Questions for next president focus on leadership

A few weeks ago I participated in a panel discussion at Harvard's Center for Public Leadership that focused on coming up with a list of questions that we'd like to ask the next president if we had the chance to put them through a job interview. The questions were to be focused on leadership - not policy - and the goal was to ascertain just how the 'applicant' would lead the U.S. government through the large, complex challenges we'll face over the next decade.

It was a challenge to come up with the types of questions that would get to the heart of how a candidate would lead - and it caused the group to consider just what leadership is. Many people resonated with the definition of leadership that scholar Ronald Heifetz has pioneered - that leadership is an act and not a role, and that act of leadership is helping a group of people discover and confront the challenges they face - and do the work together of solving the problem.

Taking the academic exercise to the web, the CPL uploaded the following summary video from the panel - it will be interesting to see what questions the YouTube community comes up with...