A Passion for Leadership

by Robert M Gates

  The review, co-chaired by the department’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, and army general Carter Ham, was a thoroughly professional job. They surveyed 400,000 service members and 150,000 service spouses about their attitudes and concerns with respect to having openly gay individuals serve in the military. There were countless focus group meetings and even a confidential channel through which gays in the military anonymously made known their views, problems, and concerns.

  The outcome of the review—completed in just over seven months—surprised nearly everyone, including me. Two-thirds of those surveyed thought having gays serve openly would cause no significant problems or might even be better for the military. The review process identified those Department of Defense policies that would need to be revised and prepared training materials to be used at every level of the military. The outcome of the review, I believe, changed enough Republican votes to allow repeal of DADT, with the proviso that the new rules would not come into effect until all training had been completed and the president, secretary of defense, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs certified that the change could be made without any serious problems. There is no doubt in my mind that eliminating DADT by presidential executive order would have had a much more divisive and disruptive result, harming those with the most at stake, including military commanders dealing with readiness and discipline issues and gay and lesbian troops seeking to “come out” in a more tolerant environment. As of this writing, I have heard of no significant problems associated with repeal of DADT and gays openly serving in the ranks.

  The salient points about the DADT task force for any aspiring leader are that establishing the review group demonstrated that action was being taken and that all points of view would be heard, it provided time to temper emotions (somewhat) and gather facts (as opposed to previously only anecdotal speculation), and it presented a detailed action plan for implementation. I will always be convinced that the review group paved the way for successful incorporation of the biggest personnel policy change in the U.S. military since women were brought into the ranks in significant numbers a generation earlier. As in every other example, the keys to success were the broadest possible inclusiveness, transparency, and open internal debate and dialogue; especially important here was the need to buy some time.

  I want to emphasize one last time that I found task forces and other ad hoc groups immensely useful, indeed crucial, for developing specific proposals for implementation of reforms and for tracking progress. Any leader can use them effectively. They break down the bureaucratic barricades to change and, drawn from different parts of an organization, can also help build collaboration and relationships that will result in long-term benefits.

  A leader bent on transformational reform will benefit greatly from demanding—and demonstrating—transparency and sharing of information about implementation, both internally and externally.

  I spent nearly all of my professional life in a secret world—a world of secret, top secret, and above top secret documents; secret operations; secret procedures; secret budgets; secret identities; secret congressional hearings. Often, even my personal calendar was secret. At the CIA, the National Security Council staff, and the Defense Department, everything was secret (including information that could easily be obtained by searching the Internet or reading the newspaper). But layered on top of “secret” were countless “compartmented” programs requiring special security clearances—intelligence collection programs, covert operations, military plans, new weapons, and more. I had clearances I could not remember for programs I had forgotten existed. And people were always showing up in my office or at home—usually at odd hours—with colored canvas bags with strange locks and seals that could only be opened or broken in front of me.

  What troubled me increasingly with each passing year was the realization that too much was being kept secret because of habit, culture, internal power politics, and a desire to avoid embarrassment or accountability rather than any risk to national security. Issues from budgets to bureaucratic turf wars were unnecessarily shrouded in secrecy internally, and the public could—and should—have been told more about how and why we did what we did without compromising sensitive information and operations. I became convinced that excessive secrecy was an obstacle to needed changes inside government organizations. Equally important, at least at the CIA, I felt that with the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union, the agency had to be more open about what it did and why or risk losing the public and political support that had been taken for granted during the Cold War.

  And so, despite a professional lifetime spent in an ocean of secrecy, I became an ardent advocate of far greater transparency both internally and externally in organizations I ran.

  Especially in bureaucracies, people are suspicious of change and always suspect hidden agendas. For too many leaders, the monopoly on information is deemed a source of power: “If you only knew what I know.” But it is an ego trip to dole out little bits of information to subordinates and career professionals, keeping them in the dark. This is, I believe, the sign of either a weak, insecure leader or an arrogant know-it-all. Whichever it may be, it is fatal to successfully implementing lasting reform. Transparency has some costs in terms of premature disclosures of options or leaks intended to influence outcomes, but overall the benefits of being open far outweigh the downsides for the reformer.

  This applies equally to business. Too often leaders don’t trouble to share—routinely—with their employees the reasons for various changes, the direction of the company, and its goals or even to talk about the company culture. This isn’t about handing out to everyone a small laminated card imprinted with the company’s mission and values. I’ve seen those, and employees mainly ignore or discard them. This is about a leader’s effort to reach out in his own voice—not something prepared by human resources or by the vice president for communications—to offer his personal perspective on company strategy and aims, and his hopes. To talk about the company’s culture. It’s not a onetime rah-rah speech but regular and personal outreach to the entire workforce, updating it on company performance, changes under way, and other developments affecting the business. Through serving on ten corporate boards and many encounters with business leaders, I have met a number of superb and successful CEOs. Some have regular sessions between executives and rank-and-file employees during which the company culture is highlighted, a lot of information is shared, and enthusiasm is generated. But I have come across only one CEO who communicates with all his employees routinely in the way I am describing—Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks. Other business leaders should emulate his example.

  As mentioned earlier, as director of central intelligence I made it a priority to increase transparency, appointing a task force on “openness,” with a view to giving the public a greater window into what intelligence agencies did and the contribution they made to national security. I made significantly more senior CIA officials available to talk to the press routinely, created a new historical declassification staff, gave scholars clearances allowing them access—with restrictions—to classified files, and opened our decades-old archive of satellite photographs of the Arctic region of the Soviet Union to scientists studying global warming. We declassified the forty-year file of analytical assessments of the Soviet Union, and I pledged to declassify our files on selected covert actions from the 1950s. I agreed representatives from the CIA would testify before Congress in hearings open to the public and the media whenever possible. I was convinced we could do all this—and more—without compromising intelligence sources and methods or national security.

  But greater internal transparency was also core to successfully implementing my agenda for change in the U.S. intelligence community. Accordingly, with only one or two exceptions, each of my memos setting up a task force was widely circulated in draft with comments from the entire workforce invited: Were there additional issues the task force should examine? Were some issues I had proposed not worth the effor
t? When each task force completed its report and made its recommendations, copies were made available throughout the CIA and the intelligence community for comment, criticism, and additional suggestions. The resulting comments were appended to the reports when they came to me. Finally, my decision memos were circulated in draft so intelligence officers could let me know their thoughts on whether my decisions could be implemented effectively or whether they could be better stated to facilitate action. Never before had the entire professional cadre at the CIA or in the intelligence community been repeatedly asked their views on such sweeping changes. I insisted on the transparency. Any good leader should.

  In addition, I regularly circulated updates (which I personally wrote) on all the changes that were going on, which were provided to everyone in all the intelligence agencies. In those technological dark ages before e-mail, these missives—to tens of thousands of people—were circulated in paper copies and also posted on bulletin boards. Today, the ubiquity of social media and e-mail makes ridiculously easy the kind of communication between the leader and her employees that I believe is so important. Failure of leaders to take advantage is a big mistake.

  I spoke to the value of transparency and information sharing (and task forces) in promoting change in remarks to both the CIA and the intelligence community managers and employees in January 1993:

  Taken together, I think it is no exaggeration to say that CIA and the Community have not seen so much change in decades—especially in so short a time. And the best part is that every single measure has been a team effort—all of us working together to improve the way we do our work, not just because the Cold War is over, but also because of wide recognition top to bottom that we can do better. The task forces, the many comments that helped shape decisions on their reports, the cooperative spirit among CIA and Community managers—all this was critical to so much being accomplished. All this reflected the value of the broadest possible involvement of our people at every level.

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  I could at least understand the culture of holding information close, even internally, at the CIA. I couldn’t understand it at all in a big university. As a dean for nearly two years, I was surprised and appalled at how little information on budgets, administrative decisions, and day-to-day operations was shared with deans and faculty. When I talked with counterparts at other universities, it was clear that what went on at A&M was the norm, not the exception, in higher education. In no small part because of my experience with transparency as DCI, when I became president of A&M, I resolved to be as transparent about choices and decision making as possible—most especially with respect to implementing my agenda for change. But even on routine matters, I saw no reason not to provide the faculty senate and its leaders, the council of deans, and student government leaders with detailed briefings on development of the budget, financial options, trade-offs, administrative issues, and problems we were facing. Apart from sensitive personnel matters, there was very little information about university affairs that I was unwilling to share in the broadest possible manner. I not only shared information on specific issues; I regularly sent e-mails to all faculty, staff, and students about progress in implementing the many different change initiatives under way. Ironically, the more information I was willing to share, the more people were inclined to trust me—and support what I was trying to do. I think that is almost always the case in leadership positions.

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  I had a different problem at Defense. Despite its penchant for classifying just about everything, the place leaked like a sieve; no internal issue or dispute was too trivial or too sensitive for someone to share with the press and congressional staff. The challenge, then, was how to tighten up the decision-making process to reduce leaks at the same time I made that process more inclusive and more transparent.

  The Pentagon is actually quite disciplined when it comes to keeping military plans and operations secret; after all, lives are at stake. But any budgetary, personnel, administrative, or policy matter was fair game for leakers. I had been furious when it leaked that I was going to extend tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan from twelve to fifteen months, mainly because the leak denied us the chance to explain it first to the troops and their families. I disliked leaks about the senior military’s preferences regarding troop surges and timetables, which also infuriated both Presidents Bush and Obama. In the real world of Washington, however, regardless of a secretary of defense’s fulminations, such leaks are nearly impossible to stop altogether. (And presidents or secretaries—or leaders in business—who obsess over leaks and use every means available to stamp them out rarely come to a good end.)

  I felt strongly, though, that leaks about major budget decisions, and especially the need to cut or cap major programs, would be fatal to real reform. Any leader has to decide where the line must be drawn. In preceding decades, decisions by a secretary to cut unneeded programs had often been compromised when word got out prematurely to members of Congress or interest groups. Based on my reading of history, one of the main reasons many of Robert McNamara’s efforts failed was that decisions were made with a small group of his civilian “whiz kids” and without significant participation of the senior military leaders. Feeling excluded (and opposed to the changes), the generals and admirals did not hesitate to go around McNamara to friendly members of Congress to thwart the secretary’s intentions.

  When I decided to aggressively winnow dozens of major defense programs that were failing or no longer affordable (or relevant to our needs), I led an intensive consultative process that involved all of the senior leadership of the military services as well as senior Pentagon civilians. I keep returning to this point of inclusion; leaders who exclude others from decision making run a high risk of failure. I asked all participants to sign a nondisclosure agreement (basically giving their word they wouldn’t share our deliberations with others, even their staffs). The number of lower-level staff who had access to any information about options under consideration was dramatically reduced.

  I believe that because officers had given their word and because of the transparency of the process to senior leaders—and multiple opportunities for their views to be heard in the larger group or just with me—there was not a single leak. An important reason why Congress ultimately accepted—or acquiesced in—all of the decisions was that no senior civilian or military officials went around me to complain to their supporters on the Hill. Some almost certainly did not agree with my final decisions, but they “supported” them in the Pentagon sense of the word, which meant carrying them out.

  Be wary of consensus. When it comes to implementing reform, you must look very closely at any recommendation for action characterized as the consensus of a group. Does it advance your agenda? Is it as bold as you want or need?

  The erudite Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban insightfully observed that a consensus means that “everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.” I cannot begin to calculate the time I have wasted in meetings—and task forces—as the person in the chair strives to get all participants to agree to a single recommendation or point of view, instead of presenting several options to their higher-up. This process inevitably yields the lowest common denominator, the most bland of initiatives, which everyone can agree to. Pap.

  A leader who seeks true reform will never get bold ideas or recommendations from task forces or working groups if consensus is the priority objective. Instead, a leader must instruct her task force chairs or subordinates leading other groups that consensus will only be valued if it represents agreement on something bold. The Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described this process graphically. He wrote that one of his Court opinions as originally written “had a tiny pair of testicles but the scruples of my brethren have caused their removal and it sings in a very soft voice now.” Recommendations that come to a leader of reform must not sing in a very soft voice.

  When I was chairing the deputies committee at the White House u
nder President George H. W. Bush, my responsibility was to clear away the bureaucratic underbrush on issues so the president would only have before him the bare-bones substantive differences of view among his principal advisers that he could weigh before making a decision. Sometimes opposition from one organization or another will, when fully exposed, be nothing more than old bureaucratic rivalries hiding behind purportedly substantive differences of opinion. It is the job of a leader at any level to choose chief lieutenants who will use a flamethrower to burn away the bureaucratic weeds so the options that remain are real and significant.

  When Henry Kissinger was national security adviser, he would only half jokingly comment that every policy paper had three options: Option A was essentially to do nothing; Option C was so radical as to be automatically rejected; and thus Option B, a middling and therefore very modest course of action, was the only sensible approach—the bureaucracy’s preference. In effect, it avoided the appearance of inaction or any serious opposition but accomplished little. A leader can’t allow her task forces, councils, or reviews to trap her into accepting Option B. A leader must insist upon real options. If they aren’t forthcoming, if the choice among them isn’t difficult, she must send people back to the drawing board. The bureaucracy can’t be allowed to dictate terms.

  A process effective in bringing forward significant proposals for reform and their implementation, noting who is for and who is against each and why, is important. In many instances, there will be a majority opinion. The leader needs to know why the minority objected, and those objections may influence the decision or lead to adjustments, but differences of opinion must not deter decisions and implementation.