A Passion for Leadership

by Robert M Gates

  President George W. Bush asked me to become secretary of defense in November 2006. The wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan were going badly; troops and commanders weren’t getting the equipment they needed; outpatient care of our wounded was a scandal waiting to break; the Pentagon bureaucracy in all the military services remained focused on planning for future wars while seemingly incapable of fighting the two we were already in (or preparing for those we would be most likely to fight in the future); dozens of major equipment and weapons programs were overdue, overcost, and, often, no longer relevant; and bureaucratic overhead had swollen dramatically in the years since 9/11. Stewardship of our strategic nuclear forces had deteriorated, as repeated crises would demonstrate. I dealt with all these—and many other—problems.

  Drawing on my experience leading transformational change in diverse organizations over many years, I aim in this book to offer leaders in bureaucracies—public and private and at all levels of leadership—specific ideas and techniques that can enable them to successfully reform and improve their organizations. Rather than create endless hypothetical situations and offer step-by-step action plans for those situations, I believe the principles of leading reform and examples from my experience are easily customized for and applicable to extraordinarily diverse situations. Some of what I have to say is just plain common sense, but you probably would not be surprised by what a rare commodity that is in bureaucracies. While my focus is primarily on public institutions, what I have written about leading reform of bureaucracies is broadly applicable to organizations of every size and kind: business for sure, and volunteer organizations, civic and service groups, schools, and churches as well. We need leaders up and down the organizational ladder with vision and purpose who can mobilize the willing and bring productive change.

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  At a time when so many Americans are frustrated and angered by government gridlock, political paralysis, and expanding government bureaucracies that intrude ever more into our daily lives, I am an optimist. I believe that with the right strategies and the right skills leaders can—whatever direction politics takes us—reform and change these institutions. Reform is not a luxury but a necessity. Failure to fix our institutions, and to do so urgently, can have catastrophic consequences for our way of life, our financial security, our national security, our freedoms, and, at times, our very lives. By showing that things can change, can get better, I hope in some small but significant way to convince Americans that the institutions that too often fail us can be reformed and to show that leaders at all levels can be involved in making that change come to pass. With skilled leadership, things can be made to work so much better.

  This book is about people and how to lead them where they often don’t want to go. It is about how a leader can make an institution better, both for those who work there and for those they serve. It is about improving people’s lives.

  I have an ulterior motive as well in writing this book. It is a sad truth that, broadly speaking, public service as a calling has been in disrepute for a number of years. The tone has been set from the top as, for decades, successive presidential and congressional candidates in both parties have run for office campaigning against the very government and public servants they hope to lead. Year after year, it becomes more difficult to persuade capable young people to enter the public arena. According to The Wall Street Journal, the percentage of federal employees under thirty was just 7 percent in 2013. It was nearly three times that percentage in 1975. Political paralysis and its consequences—government shutdown, bitter partisanship that blocks commonsense solutions to important national problems, and other irresponsible actions, not to mention the government’s long-standing reputation for red tape and hierarchy—discourage young citizens with desirable and needed talents from entering public service. If, through this book, I can demonstrate that despite the politicians public institutions and other organizations can be reformed, made more efficient and more responsive to the needs of our people, perhaps more young people will be encouraged to consider devoting some portion of their lives to their fellow citizens.

  I hope that this book will be of value to young people who aspire to become leaders: first, by demonstrating to them that public service organizations can be worthy of their talents; second, should they choose that path, by offering them, early in their careers, some of the tools and personal attributes for leading change that they can begin to develop and strengthen. After all, today’s new recruits will be tomorrow’s senior leaders.

  John Adams, our second president, wrote to his son Thomas, “Public business my son, must always be done by somebody—it will be done by somebody or other—If wise men decline it others will not: if honest men refuse it, others will not.” My fervent hope is that this book will encourage the wise and honest among us, especially young people, to consider serving our fellow Americans—with confidence that public institutions can be reformed and shaped to succeed.

  2

  Where You Want to Go: “The Vision Thing”

  My dictionary lists fifty-four definitions of the word “leader.” One is “a pipe for conducting hot air”—an apt definition perhaps for Washington, D.C., but not suitable for my purposes here. No, the definition that best fits what I have in mind is “one who guides, one who shows the way.” The implication is that what lies ahead is new territory and the guide knows how to reach the destination. It is a good analogy for organizations and change. The problem is that too many leaders start on the path of change without deciding or knowing where they are headed. Sort of like Moses and the forty years spent wandering in the wilderness.

  One of my favorite bumper stickers is “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m making good time.” Sadly, that describes too many organizations today: once-great institutions that are losing (or have lost) their edge and don’t know how to regain it; good institutions that want to be great but can’t move beyond the rhetoric; organizations that are failing to adapt to new circumstances and problems, are floundering, and don’t know what to do; self-satisfied and smug institutions running on the momentum of past achievements and moving obliviously headlong toward mediocrity and irrelevance; and bureaucracies seemingly “too big to fail” but also apparently too big to change and too resistant to reform. And then there are the many public entities mired in mediocrity, disinterested in and currently incapable of providing quality, efficient services to their customers, the taxpayers.

  All such institutions have one thing in common: the need for bold, visionary leaders at all levels who can discern a different and better future for the organization, no matter its size, and who can map a realistic path to attaining that future. If there is to be transformation, it must start at the top. But the person at the top cannot succeed alone: leaders are needed throughout an organization. They are often there; they just need someone to liberate and mobilize them.

  To be successful agents of change—of reform—leaders not only must be able to envision a new way forward but also must be practical, with the skill to build broad support for and implement their vision.

  Recent history has examples of political leaders who were pragmatic visionaries: Margaret Thatcher revitalizing the United Kingdom; Ronald Reagan restoring America’s confidence after the disastrous 1970s and believing the Cold War could be won; the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl and his vision of a unified Germany; Deng Xiaoping and economic reforms that transformed China; Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin visualizing real peace between Egypt and Israel; F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, jailer and jailed, reconciling and envisioning a South Africa without apartheid. None of these figures were uncontroversial, but each had a vision of a better future. There are also failed reformers and visionaries, men such as Mikhail Gorbachev, who destroyed the Stalinist structure that propped up the Soviet Union but had no idea what to put in its place. Or the leaders of the “Arab Spring” who sought economic and political freedom but lacked the practical skills to overcome both Islamists and authoritarians. />
  Of course, business has its own successful pragmatic visionaries, people such as Alan Mulally (Ford), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Steve Jobs (Apple), Anne Mulcahy (Xerox), Howard Schultz (Starbucks),* Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Marillyn Hewson (Lockheed Martin). And it also has its big strategic failures such as those who drove two of the big American automotive companies off a cliff, the CEOs of multiple failed financial institutions, and those big bosses who took a wrong strategic turn in manufacturing and retailing and wrecked their companies in the process.

  To again quote Jacques Barzun in From Dawn to Decadence:

  To govern well requires two distinct kinds of ability: political skill and the administrative mind. Both are very rare, either in combination or separately. The former depends on sensing what can be done, at what moment, and how to move others to want it….But one can be a true politico and be at the same time incapable of administration. To administer is to keep order in a situation that continually tends toward disorder. In running any organization, both people and things have to be kept straight from day to day.

  If a single person with these two skills cannot be found, the boss must be the visionary, and she had damn well better have a deputy or chief operating officer who can deliver the practical goods.

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  So, you are the new leader, appointed with the expectation that you can reform and improve the organization. You may be a middle manager with a dozen people working for you, or you may be the big boss with thousands of employees. It is your first day in charge. What do you do?

  Those who would be agents of change must first conceive and articulate where they believe an organization has to go and rally support for that vision. They need to diagnose what is wrong and needs to be changed, why reform is necessary. That is essential in order to persuade employees to get on board. How does a leader establish concrete goals, an agenda for action? Is the problem an immediate crisis, a near-term challenge requiring prompt action, or is it longer term, allowing for a more gradual approach?

  To answer those questions, the most critical thing a new leader at any level should do is listen.

  Too many new bosses arrive confident they have all the answers—the solutions to an organization’s problems—and on day one begin firing off e-mails and giving orders to “light a fire” under people, to demonstrate a new sheriff is in town ready to kick ass and take names, and to show dynamism (and control). Too many openly disdain their predecessors and all that was done before: “Things are going to be different around here now that I’m in charge!”

  We all have worked for such “conquering heroes,” who see themselves as riding in on a white horse to save the day. What they do, mainly, is scare the hell out of people, who then focus on keeping out of the way—lying low—and keeping their jobs. Employees quickly come to resent the arrogant know-it-all who has just condemned the work they had been doing and either resolve to do all they can to thwart the new leader’s agenda or passively stand to one side waiting for him to fail. The conquering hero (or hostile-takeover approach) is, in my view, all wrong. I learned this firsthand when I took this approach in one of my first senior jobs at the CIA, as I will describe later.

  Before issuing a single directive or making a single decision, a leader should talk to people at every level of her organization, from the front office to the mail room. Career employees often have startlingly insightful views about the strengths and weaknesses of their organization, which of course they know well; as a result, they often have well-informed ideas for practical ways to improve it. If appropriate to her position, the new leader should talk to stakeholders, governing boards, directors, retirees, alumni, legislators, other elected officials, and, critically, the “customers.” She should ask all of them about the organization’s strengths and weaknesses and what they think the priorities for change should be.

  Most of those the leader engages will have their pet peeves or projects, their axes to grind, or their own agendas. That’s okay. Taken together, these conversations will make her far more knowledgeable about the organization, with a richer understanding of the dynamics and culture of the place. Getting out of the office and listening to employees on their turf allows the leader to learn much more than enduring countless PowerPoint presentations in her conference room and will help inform her agenda for change—her vision. Even if she is an insider promoted to leadership, she will learn a lot from people who will talk to her differently now that she is the boss.

  If a leader listens during her first days or weeks—as I did as both CIA director and president of Texas A&M—she also will gain insight about the team she has inherited and the health of the organization itself.

  Through listening, the leader will quickly learn who is willing to be candid with her about problems and shortcomings (including who cynically trashes colleagues and who does not). She will likely be able to spot early on those self-promoters who are suck-ups and untrustworthy. In her “listening tour,” she will be able to make some preliminary assessments of who will be her allies in the effort to bring change and who will not. (A wise leader will not lock herself too firmly into these early judgments about people: there will be surprises along the way.)

  Listening before making decisions on the agenda for change has another significant benefit. It will allow the leader to put early points on the board in the eyes of the employees by sending the important message that their opinions matter, that she values candor, that she doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, and that she didn’t arrive with her mind completely made up or closed. But she mustn’t let the initial listening tour go on too long. That risks conveying the sense that she doesn’t have a clue about what to do, is simply a blank page waiting to be imprinted by the career folks, or is indecisive.

  A new leader should make clear from the outset that she intends to establish goals early. She should seek out reactions to her own ideas and working agenda. In short, she should communicate clearly that she has ideas and is prepared to act decisively but wants to test those ideas with those who will actually be responsible for implementation—and also get their advice, suggestions, and criticism.

  Whenever someone persuades the new woman in charge to alter her thinking or change her mind, she should make a point of saying so publicly, naming names. She may well convert the skeptic who challenged her into an ally, and she will reinforce the message that candor is truly welcome, has impact, and is career enhancing, not career destroying.

  It is especially important in the public sector for the leader to establish goals early because she has no idea how long she or her principal lieutenants will have to implement their vision. As I’ve said, this uncertainty about the length of tenure in a position is a disincentive for many to take on serious reform at all, to invest the necessary time and political capital required. Too many political appointees, accordingly, will make some superficial decisions that sound good, get some positive press for taking on a problem, and then move on without having accomplished much (except to make their employees even more cynical).

  When I became director of central intelligence, I knew that a presidential election fourteen months later might end my tenure (as it did). Thus, I moved very fast in launching virtually all my initiatives. At A&M, I was pretty confident I would be president for at least five years, and so I was able to sequence my initiatives and proceed more gradually. Even though I ended up with less time at the university because of being selected as secretary of defense, I still had nearly four and a half years to make progress on my goals. Arriving at Defense at the end of 2006, I assumed I would have only two years in office and focused almost entirely on overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, by far the most urgent priorities. It was only when I was unexpectedly asked to stay on by President Obama that I turned my attention to internal and budgetary reform. Still anticipating I would stay on for only a year or two, I wasted no time in moving ahead quickly, particularly with regard to major cuts or caps on dozens of large pr
ograms that were unaffordable, unworkable, or unnecessary.

  Even after a leader has established her goals and launched actions to implement them, she should keep reaching out and listening to people at every level for as long as she is in the job. By listening, she can learn whether her agenda for change is creating new opponents or allies and who they are. That, in turn, will give her the information she needs to assess whether to adjust her approach; at a minimum, at each step she will know the internal atmosphere as she moves forward.

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  Right away, the leader developing a vision—an agenda—needs to accurately assess the kind of situation he faces. What does the bureaucratic battlefield look like? If he confronts an urgent problem or crisis, the agenda is obvious: it’s settling on an action plan—a strategy—to accomplish it that can be tough. That was the case for me at Defense. If the challenges are long-term, as I encountered at A&M, the new boss, as I said earlier, has the leisure of taking more time to establish goals and a strategy to achieve them. In some instances, though, he will need to address an urgent problem and simultaneously develop goals for long-term reforms and restructuring, as I did at the CIA. So, let me describe in a little detail the very different situations I faced at those three institutions when I arrived and then explain their relevance to leaders across a wide spectrum of bureaucracies.

  When I became director of central intelligence in November 1991, the Soviet Union was collapsing (it would, in fact, cease to exist in seven weeks). My most urgent task, therefore, was to provide the president and his senior advisers with the CIA’s best assessment of the likely consequences of that collapse. Would there be chaos? Famine? Millions of refugees? Civil war? Ethnic cleansing? Economic ruin? Would Russia itself disintegrate? What would happen to the nearly forty thousand nuclear weapons in the Soviet arsenal or nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles—and the nuclear weapons and missiles deployed not in Russia itself but in newly independent successor states themselves in chaos? The stakes could not have been higher. There was no precedent in history for a major empire to collapse without a major war. And so, in an extraordinary effort, we produced nearly a dozen National Intelligence Estimates on these momentous questions within a few weeks to help inform the president’s decisions during a critical time.