A Passion for Leadership (15 page)

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 inevitable.

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.

It is just as true in local and state government bureaucracies, and in universities as well. And the private sector is just as flawed as the public sector when it comes to holding senior people accountable for failure—the bigger the company, the more likely the problem. In fact, the failure to hold people accountable for performance seems to be characteristic of virtually all bureaucracies. In the public sector, if you cheat on your expense account, travel and entertain too lavishly, or spend too much money redecorating your office, you're fired, but oversee a financial meltdown, a botched program rollout, a failing war effort, or steer a great institution or critical initiative into the ditch, and you have nothing to worry about. This is a failure of leadership.

By the same token, when legislative bodies or the media want someone held “accountable” for a disaster, failure to perform, or revelation of a long-ignored problem, they really mean they want to hang someone. “Accountability” has become synonymous with “blame.” This is too bad because accountability is an invaluable tool for leaders and is really about empowerment: setting expectations and measuring performance, the results of which can be either positive or negative. The private sector is quite effective in holding people accountable for good financial results in the form of bonuses, stock options, pay raises, and the like—rewards not available in the public sector. The latter is dependent on small cash rewards, a letter of commendation, a promotion, or a medal. The upside of accountability in public bureaucracies is more symbolic and psychological than material.