A Passion for Leadership

by Robert M Gates

  If a leader wants real change, he must realize the main target is how people do their work, not where. How you make people more efficient and productive, more effective, more responsive, more open-minded, better at their jobs, is little affected by the placement of their organization on the chart. There is one exception to this general proposition: getting rid of boxes on the chart—reducing layering—is almost always a good thing.

  Rearranging the organizational boxes, especially if it involves physical relocations, also is enormously distracting to an organization. Employees will be preoccupied with whether their personal and office status has improved or declined in the reorganization—as well as whether in the game of bureaucratic musical chairs they might find themselves without a job. The large CIA office analyzing Soviet foreign and domestic affairs was moved to a building distant from the agency’s headquarters in the early 1980s; I believe it affected the quality of its work for up to two years. Whether in the public or the private sector, try to leave the boxes, both actual and organizational, alone unless absolutely necessary.

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  Finally, how a leader informs her organization and external constituencies about her strategy for reform and how she intends to proceed is an important decision. She needs to decide whether to be low-key and simply announce each initiative or make a big splash.

  If you have done the proper preparatory work in terms of consulting with a broad array of your constituencies and shaping the battlefield, my preference is to go with the big splash. A strategy I used again and again wherever I was in charge was to blitz the organization with multiple actions simultaneously, the totality of the measures communicating seriousness of purpose, heft, and the reality of change. For anyone bent on change, one individual gesture or action will often not be persuasive; a dozen or more announced simultaneously are hard to ignore or dismiss. Laying out the full breadth of what you plan to do has dramatic effect, gets people’s attention, and can build enthusiasm and excitement. Announcing initiatives all at once reduces uncertainty about hidden agendas or future surprises. Whatever apprehension employees feel can be mitigated by making clear that they all will have the opportunity to help shape the actual implementation.

  Less than a month after I was confirmed as DCI, I gave a speech to leaders of the intelligence community about their future:

  Now it is time to look ahead to needed changes in priorities, mission and structure.

  I have been around too long to underestimate the difficulty of changing longstanding structural arrangements, old habits, and vested bureaucratic interests. Yet, I believe everyone agrees that change must come to the Intelligence Community and that it must come now. I hope and believe that through a cooperative, inter-agency and intra-agency effort in which all points of view are represented and have a hearing, and where people and institutions have a say in shaping the future structure, we can in fact bring about real change.

  I then described in detail the potential areas for change we would examine, laying out ideas for what needed to change, where we were headed, but without prejudging the conclusions of the two dozen task forces I would establish. Because of my preparatory work, and my reassurances, this speech was greeted with enthusiasm, in stark contrast with the disastrous speech I had made as the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence almost exactly ten years earlier.

  I had a similar experience at A&M. In remarks to the faculty senate a month after my arrival on campus, I laid out the priorities for change that would dominate my tenure as president of the university. I said that in each case, the issues would be addressed by deans, faculty, and administrators working together. I described the provost’s and my listening sessions during the preceding weeks with the deans of the colleges, department heads, and faculty and the conclusions I had drawn from those sessions in terms of the four areas of change that would be our focus. The response was quite positive. I covered much of the same ground in a university-wide convocation three weeks later, with all the various constituencies of the university community in attendance.

  Because the changes I had to make as secretary of defense in the Bush administration would take time, they did not lend themselves to a single dramatic announcement. But under President Obama, I gave a long press conference announcing thirty-three major programs I was cutting and why. In this case, while all these decisions had been discussed and debated intensively inside the Pentagon, and the civilian and military leaders of all the services had played a big part in identifying the options and making recommendations, for maximum political effect I had kept what we were up to secret from all external constituencies (the defense industry, the media, and, most important, Congress). I think this can be an effective tool for a leader if used selectively. Of course, I kept the president informed and, at the last moment, briefed the leaders of the two Armed Services Committees. The announcement was a bombshell, just what I wanted. When, a year later, I announced that long list of “efficiencies” cutting nearly $180 billion in overhead costs from the Pentagon budget, I used the same approach of extensive internal consultation and collaboration while keeping external audiences in the dark. The result was another bombshell. This approach, in both cases, yielded significant political and public opinion advantage and went a long way toward assuring success in making the changes.

  A lengthy and carefully prepared public statement was necessary in both cases because all of the changes—and the reasoning behind them—were in many cases interrelated and held together by a common strategy. Announcing the decisions and reforms piecemeal—or worse, allowing them to leak, as so often had happened in the past—would have lost this cohesive rationale and thus been far less persuasive and politically effective. The results upended the conventional wisdom on defense spending that the secretary would always get rolled by Congress or the military services on specific programs. Of the thirty-three changes I announced in April 2009, thirty-one would be enacted in the next defense budget. The other two came a year later.

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  By this point, an effective leader will have reached out to all the important constituencies to listen to their views and to win their support; established priorities; decided which initiatives she must lead and which can be delegated; developed strategies to shape the bureaucratic battlefield to maximize chances for success; and announced what she plans to do. Now it is time for the hardest part of reform: implementation, the part of the process where all too often good intentions go to die.

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  Techniques for Implementing Change

  When it comes to implementation, what you are after is the same outcome for every change you seek: practical policies, meaningful and workable structural and cultural changes, achievable plans, and outcomes that are affordable and have the broadest possible support within (and outside) the institution. Over the years, I have used several techniques to achieve those results. They can work at all levels of leadership and in all kinds of organizations.

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  In bureaucracies, the process of bringing change is critically important to getting lasting results, including acceptance or even enthusiastic embrace. Any fool can (and all too often does) dictate change from the top in a public or private sector bureaucracy. Fundamental to success, though, as I think I’ve made clear by now, is inclusiveness—getting as many people involved as possible, especially among the career professionals.

  In every senior position I held, I made extensive use of task forces to develop options, recommendations, and specific plans for implementation. I relied on such ad hoc groups to effect change instead of using existing bureaucratic structures because asking the regular bureaucratic hierarchy (as opposed to individuals within it) if the organization needs to change consistently yields the same response: it almost never provides bold options or recommendations that do more than nibble at the status quo. At the beginning of most presidential administrations, the White House (either the president or the national security adviser) asks the State and Defense Departments to propose area
s for significant changes in national security policy—bold departures reflecting changed priorities or circumstances. Such efforts have historically produced pap. In recent decades, significant changes in policy almost without exception have been driven by the White House (or forced by external factors such as foreign crises or congressionally mandated budget cuts).

  It is a rare company where the head of a line unit—an operating division—will offer the CEO a dramatic proposal for transforming (or eliminating) his own organization. I never had a line of executives outside my office anywhere I worked who were there on their own initiative to tell me what was wrong with their outfit and how they intended to fix it. I am confident the same is true of most CEOs. Leaders have to understand that a bureaucracy is incapable of reforming itself.

  Asking established organizations to come up with ways to restructure or change what they do implicitly suggests that what has been done before was inadequate, has failed, or can no longer meet the need. Many people in middle and senior positions have gotten where they are by offending as few people as possible and disrupting as little as possible. So, a leader focused on bringing significant change must find a way to break up the bureaucratic concrete and create the opportunity to develop new thinking and approaches. Involving employees in forging the path forward mitigates the implied criticism. The talent and ideas are often available inside the institution; ad hoc structures offer the best chance for them to emerge.

  The best way to get access to, and use, internal talent and ideas for specific steps to implement reform is to get people from different parts of the organization working together outside their normal bureaucratic environment.

  Task forces and similar ad hoc groups are silo busters. Most bureaucracies—both private and public—are rigid, pyramid-like structures in which information is shared with those in ever-higher boxes in the structure but rarely laterally. Properly designed task forces make diverse elements within an institution communicate and coordinate with one another at a level not achievable within the daily routine. New relationships get established that often endure long after the task at hand has been completed.

  I fully understand the inherent limitations of committees. Sir Barnett Cocks, a former clerk of the British House of Commons, wrote acidly, “A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.” Yet committees, task forces, councils, and review groups that cut across bureaucratic boundaries—properly used and directed—can be an exceptionally useful tool in leading change. However, committees in any organization must never be allowed to roam unleashed, undisciplined, uncontrolled, and without a specific date for extinction. Otherwise, they are a menace. An effective leader must structure the groups, be involved in the selection of members, give them their agenda, closely monitor their behavior and actions, and then, except in rare cases, disband them.

  In naming the chair and the members, a leader has the opportunity to ensure that all elements of the organization most likely to be affected by the task force’s recommendations—and his decisions—are represented and have the opportunity to have their ideas considered, to be involved. Having people on the task force who must eventually implement the change will contribute mightily to its recommendations being practicable and workable. With only a couple of exceptions, virtually every task force I appointed improved on and enriched my ideas and often expanded the scope of the change.

  The chair of a task force is the most important appointment, and all leaders, from middle managers to the top dog, must choose that individual with great care and always with the end goal in mind. The chair must know the general outcome sought and be in full agreement with it. A leader must be able to count on the chair to provide the freedom for members to offer options and ideas, incorporate what is helpful, and then gently but firmly—Socratically, if you will—guide the majority to the desired change, even if they come up with a different way of implementing it. The chair of a task force must also be a person respected by all those involved and have real influence throughout the bureaucracy, because part of his job is to sell the recommendations.

  That was the role I was given as deputy national security adviser and chairman of the NSC deputies’ committee at the White House in the first Bush administration. Nearly every day, on countless issues, I chaired meetings of the committee of senior officials charged with providing policy options and recommendations from State, Defense, and other departments to the president. Each morning, the national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (and sometimes President Bush 41), and I would decide what we wanted the interagency committee to recommend to the president. It was my job to deliver.

  I had been DCI for less than a month when, on December 4, 1991, I announced the formation of fourteen task forces with a deadline for all of March 20, 1992. Ten additional task forces would be added in the ensuing weeks, with similarly short deadlines. There was not a single task force I appointed at the CIA or in the intelligence community that did not have a deadline of just a few months, no matter how complex the subject. Nearly all of the task forces comprised intelligence professionals, but at least one was made up entirely of experts from outside the intelligence community. The task forces addressed nearly every aspect of U.S. intelligence activity, including creating a single organization to manage both national and tactical photo reconnaissance; creating a new mechanism for coordinating and managing human intelligence collection, whether the CIA, military attachés, embassy officers, or others; restructuring the DCI management and budget function; changing the way National Intelligence Estimates are prepared; figuring out how to better collect and exploit unclassified information, including from the Internet (sounds elementary, but this was nearly twenty-five years ago); working out better coordination of the overseas activities of multiple U.S. intelligence agencies; coming up with new approaches for increasing our human intelligence collection capabilities; improving CIA support for military operations; devising options for providing intelligence assessments to decision makers electronically, in real time; improving reporting of possible criminal activities to appropriate law enforcement agencies; and developing initiatives for enhancing public understanding of what intelligence agencies do.

  I offer this level of detail to give you a concrete sense of the massive scale of the changes we were undertaking; we were going to the guts of the entire U.S. intelligence enterprise. The issues we engaged also underscore the importance of what those bureaucracies do and the concomitant need for the best possible leadership. What they were—and are—doing is critical for our national security. As with so many other public sector bureaucracies, what they do really matters. And when they don’t do it well, as we have seen repeatedly, there can be devastating consequences.

  A number of the subjects the task forces tackled were quite controversial. Nearly all cut across jealously guarded bureaucratic turf boundaries and upended long-standing roles and responsibilities. More than a few professionals in the CIA were critical of my willingness to move parts of the agency into new “joint” organizations that better integrated overall government intelligence efforts. Indeed, hardly any part of U.S. intelligence was unaffected. But I believed the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union—which occurred less than four weeks after my December 4 announcement—provided just the kind of jolt needed to kick-start a far-reaching reappraisal of how U.S. intelligence agencies had been doing business for decades and to make broad and significant changes. Everyone recognized the world was transforming dramatically, creating a unique opportunity for change.

  Speed of change, as I said earlier, is important to a leader if he doesn’t know how much time he has. As DCI, with a U.S. presidential election coming in less than a year, I didn’t know whether I had one year or five years to implement change, so that uncertainty was part of my need for speed. There also was growing pressure in Congress to concoct legislation reorganizing U.S. intelligence and the way it did its business. I was convinced—correctly, as congressional action along these lines a dozen
years later would prove—that if Congress tried to pass legislation, it would just screw up everything. So I argued to senior intelligence officials in the CIA and other agencies that if we didn’t move fast, Congress might take the action out of our hands with disastrous consequences. The strategy worked.

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  As president of Texas A&M, I largely followed the same approach. I spelled out my philosophy with respect to both change and governance at the university at an academic convocation shortly before I was asked to become secretary of defense:

  Giving those responsible for carrying out the mission of this university an assured opportunity and assured venues to offer advice and to influence decisions on the management and direction of this institution is just plain common sense—at the department, college and university level. Department heads, deans and the president and provost must, and will, continue to make the final decisions. But those decisions will be better, and better understood and supported, if transparency, discussion and debate, communication and collaboration precede them.

  Shared governance based on those principles—transparency, open communication and discussion, and mutual respect—establishes the healthy and open environment for creating a culture of excellence in all we do and for our further enduring improvement as a university.

  To create that environment and give it content, from the time I arrived at A&M, I used a mix of task forces, councils, and advisory committees in leading change. Some were issue-specific and had relatively short life spans, as at the CIA.

  On occasion, though, the leader of an organization—public or private—with multiple, traditionally independent units must create a wholly new, permanent structure to effect institutional change and alter long-standing ways of doing business. As I mentioned earlier, the four university-wide councils of deans, faculty, administrators, and students I created were intended to be permanent. I saw the councils as a long-term mechanism for ensuring university-wide collaboration in the development of policies that cut across every college and administrative unit, a necessary and enduring collaboration not possible through any other means. The councils were a wholly new idea, at least at A&M.