To rise from professor to university president to governor to president of the U.S., Woodrow Wilson practiced ten core principles of leadership:
- Go big. Big problems require big solutions. The problems of the twentieth century were unprecedented—mass war, destructive new technologies of war, ethnic hatreds, colonialism, a global battle for spoils. Nibbling around the edges of those problems, without reorienting the basic interests and incentives, was doomed to fail. So a new vision, like the League of Nations, was essential.
- Connect bold new visions with venerable ideals. New paradigms can be scary and disorienting—and unloosed from core values. To develop and to sell new approaches, leaders need to connect them with broadly accepted values. Wilson depicted the League of Nations as a continuation of the American experiment in democracy, a global embrace and application of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Monroe Doctrine. But he also depicted the League as an unprecedented experiment that went far beyond the American system.
- Mobilize mass opinion, at every level. Political authorities operate within a narrow range of freedom, set by government power centers, interest groups, and public opinions and values. To realize a grand new vision, people at all levels—household and community, workplace and industry, pastimes and party—need to understand and adopt the ideals on their own terms. By touring the nation, Wilson attempted to arouse pubic support everywhere. His campaign however, lacked the organizational heft of the Committee on Public Information, which drove the propaganda campaigns of the Great War.
- Connect local to national to global interests. To understand big problems, people need to see the world reflected in their day-to-day lives. Wilson attempted to connect the League of Nations with the quotidian interests of Midwestern farmers, manufacturers, military contractors, Main Street businesses, the growing ethnic communities, and more.
- Appoint great managers and staff, and give them the latitude to lead and manage. Leadership is about persuading people to think and act in different ways. Management is about operating existing institutions well. Wilson was a model leader during the Great War, appointing giants like Bernard Baruch to coordinate the war effort and General John Pershing to fight the war. After the war, Wilson lost his Big Men. The campaign for the League of Nations lacked the organizational heft that would free Wilson to exert his unique brand of leadership.
- Confront unsavory practices and rhetoric, but do not scapegoat individuals. Big ideas necessarily involve controversy and inevitably create backlashes. Even before the end of the Paris Peace Conference, Republicans were mobilizing to oppose whatever treaty Wilson brought home. Wilson wavered between calling out his opponents and ignoring their points. He never found the language he needed to isolate their 1,001 complaints from his grand vision.
- Break the trance of “old ways” of thinking and acting. People perceive the world through mindsets they have developed over the course of their lifetimes. Most people repeat old patterns of thinking and action; they get stuck in grooves. To promote new paradigms, great leaders give people new words and images to embrace dynamic new solutions. Alas, Wilson’s campaign for the League got caught on the shoals of old ideas about balance of power, sovereignty, and “entangling alliances.”
- Give abstract problems a human face. People care more about one fallen soldier than thousands of fallen soldiers. The bigger the problem—the more systemic its causes—the more a great leader must use archetypal characters to illustrate the problem. At times, Wilson effectively evoked the memory of fallen soldiers to show the human costs of war. But Wilson did not paint a complete, Rockwellian portrait of how the treaty would serve everyday, ordinary Americans.
- Focus on one major problem at a time. Distraction is the enemy of change. With the Western Tour, Wilson made the treaty his sole priority. That kind of focus had helped him to enact historic domestic reforms and to guide the U.S. through the war. But a host of pent-up problems—labor, race, civil liberties, disease, disinvestment—would not allow Wilson to create a powerful spotlight on the League of Nations. Only by bringing these issues into a single narrative could Wilson give the League the rhetorical power needed to gain broad public support that translated to Senate approval.
- Give people a voice so they can hear yours. People support change when they can express, in their own words, the problems and the reforms under discussion. All too often, alas, Wilson talked to people rather than engaging them and getting them to describe their own hopes and problems.