A Passion for Leadership (12 page)

Too often, leaders think that knowing all these details is somehow unnecessary or “beneath” them, that their time is better spent on the “big picture.” Such leaders will find themselves “kept” men and women of the organizations they purport to lead, dependent on others who may not have the same agenda or priorities to tell them what they need to know. For a leader to get the big things right depends a great deal on knowing the little things, especially when implementing difficult and controversial change. Whether I was restructuring reconnaissance programs at the CIA, pushing diversity at A&M, or cutting wasteful programs at Defense, knowing the details enabled me to make informed decisions—and also to defend those decisions in public. As President Obama told me on more than one occasion, “If I don't understand it, I can't defend it.”

The point of a leader having micro-knowledge is neither to embarrass someone nor to nitpick. Both will make a leader look small and should be avoided. Everyone comes into a meeting with the boss with some measure of apprehension. Increasing people's anxiety or fear by faultfinding is counterproductive. If an error is meaningless to the larger discussion, ignore it; dwelling on typos, format, or some trivial issue in a chart suggests to people that the leader is not just in the weeds but lost in them. A leader should signal her command of detail, but that's not where her focus should be. Remember that most briefings one gets as boss—from middle manager on up—will have been reviewed by several layers of supervisors and colleagues. Nearly always, if there is an error or problem, it is a problem that extends well beyond the briefer. My approach in such circumstances generally was to address my questions or concerns to the briefer's boss, in part to convey that I suspected the mistake was not the briefer's fault. I tried never to be nasty, condescending, or personal. I don't think I ever intentionally embarrassed anyone. The more junior the briefer, the gentler I tried to be. Employing humor, when appropriate, is a good idea. Having the boss point out an error is mortification enough. And after a particularly contentious briefing, I would try to remember to thank the briefer for his or her efforts.

The purpose of doing your homework—of micro-knowledge—is not to show off how much you know, for one-upmanship, or to play “gotcha,” but to be able to make better decisions. Without micro-knowledge, you are the prisoner of your bureaucracy and your staff, and they will play you like a cheap fiddle.

Where too many leaders of change fail is in not understanding the difference between micro-knowledge and micromanagement. As head of the CIA, I wanted to know if a case officer was having a particularly sensitive meeting with an agent, but I sure as hell was not going to try to tell him or his boss how to conduct the clandestine rendezvous. A university president is going to care a lot about the quality of teaching but is not going to tell deans or faculty how to teach. And the secretary of defense, in the midst of two wars, is going to pay close attention to strategy and even tactics insofar as the latter have political ramifications but is not going to be telling generals how to deploy their troops tactically.

In trying to change any bureaucracy, especially a large one, the leader must decide on the proper course of action and then assign responsibility for implementation to his subordinates—and empower them to carry out the task. Give them space to show what they can do. Stay out of their hair. There were bosses at the CIA who were so constantly reaching down to see if their instructions were being followed we accused them of “pulling us up by the roots to see if we were growing.” A leader at any level who tries to oversee the daily efforts of his subordinates is doomed to fail. Besides which, if a leader doesn't trust his lieutenants to carry out his strategy, he has chosen the wrong people.

Lasting change in a bureaucracy depends, above all, on those below you embracing the change and taking ownership, making it their own. The more frequently you intrude, implicitly reminding them it is
your
change, the less they will believe it is
theirs
. Successful implementation, in short, depends upon them. The leader cannot hold individuals accountable for driving change if he refuses to let go of the steering wheel. He must trust his subordinates, replace them if necessary. But he mustn't micromanage them.

If you don't have the guts as the leader to make tough and timely decisions, for God's sake, don't take the job.

Nothing crushes momentum for implementing change, for reform, like an indecisive leader. And nothing takes the air out of a campaign for change—for transformation—quite like sending bold options to the boss and then waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a decision. I can't count the times over my career when I saw truly dramatic proposals for change land in a boss's in-box only to be slowly asphyxiated as they lay there gasping at the bottom of the growing stack of incoming paper because he didn't want to make a decision—or couldn't.

I witnessed this repeatedly at the CIA and heard plenty about it at both A&M and the Defense Department, where, in both cases, stories were legion about major efforts for change that languished in the front office, gathering dust because the person in charge shrank from the challenge. No wonder professors and generals alike—anyone charged with coming up with proposals for reform—become cynical. They are asked to invest huge amounts of time and energy (and sometimes personal reputation) in a project and then left to wonder whether their work was valued or appreciated—or even read. A firm no would be better. In some cases, inaction is due to sheer laziness or lack of courtesy. Whatever the reason the leader fails to make a decision, the result is that not only does he leave his own people in the lurch but he also has made it all the harder for his successor to engage the professionals' enthusiasm the next time around.

Of course there is risk in making decisions. Rarely are there obvious answers, and few are easy. Sometimes, a leader will have to choose the least bad option because there are no “good” ones. Planning, organizing, and implementing change put a leader, by definition, in uncharted territory. They are, after all, about the future. But remember the definition of a leader I cited earlier in these pages: “one who guides, one who shows the way.” A leader is in his position precisely because people had confidence in his judgment and believed he was the person for the job. There are no guarantees of success, but if he doesn't lead, who will?

As a leader confronts difficult decisions regarding implementation, as with every other part of the reform process it is important to discuss with people she respects and trusts the pros and cons of the different options before her. She shouldn't be afraid to test-drive her decisions with them and listen closely to their reactions. If they're worth their salt, they will give voice to objections, concerns, and problems, and even if the leader opts to proceed, she will have been forewarned of likely criticisms so she can either adjust her decisions or be better prepared to counter critics. Still, she, and she alone, must make the decision.

As the leader goes through the decision process, she must not send the bureaucracy signals that she is anguishing over a decision or is having a hard time making up her mind. She should be willing to take time to hear last-minute appeals from subordinates if necessary, take time to review all the considerations, but then decide decisively and unambiguously, with no vacillation, caveats, caviling, or hesitation. And she must avoid those “middling” options. As Justice Holmes said, they sing in a very soft voice.

A final, and critical, technique for implementing change is ensuring follow-through.

There must be some law of bureaucratic physics about how initial energy slowly degrades into inertia. The leader has to be the variable in that formula. Great ideas, great internal support, great decisions, are all for naught if the actions she has directed are not implemented. Contrary to what most bureaucrats believe, a good process is not an end in itself: Outcomes are the only things that ultimately matter. Decisions are really only the starting point. Just think of the number of big ideas that became troublesome because of lack of attention to implementation—like the ObamaCare Web site.

Being a visible presence during implementation is mandatory. A leader cannot delegate that. The bureaucracy needs to know its leader is personally involved in the implementation of his initiatives and monitoring their progress. Those techniques used in formulating the agenda and making decisions—transparency, inclusiveness, decisiveness, micro-knowledge (but not micromanagement), and accountability—all will continue to be essential in implementation.

At the Defense Department, I met with each task force every two weeks for status and progress reports. My immediate staff was monitoring the efforts even more closely. When problems and obstacles cropped up, as they inevitably do, we knew about them quickly and were able to act just as quickly to overcome them. My chief of staff at A&M and my special assistant at the CIA operated similarly, closely tracking initiatives under way in each of those organizations to ensure they were proceeding as I wanted and on the timelines I had set.

At A&M, when I was fighting to increase diversity, I made frequent recruiting trips to predominantly Hispanic and African-American high schools all over the state. I regularly went before both the faculty and the student senates to report on the agenda for change and take questions. As DCI, I spoke out frequently in public about the changes we were making. I've already mentioned my engagement at Defense, to which I added innumerable public statements about the changes under way internally.

Winston Churchill attached to important decision papers red tabs that read, “Action This Day.” That must be the mantra of the agent of change. Even when lives are not at stake, a sense of urgency must accompany implementation of a leader's decisions regarding change. It sustains energy, momentum, and the conviction that what is being done is vital to the future of the organization.

T
his chapter, and the two that follow, are about intangible aspects of leading change in every circumstance and every organization. I have observed many presidents, cabinet officers, generals, admirals, and CEOs over many years. Some in their actions are superb examples of how to treat subordinates and motivate them; others were from the “fear and loathing” school of leadership, treating those below them with contempt and disrespect. What follows is distilled from my observations of others and my personal experience over some four decades of leading very different kinds of organizations, often under the most trying conditions. For a young person just starting a career, a middle manager, or someone in a more senior position, I believe the lessons are equally applicable.

People, not systems, implement an agenda for change.

As a leader pursues her reform agenda, she can't get so enamored of flowcharts and PowerPoint slides that she overlooks a critically important factor that will determine her success or failure: the attitudes and commitment of the people who work for her. A leader who can win their support and loyalty will be well on her way to successful reform. Whatever a leader's place on the public or private bureaucratic ladder, she must provide the people working for her with the tools and opportunities for professional success and satisfaction. She must empower them and provide them with respect, motivation, job satisfaction, upward mobility, personal dignity, esteem, and, finally, the confidence that, as leader, she genuinely cares about them collectively and as individuals. If a leader convinces them of that, employees will forgive a lot of the little mistakes that are inevitable.

People at every level in every organization need to know their work is considered important by the higher-ups. At every level, a leader should strive to make his employees proud to be where they are and doing what they do. It doesn't matter whether you are president of the United States, CEO of a huge company, or a supervisor far down in the organization.

As a senior CIA official, especially when we were in the middle of one of our fairly regular political uproars and scandals, I would often be asked, “How is morale at the agency?” No CIA officer wants to face friends and neighbors (or his own teenage kids) when the agency is being accused of nefarious deeds. But I always believed morale there depended, more than anything else, on whether the CIA professionals thought their work was valued. If they did, that would carry them through troubled times.

Belief in the importance of what one does is of course vital in any job. Bureaucrats, wherever they work, want to believe that what they do every day has real value for their company, community, or country. It is up to leaders—at every level—to explain why their work is important. Even if the organization is a little one tucked away in an obscure part of the enterprise, part of a leader's responsibility is to ensure that employees know how their work fits into the bigger picture, how it makes a contribution, a difference. Taking time on a regular basis to explain to employees the organization's mission and why they matter is an important leadership obligation on its own merits, but also because it is both motivational and builds the individual esteem of every member of the team.

More than thirty years ago, Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. wrote
In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies.
A key theme was the importance of leaders communicating with employees (in their own work space), both to listen and to provide a sense of organizational purpose. I did this at all three places I led. At Defense, I also would travel to factories—such as the Oshkosh plant in Wisconsin where an MRAP-variant was being built—to tell the workers how their efforts fit into the larger war effort and to thank them for saving lives. Far from the battlefield, it was important for them to know their jobs were important and why.

Of course this kind of effort gets a bit complicated if an organization's mission isn't clear, the purpose of a time-consuming project is unfathomable, or there is no positive reinforcement from above; or if a task force report that required enormous effort simply ends up on a dusty shelf; or, as everyone in a bureaucracy has experienced at one time or another, if an employee realizes he has been assigned a pointless task. (Perhaps worst of all is a military unit exposed to danger at an outpost or sent on a risky mission that soon after was deemed unnecessary.)

It's unfortunate when the big boss's intentions are unclear, no one is encouraged to ask for clarification, and people proceed blindly to try to be responsive to what they imagine or guess is the real issue or question. A leader must encourage clarifying questions, and his answers must be direct and convincing.

There is a famous story of the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover writing in the margin of a memo, “Watch the borders.” As a result, a number of agents were dispatched to the Mexican and Canadian borders. When this was reported to Hoover, he furiously informed the briefer that his note had been referring to the size of the margins on the original memo—not the country's geographic boundaries. As President Reagan's DCI, William Casey was a notorious mumbler and often hard to understand. He also had trouble using his telephone, which had a couple dozen direct phone lines to various senior agency officials. He would jab a button at random, shout an order into the receiver, and then hang up. As his chief of staff, I spent a lot of time each day interpreting what he had said to people and sorting out who should have gotten the call directing a specific action. My chiefs of staff at both A&M and Defense knew one of their principal responsibilities was to ensure my directions were clearly understood. Often they would come back into the office to determine what the hell I had been talking about on a given topic or to ask if I really meant to have someone perform a given task that seemed questionable.

Unintended miscues, though, pale in significance to the frustration of people assigned major tasks that are principally make-work. This was the case at the State Department and the CIA in the early 1970s, when the national security adviser Henry Kissinger assigned massive projects to the bureaucracy on both the Soviet Union and China, mainly to keep us busy and distracted while he and President Nixon pursued secret diplomacy with both countries. The success of their policies was only partial consolation for our wasted time and effort.

Government bureaucrats tasked with writing reports that end up in limbo enter the first circle of Dante's hell. And, of course, this happens in private sector bureaucracies as well. In fact, the bigger the company, the more such useless work seems to flourish. When it comes to major projects, limbo and dead ends crush morale and feed cynicism. Both are dangerous for organizations with aspirations for excellence.

A leader must not only explain to and reassure employees that their jobs are important to the overall mission of the organization; he must ensure that their work really does contribute, that it is not pointless make-work or wheel spinning.

A leader should be very sparing in publicly criticizing those beneath her on the organizational ladder.

In recent decades, most candidates for U.S. president—both Democrats and Republicans—have blamed the very government professionals they aspire to lead for many of the problems Americans face. In my adult lifetime, only two presidents have consistently and publicly praised federal public servants—John F. Kennedy and George H. W. Bush. Never mind that many of the challenges Americans face in dealing with federal bureaucrats are the result of poorly drafted or compromise congressional legislation that is itself ambiguous, unclear, or even contradictory—leaving it to the bureaucrats to interpret what Congress or the president intended or to figure out how to make convoluted laws or decisions work.

Senior elected or appointed officials are the worst when it comes to blaming “bureaucrats” for problems, usually because the alternative is to assume personal responsibility for failure. And nameless, faceless bureaucrats are an easy target for demagoguery. I've previously mentioned my anger when the secretary of the army blamed the problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on unnamed noncommissioned officers not doing their jobs. I was similarly disturbed when the air force disciplined some colonels and NCOs for problems in that service's nuclear mission that were systemic and had resulted from earlier decisions made at much higher levels. But business leaders often do the same when facing a disaster, whether it's a product recall, financial disaster, or any other failure or scandal. Very rarely do the big boys take a hit or show themselves to be self-critical. These leaders don't understand the long-term negative impact on their employees of broad criticism of those lower down in the ranks—criticism usually more deservedly aimed elsewhere. It is the antithesis of how they should be treated.

There are many ways of reinforcing for employees their importance to an organization. The tools depend on where a leader sits in the chain of command.

Those at or near the top should do the following:

A leader further down the management ladder has fewer options. Explaining to people why their work is worthwhile is important, but without exaggeration or blowing smoke. Individuals and the team should always be praised publicly with sincerity and credibility. (Keep the bullshit quotient to a minimum; phony overstatement is worse than saying nothing.) It is essential that any middle manager understand what is going on if she is to be able to explain it to subordinates. A leader at any level should be receptive to suggestions and ideas from her subordinates. She should be careful about complaining downward about problems up the chain: there is a fine line between being seen by subordinates as a toady to your superiors and being insubordinate or disloyal to those who put you in your job. I think the best way for any leader to find the balance is to make sure she is prepared to question directions from above and also willing to go to bat for the team if given dumb orders. But be ready to salute and get on with the job, or quit. (More about that later.)

A successful leader, and especially one leading change, treats each member of his team with respect and dignity. It seems obvious, but in far too many bureaucracies bosses at all levels fail to do so.

Nearly everyone has worked for a “toxic” boss, someone who bullies, belittles, humiliates, or embarrasses subordinates. A shouter. A desk pounder. They can be found at every level. As I told midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy and cadets at West Point, “You will all surely work for a jackass at some point in your career. We all have.”

Early in my career at the CIA, I worked for such a supervisor. When one of my colleagues went to see him one day about serious morale problems in our division, the boss's reply was “They should be glad they have jobs.” Later, I worked in the White House for a deputy national security adviser with a formidable temper. He would scream and shout and carry on, routinely lacing his comments with loud and truly foul obscenities. On one occasion, his shouting and swearing on the phone was so bad that the vice president of the United States strode down the West Wing hall from his office and, without a word, slammed my boss's office door shut. Another time, this same person got so angry while on the telephone that he jumped up from his desk chair without pushing his chair back from under the desk, thus badly cracking his knees on the underside of the desk and then landing on his butt on the floor, breaking the Plexiglas mat under his chair. I witnessed this entire tantrum-induced workplace injury and nearly fell out of my own chair I was laughing so hard. He was not pleased by my reaction. The man was very smart and I actually liked him, but he had one hell of a temper.

Such poisonous pills may be smart, charismatic, decisive, and able mostly to get the job done—traits that can get you pretty far in most organizations. But the cost in morale, employee dissatisfaction, and creating a toxic environment is very high. People whose day-to-day job life is miserable are not going to feel motivated to excel, make change work, or better serve a customer or policy maker. And it doesn't matter whether they are CIA spies or retail clerks.

I have long called these kinds of bosses “little Stalins.” They choose to demonstrate they are in charge by using their authority—their power—mainly to make people miserable. Someone needs to take off for a couple of hours to take a child to the doctor? Denied. Time off to attend a kid's baseball game or tend a sick spouse? Denied. My training officer in U.S. Air Force Officer Training School—a first lieutenant—in San Antonio in 1966 was a little Stalin. Our training period included two days off at Christmas, and one member of our group planned to travel to Dallas to see his newborn daughter. The lieutenant found a way to give him just enough demerits to prevent his trip. That happened nearly fifty years ago, and I still have not forgotten what I considered a wanton act of cruelty or the name of the officer who perpetrated it.