Richardson, Gustafsson and Jordan developed a typology of national policy styles, highlighting a ‘consensus’ versus ‘imposition’ approach to implementation on one axis, and an ‘anticipatory’ versus ‘reactive’ type of problem-solving on the other axis (1982: 13). These policy styles were adapted by Barton and van Onselen (2004) to leadership styles in Australia, plotting the differences between Australian state premiers Jeff Kennett and Richard Court. Naturally, an impositional style of leadership (that attributed to Kennett by Barton and van Onselen) lends itself to the change-oriented approaches to leadership outlined earlier. One might interpret the more radical style of a Kennett as a desire to maintain a capitalist mode of production. A distinction between classical liberal and conservative goals is nevertheless worth preserving. Either way, leadership literature dealing with goal-oriented policy change can accommodate a style of conservative leadership that sets and achieves policy goals. Other aspects of conservative leadership, though, are not so well served by the dominant paradigm in leadership studies.

Moon (1995), seeking to explain the success of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, developed the concept of innovative leadership to describe leaders with both strong political will and a strong policy capacity (the right environment for change). How, though, do such typologies deal with the conservative leader whose primary goal is to hold office? For Moon, the opposite of innovative leadership is inertia. This might be an apt description of many a political leader, but Moon’s typology does not account for a leader whose goals are not specifically policy-oriented. A successful conservative politician such as long-serving Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies can hardly be said to have lacked either political will or policy capacity. Yet, Menzies only occasionally sought to be an innovative policy leader as Prime Minister (with a few exceptions, such as extending Commonwealth grants to Catholic schools). Menzies’s achievement in fashioning a successful conservative party where others had failed and holding power for 17 years was an impressive feat of leadership.

Achievement of conservative goals, then, may take a good deal of leadership skill. The goals of conservative leaders are not always clear-cut. Successful conservative leaders are adaptive. If they hold office for an extended period, we might expect them to appear in various places on the various diagrams produced by scholars of leadership, depending on the time and the issue in question. Retaining the status quo while being buffeted by exogenous forces such as globalisation, or during a national crisis or disaster, is a feat of leadership too often ignored by the change-merchants. Leadership during a crisis presents an opportunity for a different set of relationships between leaders and followers. Heifetz argues that citizens in democracies too often respond to crises by turning to leaders who offer strength and easy answers rather than those who offer the right leadership qualities to find and implement solutions (1994: 2). A number of Australian conservative leaders have been analysed through the notion of strong leadership. Strong leadership could conceivably be brought to the service of radical goals, but the psychological dimension of this leadership style has been more often associated with the bond between conservatives and their followers.

A simple typology (Table 1) combining the radical or conservative ends of leadership with the impositional or consensus styles described above produces four leadership styles — transformative, strong, reassuring, and conservatorship. The notion of radical or conservative ends does not preclude a range of policy orientations depending on the environment. Strong leadership, for example, might entail stringency measures meant to preserve a set of institutions thought to be under threat (during a war or other crisis) or a set of more radical policies aimed at preserving the social status quo through a new policy orientation (in response to globalisation or declining terms of trade). Conservatorship acknowledges the lack of policy innovation that often defines conservative government without conceding that the political activity involved in the preservation of social institutions does not involve considerable leadership challenges.

The notion of transformational leadership is probably the most familiar to scholars of leadership. Combining radical ends with an uncompromising leadership style, transformative leaders run the risk of moving too far ahead of their followers. Kennett sought and failed to be a transformative leader: one with more liberal than conservative goals. However, his failure to win the 1999 Victorian election was a sign that he suffered the fate of many strong leaders: failing to adapt his leadership style to changed circumstance. As the sense of economic crisis that Kennett had exploited faded into the distance, voters turned to the more reassuring leadership style of Labor’s Steve Bracks.