WASHINGTON >> On a recent Saturday afternoon, Rep. Paul D. Ryan texted Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. Ryan, the new House speaker, was attending a University of Oklahoma football game and wondered where the Sooner-adoring Cole might be sitting.

“I told him, ‘I am in sitting here in Washington working on my bill,’” said Cole, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee who was plowing through his section of a massive spending bill to fund the government that has a must-pass deadline this Friday. “He said, ‘Oh, sorry about that, but good job!’”

“I have a $160 billion bill here, and that was the extent of input from leadership,” said Cole, who had been accustomed to fielding micromanaging requests from Republican leaders.

The short exchange had many signets of Ryan’s nascent leadership style, which contrasts sharply with that of his predecessor, John A. Boehner.

Ryan has for the most part pushed the privilege of crafting legislation — and with it, the inherent responsibilities — out of the leadership offices and back into the hands of members, replacing Boehner’s smoke-filled rooms, at least for now, with energy bar-lined committee conference rooms. When he wants to chat, he texts.

In a grooming contrast to Boehner that seems almost willful, Ryan now also shuns shaving.

Republicans are hoping that Ryan, pressed into service against his will and still struggling to make sense of his fractured Republican conference, can leverage his inclusive style to minimize the drama in the latest fiscal showdown with Democrats, which takes on added urgency this week.

He has been having weekly dinners in a historic reception room in the Capitol with a vast array of Republican colleagues, unlike Boehner, who preferred to mingle with a small group of insiders at an Italian eatery nearby. He makes regular rounds on television to make the case for a conservative agenda, unlike Boehner, who largely eschewed the small screen.

And Ryan meets weekly with a newly assembled group of members from the most conservative and most moderate ends of his conference, unlike Boehner, who tended to surround himself with an inner circle of his peers.

“I was pleased and delighted that he is bringing together people who usually don’t associate with each other,” said Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., who recently attended a dinner with Ryan and other House Republicans whom he barely knew. “You can see that Speaker Ryan’s goal is to get people to understand each other’s common goals.”

The name placard above Ryan’s office door still seems gleaming, and tourists making their way through the Capitol Rotunda stop and stare at it, occasionally taking photos with their smartphones. For Ryan, who had been pleased to immerse himself in the arcana of the tax code as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, the duties of administration, Christmas tree lightings and endless meetings remain new.

Managing his schedule alone still has him off-kilter, he said.

“I’m really weird about time management and punctuality,” Ryan told reporters in a recent round-table interview. “I’m still working on getting a routine established.”

One of the first major issues to come before the House on his watch was in an area where Ryan has spent little of his career: national security. For colleagues judging his response, the way Ryan brought a bill aiming to curb the Obama administration’s Syrian refugee program to the floor was almost as important as what was in it.

Shortly after the attacks, Ryan empowered a task force of committee chairmen to draft legislation that could come to the floor on its own rather than as an amendment to an upcoming spending bill crafted by leaders. That gave members responsibility for the outcome. The bill passed easily, with significant support from Democrats.

On a spending bill that must be passed this week to avert a government shutdown, Republicans again are seeking to take on Planned Parenthood — a similar effort failed earlier this year — and block or reverse Obama administration policies.

But unlike Boehner, whose tendency was to promise conservative members that he would fight for even their most unrealistic policy priorities, only to eventually concede to Democrats in the 11th hour, Ryan has been forthcoming from the beginning with members about their limits, Republicans said. He has read them into any meetings he has with Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the House minority leader, and others, another departure from Boehner’s practice of keeping information closely held.

“That is a sea change from previous spending fights, where, regardless of whatever talking points were coming out of the speaker’s office, we all knew we were just going to surrender eventually and give the president whatever he wanted,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., who helped lead the fight to unseat Boehner.

Referring to Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, he said, “We know we aren’t going to get everything we want out of McConnell and Obama, but there is confidence that we are going to get some things that are really important to people back home.”

Cole, an Appropriations subcommittee chairman, contrasted Ryan’s technique with one employed three years ago when congressional leaders secretly negotiated a short-term measure to keep the government open, known as a continuing resolution, behind the backs of chairmen. Moves like that infuriated conservatives and committee chairmen, who complained of being left out of the legislative process.

“We were all enormously upset,” said Cole, who added that committee leaders went in to meet with the leadership and said, “‘You just threw away a year of work!’ They just stared with a blank look on their faces.”

Whether Ryan’s inclusiveness results in more votes for a spending measure this week remains to be seen. Scores of Republican House members, ever mindful of a potential primary fight waiting for them back home, seem compelled to vote against almost any spending bill.

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La. and the majority whip, has used unusually blunt language about Republicans who vote against budget measures to save their skin even as they hope for others to carry the House over the line and avoid a politically toxic government shutdown, aligning himself with Ryan.

“The vote that hurts our conference is the no vote from a member who hopes the bill passes, but relies on others to carry that load,” he wrote in a recent letter to his whip team.

The spending bill presents Ryan with his most important test so far as speaker and will be a measure of how long members will remain enchanted with him. He can only hope their newfound ardor will match that for his new beard: So far, the latter has more than 11,200 likes on Facebook.

© 2015 The New York Times Company