How do we get great leadership?
In sports, every team struggles with the question, how much is the current coach to blame for any particular loss, or any particular win? Would you fire a coach just because they lost 1 or 2 games?
Leadership is the most difficult skill to acquire. We know this because great leaders are rare. One can easily find a great computer programmer, a great lawyer, a great accountant, and there is even a reasonable supply of great surgeons. But historians write about great leadership because it is the skill that manifests the least, and when we see it we are mesmerized by it. Lincoln, FDR, Winston Churchill. And right now, in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The combination of courage and intelligence and moral vision is rare enough that we feel a certain awe when we consider the greats.
At that level, every case is likely to be an entirely random accident of fate. Consider Zelenskyy, who was a comedian, who no one regarded as a great leader, and if Putin had not invaded, Zelenskyy’s deeper skills would have never been revealed to the world.
Since that combination of vision and purpose and skill is so rare, let us aim for something slightly more quotidian. If the greats are so rare that we cannot plan to get them on a regular basis, then let’s think about how we can get leadership one step down from that, leadership that is, at least, very good. Since this a large topic, in this essay we will only look at a few of the motivations of such people.
A central question is what kind of incentives talented people need to step forward and offer to serve the public? We know that politics doesn’t pay, so we need to appeal to such leaders with rewards other than great wealth. And yet, we should also consider the question, maybe politics should pay better than it currently does.
One of the most obvious, and one of the oldest, incentives is that of honor, and also the fear of dishonor. As a practical matter, this means teaching history to the public, especially to school children. Each generation needs to be taught to revere the great leaders of the past — this is the most important incentive that we can offer to those who step forward to lead. And likewise, where leadership dishonors itself, we need to be ready to teach future generations to scorn such a betrayal of the trust that the public offered.
Besides honor, what does society need to offer its leaders? Clearly, the chance to survive a setback, and even a season of setbacks.
In sports, every team struggles with the question, how much is the current coach to blame for any particular loss, or any particular win? A team loses 4 times in a row, does that mean the coach is bad, or was it just bad luck, some injured players, an unusually good performance by the other side? It would be a mistake to fire a good coach who simply had some bad luck. So most teams will stick with a bad coach through a streak of losses, assuming the losses were due to other factors. With most teams, only a sustained period of under-performance will get a coach fired.
We see this in business too. If this year has been a disaster, should the Board of Directors fire the CEO? But wait, perhaps there was a worldwide recession, or some other event that was clearly outside of the control of the CEO? Likewise, when things are going well, should the current CEO be rewarded? But what if things are going well because of a smart investment made by the previous CEO? Who really deserves the reward? Perhaps all rewards should be delayed a few years, so the CEOs can reap the benefits of investments they made a few years ago? Perhaps paying bonuses to a CEO, even after they are gone, will encourage the current CEO to also make some long-term investments, knowing they will pay off after the CEO is gone?
In either case, it is wise to remain calm in the face of some temporary shock. One has to go on awhile, as steady as possible, so as to discover the long-term truth. We don’t want to “throw da bums out” after a short-term shock, as then we might be throwing away excellent leaders who have been ambushed by unexpected events.
Most of the time you want the coach of a team to focus on the needs of the team, not their own needs. For that reason, most of the time, the owners of a team will reassure a coach that their job is not in danger, even if the coach just lost a few games.
The best way to end a losing streak is to have a coach focus 100% on improving the team. You don’t want the coach to be sending out resumes, trying to find a new job.
It is noteworthy that every good leader in a democracy, on both the left and the right, came from a safe seat.
Ask yourself, who are some noteworthy right-wing leaders?
Margaret Thatcher
Winston Churchill
Strom Thurmond
Jesse Helms
And on the left?
Edward Kennedy
Bernie Sanders
Dianne Feinstein
Patrick Leahy
Margaret Thatcher represented Finchley for 33 years. Patrick Leahy is currently in his 47th year of representing Vermont. They didn’t have to think about their own re-election, so they were able to focus on actual leadership. In other words, over the last 300 years, to the extent that the democracies have had good leadership, this has been achieved through a bit of engineering, where the system grants certain leaders lifetime posts, even while pretending to do something different. But it would be better if we aimed for such circumstances deliberately and openly — it would be better because this is a powerful incentive, and therefore a way to get a better type of person to go into government, rather than going into business or some other profession. If we want the best leadership in government, we need to think about how to persuade the best people to accept the sacrifices of such a decision, especially the financial sacrifice.
By contrast, if you tell people that an elected official needs to face elimination every 2 years, then most of the time you are going to get the kind of people who are willing to engage in constant campaigning and constant fundraising. Only the most corrupt, ignorant, and disgusting lowlifes are going to go into a situation where their whole profession is at risk on a constant basis. So the only time we get great leadership in the House (and there have been many great leaders in the House) is when a given politician is given the assurance of a safe seat. In other words, the only way the USA gets great leadership for this part of its democracy, is by engineering the situation so that there is no direct democracy involved.
All of which argues for allowing politicians to serve long terms in office. They should be able to ride out temporary shocks, without being tossed out of office.
It doesn’t matter if a leader is on the left or the right, if they are going to get things done, they need to come from a safe seat. This frees them up to focus on what’s important. Having to face re-election in a hotly contested seat means a leader needs to smile and say contradictory things in an absurd effort to make everyone happy. By contrast, leaders who come from a safe seat can say exactly what they mean, and they don’t have to waste effort on making anyone happy.
But we can grant a safe seat to every person who is ever elected, simply by electing them to long terms, such as 9 years, or perhaps electing them to a single term of 11 years or even 15 years (with no additional terms allowed), so that they never have to think about re-election, while also having enough time to get something important done. In Britain, the judges at the top level are appointed for 18 years, so this is apparently the length of term that Britain has found offers the best balance of independence and accountability. And this is exactly what we should want for all of our leaders.
Again, electing leaders to 9 or 11 years means that everyone elected gains most of the benefits of coming from a safe seat: they can always say what they mean, they never have to smile or try to make people happy, and they can focus on getting things done, rather than focusing on fund-raising and campaigning.
How much of a financial sacrifice should leaders be asked to take?
No one goes into politics expecting to become a multi-millionaire, but some of the best talent could become multi-millionaires if they were to stick to careers in business. So the question comes up, can the political system offer compensation that is at least somewhat reasonable? The Founding Fathers of the USA felt it was essential that top jobs paid extremely well: President George Washington was paid $25,000 a year. Simply adjusting for inflation gives a figure of $800,000 a year, but given how poor the country was back then, and how small the wage economy was (only 22% of the population had jobs) it was truly an astounding amount. Washington was the best paid person in the USA — in that sense his modern comparison would be certain CEOs who are paid tens of millions a year.
In recent decades Singapore has committed to having the best paid bureaucracy in the world, and many international comparisons suggest the high pay has given it the best bureaucracy in the world:
The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy
by Daniel A. Bell
2016
As Singapore's economy improved over the years, the government found it increasingly difficult to atract and retain its ministers and top public service officers. Various policies to close the gap between private and public-sector salaries were explored and implemented. In 1994, the government decided to benchmark the salaries of ministers and top civil servants to the salaries of top earners in the private sector. The formula was revised in 2007 to peg the salaries of ministers and permanent secretaries to two-thirds of the median salary of the top eight earners in six professions. According to the government, economic globalization had created a single worldwide market for talent and government scholars were keenly sought by top global companies like McKinsey & Co and Goldman Sachs.
With the salary revision the annual pay of entry-level ministers and senior permanent secretaries went up from $1.2 million to $1.6 million, and that of the prime minister went from $2.5 million to $3.1 million. Top performers in the elite Administrative Service, which identifies high-potential talent early on and grooms them for top generalist posts, at age 32, would be paid up to $361,000 a year.
The advantages of benchmarking compensation in order to keep pace with the private section are obvious: as the Boston Consulting Group puts it, "It ensures that a talented public servant is not unfairly penalized for choosing a career in the public sector, and reduces the temptation to engage in corrupt practices."
Of course, the government is also aware that the policy is politically sensitive and may not be feasible in a "pure" electoral democracy with critical media and the serious possibility of being voted out of power: in his 2000 National Day Rally, then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said, "Many Western leaders told me in private that they envied our system of Minister's pay. But they also said that if they tried to implement it in their own countries [they would face a serious backlash]."
All of which suggests that the political system can and should offer pay that, at the very least, avoids punishing leaders for their willingness to lead. Higher pay better protects the system against corruption, and allows the top talent to go into politics without having to feel that they are monks committing themselves to a life of penury. Crucially, high pay allows poor people to go into politics and afford the basic amenities that they must pay for as part of their job. In 2018, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected to Congress, her ability to serve her constituents was initially limited by her poverty. She’d previously been working as a bartender and so she could not afford to rent an apartment in DC until her $174,000 House of Representatives salary kicked in. Even then, she was living modestly — $174,000 does not go far in an expensive city like the capitol.
In a system where politicians are paid little, only the wealthiest citizens can run for office. Reasonably good pay therefore increases the actual, real-life representativeness of the system.
To recap:
Honor
Longer terms
Better pay
If we want the best people to go into government, we need to think about what incentives we can offer them.