Tag: coalition strategy

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Trucking Along

Sometimes leadership lessons sneak up in unexpected locations. On Tuesday at 1am, that location was Highway 55 between Chicago and St Louis. In preparation for my future career as a nomadic carnival worker, I have decided to take the requisite post-undergraduate road trip out West. My buggy, a 2005 Chevy Cobalt, hobbles down expressways with the weight of four passengers, a spunky cat, two clown dolls, and fountains of energy drinks. On Tuesday, as my friends slumbered and the cat serenaded the car with rhythmic purrs from her nook or cranny, I began studying the lumbering giants sharing the road with me. As I coaxed my Chevy between trucks like a caffeinated ant dodging elephants, I contemplated the life of a truck driver.

Truck drivers, whether transporting water beds or Mexican jumping beans, must mobilize a hefty load toward a defined goal. By virtue of their independence and responsibility, they become highway leaders—executives in the mysterious asphalt jungle that links distance locations. Each driver is an Odysseus who struggles through a hero’s journey while conquering various obstacles along the way. While amateurs like me muddle past in clown cars, truckers maintain a consistent pace that allows them to complete their voyage. They recruit sympathetic coalition partners like dispatchers, service center clerks, meteorologists, and fellow drivers, to assist them as they drive their agenda forward. Through shrewd political capability, they establish their credibility and ensure that these partners will come to the rescue when something blocks their course. Finally, they check their egos at the toll booth; there’s no room in their cab for hefty hubris and vanity doesn’t increase gas mileage.

Truckers also share something intimate and often taboo to discuss with fellow leaders: loneliness. Talk radio and garage funk music offer poor company on a graveyard shift through rural Missouri. Like an executive left alone with a massive merger agenda, truck drivers must carry abundant loads of poise and patience. Leaders struggle with the solitude of decision-making and the pressures of authority while avoiding narcissistic obsession. Ultimately, when your agenda succeeds or fails, coalition partners disappear and you alone receive the accolades or blame. The leader’s journey is inevitably an isolating pursuit and aspiring executives must grapple with this reality. At least, when the going gets tough, you can commiserate with the Highway 55 truckers and wish you were travelling with a cat and clown dolls.

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Obama & My Mother’s Coalition Strategy

“Coalition” is a word that brings with it mixed reactions. Among academicians, there has been some wonderful work done on coalition theory.  In the world of practice, coalitions are often seen as a necessary political tool to achieve particular ends.  Leaders pushing agendas treat coalitions as nuisances they need to put up with rather than a mechanism to establish a cooperative enterprise. Successful coalitions are put in place before the fact. They are part and parcel of an ongoing process. Unsuccessful coalitions are often a weak afterthought and put in place after the fact.

Imagine for a moment the differences between the coalition mobilized by George H.W. Bush during the first Gulf War and the one mobilized by George W. Bush for the War in Iraq.  Bush, Sr. understood that coalitions are necessary for two fundamental reasons:

  1. Coalitions enhance the legitimacy of your effort.  When you have a coalition, your effort is seen as more legitimate.  Obviously the more people who rally around a cause, the more legitimate the cause.
  2. Coalitions help overcome resistance and spread the risk.  The more people you have on board, the less any one party has to lose.

George W. Bush Jr. engaged in coalition building as a token exercise which he felt compelled to do. He never totally appreciated  the legitimizing utility of a coalition, always fearing that coalitions would undermine his unitary effort.

There are two reasons why leaders don’t form coalitions

  1. They are afraid of what economist’s call the “free rider”—the individual who will do absolutely nothing, and in fact, may become a disruptive Trojan horse who will destroy the coalition from within.
  2. They feel that the compromises aren’t worth it.

When leaders find that these conditions exist, they will proceed to mobilize some while excluding others.  The problem is–what do you do when this mobilization fails? Can you go back and re-invite those you excluded the first time around? Maybe, but maybe not. In the best of all worlds, you can renegotiate and achieve a compromise that you previously didn’t have. But, in a realistic world, governed by ego, self-interest, and hurt feelings, a new invitation in the context of not being invited the first time is unlikely to yield a cohesive coalition.

I remember the adage my mother used to say–better to invite a lot of guests and hope that some will go home early rather than have a few guests and a number of angry people who resent that you didn’t invite them.  It seems to me that the recent healthcare summit proved my grandmother right.  Big coalitions can be whittled down to small coalitions, but it is harder to make small coalitions into big ones.

You can’t coalesce after the fact.

Picture Credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8533266@N04/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0