Politics: Leadership vs. Management

I started this blog by saying that I believe the paradigm of politics is changing. The essence of what politicians try to communicate, i.e. their political position, is becoming secondary to the way they communicate it and how this makes people feel.

I had a flippant conversation a couple of weeks ago, in which I suggested elections should be fought on the grounds of competence rather than ideological beliefs. It is difficult to predict the crisis’ a government will face in a term, so surely it is better to be led by people who are calm and collected under pressure and good at solving a problem?

With this in mind, I proposed general elections look more like a graduate recruitment assessment day than a forum for ideological debate. The public should watch live David Dimbleby give the proposed cabinet a task and then assess them on how they work together to complete it.

This should be followed by competency based interviews with questions such as ‘Describe a time you have persuaded a person to take a certain course of action’ and ‘Describe the biggest problem you have faced. What did you do to overcome the problem?’

The argument against
Matthew Paris, a conservative political columnist for the Times, prompted me to think of this in his article ‘Put away your mops and buckets’

Paris argues that politicians are becoming ‘glorified shop managers’ devoid of political position. They assume the big ideological questions are settled, the business of government is agreed and democratic politics is about who runs the business best.

To Paris this is negative. He says: “We want politics to be about more than wiping up spillages...We are looking for leadership dominated by a human mind, a unifying set of ideas, and the beat of a human heart.”

Despite my flippant comments about competency assessment, I do agree with Paris in principle. However in practice all too often the messages communicated do not correlate with the action being taken. Gordon Brown saying “British jobs for British workers” is a prime example. It’s a great sound bite underpinned by political principle, but in practice it’s an impossibility.

Paris describes politicians as ‘feeble managers’. But this is not acceptable. Someone with a vision and a set of unifying ideas needs the managerial skills to implement their vision effectively.
Otherwise the unifying ideas they preach are pointless and misleading.