Obama Lacked Leadership Backbone in First Year

Interesting comment on President Obama's failed leadership skills from Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn, who compares Obama's first year in office with that of his much admired model, Abraham Lincoln.

On Lincoln:

"What Lincoln did in the first six months of 1862--with critically important consequences for the fate of the country--was to find his own leadership backbone. In the crucible of his own failure and anxiety that winter, he found a clearer focus, a new resolve about the importance and purpose of saving the Union...."

"Barack Obama's most surprising weakness in his first year as president has been his own inability to find his leadership backbone and to draw from this core strength and animating purpose to really lead -- that is, to focus on the most important problems, to articulate and then embrace the central mission of his presidency, and then to take up the reins of presidential power to advance this mission, even at the expense of challenge and hostility from other powerful players."

As an Obama supporter, I have to say this rings true with me. The management literature is full of scholarship on how important the first six months, the first year, is to any chief executive trying to make a mark on an organization. But to take advantage of that early period, the leader must not only have a sense of what needs to be accomplished, but how.

In his first year Obama seemed content to identify the goals, but then step back and let other devise solutions and drive the process. He needed to be in the driver's seat, prodding, negotiating, threatening when necessary and praising when deserved.

In the same WaPo series on Obama's first year, a counterpoint is provided by Marie Wilson, In Praise of Steadiness. Wilson, who runs The White House Project, argues that "commitment to keeping an even keel is what gives a neophyte leader gravitas, and in an ideal world, time and space to earn trust."

To which I say, an even keel is great, but useless without a rudder -- backbone -- to guide the proper direction. I agree with Koehn that the president needs to go back to Lincoln for counsel on actively using the power of the presidency to lead from a sense of purpose.

What's your take on Obama's first year?