POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

An article by Professor Jean Hartley, WBS

Meryl Streep's uncanny portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in the film The Iron Lady raises many questions about what constitutes effective political leadership. In this article Jean Hartley, Professor of Organisational Analysis at WBS, outlines some of the challenges facing politicians in the quest for successful governance.

At the heart of political leadership is contest. This is not only because different political parties and politicians offer different policies and programmes to tackle societal issues and this is played out in debates and arguments in political arenas such as Parliament or Congress and the media. It is also because public goals are inevitably ambiguous, contested and subject to competing values and interests between different groups within the population. What constitutes public value has to be subjected to continuous debate and discussion.

Political leaders have a critical role to play in mobilising support across a range of stakeholders to recognise, to frame and to address complex “wicked” problems, (where there is no agreement about either causes or solutions, such as climate change or childhood obesity) and which generally require tough choices and fundamental shifts in values, attitudes and behaviours on the part of many of the stakeholders who are involved. Political leaders, in an uncertain and volatile context, have a leadership role in helping stakeholders to think through varied perspectives on a problem, to debate difficult choices and to provide and support deliberative processes and democratic forums in which the issues can be explored and decisions arrived at.

Political leaders therefore matter because politics matters. Democracy is an imperfect system, as many have noted, but politics “is a way of ruling divided societies without undue violence – and most societies are divided” (Bernard Crick, In defence of politics, page. 33).

At any moment, dissatisfaction from one or more stakeholder groups can leave the political leader fighting for survival.

Political leadership differs in its sources of authority from organisational or managerial leadership. Politicians are elected not appointed and once elected they have a responsibility to make decisions on behalf of all the various stakeholders they represent, not just those who voted for them and also with regard for the well-being of future generations not just current voters. The basis of authority for politicians lies not only in the ballot box but also in mobilising and maintaining ongoing support from the wider electorate, from colleagues in their political party (or coalition), whether at local or national level, and from wider groups of stakeholders. At any moment, dissatisfaction from one or more stakeholder groups can lead to the withdrawal of support and loss of authorisation, leaving the political leader fighting for survival or having to step down from office. This can happen literally overnight and over any issue and creates a sense of continuous risk and uncertainty in a way which appointed managers rarely experience. Political leaders therefore have to pay constant attention to the creation and maintenance of a sufficient coalition of support to authorise their actions. Furthermore, given that politics is characterised by contestation and that the public sphere is characterised by competing interests and value choices, then continual challenge to authority is the order of the day, whether from the leader’s own political party colleagues, from the opposition, from the media or from lobbyists, pressure groups and activists. Warwick research shows that many political leaders report feeling that they are only as good as their last success and so are continually having to prove themselves. Their decisions are also under scrutiny from a number of sources because political leadership carries the coercive power of the state and their use of such power has to demonstrate that it is fair.

Furthermore, there are paradoxes and tensions inherent in political leadership: how far the elected politician acts as a representative or a delegate; whether the politician is expected to be “one of the people” or is seen as a person set apart with exceptional powers and skills; whether the politician mobilises the power of popular, mass movements or of elite power holders and brokers; how far the politician is perceived to be acting in “the wider public good” or is seen to be pursuing sectional, stakeholder or class interests and so on.

The interest in political leadership has been given a further boost by the emergence of new patterns of “networked community governance”, involving differentiated polycentric patterns of power that cut across the boundaries of public, private and third sectors, as well as across different levels of government. In addition, the devolution of some powers to bodies below the level of the national state (e.g. to the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, Northern Ireland Assembly; and certain powers to promote well-being being given to local government) contributes further to polycentric governance. The burgeoning use of new interactive communication technologies has spawned new social movements and mass participatory debates, lobbying, affiliation and direct action which challenge some of the more traditional representative forms of political leadership. Local and national politicians are now complemented by a range of political actors, activists and citizens, though at the same time formal political leadership becomes more important in fragmented societies.

Historical analyses of political leadership show that conceptions of leadership and how leadership is practised tend to shift in times of profound change. The changes facing Western and other societies means that we can anticipate that patterns of political leadership will continue to shift and change.

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Further reading:

• Benington, J. and Moore, J. (2011) Public value: Theory and practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Crick B (2000) In defence of politics 5th ed. London: Continuum.
• Hartley J (2010) Political leadership. In Brookes S and Grint K (eds) The public leadership challenge London: Palgrave.
• Hartley J (2011) Learning in the whirlwind: Politicians and leadership development Public Money and Management, 31 (5), September, 331-338.
• Hartley J and Benington J (2011) Political leadership. In Bryman A, Jackson B, Grint K and Uhl-Bien M Sage Handbook of Leadership London: Sage. pp 201-212.
• Hartley J and Pinder K (2010) Coaching political leaders. In Passmore J (ed) Leadership in Coaching London: Kogan Page pp159-175.
• Heifetz, R. (1994) Leadership without easy answers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Morrell K and Hartley J (2006) A model of political leadership. Human Relations 59, (4), 483-504.
• Wren T (2007) Inventing leadership: The challenge of democracy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Jean Hartley is Professor of Organisational Analysis at Warwick Business School. Previous appointments include Senior Lecturer at the University of London's Birkbeck College and research and teaching posts at Universities of Manchester and Sheffield. She is a Fellow of the Sunningdale Institute of the National School of Government, Fellow of the British Academy of Management and Fellow of the British Psychological Society.

Photo Credit: Alex Bailey / Courtesy of Pathe Productions Ltd.