Angela Merkel has been in the news more and more lately, and it's not hard to see why. In 2015, she won TIME Magazine's person of the year award. As the Chancellor of Germany at age 59, she may be one of the most influential and successful world leaders today. Not only is she young, she has been, for all practical purposes, the leader of the European Union for about 9 years now. Her major accomplishments have been managing Europe's debt crisis, keeping the European Union intact, and managing to set Greece on the path to recovery from the brink of collapse.
Merkel is certainly one of the most powerful and influential female leaders in the world today, and this is due in part to her ability to negotiate under extreme pressure, her willingness to stand alone as a minority voice, her ability to "lead from behind," her unflinching dedication to her own values, and attention to hard data. All of this, coupled with her steadfast determination and calm demeanor have helped make her a respectable, moral voice for a group of nations desperately in need of someone to take a stand for them.
These leadership qualities are unique in that most politicians have built a career studying politics and leadership, and many are great at rallying people because they have a flair for the dramatic. Yet Merkel sets herself apart by refusing to play that political game, and instead remains focused on her values, which are based on hard evidence and proven effectiveness, and keeps a few manageable end goals in mind, which will serve to deliver what the people want to them and show that she is true to her word. In fact, she never studied politics at all, instead pursuing a career as a politician after studying chemistry.
According to Fiedler's Contingency Theory, which asserts that effective leadership depends on the unique situation and includes many factors, like the nature of the task, the leader's personality, and the makeup of the group being led. Make no mistake, Europe was desperate and in dire need of someone to take the wheel, and they wanted nothing short of a complete overhaul of the current solutions in place. Nothing was working, and they were eager for a change. Doing away with their current means of achieving a solution seemed the only way to manage the debt crisis that was threatening to tear them apart.
Angela Merkel was a shining beacon of hope that provided the perfect answer to their needs: she didn't have as much charisma as the other politicians, but she paid attention to data, offered a hard-working persona and an analytical mind, and delivered on her word. Not only was she the perfect candidate to solve a problem such as this one, she had the intelligence and determination to do it successfully, and that is what made her success as a leader so definite. Chemists by nature are very task-oriented people and Merkel is no exception.
In Path-Goal Leadership, a leader must consider employee characteristics and task and environment characteristics, select the best leadership style, and focus on a clear path with defined goals. In Merkel's case, she had goals defined almost immediately, as well as a clear path set out in order to achieve those goals. People trust her because she does not just spew the same lofty rhetoric involving "freedom" and "values" as other world leaders tend to do. First, she is pragmatic in both her goals and her vision for achieving them; she knows what the numbers are and she knows that Germany cannot continue to be so generous when it comes to spending. She also knows that she does not want to see her beloved country go through the same system collapse that it saw during the 20th century. The environment of Germany and the EU as a whole is one that is still recovering, and thus must be considered as such, in order to be able to ensure future prosperity. Because of this, a leader must be both competitive and practical, forging alliances and strengthening bonds where necessary instead of relying on national pride and emotional decision-making to get ahead.
Normative Decision Theory decides the best decision to make, assuming there is an ideal decision-maker who is both rational and able to compute with accuracy. The practical application of this would be "decision analysis," otherwise identified as how people should make decisions, given a set of values. It is an approach aimed at finding better ways to make decisions, such as different methodologies and software. This sort of lens works almost perfectly when studying Merkel's behavior as a leader because she is so analytical and rational that other leaders find it hard to compete with her data-driven arguments. Not only that, but her values seem to line up perfectly with her proposed solutions and the values that her people hold dear. As a leader, she makes a habit of shying away from choosing to do anything which is reminiscent of failed past endeavors and using hard data to fuel her arguments, which is certainly the most rational approach to problem-solving and planning.
As a general rule, visionary leaders are quite uncommon, but their characteristics include imagination, persistence, and unwavering conviction. Visionary leaders tend to possess an extraordinary amount of openness to new ways of doing things and to new information. Angela Merkel certainly possesses all of these qualities, and more. As Chancellor of Germany, she has continually sought new alliances, new ways of doing things which would bring Germany into the 21st century and level the playing field with other nations. While Merkel seeks knowledge, and listens to her contemporaries and predecessors, she by no means bows to their way of doing things. By ignoring these norms already in place, she is able to transcend the mistakes of the past and see clearly into the future. To do this requires imagination and vision and she has plenty of those as well.
To choose one leadership style for Merkel is difficult, but if one considers her history as a politician, it seems that Path-Goal Leadership is the clear choice. For example, Merkel has always remained very centrist in terms of German politics and her position on the polls. She was open-minded when it came to sacrificing conservative values to rule in favor of the German popular vote when it came to switching to renewable energies after Fukushima. Yet she is currently governing against the majority of Germans when it comes to the issue of the refugee crisis. Overall, Germans find that she is steadfast in her own values, yet reliable when it comes to serious issues, and that is the reason that she has remained at around 50% support in the polls. She has done controversial things, yes, such as meeting with the prime minister and president in Turkey just before the elections, but she has always had clear goals for her country in mind, and goals that are mainly shared by other Germans. Experts have defined her leadership style as "principled pragmatism" and I tend to agree with that assessment.
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