The leadership style of Alvaro Uribe, President of Colombia

The Leadership Style of Alvaro Uribe, President of Colombia.

As I mentioned in my last article, I was invited to speak in Santa Marta, Colombia, to ANATO, the very influential association of travel agents of Colombia.

I say the “influential” because they have had President Alvaro Uribe open the congress, seven of the last eight years. To have the President of the country open your conference, is very difficult and shows the importance that your industry has in the country.

I met President Uribe. I gave him my signed book along with my business card, which as many of you know, is a million dollar bill. He was very impressed by the title of my book and by the card, asking his personal secretary to make sure she didn’t lose it because he wanted it.

President Uribe arrived almost two hours late, so as you can imagine, that threw the schedule out the window and I must imagine that the conference organizers were sweating bullets. I was surprised that he didn’t apologize for being late.

There were around 350 people in the room and when he came in, he went table by table, the first two rows across the room, shaking hands and talking to everyone. The man has lots of charisma and he has the memory of an elephant. Next to me was a beautiful woman who he recognized from a speech he had given in Bucaramanga a few months before. Did he remember her because of her beauty or simply because he has that kind of memory? They told me that he remembers everything and I must say that he spoke about 30 minutes with out notes and he recited figures and facts out of memory. He then answered questions for one and a half hours.

He was very candid, very open, sometimes agreeing with the participant and sometimes disagreeing. He always stated the reason why he disagreed and when he agreed, he would give an order to his assistant to take notes because he had to take some type of action. He asked very good questions, demonstrating knowledge about the subject. Only on a couple of occasions he deferred to the minister of tourism and commerce present in the event.

You can tell that this President knows what he is doing and he has that aura of self confidence that rubs off into the public. There was a sense of admiration in that room for this man.

As many of you know, there is a movement in Colombia to have him run for a third term. He hasn’t openly accepted the invitation to run for a third term although very close to me in the conference sat a couple that when he came around shaking hands, they said they were his re election committee and he thanked them. I would suppose that if he wasn’t planning on running, he would have made a comment to the effect, but you never know.

I believe most people in that event would vote for him again. I didn’t find the same level of acceptance out in the street. I asked four taxi drivers the question if he should run again, and the four of them said “no”, that they wanted new blood in the presidency, that he had already done all the good he was going to do.

President Uribe has the highest acceptance ratings in all of Latin America, at times close to seventy per cent. That is unheard of in practically every country.

Why is he so popular?

I asked around and I was told that he is a people’s president. He listens to people and he acts on what he says he is going to do.

Trust is such an important factor, maybe the most important one for a leader. Low trust is the greatest cost in life, in organizations, in companies in countries. Low trust or no trust creates hidden agendas, interpersonal conflict, deep seated rivalries, scarcity thinking, in other words, a win lose mentality and all of these reduce the speed of trust. Low trust affects every decision, every communication, every action; it practically slows or even paralyzes everything.

Mahatma Gandhi said, “The moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he does becomes tainted”.

A few years ago, in the United States a Harris poll revealed that only 22% of those surveyed trusted the media, only 8% trusted political parties, only 27% trusted the government and only 12% trusted big companies.

British sociologist David Halpern declared that only 34% of Americans believe that other people can be trusted. In Latin America the figure is only 23% and in Africa, 18%. He mentioned that forty years ago, in Great Britain, 60% of the population believed that other people could be trusted, it came down to 29% in 2006 and I am sure that with the problems they are now having, it is down into the teens.

I wonder if anyone is keeping track of these figures in Puerto Rico. Are the economists in our island looking at the trust factor?

Stephen M. R. Covey, who I met several times when I was involved with the Franklin Covey Corporation, devised a simple formula which I think is very interesting.
The formula is based on this critical insight: Trust always affects two outcomes, speed and cost. When trust goes down, speed will also go down and costs go up.
When trust goes up, speed will also go up and costs will go down.
It is that simple, that real, and that predictable.

There is a Chinese proverb that says that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time is NOW.

Our whole society must work on this trust factor, especially our government, our politicians, the media and everyone else.