Monocolumn: The Art Of The Under-Promise, Over-Deliver Leadership Style

Monocolumn is Monocle’s daily bulletin of news and opinion. Catch up with previous editions here.

With the world’s eyes on Chile’s rescue of 33 trapped miners, one person has emerged as an unexpected winner: mining minister Laurence Golborne, whose work as the public face of the rescue effort has quickly made him the country’s most popular political figure and a possible presidential candidate.

The public affection for Golborne popped up from nowhere. In July, a monthly poll testing ministers’ popularity found him to have the lowest name recognition in President Sebastian Piñera’s cabinet. He was familiar to the financial world from his years running the country’s biggest retailer, the Cencosud conglomerate of big box stores, supermarkets and consumer finance. But he was invisible to the general public: only 14 per cent of Chileans knew his name.

Now there is barely a Chilean who doesn’t know him and most seem to like what they see: he has an 87 per cent approval rating, according to pollsters Adimark GfK, the highest marks an individual has received since the survey began in 2006.

Education minister Joaquín Lavín, a presidential candidate in 1999 and 2005 with all but universal name recognition in Chile, told a local daily that he’d hand over the task of campaigning to his colleague in mining. “There’s another minister who’s very popular,” he said. “Leave it to him.”

When Golborne first appeared at the San José mine site, he looked uncomfortable, his voice cracking under the stress. On Twitter, with far fewer than his current 54,000 followers, he fended off criticism of the rescue effort, responding directly to one tweet after another, a habit he has kept up. Golborne spent many nights with the miners’ families, with a policy of explaining everything – including rescue plans – to the relatives before speaking to the press.

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