Early one morning, in Ronald Reagan’s first year in office, I walked briskly with him from the Oval Office to the motorcade on the circular drive of the South Lawn. I was scheduled to take my first limousine ride alone with the president as a senior aide. The trouble was, I had no idea which door of the limo to enter.

Reagan, always elegant of gait, strode to the right side of the car, and while intuitively sensing my predicament, but not engaged in it, waved me around the other side of the long black Cadillac – where I landed on the back seat next to him in what seemed like one choreographed contretemps.

Our errand that day was for the president to unveil his public-private partnerships initiative. It was part of my responsibility in that first year to develop and manage what became Reagan’s favorite domestic policy project. What unfolded on that ride, however, was far more than the typical policy briefing delivered to a president under way to an event.

Reagan talked the whole way, delivering an uninterrupted explanation – more of a sharing really – of the roots of the belief system that shaped his leadership.

One thing about Reagan was that people always knew what he stood for and where he stood on the major issues of his presidency. In the current political climate, many voters may have a difficult time finding that kind of rock-solid set of beliefs in either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.

So it’s worth looking at Reagan’s leadership, and three key ways in which authenticity defined it – all on display in that motorcade ride:

1. Unshakable adherence to values. Two words often used to describe Reagan were optimistic and stubborn. Note that he not only had a belief system (for example, optimism), he also adhered to it (stubborn).

Reagan believed the adage that people like you better if you tell them their virtues than their vices. He saw the good in just about everyone. Americans responded well to Reagan telling them that they were good and that they were a part of a grand experiment to benefit the world.

His basic belief system was born in two parts. The first was the moral architecture built in his early childhood. In his limo that morning, Reagan told me how greatly his mother had influenced him. She was an occasional preacher, a Bible teacher, and expounder.

His early values provided him with an internal compass he consulted almost unconsciously. These beliefs weren’t bracketed by a specific creed or organized religion; they were his own, in the way that Jefferson handpicked moral ingredients that made up his belief system.

The second part was developed as an adult in his political journey from union organizer to staunch conservative. This “Part B” focused on what he came to believe was the correct fundamental role of government – small and nonintrusive – and the primary position of the private sector. Hence, his interest in public-private partnerships.

Reagan’s beliefs made him regular, honest, confident, and repetitive, but somehow not boring. His constituents knew what to expect. People understood his message. What you saw with Reagan was what you got. Nothing dauntingly intellectual, yet purposefully inspirational.

2. A high degree of self-knowledge. Teleprompters cannot hide gaps in self-knowledge. The camera lens magnifies every element of personal insecurity. I remember trying to convince the president to wear higher cut collars on his dress shirts to provide a more youthful appearance.

No deal! To his credit, though, he tried it. For one day. After that he said, “Thank you, but it’s just not me. I have to wear the shirt collars I am comfortable with – even if they do expose my Adam’s apple and make me look older.”

Reagan, as a leader, was comfortable with himself, so people were generally comfortable with him. He was not unmindful of his mistakes, but he didn’t obsess about them. He was accorded the “Teflon” label because no matter what mistakes he made, most of them didn’t stick to him. But really, it was his attitude on the inside that caused criticisms to only temporarily affect his popularity, his outside.

He was not prone to personal pique, and he didn’t take things personally. He was able to live that famous saying that sat front and center on his desk, “There is no limit to how far a man can go or what he can achieve if he does not care who gets the credit.” And he didn’t care.

3. The power of nonverbal and verbal communication. It is often said that you win your audience within the first eight seconds in which you enter a room, and you may lose them in the first eight seconds of your speech.

True, Reagan had honed his nonverbal communication skills on studio back lots and under stage lights, yet many of these moves were natural and as fluid for him as when he was a lifeguard or a running back – just as was his motioning of me to the correct side of the motorcade limo.

Early in the first term, the way Reagan entered the East Room at the beginning of White House press conferences was altered to fill a camera lens – the opening televised frame of the president striding down the “cross hall” on the long red carpet and up to the podium to provide a sense of anticipation of the important messages to come.

These types of moves may be attributed to theatrics and handlers, but they are all essential elements of Reagan’s leadership style and reflected his reverence for the country. And because of that, they worked – not through artifice but naturalness.

Fundamentally it is important to relate the ability of the “great communicator” back to his ever-present belief system.

When Reagan honored the fallen Challenger shuttle astronauts and repeated those famous lines from John G. Magee’s poem “High Flight,” you had a sense he could feel “the surly bonds of earth” loosening – because he did.

He lived in that type of world. He believed, as the poem concludes, that those who had perished on that space mission would “touch the face of God.”

Reagan’s speaking skills were directly related to his beliefs in this way: He knew what he believed, and what he spoke was what he believed. There is no better test or proof of a leader’s ability to communicate than that.

James S. Rosebush was a deputy assistant to President Reagan and also chief of staff to first lady Nancy Reagan.

This post by James Rosebush was featured on the Harvard Business Review’s HBR Blog Network.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/03/why_great_leaders_are_in_short.html

We’re living with something of an irony right now regarding leadership. On the one hand, the topic has never been more studied and written about; my recent Google search for leadership research by academies and institutes returned some 375,000 hits. On the other hand, we are experiencing a dearth of leadership in society. We see fewer prominent leaders who seem genuine and highly capable, and many who have been compromised, deposed, or defeated. Even more seem to have run out of ideas, or simply appear unable to craft the necessary consensus to lead. Perhaps it’s really not so ironic that there would be this inverse relationship: the deeper we sink into leadership crisis, the more it shows up on the agendas of think tanks and conferences.

From my own perspective as someone who has had a front-row seat to leadership over a few decades, it isn’t so much that today’s leaders fall short of the capabilities or character leaders had in the past. It isn’t that the visionary, principled, courageous type we would all prefer to follow was once common and is now a rarity. Rather, it’s the context of leadership that has changed, so that people with just as great capability as their predecessors find it much harder today to lead. We could probably cite many factors that have contributed to this shift, but three are particularly important. As I see it, leaders in the past had the great advantages of:

Privileged access to information. People naturally look for direction from someone they perceive to be in possession of more information about an evolving situation. It used to be that leaders were in a unique position to gain information, and to dole it out on a need-to-know basis. Now the world is awash in instantly accessible information of all types and on all subjects. Human beings making ground-level observations can communicate them directly to others either around the globe or around the corner, while they walk down the sidewalk of an urban neighborhood or the dirt path of a remote jungle.

Is it any wonder that the Web became the greatest fear factor of every dictator? When even State Department communiques become public knowledge and, in almost any realm, an impassioned nobody can be in greater possession of the facts than a leader in that same realm, information is decoupled from leadership. In fact the flows of information actively undercut leadership—both the practice and the perceived need for it.

The reflected glory of their institutions. Twenty years ago, a citizen might not know the name of a Fortune 500 CEO or NGO director, but they knew the reputation of the institution—and made an assumption that the person chosen to lead it must personify its good qualities. Two things have changed that: it is much easier to see leader and institution separately, and there has been a significant decline in respect for the institutions themselves. Whether we’re talking about multinational corporations, churches, or public treasuries, we are constantly reminded by Pew and Gallup that reputations now scrape the bottom. There is an increasing perception of incompetence, greed, and frivolity at the expense of the governed, the taxed, and the managed.

Are institutions truly less noble, or is it that they, as well as their leaders, are subjected to more relentless scrutiny? In my own years in the White House I vividly recall the media’s clamoring for details about presidential habits and the daily life of the West Wing—only to find them all too ordinary and boring to report. Today the media churns out every minor indiscretion and then, in a rare act of community, the public blogs on it. Social media platforms give motivated critics, even lone voices, the ability to be heard. YouTube is a bargain-basement media buy for campaigning on any issue.

Whether it is a matter of perception or reality, we can only hope that respect for our institutions will rise again. Institutions are where we join together, worship together, convene, gather, assemble, debate, celebrate, where preachers preach and where leaders convince. When any of them loses respect, society loses a platform for concerted action. Potentially great leaders lose a platform for leadership.

Broadly shared foundational principles. One other foundation of leadership that used to be firmly in place seems shaken today: a common understanding of the age-tested principles, religious or moral, that should guide decisions. Leaders may be yet another victim of the move away from the teaching and practice of moral values and their integration in early family life. Interpersonal relations patterns start early and are almost impossible to change; taking a graduate school class in ethics may be too late for someone who has not had good character modeled for them and required of them from early childhood. Much is said today about the diminution of the “actions have consequences” school of hard knocks that may have built the best leaders.

Meridian International, which offers a gathering place and leadership training for diplomats and internationalists in Washington DC, has studied this problem. Its conclusion: “Trust in public and private sector leaders can only be restored when leaders align value-based decisions, not rhetoric, with basic aspirations such as security and economic opportunity.”

Moreover, if the body becomes weakened or broken in some way it needs an advocate to address these strains.  The corporate leader therefor would be the one leading the examination, determining the cause for a breakdown and proscribing the remedy.  Then the effective leader will take visible responsibility within the organization to bring it back to health.  With the world and individual economies in such a dynamic state, the resulting stresses in every industry will surely result in many corporate vulnerabilities or stress fractures.  Then who will step into the fray?  Here is when genuine leadership by someone invested in its well being is called for.