Franklin D Roosevelt Leadership Style

Academics and historians consider Franklin D Roosevelt as one of the greatest US presidents the most important statesman of the 20th century, he is ranked alongside of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.

In fact, in 2011 United States Presidency Center voted him the best American president.

Roosevelt, commonly known as FDR, had the leadership skills to guide the US through the Great Depression of the 1930s and most of World War II, led the Allies to victory over the dictators, won an unprecedented four consecutive elections, and did all this with a broken body.

So if we can’t learn any leadership lessons from his life, we’re not really trying.

Here are five.

First, keep your ends certain but your means flexible. In the period 1939-1941, Roosevelt

took America from divided and hesitant middle power and transformed it into a global leader. He pushed seclusion to the brims of national life. Though this journey required great effort and determination due to hardships yet his actions were ceaseless, and behind them all a clear and inexorable direction can be recognized. To adapt his own metaphor, he navigated his government like a pilot takes his aircraft full of passengers to a safe destination in a thunderstorm, making surety that they reach safely.
Second, you are stronger when you work with help of others. Paralyzed from the waist down by polio, Roosevelt was forced to rely, for political success and his very survival, on family, friends and aides.
In the lead-up to Pearl Harbor, he tapped five extraordinary men – well-bred diplomat Sumner Welles, Republican adventurer and future spymaster “Wild Bill” Donovan, social worker and fixer Harry Hopkins, GOP presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, and railroad heir Averill Harriman –and sent them on special missions to Europe that were critical to the war and the American century that followed. These five envoys were the inspirations and gadgets of FDR’s foreign policy.