Leadership Styles part 1

Obama vs. Clinton: Leadership Styles
His approach of visionary leadership is appealing but risky. Her health-care reform
managerialism already has been proven ineffective
The virtual dead heat in the Super Tuesday Democratic primary is being attributed by the
punditocracy to the absence of any significant policy differences separating candidates
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The two nonetheless have drawn clear distinctions
between the ways in which they each propose to govern the nation, and those differences
sound a lot like a rehashing of past debates about opposing styles of corporate leadership.
Senator Clinton (D-N.Y.) argues that the role of the President is not only to provide
visionary leadership outward from the Oval Office to the nation and the world but also to
control and direct the federal bureaucracy downward to ensure that policies are carried out
faithfully and effectively.
In sharp contrast, Senator Obama (D-Ill.) declares he will do the chief executive's job by
focusing completely on providing leadership vision, judgment, and inspiration. As for
controlling the agencies that would report to him, he says he will delegate that
responsibility. He pledges to stay above the managerial fray and, instead, hold agency
heads fully accountable for the performance of the bureaucracies in their charge.
On one level, these visions seem to reflect a Carteresque tendency to micromanage
(Clinton) and a Reaganesque organizational nonchalance (Obama). But each candidate is
actually putting forth a well-reasoned philosophy of leadership, and their distinct
approaches have implications for their respective abilities to deliver on the changes the
majority of the nation seems to desire. From the vantage point of a business school
professor, what is particularly striking is that the two candidates clearly articulate
competing theories of leadership that have been the focus of much scholarly research over
the last several decades; what I'll refer to as the "managerial" and "transformational"
approaches.