Why Is Huckabee In The Lead?
Mike Huckabee, HunterLeadership. Authentic, Consistent Leadership. From the PalmBeachPost, Buzz gets louder as Huckabee tours state
Huckabee picked up a surprise endorsement standing on a podium at Orlando Executive Airport.
Former state Sen. Dick Langley, who had been a co-chair of Romney’s Florida campaign, ripped a Romney sticker off his lapel and replaced it with one of Huckabee’s.
“I just couldn’t figure out where Mitt stood,” Langley said to applause from the crowd. “I had to have somebody that I could know where he stood, with the right values for this country and for a future for this country.”
Your Business Blogger teaches business at the Northern Virginia Community College. My favorite section is advising and lecturing on business leadership.
Warren Bennis provides the academic definition of the personal qualities of leadership.
Integrity
Integrity means alignment of words and actions with inner values. It means sticking to these values even when an alternative path may be easier or more advantageous.
A leader with integrity can be trusted and will be admired for sticking to strong values. They also act as a powerful model for people to copy, thus building an entire organization with powerful and effective cultural values.
Dedication
Dedication means spending whatever time and energy on a task is required to get the job done, rather than giving it whatever time you have available.
The work of most leadership positions is not something to do ‘if time’. It means giving your whole self to the task, dedicating yourself to success and to leading others with you.
Magnanimity
A magnanimous person gives credit where it is due. It also means being gracious … and allowing others who are defeated to retain their dignity.
Magnanimity in leadership includes crediting the people with success and accepting personal responsibility…
Humility
This simply recognizes all people as equal in value and know that position does not make them exalted.
Openness
Openness means being able to listen to ideas that are outside one’s current mental models.
An open leader listens to their people without trying to shut them down early, which at least demonstrates care and builds trust. Openness also treats other ideas as potentially better than one’s own ideas. In the uncertain world of new territory, being able to openly consider alternatives is an important skill.
Creativity
Creativity means thinking differently, being able to get outside the box and take a new and different viewpoint on things.
For a leader to be able to see a new future towards which they will lead their followers, creativity provides the ability to think differently and see things that others have not seen, and give reason for followers to follow.
Guns, Gay Marriage, Abortion. Huckabee has provided consistent, trusted leadership on issues conservatives care about. For years. Romney changed his mind on all three issues. At the same time, I suppose.
Thank you (foot)notes:
Huckabee questions Romney hunting claim
updated 10:24 a.m. CT, Mon., April. 9, 2007
WASHINGTON – GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was wrong to suggest he was a lifelong hunter even though he never took out a license, campaign rival Mike Huckabee said Sunday.
“I think it was a major mistake,” said Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor. “It would be like me saying I’ve been a lifelong golfer because I played putt-putt when I was 9 years old and I rode in a golf cart a couple of times.”
“I think American people are looking for authenticity,” Huckabee added. “Match their record with their rhetoric.”
Full Disclosure: Charmaine, the wife of Your Business Blogger, is Senior Adviser to Mike Huckabee.
To know something with just the intellect is to dissect, capture, imprison, and even kill it to catalogue the knowledge for some future use. But to know something with the heart is to enjoy; being one with it through experience, thus owning it forever and Huckabee seems to have one heart with his country.
Huckabee is so far to the right, he is going to alienate a lot of conservatives. His position isn’t merely ‘pro-life,’ its ‘No abortion, even if that means allowing a woman to die.’ Its not ‘no gay marriage’ but ‘Gays should be imprisoned for crimes against nature.’ He is right at the extreme of the right wing – and extremes dont do well in elections. He can score with the party faithful, but as soon as the dirty politics of a presidential campaign start and his more unpopular views are more widely publicised… he is going down.