Cowen faces stiffer challenges than any of his recent predecessors

The leader who is prepared to put his or her own ego second to the success of the project he or she is involved in is the leader who will be admired, respected and followed

BRIAN COWEN has a lot to learn. It may not look like that — he may, right now, seem like a man who has been preparing for leadership all his political life — but, believe me, he has a lot to learn. And if he doesn’t know that, he won’t last long.

There’s going to be a huge amount of focus on him over the next few weeks as he prepares to step into the shoes of his predecessor.

Most of that focus will be on how he goes about forming his cabinet. Conservative or radical? Slasher or appeaser? Promoter of the young or content with the lads? It will be his first test, and the first thing we use to measure him by.

Of course, he may just be making his first mistakes when he picks his team, and he may learn from those mistakes. Although we do it all the time, it’s nearly always an error to pass judgment on a new leader by referring to the first few things he or she does — because real leaders make mistakes, but they learn lessons from them.

The truth is that all of Brian Cowen’s shocks are ahead of him. The day he takes up his new job, he is starting the learning curve all over again — because he’s not taking on just one big job, he’s taking on two. Being leader of a country is hard enough but leadership of a cantankerous and demanding voluntary organisation like a political party is a real full-time job. In leading the country, as hard as it is, he will have a lot of help and support. A lot of the time, when he’s leading the party, he’ll be on his own.

And it comes as a shock to every democratic party leader, no matter how long they have served as deputy or been in the shoes of the leader before them, to realise they really know almost nothing about leadership until they have to exercise it. The demands of leadership in the modern era — leadership of party as well as country — are incredible, and it can be an amazingly lonely place to be.

So here’s a piece of advice from Martin Luther King: “If you want to be important, wonderful. If you want to be recognised, wonderful, If you want to be great, wonderful. But recognise that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant.”

That’s not intended to be pious. Leaders are routinely expected to be people of vision, people who can command attention, people who will always perform better than everyone else (and some leaders come to see themselves that way, too).

In politics, especially Irish politics, the party leader is the disciplinarian and the reward-giver, the massager of egos and the motivator, the master tactician, the visionary, the fundraiser. The leader gets a lot of praise when things are going right, and takes all the blame when things are going wrong.

It’s not an easy job, and no one is ever ready for it. That’s why it has often been the case that people you assumed would be great leaders can seem to diminish in the job, while people you were ready to write off can grow.

And one of Mr Cowen’s problems is that he comes to power and office on the basis of high expectations. In fact, the expectations are an awful lot higher than they were for any of his predecessors going back to CJ Haughey.

Everyone expects that he will be a superb financial manager, that he will bring a strong and well-formed sense of vision to the job, as well as the decent old-fashioned republican values we associate with him. And everyone expects that he will make a clean break with the past. He is the first leader of Fianna Fáil to have had no connection, in any real sense, with the Haughey era, and therefore he’s the one we all expect, and hope, will finally clean up the act.

Of course, he won’t admit there’s an act to be cleaned up but everyone, nevertheless, is expecting him to be a reforming leader of his party.

And what of the country? Already, the advice is pouring in.

Over the weekend I heard two economists advising Mr Cowen that he needs to appoint a finance minister with the guts to say no. Hear, hear, I thought. But to whom should the new finance minister be saying no?

Should it be the poor, the sick and the handicapped? Or should Mr Cowen be looking for a finance minister who is prepared to say no — now that we’re in a bit of a downturn — to those who did best from the Celtic Tiger?

Should it really be payback time for people who have benefited most in the past — all those developers, for instance, reported in yesterday’s Irish Examiner, for managing to avoid hundreds of millions of euro in stamp duty?

So, there are no easy choices ahead. And the physical and social demands of his new role are going to hit Mr Cowen like a bolt from the blue. He has a bit of a reputation as someone who can be formidable, even grumpy, in public, while being great company in private.

He is going to have to reverse that balance — not completely, but a bit. He simply won’t survive if he continues to spend too much time in the easy company of “the lads”, while always looking as if he’s spoiling for a fight when he’s in the public spotlight.

And all of that is where the advice from Martin Luther King comes in.

Leaders have egos. They wouldn’t be putting themselves forward to lead if they didn’t.

But a leader whose job and whose performance is about his or her own ego never amounts to much.

The leader who is prepared to put his or her own ego second to the success of the project he or she is involved in is the leader who will be admired, respected and followed.

IN addition, Mr Cowen also has a few significant projects ahead of him. He has inherited a party that may be able to tell the rest of the world how great it is but is actually not as proud of itself as it needs to be.

He needs to bear in mind, always, that more than 60% of the electorate actively vote against his party, and are strongly opposed to it. It’s time for a principled party leader to examine an issue like that. It’s one thing for people to disagree about ideology and philosophy but a new leader of a political party needs to understand why his organisation simply isn’t trusted by so many.

Furthermore, Mr Cowen has inherited a country that is anxious about the future. In every sense, he is the servant of the country as well as its leader. He has been elected to lead and to serve. If he starts off by recognising that those two words are the same in every sense that matters, he’ll be off to a very good start.