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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 not exactly a shining example of collaborative leadership. 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 were brought into the convention specifically to play a role. Neither one expended much energy on transactional leadership during the campaign -- they played a motivational role and Clinton especially went on the stump in key moments for his candidate.

Though there was much fractious rhetoric in these speeches, it is worth noting that both discussed collaboration as well. Christie touted his own collaborative skills more than those of his candidates. He outlined the successes that he enjoyed in New Jersey in passing bipartisan agreements. The strongest part of his speech is where he cut past political differences to identify and focus attention on themes common to both political parties. An example of this is "We believe that the majority of teachers in America know our system must be reformed to put students first…" Ironically, this line and others similar to it came when Christie was juxtaposing his view of Democrats with his view of Republicans, because this line is precisely the common-level of understand that he would have needed to reach bipartisan compromise and work with teachers unions to reform the New Jersey education system. He demonstrates that he understands collaborative leadership while arguing that his opponents are wrong and he is right.