Managing a Presidential campaign: Lessons for managers?

No doubt all business books that provide insights into effective management techniques have a few rules in common… things like the importance of decisiveness, keeping the strategic view, not allowing problems to fester, communicating effectively to both internal and external audiences, maintaining and encouraging loyalty, minimizing staff dysfunction and turnover. Things in that vein. These rules apply in spades to CEOs and, for that matter, the President of the United States.

In fact, the modern presidential campaign provides the kind of trials and pressures not unlike those faced by most CEOs. That includes managing massive budgets, creating and sustaining loyalty, selling a range of ideas to skeptical audiences, selecting and motivating quality senior managers, and developing trusting relationships with those top people.

In that context, then, it was revealing to read in the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly that Hillary Clinton apparently fell short in most of those areas. The only conclusion the reader can draw after reading the 6100-word article (“The Front Runner’s Fall,” by Joshua Green, Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 2008) is that Ms. Clinton apparently lacked core management skills as she made her run for the presidency. Reaching that conclusion leads to the follow-on: that she probably was not presidential timber.

At the same time, the parallel conclusion one might draw is that, in this day and age, candidates like John McCain and Barack Obama, in getting as far as they have, demonstrate those key management skills and both should be commended for that.

We may complain about the duration of these campaigns – going on more than 18 months now – but one thing is sure: they truly test the mettle of the candidates, putting them through some pretty rough paces.

Certainly, glad-handing voters in Bumsteer, Iowa, and Zipville, Ohio, is not the same as staring down Vladimir Putin or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And deciding whether to run an attack ad is not the same as the decision to go to war.

But this is a tough job en route to acquiring the world’s toughest. On many levels, the campaign is good preparation in that it demands the ability to:

• Attract, build and retain the necessary talent pool to run a very complicated process under severe budget and time constraints
• Develop and maintain the loyalty of hundreds of staffers
• Create, staff and inspire at least 50 independent state organizations
• Communicate your core messages clearly and effectively
  
• And to do it all under the constant scrutiny of the modern news media

Those who do it well enough to get the nomination of their party certainly deserve our respect, regardless of how we may feel about their politics or their ability to govern.

So why did Hillary Clinton fall short? Pundits on both sides of the political spectrum long felt she had an honest shot at winning the Democratic nomination. Could her downfall have been her poor management skills, as evidenced in the Atlantic Monthly article?

Joshua Green sums up the dysfunction early in his story:
“Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence – on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to ‘do the job from Day One.’ In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.”

Green cites numerous cases where she hesitated, wouldn’t make a decision, or left it to others, including her husband, the former president. Former GE CEO Jack Welch always said that it isn’t the wrong decisions that hurt your business. It’s the ones you don’t make.
Mrs. Clinton also struggled with putting together an effective core team, one whose skills blended and complemented one another. There was a lot of backstabbing, backbiting, and second-guessing going on. Consequently, making a bad situation worse, there were no clear lines of authority, and Mrs. Clinton couldn’t or wouldn’t fill the gaps.

Therein lies an important lesson here for businesspeople – managers who must make decisions, hire and fire people, develop talent, sustain loyalty, all in the on-going challenge of running a successful business. People become managers and progress in the organization because they learn how to exercise these important traits, and then they get better as they progress in the organization.

Most businesses are structured in such a way that those who don’t progress in their management skills don’t climb the corporate ladder. We could say the same is true of our presidential campaigns.