Leadership The speeches by Chris Christie and Bill Clinton at their respective national conventions highlight a number of characteristics of collaborative leadership. In politics, being able to collaborate while retaining one's sense of identity is essential success. Obama won by building a coalition of African-Americans, Latinos, women, the young, city dwellers and the educated. Romney failed to build a coalition of different groups, relying primarily on rural white voters. Collaborative leadership and team-building are clearly essential to political success.

Both speeches spent considerable time attacking the other side, and those elements of the speeches work against collaborative leadership. We can learn from the negativity, because there is a tremendous fracture in American politics. As a result of this fracture, the last Congress passed a low number of laws, failed to do even the basic tasks of government, and managed to get the credit rating of the country lowered. Dedicating your efforts to ensuring that Obama is a one-term president is...

Thankfully, as much as these speeches highlight the lack of collaborative leadership and effective team-building, there is also evidence from these conventions of team-building.
Both of these speeches come from leaders. An election campaign requires tremendous resources, including for transactional and transformational leadership. High-level leaders like Christie and Clinton represent the transformative side of these leadership teams. Each plays a role in establishing the credibility of the candidates (and in Christie's case, later undermining that credibility). Both play a role in motivating the overall group to action. Christie's speech ends with a rousing call to action that summarized the key motivational points of his speech. Clinton's speech had perhaps a softer tone, but also ended with a summary of motivational points, if not a direct call to action. Both leaders sought to inspire.

What is noteworthy is that neither of these leaders was running in this election. Both…