ELEVEN
Lessons on Leadership
Show me the leader and I will know his men.
Show me his men and I will know their leader.
—ARTHUR W. NEWCOMB
I am in the winter of my life now and have spent much of that life leading people, reading people, leading myself, being led, and studying leaders and leadership. I want to share with you what I’ve learned—the Dos and Don’ts—the principles and maxims that have shaped my life, and offer some examples of how I have applied these lessons during that life.
The date was February 12, 1940. I was on the last day of being seventeen, sick in bed recovering from pneumonia. Earlier I had decided that I wanted to try for an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in hope of becoming an infantry officer. In pursuit of that goal I had written my congressman and the two U.S. senators from Kentucky seeking that West Point appointment without success for two years. I had not given up hope.
Late that dark, cold February afternoon my dad came home and immediately came to the bedroom where my mother was tending me. He wasted no time. The local representative of U.S. Senator A. B. “Happy” Chandler had informed Dad that the senator had a patronage job opening in the Senate Book Warehouse in Washington—and it was mine if I wanted it. The pay was $30 a week. He needed an answer immediately, and if the answer was “yes” I would leave early the next morning. Dad said he would accompany me and help me find a room in D.C. and find a doctor to care for me.
Dad said the principal of my local prep school had agreed to allow me to graduate with my class in June if I could accrue the necessary credits in English and algebra from a Washington school.
Immediately and instinctively I knew that this offer was very likely the only real chance I had to obtain an appointment to West Point—there in Washington, where such plums are handed out, as opposed to begging letters mailed from the backwoods of Kentucky.
This was my first real challenge where I had to make an immediate, time-critical decision based largely on what my instincts told me. I said yes. My mother broke into tears and we packed a suitcase. My dad and I left Bardstown at five a.m. the next day, February 13, my eighteenth birthday. We spent the night in West Virginia and reached Washington, D.C., on February 14 in the afternoon.
We found a room for me in the home of an elderly couple, got me registered in night school, and visited a doctor for treatment of my pneumonia. Then I reported for work in the Senate Warehouse. My life had changed direction suddenly and drastically.
Later I realized I had trusted my instincts when I decided to accept that Washington opportunity. During the next three months I finished high school at night, studying alongside cabdrivers and government workers, got the credits transferred back to Kentucky for graduation, and registered for night school at George Washington University, which I attended for two years, year-round.
Every month I pored over the list from the War Department of unfilled West Point appointments and went knocking on the doors of senators and congressmen on Capitol Hill trying to persuade one of them to give me that appointment. I had no luck in the beginning, but I kept studying that list and walking the halls of Congress.
In short, I NEVER QUIT—a firm principle of self-leadership in any endeavor.
Nearly two years later, on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked and the world changed overnight. America went to war. Six months later President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation granting every senator and representative an additional appointment to both the Military and Naval academies. The wartime Army and Navy desperately needed commissioned officers as we began urgently expanding the military from fewer than half a million troops to 15 million.
I immediately went to Senator Chandler’s office and was told that he was appointing another young man to West Point. Next I visited my congressman’s office (Rep. Ed Creal, 4th District of Kentucky), and he told me that he had given his West Point slot to another boy. But the congressman told me that he would give me his appointment to the Naval Academy. I was surprised, as I had not asked for it. I thanked him and then a novel, instinctive thought hit me and I asked him: What if I can find another congressman who would appoint me to West Point in exchange for Representative Creal’s Naval Academy appointment?
Representative Creal was startled and surprised, but after a moment’s thought he agreed to that if I could pull it off. It took me less than a week to obtain my West Point appointment from Congressman Eugene E. Cox of the 2nd District of Georgia, in exchange for the Naval Academy slot I had in my pocket.
These events, truly a life-changing episode, and other such major turning points in my life in the years to come were the result of key decisions I made based on a number of principles, guidelines, and rules of behavior I was developing and thinking through for myself. Let’s take a look at them.
First, over two years earlier when my father told me about that Washington job offer, I instinctively knew that was my best chance of getting into West Point. I trusted my instincts then and have done so ever since.
Trust your instincts. They are sometimes called a hunch, a gut feeling, intuition, or a sixth sense, and they are part of every person’s makeup. They are the product of your personality, education, experience, reading, training, observations, and the environments in which one has lived and worked.
When seconds count and time is critical, instincts come into play in judgment and decision making. Instinct can provide a caution light; a heightened focus; an early-warning system. It is a distillation of what you know and who you are, and on occasion can lead you to a far better decision than one based on a logical process that considers all the pros and cons. In a quickly developing situation when a leader must act fast, the decision is largely based on instincts. Hunches are often more accurate or predictive than the analytical reasoning—a time-consuming exercise you no longer have time to conduct when seconds count.
When time permits, I use both intuition and analysis. I get all the information, look into the pros and cons of the options, then back off for a few hours or overnight using one or both of two approaches. One is to reach a tentative decision at day’s end but not announce it. Instead I sleep on it and see how it feels the next morning when my mind is fresh. The other approach I have found valuable is to go to the gym for a good hard workout. I am not medically qualified to explain how and why, but new ideas and thoughts and often a better decision come to me when I exercise and break a sweat.
A helpful rule of thumb that I learned at West Point from a trusted mentor is “If there’s a doubt in your mind, there’s no doubt at all.” In other words, if you have any reservations at all then the answer is “no.” But if my head tells me one thing and my gut another—I will usually go with my gut, listen to my instincts.
When Representative Creal offered me that appointment to the Naval Academy, I immediately thought about that possible swap. I didn’t know if the congressman would be willing, or even whether such an idea could be carried out under the rules on the Hill. It took only seconds for me to exercise what would become another useful lesson during my life. In situations like this, Never say no to yourself. Make the other guy say no.
The successful outcome of my search for a West Point appointment also illustrates another principle I have found useful: There’s always one more thing you can do to influence any situation in your favor—and after that one more thing, and after that…. The more you do the more opportunities arise.
At age twenty, having just arrived three months before at West Point, I learned two great lessons that I have applied throughout my life. I had worked hard for over two years to get there—working days, going to school nights, and walking the halls of Congress in search of my dream. Finally, I made it and reported to West Point on July 15, 1942.
By the end of October my name was on the list of cadets severely deficient in grades in solid geometry and advanced algebra. I was in grave danger of flunking out, being dismissed from the Academy in
December, seeing my dream go down in flames unless I brought those grades up. I was shocked and frightened that I might lose everything I had worked so hard to obtain.
From that point on, for three tough academic years, I was glued to my advanced math textbooks every night from 7:30 p.m. till lights out at 11:00 p.m.—and after lights out I moved to the nearby restroom down the hall from my room, where I sat on a toilet under a 40-watt lightbulb and continued studying until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. If I didn’t understand the advanced, arcane math and bewildering engineering, physics, and chemistry, I could at least memorize the procedures.
I made it through the academic trials and tribulations and graduated in 1945 very near the top of the bottom 20 percent of my class. I may not have mastered mathematics at West Point but I learned how valuable those two lessons are in life: Never quit! And: There’s always one more thing you can do to influence any situation in your favor!
Another example that illustrates that principle came as I prepared for my entry into West Point. I was reading the Army booklet on West Point appointments and requirements for admission and learned that the Army would give an aspirant a preliminary physical exam that could reveal any problem that might bar admission. I took such a preliminary physical at Walter Reed Hospital and learned that I was “red-green color-blind” in the fainter shades of those colors and that I also needed some dental work done.
I had my teeth fixed and got a copy of the Army’s color perception test book and memorized it. When I took my final physical at Fort Knox for admission, they didn’t use the test I had memorized; they asked me to identify the colors of various pieces of yarn, and that I passed without a problem.
I also found out that an applicant could be admitted without taking the written examination if his high school and college grades were high enough and comprehensive enough to eliminate the need of a written exam. I submitted my grades and was excused from taking the written exam. One more thing!! Stack the deck!!
A leader must find or make the time to detach himself from an ongoing critical situation or daily life and ask and answer these two questions:
What am I not doing that I should be doing to influence the situation in my favor?
What am I doing that I should not be doing?
By asking and answering those questions frequently in a crisis you begin to shape the battlefield or the playing field in your favor; you begin to get ahead of the curve.
A senior executive is paid to do three things:
Get the job done and get it done well.
Plan ahead. Be proactive and not reactive. Create the future.
Exercise good, sound judgment in the doing of it all.
To get the job done, you must have a clearly defined goal or goals and a clear understanding of what it takes to achieve those goals. You will do well to give thought to a wide variety of factors that may have an impact on your chosen course for good or ill. A good leader will continually tell and retell his people what those goals are and what their roles are in attaining those goals.
Leaders must have a workable plan, and a system of measuring progress. Subordinate leaders must understand the goal, the plan, and their role in its execution. A very important part in planning is to think through the positive and negative what-ifs before they occur and how they should be handled if they arise—especially the negative ones.
In the Korean and Vietnam combat zones while creating a plan for an operation, and after it kicked off, I always thought through the what-ifs and had my operations and intelligence officers do the same. What if this happens? What if the enemy does that? What if this subordinate leader is wounded or killed? The best leader in any enterprise anticipates problems and has plans if problems arise. He also has thought through ways to take advantage of positive openings that often occur in fleeting windows of time.
A critical part of success for any work unit is teamwork and motivation. There’s a mentally reinforcing connection between discipline and confidence that results in motivated, smooth-running teamwork. By discipline I do not mean punishment or admonitions.
There are four key points for harnessing discipline in any endeavor:
Self-discipline leads to self-confidence.
Disciplined use of technology creates confidence in those tools.
Disciplined leaders create and foster confidence and trust in themselves by their subordinates.
Team discipline leads to team confidence.
A team with leaders and followers at all levels who strive to achieve these four levels of discipline will be motivated, efficient, and successful.
The second responsibility of a leader, creating the future, requires that you be proactive, not reactive. Acuity, insight, seeing the trends, analyzing them correctly, having a vision, and having confidence in that vision are all vital to creating the future. A good leader will inspire and motivate himself and his people to shape and create a positive future even as he deals with today and today’s challenges. Check up to make certain today’s jobs are getting done even as you stack the deck for future success. Keep up the momentum.
Senior leaders who push the power and the decision-making authority down free up talent in their subordinates even as they free up more of their own time to plan ahead. I am convinced that micromanager workaholic leaders who are heavily involved in the minutiae of day-to-day actions run the risk of neglecting the future of their enterprise.
The author and thinker Peter Drucker hit the nail on the head: “Even the mightiest company will be in trouble if it does not work toward the future. It will lose distinction and leadership. All that will be left is big company overhead. By daring not to take the risk of making the new happen, management takes by default the greater risk of being surprised by what will happen.”
There are a number of other principles—some mine, some drawn from men I admire, like Gen. Colin Powell—that will help anyone be a better, more effective leader:
Be dead honest and totally candid with those above and below you.
There must be total loyalty, up and down the chain of command.
If you have to take a subordinate to the woodshed do it in private. Praise someone in public; correct or counsel him privately. Never take a subordinate’s pride and self-respect away.
Treat everyone fair and square, without favorites. If you discover subordinates with extraordinary talent give them the toughest jobs, not the easiest ones, and mentor them.
Stay away from higher headquarters or corporate headquarters unless summoned. No good can come of wandering aimlessly around corridors filled with bosses alert for any sign someone is underemployed.
As you push power and decision-making authority down you must also push subsequent praise and recognition for outstanding unit performance down as well. Don’t hog the glory for yourself if you want to build a superb team.
Good leaders don’t wait for official permission to try out a new idea. In any organization if you go looking for permission you will inevitably find the one person who thinks his job is to say “No!” It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.
The leader in the field is always right and the rear echelon wrong, unless proved otherwise. Shift power and accountability to the people who are bringing in the beans, not the ones who are counting or analyzing them.
Bookstores are filled with tomes on leadership and management. You can be Attila the Hun, Lee Iacocca, Jack Welch—or a 3-minute manager. All promise to reveal the “secrets” of effective leadership. But there are no secrets; only common sense. I have dozens of well-thumbed books on leadership in my library. I have spent a lifetime involved with leadership—good and bad. Being led, leading myself and others, reading about leaders, learning from my mistakes, successes, and experience of others.
But of all the tips, tenets, and principles I talk about here and list above, the ones about people are the ingredients that make any leadership recipe work. People are the most important part of any organization. This is why leadership is an art; ma
nagement is a science. Leadership is about getting people to do what you want them to do, and that requires all we’ve said here and more. Above all it demands that you care deeply about those you are leading. You must care about their training, the quality of their lives, about their todays and their tomorrows. Without this love of the people who stand with you in pursuit of success, leadership is doomed to failure sooner or later. As I told the cadets at my farewell lecture at West Point in the spring of 2005, of all the principles and tenets and rules of leadership the greatest of them all is love.
Love is not a word military leaders throw around easily but it is the truth as I know it. Especially if you are a military leader. You must love what you are doing, because the rewards are few and the risks and hardships many. You must love the soldiers who serve under you, for you will ask everything of them, up to and including their precious lives. You must put their care and comfort ahead of your own in all matters large and small. As a leader you don’t eat until they have eaten; you don’t see to your own needs until you have met all theirs. Loyalty must flow downward first, then it will be returned tenfold when it is needed. I realize there are differences in military and civilian leadership, but in my opinion these bedrock principles based on love are universal.
My experience during military service and afterward in business has shown me that there are at least two categories of what ifs in any endeavor: those that you can do something about, and those you cannot. Either way it is a grave mistake not to plan for them. Be ready.
I never was comfortable with taking on a lot of risk that was out of my control or could have disastrous consequences if a situation went sour. On the battlefield when taking a bold risk, my staff and I carefully calculated it with detailed forethought not only to make it work, but to think through contingency plans on what we would do if we ran into trouble from any direction. It is very important to have a plan to follow through so you can exploit success when you are blessed with it.
We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam Page 14
