Leading the poll with influence

Russell Deathridge, at the Centre for High Performance Development (CHPD), reports on the crucial role that the trait of influence played in winning voters in the US presidential race for leadership.

Dale Carnegie could not have been closer to the truth when he wrote of how to win friends and influence people. Influencing is one of the 12 high performance behaviours in our leadership model that we assess to benchmark global business leaders. It is the behaviour that characterises a leader’s ability to forge relationships, negotiate win-win outcomes and garner support and buy-in for ideas and proposals. For us, influencing is one of the strategic behaviours for working with others.

For business leaders it is important, but for two people in the world at the moment, it has been at the heart of their chances of success. I’m talking, of course, about Obama and McCain. Their respective ability to exercise the behaviour of influence has been the likely critical deciding factor in the US presidential race to the White House. In the last few months, we have watched with interest how the behaviour of influence has been used by both candidates.

Successful presidential candidates have demonstrated the ability to pitch a ‘broad tent’ that attracts the centre ground voters. Obama managed to achieve this early on in his campaign. During the primaries he connected with voters who felt disenfranchised by the ‘tarnished Washington elite’. His relentless ‘change’ mantra placed Hillary Clinton at the heart of the status quo, implying she was part of the problem not the answer. The true answer, he said, was to galvanise the grass roots of both the party and the populace: “We are the change that we seek.”

Nomination won, Obama turned his attention to McCain. He managed to make McCain look like a ‘Bush-lite’ figure. Even though the policy platform between Bush and McCain is quite different, Obama positioned McCain as a candidate bereft of original ideas who will continue with the same policies but without conviction or the neo-con ground base. In short Obama built a win-win alliance that says: ‘it’s us against the Washington machine’. 

McCain had to build a different set of alliances — firstly, with his own party. A year ago McCain had all but abandoned his campaign, convinced that he, a social-liberal Republican, could not win his party’s nomination. His approach to influencing his own party has been a remarkably deft, sometimes openly daring to court the Republican right. Tis courting has been steeped in the language of the conservative right – religion, family and nationalism.

Once the nomination was secure, McCain had to build another alliance, this time with the ‘Hillary’ democrats. Stung by their candidate’s defeat, many of the 18 million Clinton supporters threatened to switch their support straight to McCain. McCain seized the moment and chose Governor Sarah Palin as running mate to capture the ‘Hillary’ Democrats and reinforce his right wing credentials. 

While it is the role of the presidential candidates to strategically operate at higher levels of the influencing behaviour, the role of vice presidential candidates is very different. The analogy of good cop/bad cop is apt here. It is their role to attack their opponent’s character, policies and position. CHPD’s behaviour matrix talks of influencing at a negative level as ‘attacking others interests and being consistently negative to their ideas’. This is where vice presidential candidates come into their own.

Yet there is a warning from history: successful vice presidential ‘pitbulls’ tend to find it difficult to attain and then maintain higher office. Richard Nixon for Eisenhower, Hubert Humphry for Johnson, Al Gore for Clinton could all brutally savage their opponents. However, when it came to running for the top spot, none made it first time.

Perhaps there is a lesson here for business – organisations, like electorates, have long memories. If you have a good track record of being divisive it is an impression that is difficult to change. The ability of presidential candidates to build relationships within their own parties and with the electorate has played a crucial role throughout this presidential race and, undoubtedly,
it was the candidate with the stronger influencing skills that won this race.