🛠️ Kamala and the 3 Counterintuitive Power Tools She Never Heard Of

Issue 276 — October 18, 2024

Last week I watched a televised conversation Kamala Harris had with constituents in Arizona. It was informal, and obviously aimed at winning over moderate Republicans and Independent voters who are likely to be the key to who wins Arizona.

She told a story about her first tangle with the late AZ Republican Senator John McCain. As a newly minted senator from California, she served on a committee with McCain. As someone who did battle with McCain more than once in my past life, I could relate to her rendition of how he started going after her in a committee hearing.

Image from footage courtesy of AZCentral

By her telling of it, she went after McCain just as vigorously. After the hearing, he told her she was “going to make a great senator.”

There couldn’t be a better example of a truth I tell when teaching women about the 6th Leadership Power Tool: “Wear the shirt.”

It’s one of three that I call the “Counterintuitive Power Tools” because they are often the things your mother told you not to do: Embrace controversy, Carpe the chaos, and Wear the shirt. Yet I have found these tools, used intentionally and skillfully, can be among the most powerful devices a leader can have at hand, regardless of whether in business, professions, or public service.

The shirt metaphor is about your most deeply held values. What do you believe so strongly in that you’d put it on your shirt and wear it to the gym? What’s on the shirt of your convictions?

In the course, we literally ask participants to design and share their shirts.

What would you put on your shirt?

I learned from leading arguably one of the most controversial organizations tackling some of the most controversial issues of our time, that people follow people who have a point of view. Whether they agree with you or not, people tend to respect authenticity, clarity of values, and courage.

If ever there was a woman who “wore the shirt” of her convictions, it’s it was Lilly Ledbetter. Her legacy of fighting for equal pay will always be a blessing. Lilly passed away last week. May she rest in power.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Michael Maccoby, author of Strategic Intelligence: Conceptual Tools for Leading Change, says, “For leaders to lead, they need not only exceptional talent but also the ability to attract followers…in 30 years of experience as a psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and management consultant, I have found that followers are as powerfully driven to follow as leaders are to lead.”

He observes that people have both rational and irrational reasons for following: “The rational ones…have to do with our hopes of gaining money, status, power, or entry into a meaningful enterprise by following a great leader — and our fears that we will miss out if we don’t. More influential, much of the time, are the irrational motivations that lie outside the realm of our awareness and, therefore, beyond our ability to control them. For the most part, these motivations arise from the powerful images and emotions in our unconscious that we project onto our relationships with leaders.”

That projection is what he calls “transference.”

Similarly, conscious business coach Caroline Leon makes the case that a strong point of view not only allows you to be aligned with your values but it also attracts people to you. They are more likely to follow a leader who exhibits those qualities and less likely to follow someone who is wishy-washy or equivocal.

Make no mistake, the motivations described by both Maccoby and Leon can be beneficial to charlatans who speak with certainty and detrimental to people who may have the public interest at heart but in the interest of acknowledging complexities, appear to be uncertain of their points of view.

When she told the story about her first interaction with McCain, Harris was in Arizona on a mission to show her ability to work across party lines in order to attract the votes of moderate Republicans and the Independents who make up a third of purple Arizona’s voters.

Does this put her in danger of losing loyal Democrats? Compromise is the name of the political game, but how far can Harris flex before she falls over? She needs to embrace the energy of the controversies and use it to propel herself forward with a clear vision statement.

Similarly, trying to thread the needle on hot issues like immigration and the Middle East could work against her and the principle that people follow people who have a clear point of view.

Harris has been strongest in “wearing the shirt” on women’s reproductive rights and health. No apologies, no equivocation, no threading the needle there. On that one she embraces the controversy and uses it to propel her attractiveness to women voters.

Image courtesy of 19th News (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

And her whirlwind ascent to becoming the top of the Democratic party ticket is the very definition of Power Tool #5: Carpe the chaos. She arose from the swirling chaos of Biden’s faltering debate performance, vacillation of support and then no confidence in Biden, and her own swift rise to become the party presidential nominee, pulling many levers strategically to win her party’s presidential nomination in record time.

Because of her swift and sure seizing the chaos instead of retreating from it, grassroots support groups arose spontaneously. White Dudes for Harris, Swifties for Harris, Childless Cat Ladies for Harris, Black Women for Harris, Geeks and Nerds for Harris, Western Women for Harris, you name it, raise money and deploy campaign volunteers.

There’s another leadership lesson in the “Wear the shirt” metaphor that brings together all three of the counterintuitive tools.

It’s that great leaders know themselves and show themselves. So they are able to navigate controversy and chaos without abandoning the shirt of their convictions, no matter what the perceived community sentiment might be.

There’s so much to unpack here about leadership in this year’s presidential race that I can’t limit myself to only three posts about Kamala Harris’s use of the 9 Leadership Power Tools (whether she knows it or not) as I originally promised. This is the third in the series and there will be at least one more. I’d love to know your thoughts. Drop a comment with your observations about the leadership lessons from this unusual leadership laboratory.

Meanwhile if you’d like to learn more about all of the 9 Leadership Power Tools and the courses, check them out here. I’d love to share them with you inside the course. Use code GLORIA100 for a $100 discount.

GLORIA FELDT is the Cofounder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker, a global expert in women’s leadership development and DEI for individuals and companies that want to build gender balance. She is a bestselling author of five books, most recently Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. Honored as Forbes 50 Over 50, and Former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she is a frequent media commentator. Learn more at www.gloriafeldt.com and www.taketheleadwomen.com. Find her @GloriaFeldt on all social media.