It Worked For Me (3 page)

Whenever I inspected barracks, I looked over the bunks and the displays of wall lockers and footlockers (long gone; troops now live in barracks resembling small college dormitories). I also made a beeline for the latrine. Not just to see if it was clean. Was there a shortage of toilet paper, were any mirrors cracked, were there any missing showerheads? Finding any of these situations immediately told me one of several things—the unit is running short of upkeep money, no one is checking on these things to get them fixed, or the troops are not being supervised well enough. Find out which and fix it.

I detested whitewashed rocks lining a pathway. And the smell of fresh paint meant they’d heard I was coming. Fresh cookies were another dead giveaway.

Once in Korea, we got word that the admiral commanding Pacific forces would be visiting our post and would walk through my battalion area. I was delighted. We lived in ancient, disgusting Quonset huts; we couldn’t get parts for the stoves or paint for the outside. Because we were short of paint, I was told to paint the front but not the back of the mess hall the admiral would walk by. He walked by and saw the fresh paint. It was so fresh compared to everything else he saw that he wasn’t fooled. We should have sat down and told him our problems and not forced him to be a detective.

The followers, the troops, live in a world of small things. Leaders must find ways, formal and informal, to get visibility into that world. In addition to my dropping in, I relied on a cast of informal observers who had direct access to me to tell me about details the system would not normally offer up to me. They also told me when I was totally screwed up and the “commander had no clothes.” In my military commands, they were my chaplains, my command sergeant major and his network, my inspector general, and GIs coming in on “Open Door” night. In my National Security Council and State positions, I always had trusted friends outside and agents inside the organization who prowled the basement and kept me informed. Leaders need to know ground truth and not just what they get from reports and staffs.

One day at the State Department, about two in the afternoon, I was wandering around and ran into a young lady leaving the building. She did not seem to recognize me, or else she didn’t let me know that she recognized me. I asked her why she was leaving so early. “I’m on flextime,” she told me. “I started at seven a.m.”

That got me curious; I didn’t know much about flextime. I fell in stride with her and talked about how it worked for her and her fellow employees. I learned more about the program than I had ever heard from my staff. It was a good program, I realized—worth expanding. Meanwhile, she still didn’t acknowledge who I was.

To needle her, I said, “Gee, I’d like to get flextime. How did you do it?”

“Ask your immediate supervisor,” she responded.

“I’ll do that on Monday, after he comes down from Camp David,” I told her.

She didn’t miss a beat. “Good,” she said. “I hope you get it.” She went through the door and I stood there not knowing if I’d been had. But I had learned a lot about flextime, a small thing for me, but a big thing for her and lots of my employees.

9. SHARE CREDIT.

When something goes well, make sure you share the credit down and around the whole organization. Let all employees believe they were the ones who did it. They were. Send out awards, phone calls, notes, letters, pats on the back, smiles, promotions—anything to spread the credit. People need recognition and a sense of worth as much as they need food and water.

In the military we make a big deal of change-of-command ceremonies, where the new commander assumes responsibility of the unit from the old commander, symbolized by the passing of the unit colors. These ceremonies normally function as celebrations of the commanders. The troops are assembled in formation on the parade field. The dignitaries arrive and the old and new commanders make speeches. The old commander is praised and given an award. The troops stand and listen, usually in the sun.

Lieutenant General Hank “the Gunfighter” Emerson, one of our most colorful generals and one of my favorite commanders, was not fond of these ceremonies. When I took command of my battalion in Camp Casey, Korea, he was my division commander. At that change-of-command ceremony, at his insistence, only the two commanders, their staff, and the company commanders stood in the middle of the field. No troops stood behind them, but they were invited to sit in the bleachers and watch the two senior officers pass the battalion colors from the old to the new commander. There were no speeches. I loved it.

A few years later, it became time for the Gunfighter to give up command of the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the famous 82nd Airborne Division. Protocol and expectation required the old-fashioned ceremony with thousands of troops. I was then a brigade commander in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which was part of his corps. He ordered me to Fort Bragg to command the formation at his change-of-command and retirement ceremony.

After we’d practiced the ceremony to perfection, the day came. As we stood there in the sun waiting for it to begin, the Gunfighter signaled me to come up to the reviewing stand for new instructions. He directed me to return to the formation and order all the officers to do an about-face and gaze at their troops. I was then to order the officers to salute their soldiers. We conducted the ceremony, and the officers turned as he had directed and saluted the troops. It was a deeply moving moment. The gesture was the only way he could truly show that credit for his success belonged to the soldiers who had served under him.

It is the human gesture that counts. Yes, medals, stock options, promotions, bonuses, and pay raises are fine. But to really reach people, you need to touch them. A kind word, a pat on the back, a “well done,” provided one-on-one and not by mob email is the way you share credit. It is the way you appeal to the dreams, aspirations, anxieties, and fears of your followers. They want to be the best they can be; a good leader lets them know it when they are.

When things go badly, it is your fault, not theirs. You are responsible. Analyze how it happened, make the necessary fixes, and move on. No mass punishment or floggings. Fire people if you need to, train harder, insist on a higher level of performance, give halftime rants if that shakes a group up. But never forget that failure is your responsibility.

Share the credit, take the blame, and quietly find out and fix things that went wrong. A psychotherapist who owned a school for severely troubled kids had a rule: “Whenever you place the cause of one of your actions outside yourself, it’s an excuse and not a reason.” This rule works for everybody, but it works especially for leaders.

10. REMAIN CALM. BE KIND.

Few people make sound or sustainable decisions in an atmosphere of chaos. The more serious the situation, usually accompanied by a deadline, the more likely everyone will get excited and bounce around like water on a hot skillet. At those times I try to establish a calm zone but retain a sense of urgency. Calmness protects order, ensures that we consider all the possibilities, restores order when it breaks down, and keeps people from shouting over each other.

You are in a storm. The captain must steady the ship, watch all the gauges, listen to all the department heads, and steer through it. If the leader loses his head, confidence in him will be lost and the glue that holds the team together will start to give way. So assess the situation, move fast, be decisive, but remain calm and never let them see you sweat.

The calm zone is part of an emotional spectrum that I work to maintain.

I try to have, and every leader should try to have, a healthy zone of emotions. Within that zone you can be a little annoyed, a little mad, a little loving. Within your zone you are calm (most of the time). You are interested. You are caring, yet you maintain a reasonable distance. You are consistent and mostly predictable (which does not mean you are dull and boring, or that you will never surprise them, or that you will never explode and come down hard on somebody). Your staff knows pretty much what your zone is and how to act accordingly.

Sometimes I
do
explode. Sometimes my explosions are right and justified.

One day, back in the hard-drinking old days in the Army, I was at wit’s end dealing with DUI incidents. I was a brigade commander. A sergeant was standing before me about to be punished for driving under the influence. It was a serious offense. He knew he was facing a reduction in rank and a fine. He stood there and begged me to let him off. My punishment, he told me, not his own actions, would hurt his family. I flipped. He was the one who was hurting his family, not me. I stood up and slammed my fist so hard on my desk that the glass cover shattered with a great crash. My staff came running and rescued the sergeant, scarcely believing that their usually calm and cool commander had totally lost it. Frankly, it felt good, and I wasn’t sorry to let them realize it could happen again.

I have occasionally exploded again, but I’ve never broken another glass desk top. I’ve learned how to display extreme, out-of-my-comfort-zone displeasure without destroying government property.

In the “heat of battle”—whether military or corporate—kindness, like calmness, reassures followers and holds their confidence. Kindness connects you with other human beings in a bond of mutual respect. If you care for your followers and show them kindness, they will reciprocate and care for you. They will not let you down or let you fail. They will accomplish whatever you have put in front of them.

11. HAVE A VISION. BE DEMANDING.

Followers need to know where their leaders are taking them and for what purpose. Mission, goals, strategy, and vision are conventional terms to indicate what organizations set out to accomplish. These are excellent and useful words, but I have come to prefer another and I believe better term—
purpose
. Think how often you see it—“sense of purpose” . . . “What’s the purpose?” . . . “It serves a purpose.”

Purpose is the destination of a vision. It energizes that vision, gives it force and drive. It should be positive and powerful, and serve the better angels of an organization.

Leaders must embed their own sense of purpose into the heart and soul of every follower. The purpose starts from the leader at the top, and through infectious, dynamic, passionate leadership, it is driven down throughout the organization. Every follower has his own organizational purpose that connects with the leader’s overall purpose.

I once watched a TV documentary about the Empire State Building. For most of the hour, the documentary toured the wonders of the building—its history and structure: how many elevators it had, how many people worked or visited there, how many corporate offices it had, and how it was built. But at the end the story took a sharp turn. The last scene showed a cavernous room in a subbasement filled with hundreds of black trash bags, the building’s daily detritus. Standing in front of the bags were five guys in work clothes. Their job, their mission, their goal was to toss these bags into waiting trash trucks.

The camera focused on one of the men. The narrator asked, “What’s your job?” The answer to anyone watching was painfully obvious. But the guy smiled and said to the camera, “Our job is to make sure that tomorrow morning when people from all over the world come to this wonderful building, it shines, it is clean, and it looks great.” His job was to drag bags, but he knew his purpose. He didn’t feel he was just a trash hauler. His work was vital, and his purpose blended into the purpose of the building’s most senior management eighty floors above. Their purpose was to make sure that this masterpiece of a building always welcomed and awed visitors, as it had done on opening day, May 1, 1931. The building management can only achieve their purpose if everyone on the team believes in it as strongly as the smiling guy in the subbasement.

Good leaders set vision, missions, and goals. Great leaders inspire every follower at every level to internalize their purpose, and to understand that their purpose goes far beyond the mere details of their job. When everyone is united in purpose, a positive purpose that serves not only the organization but also, hopefully, the world beyond it, you have a winning team.

Not long ago I spoke at a conference for the leaders of a credit rating company. Their whole focus seemed to be on reducing losses, eliminating high-risk applicants, purging bad debt, and speeding up the process. These goals are all essential to the success of the company, I told them, but they are all negative and hardly inspiring. Isn’t your real purpose to find the right people to give credit to? Isn’t your purpose to help people buy homes, educate their children, plan for their future? Isn’t that what this conference should be all about?

Google’s corporate mission statement is identical with its purpose: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The founders set out to serve society, and created a remarkably successful company.

To achieve his purpose, a successful leader must set demanding standards and make sure they are met. Followers want to be “in a good outfit,” as we say in the Army. I never saw a good unit that wasn’t always stretching to meet a higher standard. The stretching was often accompanied by complaints about the effort required. But when the new standard was met, the followers celebrated with high-fives, pride, and playful gloating.

Standards must be achievable (though achieving them will always require extra effort), and the leaders must provide the means to get there. The focus should always be on getting better and better. We must always reach for the better way.

12. DON’T TAKE COUNSEL OF YOUR FEARS OR NAYSAYERS.

This one has a long history. You can trace it back to Marcus Aurelius, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and hundreds of others. Perhaps the best known comes from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Fear is a normal human emotion. It is not in itself a killer. We can learn to be aware when fear grips us, and can train to operate through and in spite of our fear. If, on the other hand, we don’t understand that fear is normal and has to be controlled and overcome, it will paralyze us and stop us in our tracks. We will no longer think clearly or analyze rationally. We prepare for it and control it; we never let it control us. If it does, we cannot lead.