything I have learned about great leadership into one simple but powerful idea it would be this:  extraordinary leaders are both strong and warm.

A strong leader is intelligent, competent and agentic.  They make things happen.  

A warm leader is compassionate, collaborative and engaging.  They connect with people.

We seek and respond well to leaders who demonstrate both strength and warmth because we believe they know what they are doing, and at the same time have our interests at heart, not just their own.

Leadership can be strong

I agree with Julia Gillard, the former Prime Minister of Australia and Brookings Institute fellow when she said recently that the success of New Zealand, Norway and Germany in responding to the COVID pandemic lies not in the gender of their national leaders, but in their ability to balance strength and warmth.   In her words “They (people) want to know that someone is getting the job done, but they also want someone to care about how they are feeling”.[1]

It is true that leaders need to be strong. A weak and ineffectual leader will struggle to hold and exercise power effectively. Although, some leaders like Trump in the US, and Bolsanaro in Brazil seem much more concerned with displays of strength alone.  Unfortunately, it’s not even a competent version of strength.  It’s more concerned with dominance, based on an erroneous belief that sheer power and brutal force is the answer.  “You’ve gotta be strong” and “you have to dominate” was the repeated advice Trump gave to the state governors during the recent widespread protest rallies across the US.  

Leadership can also be warm 

Strength alone, however, is an insufficient condition for effective leadership.  It must be accompanied by regard, care and love for all the people that a leader must serve, not just themselves and a small faction of close friends and allies.

It is perhaps even ironic that a man who understood leadership well, and courageously championed the rights and interests of people of color decades ago had the best response to Trumps exhortations of power and strength.  It was Martin Luther King who said “love without power is sentimental and anaemic, but power without love is reckless and abusive.”[2]

Great leadership brings them together 

The challenge for those more ordinary leaders who lead exclusively with strength, or with warmth alone for that matter, is that they lack the capacity to unify these two conditions through what influential management thinker and philosopher Professor Charles Handy referred to as the genius of “and”. Lacking the mental complexity to integrate strength and warmth in themselves, or in their leadership, they are limited by the tyranny of “or”.  As the great American author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”[3]  

Fitzgerald did not elaborate whether he was referring to the intelligence of intellect, or emotional intelligence, although we know that effective performance in managerial and leadership roles needs both.[4],[5]  When either are missing we can get buffoonery or psychopathy.  When both are missing it even has the potential to produce a malicious idiot.

Whilst some of us may not be voting in a president any time soon, every day we have the opportunity to choose who we will trust and follow in different aspects of our lives. If you give us a leader who has the capacity to marry power with love, and strength with warmth, the majority of people will choose to follow them over the alternative any day of the week.

Ged Penna is a leadership coach, teacher and advisor to leading global companies. Believing we deserve something better than the ho-hum, barely acceptable version of leadership that most of us have to tolerate every day in our lives, he researches and writes exclusively on the difference between ordinary and extraordinary leadership, and how to get there. 

#greatleaders #goodtogreat #howtobeagreatleader #extraordinaryleaders #extraordinaryleadership #xtraordinaryleaders #strengthandwarmth #powerandlove #leadership #leaders #leading

[1] Julia Gillard. ABC TV, Q&A Episode, 13 July 2020

[2] Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go From Here? 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, GA. August 16, 1967

[3] Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1945). The Crack-Up (1st ed.). New Directions.

[4] Hunter, J. E. (1986). Cognitive ability, cognitive aptitude, job knowledge. and job performance. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 29, 340-362.

[5] Mills L. (2009). A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence and Effective Leadership: Journal of Curriculum and Instruction (JoCI), November 2009, Volume 3, Number 2