Political Leadership: Managers (Angela Merkel) 5/5

It took just 1 minute and 40 seconds for Angela Merkel to dismiss Norbert Roettgen from his job. There were no platitudes or well-wishes, simply a limp thank-you and the nomination of his replacement in front of the press.

The Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety was gone. 

He remains just one of two ministers Chancellor Merkel has ever sacked outside of reshuffles, dismissed in 2012 for helping lose a major regional election.

Merkel is Europe's longest serving democratic leader. She has overseen four coalition governments and everything the twenty-first century has to offer. 

And she is the epitome of the manager-leader. This is the politician who can lead a complicated team through any trouble, exercising both ruthlessness and patience at the very top level. 

And after sixteen years, she's still very ruthless. That second minister was sacked just last year.

Managers

To be a Manager

This is the fifth and final in this blog series on political leadership. We have been looking at five different categories of political leaders in this series, examining each one in turn along with case studies from past and present.

We've also started understanding how these abilities influence each other, and how they differ conceptually. 

However this final ability is actually quite isolated from the others; it's certainly the least glamorous.

A sturdy cabinet 

No leader can work alone. They always need supporters, teammates, friends to help them. And political leadership has much higher stakes, requiring much more intelligent, dedicated, and skilled people than in a normal boardroom.

However such people can also be ambitious and selfish. They want more power. And government is complicated and tumultuous. 

Therefore any leader who a) can be easily removed from office and/or b) wants to get stuff done must be an effective manager of their subordinates.  Otherwise they're no leader.

They need to harness the ego and weather the storms. They must lead a unified team that can run the country reliably despite the difficulties of governance.

This takes two forms, often depending on what the leader wants. If the leader is simply focused on survival, they will be a 'guiding' manager. 

They will get stuck into discussion, plunging their hands into the filth in order to keep tight control and prevent any cracks in the team becoming public. British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in the 1970s is an example of a guider. 

Sunny Jim: a smart manipulator of his Cabinet

However managers looking at the long-term are likely to be 'presidential' managers. They will step back from discussion, waiting out storms and allowing temperatures to cool again before making decisions, often major policies. 

This is the Angela Merkel manager, and we will analyse this style more thoroughly in due course.

And aside from the style of management, managers are also defined by what they achieve. (This is the first of our five categories where the conduct and consequences of a leaders' ability are equally important. Worth digging into why that is on another day.)

We must, therefore, see whether Merkel has done much with her skilled leadership.

Angela Merkel

Key Texts: A Chancellorship Forged in Crisis (Crawford, Czuczka); Angela Merkel, the Grand Coalition, and "Majority Rule" in Germany (Mushaben)

Sixteen years.

That's three American Presidents, five British Prime Ministers, and long enough for half of Italy to have a pop at their top job.

Being Italian Prime Minister must be one of the shortest average
jobs in the world 

In that time, Germany has been governed by a single Chancellor (their Prime Minister - effective leader, though not head of state). Many Germans have never known another. Many Germans don't want another! But later this year, Angela Merkel will be retiring from politics entirely.

Merkel has made her job look, frankly, easy. But it's been anything but, and her unruffled style only emphasises her leadership skills.

German politics lends itself to coalition-building, meaning Merkel has always been the head of a coalition government - a 'grand coalition' of the two biggest parties in 2005-2009 and 2013-2021, and a right-wing coalition from 2009-2013.

Therefore, by the nature of Merkel still being Chancellor, she must already be a decent manager: she's always having to balance vastly different demands and personalities, and has done so since 2005. 

But what kind of manager is she? And just how good is she? 

The Chancellery -  Merkel's office

The first question first.

On a day-to-day level Merkel works through a tight-knit team of advisers around her, similar to any modern leaders' team. 

They advise and support her decisions, removing much policy discussion from the wider Cabinet, and provide a loyal, discreet core on which the government hinges. 

Here, yes, she is a guider, but this isn't really the government at large, just her personal team, through which she acts as a president-manager to the wider government: often well-removed and well-informed, able to observe without being caught in arcane disputes.

Where the government is involved, whether Cabinet or the EU, Merkel is a real president. She is widely recognised as superb in chairing discussion, bringing forth a range of ideas and going into meticulous detail. 

The current Merkel Cabinet

She is able 'to communicate clearly, coupled with a willingness to listen', holding judgement until the  last moment, when she finally makes a decision.

This does not, however, make her a peripheral or easily swayed character. She is a 'dominant personality in face to face encounters', and, as we have seen, is ruthless in destroying unreliable ministers. 

But it does mean she 'stands high above the fray, allowing all the factions to fight it out', eventually using the exhausted combatants to make a pragmatic, middle-ground solution.

So she is clearly able to manage a team, but manager-leaders are just paper-pushers if they can't convert ability into results. Does Merkel have results? 

Yes.

Other than survival, which, after fifteen years, is really a win in itself, Merkel's early governments particularly show that she can walk the talk.

In her first government, she passed 'complicated federalism reforms, and orchestrated serious economic restructuring with "stability and growth packages"...[as well as] the adoption of unpopular domestic security measures'. 

2005-2009 was most notable for domestic stability and legislative success. Germany also passed reasonably successful stimulus packages to counteract the 2008 Crash, contrasting with the bombastic and derisory, but ultimately wasteful, French response.

This crash would rise again in the second, 2009-2013, term, when the Euro looked on the edge of collapse as a consequence of Greek insolvency. 

No love lost in Greece

Here, Merkel had to manage her Cabinet into alignment in order to then align the wider European Union in favour of tough bailout measures for Greece (that were very unpopular in Athens) and other afflicted countries. 

Her 'summit diplomacy' is second-to-none in global affairs, and her patient, step-by-step, consultative negotiations bore fruit in the Euro's eventual stabilisation and Greece's recovery. 

This was a more guider management, made necessary by overwhelming pressure, but still showing presidential traits. 

In this period she moved from 'a "mom" [her German nickname is 'mutti' - 'mom'] to a matriarchal figure with absolute power over her household: her party, her coalition, and her regional adversaries'. 

The manager sometimes has to flex their muscles when the team won't play ball.

And so, while Merkel is a presidential manager, and one who secures great achievements as a consequence, her flexibility in management, in being able to variously listen, cajole, or command, is her real strength, and what has enabled her to lead Germany for over a decade.

The manager is not just a leader who helps everyone get along. They have to exercise power cleverly, manoeuvring their team to fall in line (or sometimes openly ordering them to) in order to produce results of substance. 

The business of politics is to do things. Managers know this. Merkel knows this.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading this final essay on political leadership qualities!

I have enjoyed doing these pieces immensely, but I am looking forwards to a rest.

Doing this independent work is tiring, especially with very little views. So, I have no specific plans for this series moving forwards. 

But I do have lots of ideas. 

I want to - maybe soon, maybe not - update and expand the categories with guest contributions. It's tempting to dive deeper into the philosopher-innovator relationship, or chart which quality is truly most needed for a successful political leader. 

And one day, I would love to write a book with a full breakdown of different styles of political leaders, and how they all relate in one abstract mess. Having a special focus on non Anglo-American leaders would be particularly exciting to do, I think. 

But, most of all, I hope that you have learned something about leadership, and that you can frame our leaders - in all areas of life - much more accurately because of this series. 

Poorly Informed exists because we want you guys to grow in what you know. That's a mission I have influenced and am influenced by. 

Despite how often I told myself this was a private project for my CV, I was always thinking about how to teach and challenge you guys as best as possible. Really, this was always for you - whoever you are. 

So, thank you.

All the best,

Theo, 28th July 2021