Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom Leadership Lessons from Campaign Headquarters

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom Leadership Lessons from Campaign Headquarters Henry De Sio is the author ofCampaign, Inc.: How Leadership and Organization Propelled Barack Obama to the White Houseand is known for serving as the chief operating officer of President Obama’s epic 2008 campaign for the highest office in the land. De Sio credits a campaign organized around three principles â€" agreement,collaboration, and reliability â€" as critical to its ultimate success. He also connects his many valuable campaign insights to the business world. “When a campaign starts up, it’s an entrepreneurial showcase,” he says. “Leadership is on display like on a reality show, and every action is open to full scrutiny and review. At the end, the best CEO wins.” Here are five lessons we can learn from De Sio’s political adventure. Strive for Efficiency The first employees of the Obama campaign, including De Sio, wanted everything to move through a proactive and efficient process. At the beginning, however, the system was tenuously held together by fax machines and human runners, and new people were put anywhere they could find an Internet connection and a flat space. When they moved into campaign headquarters, staffers were ripping Blackberries out of boxes and opening bank accounts minutes before they were paid by donors. Building the airplane mid-flight, they struggled to catch up. De Sio credits Intuit QuickBase as the red tape buster, helping the team to become instantly more productive. “I was in quicksand, and QuickBase was my lifeline,” he says. Select Your People Carefully Obama insisted his campaign build from the bottom up, be free from drama, and respect everyone. The candidate’s persona was of a hope and change-maker with a collaborative outlook, an entrepreneurial spirit, an innovative mind, and a service-oriented heart. From these factors, De Sio created the identity of hisideal team member: ambitious, competitive, hungry, personally motivated, and driven to make a difference â€" and not necessarily with a Washington resume. Position Your Leadership De Sio learned that he must define himself in the moment, lest someone else do it for him. “You have to claim your frame,” he says. He also had to be prepared to recalibrate. For instance, in the campaign’s early days, De Sio was the quarterback, then a coach, and then a strategist. Refusing to be boxed in, he constantly re-assessed his positioning so that he was known not for his responsibilities, but for his possibilities. At the same time, an effective leader makes it clear that he controls his environment. “In a campaign, everyone wants to be noticed by the right people and sometimes they give in to their inner jerks. Without longstanding cultural norms, seeds of turmoil can form,” he admits. “It’s the manager’s job to get ahead of this.” For more where this came from, head over to Intuits Fast Track blog.