Different styles, same goal: How the candidates made it work

WASHINGTON -- They're both senators, but that's pretty much where the similarities end.

From their first jobs to the financial crisis, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain have revealed themselves as polar opposites, forged by their personalities and biographies into potential presidents with vastly different leadership and management styles.

One came up through the military, the other through community work and law school. One is impulsive and emotional, the other cool and analytical. Both have worked with diverse people and both get results, says Princeton scholar Fred Greenstein, author of The Presidential Difference,but the methods reflect the men. "McCain breaks a lot of china along the way," Greenstein says. "With Obama, it seems like nothing's happening, but somehow everything seems to work."

Leadership traits were a sparring point during Tuesday's presidential debate.

McCain, stressing his long experience, called himself a "cool" and "steady" hand at the tiller. Obama suggested he is more "somber and responsible," noting that McCain once joked about bombing Iran.

Vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and other Republicans have mocked Obama's post-college stint as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side, yet much of his success is rooted in that training.

He helped people find common goals and pursue them together — tools he's applied to every undertaking since, from heading the Harvard Law Review, to serving as an Illinois state senator and U.S. senator, to a presidential campaign that raised unprecedented amounts of money and toppled the Clinton dynasty, to nudging Congress behind the scenes to act on the Wall Street meltdown.

Ronald Heifetz, a leadership professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says Obama's inclination as president would be to "bind and repair" relationships among Americans and with the rest of the world.

That's not a kumbaya strategy, Heifetz says; it's a practical foundation for governing. If people trust and respect each other, he says, "they can withstand the forces of division that emerge as soon as conflicts break out. They stay in the game with the negotiation, looking for creative solutions, looking for compromise."