Lessons in Leadership

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: What Presidential History Can Teach Us

Competencies: leadership, coaching, talent management, team building

Who benefits: any employee

Consultant Usage: food for thought

What’s it about? Disclaimer: this post is intended to present ideas on leadership characteristics and competencies and is in no way intended to make any kind of political statement. 

Last week I suffered through and then recovered from a severe case of stomach poisoning while the news was dominated by Osama bin Laden suffering a fatal case of lead poisoning. 

Since I didn’t feel up to anything else, I laid about thinking about Presidential leadership and what we can learn from these crisis situations. 

President Obama seems to have received praise from almost all US citizens, including most of his harshest critics.  It is hard to criticize success.  As a leader, what did the President do right that led to this success?  As strange as it may read, he apparently did very little.  It isn’t how much he did, but what he did that was characteristic of great leadership.

First, he laid out a clear mission/goal.  Second, he delegated the tactical problem to well-trained experts and let them do what they do.  Third, he asked one simple question: “What do you need from me for you to be successful.”

Compare this to another moment in history when then President Carter set out to recuse American’s detained in Iran.  According to reports and books since, he micromanaged the entire engagement, failing to trust his experts to carry out their mission as they saw fit.  The result was a disaster. 

There is one additional eerie similarity.  In both events US forces lost a helicopter.  When it occurred in the Iran operation, the mission was aborted. When it occurred in Pakistan, it was barely a blip.  The experts had planned for things to go wrong and had contingencies. 

There are two more Presidential crisis during my lifetime that come to mind.  In the early 1960s President Kennedy was faced first with what is often termed the “Bay of Pigs Fiasco.”  It was a US decision to support a small invasion of Cubans against Castro.  It failed miserably.  Why?

It was a poor decision.  Yet it happened.  The decision was made by the President and his National Security Council.  At the President’s direction, then Press Secretary Pierre Salinger conducted a post-mortem investigation of how the decision to invade was reached.  If memory serves me correctly, there were 27 members in the room when the decision to invade was made.  There were two in favor of the invasion (The Secretaries of Defense and State).  The President remained publically neutral.  The remaining 24 were against the invasion.  Yet the two votes to invade carried the day. 

The “Two” were vocal, loud and adamant.  They carried seniority and rank.  They spoke as if there could be no contradiction to their thoughts.  What occurred that day is 24 people at the highest level of government, shrunk and shirked their duty and did not voice their opinions in any convincing manner.  And thus ill-conceived history was made.

The term “Group Think” might not have been new, but it certainly became popular after that event.  There has been a lot of research since that strongly suggests the quality of team performance suffers greatly when one or two people dominate a team.

President Kennedy was wise enough to learn from his mistake (yes, he must be held accountable).  He changed the process his Security Council used to make decisions.  He even went so far as to appoint Press Secretary Salinger as the team’s official devil’s advocate.  No matter what was proposed, Secretary Salinger would take the opposite view.  Every team member was required to voice his/her opinion before a decision was made.

Less than two years later came the Cuban Missile Crisis.  This time the new team processes were invoked and the desired results were achieved. 

So what are the Leadership Lessons?  There are many, but here are a few of the key lessons of great leadership:

The leader is responsible for setting out the mission and the boundaries, but delegates authority and responsibility to those who must achieve the goal(s).

To achieve organizational missions/goals, leaders must be exceptional talent managers.  They need to attract the kind of people who can succeed.  They need to train and/or develop them so they can do the job they were hired to do. 

Leaders must eliminate barriers to success and provide the necessary resources to accomplish the mission/goal.

Leaders must adhere to the first law of leadership “Thou shall not micromanage.”

Leaders must create teams where all sides and all opinions are heard.  Creative conflict must be encouraged.  Individuals are not allowed to dominate. Dissenters are not to be punished (unless they cannot commit to the final decision).

If you would like to add more, please feel free to use the comment section below.

Catch you later.
[tags]envisia, envisia learning, leadership, coaching, talent management, osama, obama, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.