DATE: Wednesday, October 22, 1997           TAG: 9710220003

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B10  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: BY GERALD L. BALILES 

                                            LENGTH:   79 lines

LEADERSHIP INVOLVES UNDERSTANDING, PLANNING AND PERSUASION

Hampton Roads faces a wide range of difficult challenges. Many of the issues - education and transportation, for example - are common to other regions of the state. Yet several of the hardest challenges are presented by special conditions faced here in this region - the decline of defense spending, the loss of several key financial institutions and the unique geography of the region being the most prominent.

Successfully facing those issues will require effective leadership. Indeed, it is axiomatic to state that very little would be accomplished in this world without leadership. As an example, I'll discuss how I saw my role as a leader during consideration of the 1986 transportation- funding package.

Upon becoming governor, I saw that Virginia's transportation needs had grown well beyond the capability of our traditional funding system to deal with them. Transportation is the lifeblood of our economy - it's how we get the goods and services we produce to our customers. Transportation is crucial to economic growth. A transportation system that does not work becomes a bottleneck, choking off growth.

No one in my administration needed a pollster to come to this conclusion. No consultant sent a memo. There was no research done during the campaign showing that transportation funding was the citizenry's No. 1 issue.

As we set to work on our transportation program, we brought business and civic leaders into the effort. We called on the wisdom of every living former Virginia governor, and involved the legislature. A pollster might have come up with a plan to co-opt the issue, pre-empting Republicans or some other group. But we wanted the support of Republicans and didn't frankly care how much credit anyone else received for the final product.

The result was a special session of the General Assembly eight months after I took office. The Assembly passed a new 10-year program that included new projects - and new funding sources. Yes, they were called taxes. But all involved in the effort to devise the program, including Democratic and Republican legislators, spent a great deal of time persuading the press, the public and political leaders of the need for action on transportation issues. We were well-prepared with our arguments. The program had the support of Republicans and Democrats, business and labor, environmentalists and developers. The program was not focused only on highways but on air and seaports as well.

A year or so later, someone did take a poll. The result was that well over 80 percent of Virginians supported our transportation-improvement program.

A meeting with that pollster prior to my inauguration might have revealed that Virginians did not want to pay higher taxes. The pollster might have said that Virginians had no appetite for doing away with the old pay-as-you-go tradition. The pollster probably would have reported that Virginians had a dozen other things that stood higher on their list of priorities than transportation and that those should be addressed first.

Leadership and vision do not come from survey research. Leadership is not about taking a poll and then molding a program to fit the findings. A poll can help provide a leader with a snapshot of public attitudes at that particular moment. But it is no substitute for the real thing.

Leadership is about understanding needs, planning a strategy for meeting those needs and then persuading people to follow. It is hard work, understanding the context within which problems must be addressed, preparing yourself to understand the issue and develop solutions, and persuading people of the wisdom of a particular course of action. Much harder, certainly, than taking a poll and then announcing that you agree with its results.

Everything I've ever read on leadership can be boiled down to three simple words that I have used often: Context. Preparation. Persuasion.

Benjamin Disraeli once said that a leader ``must know the times in which he lives.'' In other words, a leader must clearly understand the context within which leadership will be exerted.

Bill Parcells, who has coached in three Super Bowls, once said that the better prepared he felt for a game, the better his teams would play. Those you lead will be no better prepared to face a challenge than you, yourself, are.

Finally, the importance of persuasion. If you cannot persuade people to follow you, how can you get anything accomplished? If you cannot persuade people to follow a course of action, why would they do it? MEMO: Gerald L. Baliles was governor of Virginia from 1986 to 1990. This

article was adapted from his remarks to the 1997 CIVIC Leadership

Institute. KEYWORDS: ANOTHER VIEW

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