Goodwin: There are lessons to be learned from Lincoln

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, delivering the keynote address at the MMA Annual Meeting on Jan. 23, urged local officials to take to heart the qualities that made Abraham Lincoln an extraordinary leader.

“He always had the empathetic understanding to get inside other people’s point of view,” Goodwin said of the 16th U.S. president, the subject of her acclaimed 2005 biography “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”

Lincoln invited several former rivals into his cabinet, including New York Sen. William Seward and Ohio Sen. Salmon Chase, both of whom he had defeated for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. Both had far more political experience and formal education than Lincoln, but, Goodwin said, Lincoln’s “unparalleled array of emotional skills was more important than anything lacking in his resume.”

Lincoln’s listening skills, and his refusal to let his personal feelings about people cloud his judgment of their capabilities, “created a climate [in his cabinet] in which people felt free to disagree, without fear of consequences,” Goodwin said.

Lincoln’s distinguishing leadership qualities included a willingness to acknowledge his mistakes and to share credit for his successes.

Even more striking, Goodwin said, was Lincoln’s “willingness to shoulder the blame when things went wrong, even when it was a subordinate’s fault.” This was especially important, Goodwin said, during the early years of the Civil War, when his ability to deflect blame from his generals helped to maintain troop morale.

Lincoln also had the ability to recognize his own weaknesses, and to find ways to compensate for them, Goodwin said.

In dealing with George McClellan, the much-criticized Union general, Lincoln gave himself a deadline for deciding the general’s fate, Goodwin said, “knowing his own tendency of giving people second chances.”

Other attributes that distinguished Lincoln’s leadership style, Goodwin said, included a keen sense of timing and a remarkable ability to communicate his goals.

She noted, for example, that when Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term as president, in March 1865, instead of using the occasion to celebrate the Union’s imminent triumph, he struck a conciliatory tone toward the South, as a means of making his goal of post-war reconstruction more reachable.