How Obama Makes Me A Better CEO

Different people will have different opinions about his politics, but I think everyone has to admit that Barack Obama knows how to get people to follow him (otherwise he would still be State Senator Obama, and not President Obama).  To rise from where he was to where he is in such a short period of time...his skills in this area are once-in-a-generation.

By definition, leaders must have followers, therefore Obama must be considered one of the greatest leaders of my lifetime.

How does he do it?  As a startup CEO, I need to know how to be a leader / attract followers.

One of the most illuminating moments of the presidential campaign was in the primary debate with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, the question was posed to each "If Dr. Martin Luther King were alive today, who would he endorse?"  Clinton and Edwards gave the stock answers of why Dr. King would support them, blah, blah, blah.  Obama delivered an answer that skewered his opponents (without intentionally meaning to), and crystallized his leadership style, and I believe identified the single reason why he ultimately won the election.  Below is the 60-second clip of his answer:

He is that leader who makes the people following him truly believe that he is simply the vehicle that they use to accomplish their objectives.  It is very Zen-like, and may reflect his early upbringing in Indonesia.

We had a country of angry people who, rightly or wrongly, did not feel that the Bush administration reflected their wishes.  In comes Obama whose central thesis is that change happens from the ground up and the role of the president is to channel the wishes of the people.  He had a lock on that positioning throughout the primary and general election, and he rode it all the way to the presidency.

As a CEO, that is a great lesson.  While there is a critical difference in that the job of the CEO is NOT to be the most popular person / "win" an election, but it is to inspire and empower the team to go beyond their normal performance.  Empowered employees are the only kind of employees capable of performing above their normal levels, and more importantly are capable of acting as a true team and becoming much greater than the sum of their parts.

Q: How do you do that?

A: Make them feel like Obama made the voting public feel when he answered that question about Dr. King's endorsement.  That it's not about "me" as the CEO, it's about "you" as the real contributor and that it's my job as the CEO to channel all of your collective contributions to achieve our collective objectives.

This ad for Adidas from the Beijing Olympics captures this idea really well.

While the CEO (or the President of the U.S.) may be the one that looks like they're putting the ball in the basket, it is really the collective effort of everyone to raise the basket and lift the CEO to the level where they can reach it.  The CEO has to recognize, acknowledge and praise everyone for their contributions in scoring that basket.  Not that they "assisted" the CEO in scoring the basket, which implies that all they did was make it a little easier for the CEO to score the basket but that he could have done it anyway with a little more work on his part; but rather that the basket, the court, and the entire game would not even exist without everyone doing their part.

Obama is a master at that, and that is why watching him will (hopefully) make me a better CEO.