North Idaho congressional hopefuls show leadership

Third of three parts

BOISE – With just two seats in the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives, Idaho’s clout in Congress doesn’t come from its numbers. Instead, it’s highly dependent on the effectiveness of its representatives as leaders.

“A leader is one who engages, works in and through other people to accomplish an objective,” said Chris Baughn, a professor of management at Boise State University who teaches courses in leadership skills. “The inability to create that common sense of purpose, that common vision, and inspire people to move in that direction would make for a rather ineffective leader.”

The Spokesman-Review asked each candidate for Idaho’s 1st Congressional District House seat to discuss how he could be an effective leader for Idaho and to cite an example of effective leadership each has shown.

Constitution Party candidate Paul Smith said he’d be effective “because I’m not going to compromise with anybody. Nobody’s given me a dime for my campaign, and I don’t have any favors to pay back.”

Others offered examples of how they have influenced change.

Democrat Larry Grant told how, as lead attorney for Micron Technology, he filed the first semiconductor anti-dumping case with the International Trade Commission and the U.S. Commerce Department, challenging Japanese chip-makers who suddenly had driven the memory chip market into a tailspin by selling below cost.

“I spent a lot of time shuttling back and forth between Boise and Washington, D.C.,” Grant said. “The net result of that was that President Reagan eventually put tariffs on Japanese semiconductors.”

Republican Bill Sali told how he brought together advocates for the disabled and state officials with the Idaho State School and Hospital who first were warring over the future of the facility, then came up with a joint proposal for a new focus there.

“It produced one of the best results,” Sali said. However, the governor and legislators from near the Canyon County facility then opted for continuing the previous institutional focus and constructing a new building at the facility, he said.

“Politics kind of overcame the reasoned approach that we had kind of arrived at, and that was that. I lost that one,” he said. “It doesn’t change the fact that we came up with the right answer.”

United Party candidate Andy Hedden-Nicely recalled his time as a Cub Scout leader for a den of 13 boys when no one else wanted to be the leader. “I said I would do that with the condition that everybody else who had a son in the group would also take a responsibility for part of what we needed to get done,” he said. “It worked out really great.”

Independent Dave Olson told of an experience in the Air Force when he redesigned storage bunkers for munitions by including sand-filled walls, which allowed the explosives to be stored in fewer and smaller bunkers, saving both money and time. “I had to present it to senior people to me and sell ‘em completely on the idea,” he said.

All of these stories show examples of effective leadership, Baughn said.

Grant’s story of the mid-1980s chip-dumping case showed “an emphasis on rational argument as a persuasive device, in bringing about other people’s willingness to go along with a particular objective, and his persistence in the face of that,” Baughn said. “Those certainly are two things that you would expect in a leader.”

Grant said he found an amendment in anti-dumping statutes that allowed him to file the case, though no one had done so before and some in Washington objected, saying if his company couldn’t compete it should go out of business.

At the time, the price of a 56K memory chip had dropped from $1.50 to 25 cents in three or four months, Grant said – and Micron’s production cost was $1.25. “We were shipping a dollar out the door every time we shipped our product,” he said.

As he pressed the case, people came around, he said. “By the time it was obvious to them that we had a valid claim and opportunity to save the industry, then a lot of folks got behind us.”

Sali’s experience came as an interim legislative committee was looking at the role of the state school and hospital in Nampa. “The issue was if we were going to close it down as other states had and go to community-based services,” Sali said. “I was on that interim committee, and we didn’t seem to be making a lot of headway.”

So Sali said he “started talking to some of the folks that are involved … and said, ‘If you were king or queen for a day, how would you design this system for people in the state of Idaho that have disabilities?’ ”

Those discussions led to a working group, and the ideas led to bringing in more people – including the advocates on both sides. Finally, the chief advocate of closing the school and the then-head of the school came up with a joint proposal to keep it open but change its mission to provide beds for patients in crisis, prescription drug counseling, and other services to patients who mostly would be living out in communities. The two made a joint presentation to the legislative panel to pitch the idea.

“It became pretty obvious that I was going to get rolled over when the governor weighed in,” Sali recalled. “I nonetheless spent some time trying to talk with his folks and convince them that, hey, we spent all this time working on this and it was a good proposal.”

Baughn said Sali’s story is an example of “consultative” leadership that shows “rational appeals, trying to manage relationships with others, to find common ground, and to be persuasive even in the face of opposition. … Certainly the details he gave you suggest a nice approach to trying to build a coalition of people in a consultative way,” particularly with the “queen for a day” approach to building the idea.

“He brought key constituents together – clearly there were other constituents that he was not able to bring together,” such as the governor and the other legislators, Baughn said.

“You’re not going to win all of your battles regardless of the arena that you are exercising leadership in,” he said. The key in such an instance is to learn lessons about how to make the approach more successful the next time, he said.

Hedden-Nicely’s experience also highlights bringing people together to work toward a common goal, Baughn said. In most organizational settings, that process also would include matching the delegated tasks to the abilities of the other people. “Certainly a leader … needs to be able to look around at the people working with him and find what their strengths are and make sure that each person they’re working with has an opportunity to play to their strengths,” Baughn said.

Olson’s story highlights rational persuasion based on the data Olson developed, Baughn said. “Generally when we think of leadership, we think of influencing followers or the public. He’s talking about influencing his boss – that’s not irrelevant. A leader’s upward influence also matters.”

In Sali’s story, upward influence might have involved him persuading the governor to support his proposal, Baughn said.

“A leader … needs a large repertoire of abilities to influence others,” he said. “Ideally you’d like to see a wide variety of those.”

One other factor also is key to effective leadership, the professor said: adhering to high ethical standards. “We see so much in the news today about political leaders, also corporate leaders, who have not abided by high levels of ethical standards. That certainly would be a key issue,” Baughn said.

Ethical leaders are more likely to persuade and inspire followers, he said. “Certainly we would expect a leader to serve as a role model.”

The election is Nov. 7.