A Passion for Leadership

by Robert M Gates

  Evaluating performance is not only difficult but risky. A hard-ass boss who lacks objectivity can send talent flying away from an organization because of unfair appraisals. An easygoing boss can allow slackers and mediocrities to nest in a unit. And a boss who is careless with words can get you a lawsuit. I wish I could offer a way to evaluate people that isn’t too hard or too easy but just right. But there isn’t one. A leader probably can’t do away with the formal review process, but there are several ways to mitigate its worst effects.

  • Is a poor (or superb) evaluation an anomaly, and if so, is the reviewer new to the job? If not, what caused the abrupt change?

  • As so often, my advice again is to listen. I learned an amazing amount of information about how people were performing just by keeping my ears open. Peers say things, subordinates gossip among themselves, and old colleagues often pass along what they hear. A leader’s immediate staff often has insights into the behavior of subordinate leaders—or can find out about it easily. A leader shouldn’t hesitate to listen to them and to make use of their access. Nearly all of the information you glean will be gossip, hearsay, impressionistic, or anecdotal. But put it all together and it can provide a feel for whether there is a problem with the boss of a unit and whether more questions or a deeper probe is warranted.

  • Watching how people behave in meetings is useful: Is a subordinate afraid to speak up if his immediate boss is there? If the boss says something clearly incorrect, will subordinates pipe up with a correction? Or, vice versa: How does a boss treat a subordinate who speaks up or corrects someone? Is anyone bold enough to use humor or sarcasm? (I always found the use of humor—or lack of it—quite telling about the health of an organization and relationships within it.)

  Evaluating subordinates in business has its own pitfalls, and judging intangible qualities such as people skills can be as fraught with difficulty as in the public sector. But many jobs in business at least have some unambiguous performance metrics. Did the employee make his numbers or not? Did he meet the sales or revenue target? Did he meet or beat his expense allocation? Did he receive fewer customer complaints? With additional effort, I think some of these kinds of metrics can and should be applied in the public sector. No evaluation should be entirely statistical, but neither should it be entirely subjective.

  Candor is critical to a leader’s success. Every boss needs to understand that creating a climate where people feel comfortable in being honest in their opinions is the cheapest possible job insurance for the person in charge.

  Leaders who think they don’t need frank, critical advice every day are usually doomed. I would never knowingly hire such a person. However, encouraging candor is one of those areas where rhetoric is meaningless; only actions over time have any impact in terms of persuading people a leader is serious and overcoming their concerns about the career risk of speaking up.

  George Washington was pretty thin-skinned but recognized the importance of candor and criticism. He once wrote, “I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors. The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults, or remove prejudices which are imbibed against him.” Would that all leaders were as insightful. No one likes to be criticized or told of his or her shortcomings or errors, yet everyone needs to hear it—and welcome it.

  One of the greatest American generals and statesmen was George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the army during World War II (considered “the architect of victory”), author of the Marshall Plan to save Europe after the war, and secretary of both state and defense. In September 1938, after the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had signed the Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler, the then brigadier general Marshall attended one of his first meetings at the White House. A number of more senior officials were present. As described by the historian Eric Larrabee, in that meeting President Roosevelt proposed a program to build some ten thousand airplanes a year but with no supporting forces. At the end of the meeting, Roosevelt asked Marshall if he thought that was the correct path forward. Marshall replied, “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with that at all.” Nearly everyone at the meeting thought Marshall had just ended his career. But less than a year later, Roosevelt named Marshall army chief of staff. Marshall had, in a phrase now famous, “spoken truth to power.” Equally as important as Marshall’s courage and candor, however, was Roosevelt’s understanding of the value of having a person at his side who would tell him what he needed to hear, not just what he wanted to hear.

  Virtually all leaders tell their subordinates that they want and expect candor. The problem is that most don’t really mean it. They fall more into the camp of Samuel Goldwyn, one of the founders of MGM, who allegedly once told his people, “I don’t want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.” No one, especially a person who has risen to the top of an organization, wants to be told he has just committed a huge blunder or is about to. Or that he just gave an awful speech. Or that his policies are failing. Or that he totally misjudged someone. More than a few professionals who have been assured candor was welcome have been sidelined or cast aside for offering unvarnished opinions on such matters. Just as the army general Eric Shinseki was sidelined by the secretary of defense after the general had the temerity to tell Congress that the occupation of Iraq might require several hundred thousand troops. And Richard Helms was fired as DCI for telling President Nixon candidly what he didn’t want to hear—that the CIA would not take the fall for Watergate. Under more than a few modern presidents, candor and dissent such as Marshall demonstrated has resulted in the culprit being cast into the outer darkness—persona non grata in the Oval Office. (Although I must say that despite my disagreements, dissent, and candor with President Obama, he never once told me to back off or froze me out.)

  No one makes the right decision every time or hits a home run with every interview, testimony, or speech. Yet nearly all leaders, especially at more senior levels of business and government, have sycophants who will always tell them how smart, how wonderful, how amazingly thoughtful and insightful they are. Every normal human being loves hearing how great he is, and therein lies the danger, because few really are. Most of us have flaws, blind spots, and biases we can’t easily see. We often don’t understand the consequences—both intended and unintended—of actions we are considering.

  At home, if we’re lucky, we have spouses who keep us grounded. (As an NSC staffer in the 1970s, I’d come home and brag to my wife about attending some meeting with the president that day, and the response would usually be along the lines of “That’s nice, dear. Now take out the trash.”) At work, we need people who do the same. Every leader needs people around him or her who will speak their minds freely.

  All that said, getting candor, even when you want it—even when you make clear you welcome it—can be difficult. I worked hard at the CIA, A&M, and Defense to create an environment where candor was encouraged and welcome. I knew how much I needed it. Even so, when I was CIA director, I could get true candor only from my deputy, as well as my secretary, executive assistant, general counsel, head of congressional affairs, and the inspector general—but not from a single senior line officer. At Texas A&M, among administrators, I could count on only the executive vice president and provost, my chief of staff, secretary, director of special events, head of legislative affairs, and the senior vice president for finance. (On the other hand, a university president never has to worry about a lack of candor from the faculty.) Interestingly, at both institutions, I found women disproportionately more willing to be candid with me.

  At Defense, much to my surprise, the number of people who would be candid was far larger than I expected: the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs Pete Pace and then Mike Mullen, and my chief of staff, senior military assistants, press spokesman, and a couple of assistants in my immediate office. I also found nearly all the military service chiefs and senior commanders to be
quite open about their concerns and about decisions under consideration, especially those involving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on budgetary matters. Almost every junior officer and enlisted man and woman I encountered was candid as well. They were fantastic. Maybe they were just so far down the chain of command they thought, “What the hell?” Much to my surprise and delight, men and women in uniform—in the most rigidly hierarchical organization there is—were the most open and candid of any I worked with over four decades.

  I’ve thought a lot about why those in the military were so different in this regard from the CIA and a big university. I’m sure senior officers pulled their punches and left certain things unsaid when disagreeing with me, not revealing just how much or how deeply they differed. But I always had a good idea where they stood on important issues. Clearly, this was due to more than something in the Pentagon drinking water and probably has to do with military training and culture—and perhaps because the stakes are so high on most Defense issues and the sense of responsibility to the troops so great.

  Every time someone persuaded me to change my mind, urged me to revisit a decision or to acknowledge I had made a mistake, I would publicly highlight the episode, including the name of the person who had spoken up. For example, when the time came to nominate a new U.S. military commander in South Korea, I decided to appoint someone from a service other than the army for the first time. General George Casey, the army chief of staff, came to see me to contend that the circumstances in Korea at that time made it imperative for the army to hang on to the job for at least one more rotation. George made a persuasive case and I changed my mind. I was very open in telling people Casey had gotten me to reverse my decision. I wanted to do all I could to emphasize that candor was career enhancing and not career destroying.

  Even so, as I’ve said, in two of the three organizations I led, the number of those willing to speak up and disagree with me or offer a contrary opinion—or warn me I was about to make a mistake—remained disappointingly small. I always wondered whether officials who were chary about being candid with me did not particularly welcome such candor from their own subordinates. Indeed, at A&M I was often approached by faculty members who would ask me why their department head or dean was not as open about matters as I was as university president.

  I have served on the board of directors of ten corporations over the last two decades and found getting candid responses to questions—particularly from those below the CEO—often to be just as challenging as in the public sector. Executives are reluctant to acknowledge problems or mistakes or that an initiative has failed. In the boardroom, getting a lower-level executive just to admit he doesn’t know the answer is all too often like pulling teeth. When a senior company official wasn’t candid with the board, I always worried that he might not be candid with the CEO either—or that the CEO himself did not welcome candor. I served on one board where no idea ever surfaced that the CEO didn’t make clear he had already thought of it—as though admitting he hadn’t thought of something revealed some deep inadequacy. I always thought it was just bullshit. In contrast, I always thought the willingness of executives to express different points of view among themselves in the presence of the board reflected a healthy internal environment. The bottom line: the scarcity of candor afflicts public and business bureaucracies and is an impediment to effectiveness in both.

  Despite the difficulty, though, the leader must make the effort because candid advice is so important to success. Every leader must encourage respectful, loyal dissent. Every leader must look for every possible opportunity to demonstrate that candor is welcome. A leader must have people around him who will speak truth to power. Even if a leader doesn’t agree with the comments or criticism, he will be aware of points of view different from his own and be better prepared to respond to those concerns. Leaders need candor because none of us are as smart as we think we are.

  Exhausted people make bad decisions and give bad advice.

  President Reagan loved to say that while it was true hard work never killed anyone, he saw no reason to take any risk. While many people in bureaucracies share that view and watch eagerly for the clock to indicate it’s quitting time, a substantial number in both the private and the public sectors put in extraordinarily long hours—often for no good reason. Indeed, particularly at the CIA, Defense, the NSC, and many other national security departments and agencies, there is an unspoken rule that if you don’t put in twelve- or fourteen-hour days and work on weekends, you are a slacker. Sometimes subordinates stay in the office for long hours simply because the boss is still at his desk and might call. The advent of BlackBerrys and smart phones has only made the situation worse as bosses at home or on vacation can monitor what’s going on at the office. While there are certainly times when long hours are needed to get the work done or to deal with a crisis, I think all too often it’s more a matter of office culture, habit, and machismo. My God, my job is so important that I’m working seventy hours a week. And I’m afraid too many bosses force people to put in long hours just because they can demand it.

  Similarly, I would frequently encounter people in the federal government and in companies who rarely took vacations. I always felt they either had a profoundly exaggerated view of their importance to the organization or were so lacking in self-confidence that they were afraid they wouldn’t be missed and their job thus considered redundant: their desk might be gone when they returned. I always thought both of those excuses rather sad. When I was DCI, I took three weeks’ vacation every August and, even as secretary, took two weeks each summer and another week at Christmas. At A&M, I took four weeks. We all need to recharge our batteries and spend time with our families. And in all three jobs, I always returned from vacation with a yellow tablet full of ideas and initiatives for further change and reform.

  As both CIA director and secretary of defense, I arrived in the office about seven in the morning and, absent a meeting at the White House, tried to leave for home by six. While an eleven-hour day is not exactly loafing, I was often one of the first people out of the building at night. I would always take a briefcase full of homework with me, but I thought it healthy to get out of the office, go home, see my wife (and, while I was at the CIA, my kids), relax with a drink, and have dinner. I also hoped that if I left the building at a reasonable hour, others who were staying only because I was there would also go home to spend the evening with their families. As secretary, while I often had to attend meetings at the White House on Saturday or Sunday, I never once in four and a half years went into the office on Saturday. I didn’t want to go in personally, but I also didn’t want a bunch of subordinates losing their weekend just because I decided to work on my in-box at the office instead of at home.

  All that said, there will be times in both public and private organizations when the leader must demand extraordinary exertions from his or her subordinates, perhaps over an extended period. Just as a junior officer or NCO must look after the well-being of the young troops in his charge, the wise leader will take responsibility for husbanding the physical and mental strength of the team. This involves avoiding unnecessarily long hours expended for no significant purpose and encouraging people to take time off so that when the crisis strikes or a big new initiative is undertaken, the team has the stamina and reserve strength to put forward maximum effective effort when it really counts.

  Accountability is essential to any successful reform effort.

  The only way someone can achieve transformation in a bureaucracy is to empower individuals to complete specific tasks, establish milestones to measure progress, and hold those individuals accountable for success or failure—and then reward or penalize as appropriate and possible.

  Because responsibility for everything in a big organization is often so diffuse, when something goes wrong or isn’t working properly it is tough to assign blame and hold individuals accountable. That is the conventional wisdom and all too often true. But it is neither necessary nor inevita
ble.

  Failure to hold senior people in big organizations accountable for monumental screwups and disasters is common. Examples abound. To the newsworthy failures I have mentioned previously, one could add the veterans’ health-care scandal in 2014, General Motors’ giant recalls in 2014, the mismanagement of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and so many more. In all but a few cases, no one was truly held accountable for incompetence, ineffectiveness, or failure to do the job right. If senior officials aren’t held accountable for failing to prevent or respond adequately to major disasters, it’s no surprise that no one gets held accountable for ordinary bureaucratic ineptitude.

  It shouldn’t be that way. If you truly want to implement lasting change in a bureaucracy, you have no choice but to hold people accountable for performance, especially at senior levels. I saw all too often in my decades of government service that when something went wrong, it was the lower-level or mid-level official who was assigned blame and had to walk the career plank while more senior officials, who should have known about the problem and acted, escaped reprimand altogether. Many years ago, I resolved that if and when I was in charge, “accountability” would reach much higher on the totem pole.

  What was astonishing to me was the amazement in Washington when I did fire senior people, amazement that a senior government official could actually be fired for anything short of mass murder or getting caught red-handed with a sack of dirty money. When you think of the countless public and private organizational disasters and problems in recent years, when you think of the day-to-day ineptitude of so many bureaucracies, it is staggering how few senior officials responsible are replaced. All too often, this is because firing a senior official will reflect badly on his or her boss, or on the president or CEO who appointed the person, or on a political leader’s policies more generally. So the cycle of unwarranted praise and deflection of responsibility continues.