St-Victor: Flamboyance isn't enough to be a good leader

Montreal Gazette

10-07-2025

I have an interest in connecting the dots between personal traits and leadership styles. It's an exercise I do when evaluating elected officials and business leaders. I head a business, and I'm sensitive to how one's identity affects how they lead, as well as how shifting times mean evolving expectations, whether from clients or constituents.
Those expectations evolve in different ways in different places. Here in Canada, tariffs and talk of annexation shook our usual steady flow. I've sought to understand how our leadership should handle the change from having a neighbour led by presidents who saw us as allies to a neighbour that voted for Donald Trump, who, as soon as he was re-elected, declared economic and territorial threats.
Montreal-born Timothy Naftali is a senior research scholar at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in New York and a presidential historian on CNN. Radio-Canada's all-news network RDI also has him on its roster; that's where I met him last year, as we were on-air analysts during the U.S. presidential campaign.
We had coffee one afternoon, and after comparing notes on our daily lives, I switched the mode from two friends exchanging pleasantries to that of a forever-student wanting to learn from the professor.
I asked Naftali who his favourite U.S. presidents were. He singled out George H.W. Bush — not his actual favourite, per se, but because Bush Sr. had been capable of changing his mind.
As Naftali recalled, paraphrasing: 'George Herbert Walker Bush said: 'I know you gave me the mandate to do X and Y, but now that I see the entire landscape, it's not that special interests are forcing me to change my mind, it's that I know more and I'm a little smarter and let me explain to you why what I ran on and what I believe today are two different things.''
Leadership is very much about humility. There's no growth if you can't step back to realize your initial plan may not be best for the current situation. Bush's capacity to reassess by no means made his presidency perfect, but it made him a better leader for the moment.
That was then. How about now? What does it take to be a good POTUS in 2025?
'Americans elected a candidate in 2024 whose personal characteristics would have disqualified any previous traditional candidate' before Trump's first presidency, Naftali said. 'This begs the question of whether enough Americans are now looking for something completely different in a president — have 'we' changed, rather than has the presidency changed?'
What we need to be more vigilant about, as electors and consumers, is that our new expectations should require leaders to be better — not just 'different.'
I continued my quest to better grasp the moment we're living in by asking the good professor about differences in character between leading the U.S. and Canada.
'Until Donald Trump's '51st state' nonsense, Canadians, I believe, were traditionally demure flag-wavers and expected their PMs to follow suit,' Naftali said. 'It was a quiet pride.
'Effective Canadian PMs, like all effective parliamentary leaders, must be decent debaters,' he continued. 'There is nothing like question period for presidents. The closest are press conferences, but those are not designed to be debates. As a result, Canadian PMs need to have a more detailed understanding of policy than U.S. presidents.
'The Canadian PM isn't the head of state, so he, she, has not traditionally been the unified embodiment of the nation in any way similar to the U.S. president. One consequence of that is that the PM has more latitude to have a private life than the U.S. president.'
As someone who observes the impact of image, I think Naftali's points are essential. We can't lose track of what's needed to be a good leader. It's not charisma, and it's certainly not flamboyance, even at a time when that is too often what's rewarded. Something to remember as we'll soon head to the polls to elect a new leader for our city.