Principles of Pennsylvania Avenue: How US Presidents Make Decisions

By Jonah Goldberg

“The best we can do is find a framework that helps us consider our choices, knowing that there may not be one perfect answer. That way, we can rest a little easier knowing that we did the best we could in the circumstances, come what may.”—Barack Obama

The president of the United States faces more pressure than anyone else in the country—perhaps in the world, according to some views. From handling urgent crises in the situation room to rolling out budgets whose consequences will only be visible years later, the president has to make decisions with American lives at stake every day. Failure can mean a loss of credibility and trust in both the commander in chief and the entire nation. One would hope that every person who has taken this office has reflected deeply on how he makes these decisions.

Three of our recent presidents have published open windows into their decision-making processes: Bill Clinton created a MasterClass course on inclusive leadership, George W. Bush curated the biggest challenges of his candidacy in his autobiography Decision Points and Barack Obama published an article on tough decisions on his Medium blog. This article will explore one value each shared and one unique tactic each brought to the Oval Office.

The Most Powerful Person Is Really the Most Powerful Team: Encouraging Debate

It is never easy to stand up to an authority figure. The president thus faces a heightened version of a problem that is present for every manager and team leader: how to ensure that the best ideas are heard and that decisions are not made in an echo chamber.

Clinton, Bush and Obama hired people whose intellects they respected, and they needed assurance that these people felt empowered to speak up. Each president found that one effective approach to this goal was to state it explicitly. Clinton famously said in his first all-staff meeting, “I want you to know that you will never be fired, transferred, iced out [or] in any way hurt by disagreeing with me or anybody else.” Bush regularly reminded his staffers, “Do not worry about the politics. Do the right thing. I will take the heat.” Obama made it a concrete part of the meeting structure: “For me, that meant asking everybody in a meeting what they thought about the problem at hand. I’d call on folks in the back row, including the most junior staffer. That required people to come prepared to share their views.”

Just as first impressions between individuals can determine the rest of the relationship, set the tone at the start of a new project or team that this will be a space for productive feedback. And it can only help to continue to remind everyone of this tenet before contentious decisions.

Of course, maintaining this space requires follow-through. Obama graciously admits in his article that “like every leader, I had my blind spots. Late in my first year, Valerie Jarrett reported that some of the senior women on staff were experiencing a culture where the men on the team interrupted them … to the point where some of the women had altogether stopped talking in meetings. These were some of my most important advisors, so I convened them over dinner to hear more. Listening to their stories, I considered the degree to which my own tolerance for machismo behavior had contributed to their discomfort and, inadvertently, stifled their important contributions. We didn’t resolve everything in one night—but being aware was a start. The men, I later discovered, had been oblivious—and were appropriately mortified. They promised to do better, and a few months later, Valerie said she noticed some improvement.”

Fostering healthy debate enables us to recognize our blind spots when making individual decisions. An even stronger environment to reach for is one where team dynamics can be discussed and workshopped with the goal of improving processes moving forward rather than becoming mired in blame. This may be why Clinton focused entirely on inclusive leadership in his legacy.

Bill Clinton: Team Cohesion through Clarity

The leadership mindset Clinton outlines in his MasterClass boils down to three elements: 1) clarify the purpose and priorities of the team, 2) show others how their work fits into the larger context and why it matters, 3) give credit where credit is due. These human elements reinforce open communication as well as incentivize hard work and passion.

Clarifying a team’s mission may sound elementary. However, given the ridiculous range of responsibilities and fluctuating timelines that a president and his staff have, it is very easy to miss the forest for the trees. Moreover, there is a gulf between campaign slogans and actual grounded values to guide decisions, and it is not often clear how a particular economic position should bear on a foreign relations dilemma.

The next step is establishing personal connections to an organization’s mission to drive worker dedication. Clinton accordingly advises making people feel like they’re on a special mission. “When you do that, then you’ve got everybody looking for ways to knit the cooperation together tighter,” he says. If people who were already running a global superpower still felt more accountable and enthusiastic after being told they were on a special mission, it can’t hurt the morale of your team.

In the paper, “On the Emergence of Collective Psychological Ownership in New Creative Teams,” Olin professors Markus Baer and Andrew Knight studied the dynamics of teams that started with one creative lead, such as an entrepreneur coming up with an idea on their own and recruiting others to bring it to fruition, or a US president assembling his staff. Their study of 79 teams in an entrepreneurship competition indicates that teams with a sense of collective ownership—members believing that they have input—correlates with early success. The paper also backs the presidents’ earlier advice: Proactively seeking help from team members can foster collective ownership, and doing so is compatible with a healthy amount of territorial marking—making clear which parts of the plan/process are not up for debate.

The final step is sharing credit and recognizing others’ hard work. Doing so rewards team members for their effort and the project’s outcomes. People often assign disproportionate credit to top leaders for organizational outcomes—a phenomenon known as the “romance of leadership.” But, an organization’s outcomes are a product of a group of people working together in concert. By acknowledging this—and recognizing the people who played an instrumental role in a project’s success—leaders can motivate team members to work hard.

George W. Bush: Don’t Take the World at Its Word

I was surprised to see that the first major decision of Bush’s presidency that he discusses in Decision Points is stem cell research. It proved to be a fascinating example of a question that had deep ramifications but lacked the urgency of the 9/11 response and other flash points of the Bush presidency, and it illustrates both Bush’s ability to find a middle path in a black-and-white situation and the attitude he developed toward public criticism.

Bush needed to determine whether the federal government would fund embryonic stem cell research. The challenge he faced was that embryonic stem cells had immense potential for health research, but they could only come from destroying human embryos. Bush was not in any way anti-science. He had campaigned on doubling NIH funding, and he had lost a sister to leukemia and recognized that stem cell research could lead to more effective cancer treatment. Yet he was also firmly pro-life, and he had met families with “snowflakes”—children raised from implanted, previously frozen embryos— that embodied proof that every embryo had the beginnings of a human life. Was it more important for the future to support medical research or to ensure that the government did not cross a moral line in technology use?

Bush spent months educating himself on the science and speaking to people on all sides of the question, from physicians to the pope. He shares that opinions were often unexpected—some pro-choice surgeons “believed there was a moral distinction between aborting a baby for the direct benefit of its mother and destroying an embryo for the vague and indirect purpose of scientific research.” On the other side of the aisle, “Orrin Hatch and Strom Thurmond, two of the most staunchly pro-life members of the Senate, supported federal funding for embryonic stem cell research because they thought the benefit of saving lives outweighed the cost of destroying embryos.” 

Through entering the situation with humility and seeking out teachers who disagreed with him, Bush was able to create a middle option. The US would fund research on stem cell lines that had already been taken, meaning the life-or-death decision could not be reversed, but drew a clear line that federal funds would not be used to produce new lines. He chose to host a primetime TV broadcast to explain this decision to the American people, recognizing that they might know as little as he had at the start of the process.

At first, the decision was generally praised, with only the far-right still labeling him a murderer. However, the tide changed when scientists began to ask for more funding and political opponents began to weaponize the decision to paint Bush as anti-science. Some vindication was earned when scientists later discovered ways to generate more stem cell lines without destroying more embryos, a research direction that Bush had funded and now rendered the ethical dilemma unnecessary.

During this time, Bush himself turned to older presidents and developed a healthy philosophy on criticism.

“The shrill debate never affected my decisions. I read a lot of history, and I was struck by how many presidents had endured harsh criticism. The measure of their character, and often their success, was how they responded. … As I told Laura, if they’re still assessing George Washington’s legacy more than two centuries after he left office, this George W. doesn’t have to worry about today’s headlines.”

When we make decisions based on principles and on the best evidence we have, things still may not always work out, but we can still trust ourselves moving forward.

Barack Obama: Set Time Aside

During his time as president, Obama’s routines included daily exercise and a weekly haircut. The immediate lesson to draw from this fact is that if the president could make time for self care, so can you.

Obama’s primary intent with these breaks, however, was to step away from the insular, frantic pace of the Situation Room. He recounts a full day in 2009 spent debating with his staff and hearing from Senate leaders about the financial crisis, trying to choose between the least bad of three unenviable options to stabilize the country’s economy. Late in the day, he stepped away for dinner and a haircut, and he had come to a decision by the time he returned. He says of this break, “That mattered, too. That was part of making the decision. Even in situations where you have to act relatively quickly, as was frequently the case during the financial crisis, it helps to build in time to let your thoughts marinate.”

This advice resonated with me the most. Often I am forced to step away from a problem that has been plaguing me and only then do I see a larger picture that made me realize I had boxed myself into one approach when another was still open to me. The science backs these epiphanies. Dozens of studies have shown that breaks (and especially taking walks) are helpful for processing and remembering new information, stress levels and problem solving. One study that examined the factors that promote creativity at work found that people have creative breakthroughs following a period of overnight “incubation” of the problem and potential solutions. 

Another forced break Obama recounts was while attending a dinner with veterans and their families. In the middle of a discussion on intervening in Libya, Obama saw one soldier who had lost both of his legs in Afghanistan, and that put the weight of his decision in shocking clarity.

We all risk losing perspective when we spend too long mentally sealed in the Situation Room. Setting aside time can help us reset and come back with a better idea.

The Importance of Decision Role Models

We may not agree with the decisions of one or any of the presidents. Bush’s pro-life stance may alienate liberal readers, for example. However, they might still argue that he made the best decision under the constraints he gave himself.

Bush writes in his introduction: “Many of the decisions that reach the president’s desk are tough calls, with strong arguments on both sides. Throughout the book, I describe the options I weighed and the principles I followed. I hope this will give you a better sense of why I made the decisions I did. Perhaps it will even prove useful as you make choices in your own life.”

Some of us have role models in our industry who arrived at their place of authority through completely different circumstances than we did. I believe it’s as important to find role models who may operate in completely different spheres than we ever will, but whose principles and processes we respect, so that we can go as far as they did on our own path.