A Passion for Leadership

by Robert M Gates

  Upon taking her job, a leader may have the opportunity to fill vacant senior positions. She should look for capable, independent-minded people who share her goals but are willing to give candid recommendations for how to achieve them. As should be clear by now, I believe a leader must avoid yes-men. Once a decision has been taken, though, those new colleagues should be committed to implementing it.

  A new leader will also have to decide if she needs to replace some executives. She should not be in a rush to do so. Everyone should be given a chance to prove herself. No one should be fired just so the new woman in charge can portray herself as being tough.

  At A&M, I felt there was an urgent need to send the message that a change in outlook and culture was required, and I concluded that most current senior administrators needed to go. I let a couple go pretty quickly; I told others to announce their retirement a year ahead of time so I could signal change was coming in his or her area and we could get searches under way for replacements. As I’ve said, I intended to reorient the entire university away from an administrator-dominant culture to one where the academic leaders dominated the decision-making process. To do that, I needed a new team of administrators.

  I replaced no senior officials at the CIA when I became director and had no authority to replace the leaders of the other agencies that I nominally led. At Defense, I replaced no one when I arrived. As I said earlier, I wanted to send a message of my confidence in the incumbents. But there was a practical reason as well: with two wars ongoing and going badly, and the unpredictability of the Senate confirmation process, I wanted to take no chances on important chairs being empty. I knew I had to make a number of tough decisions on programs and issues, and I wanted a generous sampling of opinion. Meanwhile, I could determine whom I could count on in the long term. (I was immensely relieved to discover that was nearly everybody.)

  In some ways, as important as who occupies the senior operating positions for a leader’s success is the immediate staff with which he surrounds himself. Who they are and how they conduct themselves reflect directly on him.

  I had been on the staff of one national security adviser, executive assistant to another, executive assistant to one DCI, and chief of staff for another. So I knew better than most what kind of person I wanted right outside my door. I wanted someone who was a facilitator, not a guard dog; someone who could ascertain whether a senior officer’s need to see me was truly urgent and, if so, find a way to get him through my door in a timely way; someone who could identify and expedite high-priority decision papers; someone willing to ask me to clarify directions I had given—or report a dissent objectively; someone who kept the lines of communication open between my office and my senior associates. I wanted someone seen by the bureaucracy as an asset to them as well as to me. I wanted a mix of experience and new eyes and people who would be absolutely honest with me, who would tell me what I needed to hear, not just what I wanted to hear. I did not want any of my staff to be self-important or, worst of all, “wearing my epaulets”—a phrase describing staff who behave as though they have their boss’s rank, treating others arrogantly and with disdain.

  I wanted people competent and self-confident enough to make sure my wishes and directions were being carried out. From time to time when I was secretary, we would send one of the middle-ranking noncommissioned officers from the office into the field to help prepare for my trips. On one occasion, in Afghanistan, one of these men (all of whom I admired a great deal), Staff Sergeant Jason Easom, was doing the advance work and had a face-off with a full colonel who was working on my visit to the front lines. Jason had politely told the colonel what I wanted, but the colonel had a different plan, which he insisted upon. (He wanted me to spend most of my time in briefings; Jason knew I just wanted to visit troops.) Finally, Sergeant Easom walked over to the colonel’s phone, picked up the receiver, held it out, and told the colonel, “One of the two of us can call the secretary of defense and be put through immediately.” The colonel got the point and acceded to the guidance I had given Easom.

  I ran a very lean front office in all three institutions I led, especially given their size. I suggest all leaders do the same. Too big an immediate staff becomes an obstacle to good communications and getting things done. After all, someone who is part of a large front office staff needs to keep busy and usually does so by bothering the rest of the institution—asking unnecessary questions, interposing himself unnecessarily in decision making, and generally creating problems for everyone, including the boss, who probably doesn’t know the staffer is out there meddling in everybody’s business trying to justify his position. A big staff also makes a boss look self-important and oblivious to cost, not good things when he is trying to lead reforms. With small staffs, there is much less jockeying for position or face time or petty gamesmanship. There was a lot of trust among my staffs at all three places I led and an environment that not only encouraged but was conducive to real candor. Even with a small staff, a leader can still get a mix of perspectives so that in the front office itself every problem is seen from different vantage points and experiences, a huge benefit for a decision maker.

  This approach served me well. At the CIA, my personal secretary was a woman I had worked with for nearly a decade and whom I could count on to tell me exactly what she thought. (One time I wanted to go to a corporate-sponsored social event and asked the agency’s general counsel if it was okay. She brought in his memo, sort of flipped it onto my desk, and rather snidely said that the general counsel had offered a wishy-washy opinion concluding that there was no problem, but she went on to say that in her opinion it didn’t pass the Washington Post smell test. I didn’t go to the event.) My executive assistant was a very bright career CIA economic analyst, Janice Williams. And, finally, I had a special assistant, Neal Wolin, a young lawyer my predecessor, Bill Webster, had brought in for a year to serve in that role—a practice he had followed with young lawyers as FBI director and then continued at the CIA. I was very impressed with Wolin and quickly moved him into a much more substantive role reviewing all paperwork coming to me with his lawyer’s eye and acting as my surrogate monitoring all the task forces. (Years later he would be appointed deputy secretary of the Treasury.) Overseeing the CIA and an intelligence community of some fifteen other agencies, a budget of several tens of billions of dollars, and more than a hundred thousand people, I had an immediate staff of three. It worked just fine.

  At A&M, my staff was about the same size—a personal secretary, a director of special events, an office manager, a receptionist, and two support staff (all women). I created, for the first time at A&M, the position of chief of staff to the president, which I filled with a young lawyer from the provost’s office, Rodney McClendon. I told him I knew nothing about Texas law pertaining to higher education and needed him to keep me out of trouble. He was amazingly well-informed about what was taking place on campus and was very effective in facilitating communication both from and to my office. This small group, together with the vice president for governmental affairs who shared our office suite, was brutally candid with me to the point of near insubordination on a daily basis. That small team kept me grounded, extremely well-informed, well-advised, and accessible and was an asset to the entire university community.

  Finally, at Defense, the inner circle was somewhat larger but, compared with those of predecessors and successors, still quite small. The de facto chief of staff was Robert Rangel. I never heard Robert raise his voice—although one eyebrow often seemed to be especially upwardly mobile—but I think he was one of the most intimidating figures in the Pentagon because his standards for materials coming to me were so high, his discipline in keeping the trains on the track and on time was so rigorous, and his knowledge of the department and, indeed, all of Washington was so extraordinary. My confidential secretary kept the schedule and guarded the door to my office. I also had a senior military assistant, two junior military assistants, and two civilian assistants who played an instrumental rol
e in almost every initiative I undertook.

  I have described these staffs in some detail simply to underscore the point made earlier: leaders in all organizations—including the biggest ones—are well served by a small front office staff. It is more effective, and for a leader focused on transformational reform, it sends a powerful message.

  In the real world of bureaucratic institutions, you almost never get all you want when you want it. A good leader must compromise, adjust his plans, prioritize, and show flexibility and pragmatism.

  There is an old military saying that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. That is true in reforming institutions as well. Sometimes, a plan turns out to be unworkable for any number of reasons, from impracticality to a lack of resources or the technology necessary for implementation. Sometimes, the opposition is just too strong. When it comes to implementation of a leader’s reform agenda, she needs to stay focused on her agenda or vision but flexible about how she achieves it—and sometimes either admit defeat or be satisfied with half a loaf (and come back for more later). I had to do this all the time.

  One of the reforms I wanted to put in place as DCI was to move away from providing intelligence to policy makers once a day (first thing in the morning) on paper. I would tell my staff we were delivering intelligence to President George H. W. Bush the same way it had been delivered to George Washington: we wrote it down on a piece of paper, put a person in a vehicle (we had gotten past using horses), and carried the document by hand to the recipient. I wanted to do all this electronically, sending the information in real time to a computer on the policy maker’s desk and updating it constantly throughout the day—and enabling the user to ask questions of us electronically. This effort in 1992 failed partly because of technological challenges in those days and partly because a number of our “customers” were uncomfortable receiving information in this newfangled way. This was one reform that died on the vine—then.

  Another reform I pursued was to change how the intelligence community managed our photographic intelligence assets. During the first Gulf War, there were many problems in getting reconnaissance photographs to field commanders and units in the fight. Over a period of decades, we had solved this problem in signals intelligence by giving the National Security Agency the authority to standardize transmission systems and coordinate all levels of collection, from a tactical military unit in the field to space satellites. We had no comparable organization on the photographic side, and I intended to fix that. My idea was to create a single agency—comparable to the NSA—that could coordinate all our imaging assets (a soldier with a camera, a Beechcraft airplane, satellites) and have the authority to make sure those images could be shared with the smallest units in combat. The initiative was bitterly resisted by the CIA, which wanted to maintain its independent institutional capability for photointerpretation. I wanted to integrate it into this larger, multiagency organization. I could override the CIA’s objections to the new agency but not those of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Colin Powell. Both were deeply skeptical of creating a big new agency that put together nearly all civilian and military imaging assets, including the Defense Mapping Agency (highly dependent on satellite photography). I settled for half a loaf, creating the Central Imaging Office, which coordinated our photographic assets and needs of users but lacked the authority for standardization and coordination the NSA had on the signals side. My concept eventually won out, however, and the agency I tried to create in 1992 was ultimately established four years later. It is now known by the inelegant title “National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,” and its mission covers virtually everything I intended in 1992 and more.

  At all three institutions I led, I told folks that between where we stood and achieving our goals was a swamp. Sometimes, you slog your way across the swamp, dealing with alligators and snakes and such. And sometimes, it’s best just to walk around the swamp; it might take longer, but you eventually reach your destination without the teeth marks on your ass. The key is to keep moving forward. The smart reformer knows when to plunge into the swamp and when to take the roundabout route.

  One key aspect of successfully reforming institutions, public or private, is taking the work seriously but not yourself. A leader needs to set the example of that principle.

  Never underestimate the extraordinary power of humor. Of the eight presidents I worked for, two had no discernible sense of humor: Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. You can draw your own conclusions from that. I suspect many Americans would be surprised how much laughter there is in the White House Situation Room, even during the most tense moments. I have always believed that humor is the way sane people cope with intense pressures, with decisions involving life and death. Often, it will be just a wisecrack, a pun, or a muttered aside that provokes laughter. It may seem inappropriate, but it is in fact a useful tool.

  At the end of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, we heard that Admiral William McRaven had a six-foot-tall SEAL lie down next to bin Laden’s body at our base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to see if it was indeed six feet tall, another effort to confirm the terrorist’s identity. President Obama quipped, “McRaven can crash a $60 million helicopter but can’t afford a tape measure?”

  George H. W. Bush had a great sense of humor. He liked jokes, including practical ones. On his birthday, we would go out and get him risqué cards and sign the names of foreign leaders to them, and we would all roar with laughter. He created the Scowcroft Award, named for his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, an award that he gleefully presented to the U.S. official who most ostentatiously fell asleep in a meeting with the president of the United States. He carefully weighed the length of the nap, depth (snoring always won extra points), and quality of recovery—did you quietly regain consciousness and ease back into the conversation or come awake with a jolt that knocked over coffee? During long meetings with foreign leaders, he would carry the conversation for the first hour but then looked to the rest of us to relieve him of that chore for the duration. He would actually score us on our contribution—the amount of time we each used up. I once received high marks on time consumed but earned the comment “although you were boring as hell.”

  I highly prized irreverence among my colleagues, partly because I am irreverent myself. A leader should never underestimate the benefits of self-deprecating humor; making jokes or humorous observations about himself can be a powerful tonic to his team. Henry Kissinger was probably the most talented person I worked for in this regard. In all three of the institutions I led, little was off-limits, from comments about my white hair to my ridiculously unhealthy eating habits and boring suits and ties.

  Almost everything about Congress was good for a laugh, and the same was true about the antics of the Texas legislature when I was at A&M. Along with the serious stuff at the CIA, we were always getting intelligence reports about the nonpublic activities of foreign leaders, some of which were hilarious.

  The best corporate leaders have a good sense of humor and encourage it in others. Years ago, I was on the board of directors of a holding company that owned a kitchen appliance business. Executives would regularly demonstrate new products for this older, all-male board, including at one meeting a new model of “salad shooter” for making tossed salad. I quipped that asking that board—none too familiar with what went on in a kitchen—to evaluate such a device was like asking a teetotaler to judge the quality of a whiskey. I joined the board of a company that owned Massey Ferguson tractors and was told of a board visit to a factory before my time where the CEO mischievously organized a plowing contest to see which urbane board member could plow the straightest furrow. The results weren’t pretty, but there had been a lot of laughs. These business executives and others I observed knew how to use humor to build a team.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about the value and importance of humor in her wonderful book about Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals:

  Modern psychiatry regards humor
as probably the most mature and healthy means of adapting to melancholy. “Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne,” writes George Vaillant. “Humor can be marvelously therapeutic,” adds another observer. “It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.”

  My experience in public life affirms every word of that passage.

  Don’t overstay your welcome.

  When you have accomplished your mission of reform, or taken it as far as you likely can, go home. Don’t let power and position—or being spoiled by the corporate airplane—go to your head. As the old saying goes, “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”

  One of the toughest decisions in life is knowing when to dance off the stage. We have all seen political and business leaders who stayed too long. Some get so enamored of the power, perks, and privileges they just can’t bear to give them up. Or they don’t want to give their critics inside and outside the organization the satisfaction. And so they remain in place, a growing liability to the very institution they might have ably led for a long time. I have always thought the sweet spot was to leave at a point when people would say “I wish he weren’t leaving so soon” as opposed to “How the hell do we get rid of this guy?”

  The toughest decision on whether to leave is when circumstances begin to sour, trending in a direction that makes you uncomfortable, or when you disagree with important decisions by those in charge. It is the dilemma many senior public servants have faced: Do I leave as a matter of principle and because I am increasingly at odds with the initiatives, or do I continue to soldier on, hoping I can mitigate the consequences for my organization (and perhaps my country or state) by staying? It is a question every individual must answer for himself or herself. An important part of the decision for a leader at any level is to look inward and be honest with herself whether she is staying for noble or ignoble purposes.