by Colin Powell
CHAPTER FIVE
Kindness Works
Many years ago I was the warden—the senior lay person—of a small suburban Episcopal church in northern Virginia. During that time our bishop assigned to our parish an elderly priest to serve as an assistant pastor. The priest was in some kind of personal distress and needed a parish home. I never knew the nature of his problem. Whatever it was, we were pleased to take him in. We welcomed him into the church family, treated him as one of us, and ministered to him, just as we ministered to each other. Nobody asked about his problem or pried into his life.
He was with us for a year. On his last Sunday he was assigned to give the sermon. I listened to it in my usual proper Episcopalian position, right rear of the church. I’m sure it was a good sermon, but one sentence hit me with special force and has remained with me for four decades. At the end of the sermon, the priest looked over the congregation and with a smile on his face quietly concluded: “Always show more kindness than seems necessary, because the person receiving it needs it more than you will ever know.”
He was talking about himself, of course. The lesson was clear: Don’t just show kindness in passing or to be courteous. Show it in depth, show it with passion, and expect nothing in return. Kindness is not just about being nice; it’s about recognizing another human being who deserves care and respect.
Much later, when I was Secretary of State, I slipped away one day from my beautiful office suite and vigilant security agents and snuck down to the garage. The garage is run by contract employees, most of them immigrants and minorities making only a few dollars above minimum wage.
The garage is too small for all the employees’ cars. The challenge every morning is to pack them all in. The attendants’ system is to stack cars one behind the other, so densely packed that there’s no room to maneuver. Since number three can’t get out until number one and two have left, the evening rush hour is chaos if the lead cars don’t exit the garage on time. Inevitably a lot of impatient people have to stand around waiting their turn.
The attendants had never seen a Secretary wandering around the garage before; they thought I was lost. (That may have been true by then, but I’d never admit it.) They asked if I needed help getting back “home.”
“No,” I answered. “I just want to look around and chat with you.” They were surprised, but pleased. I asked about the job, where they were from, were there problems with carbon monoxide, and similar small talk. They assured me everything was fine, and we all relaxed and chatted away.
After a while I asked a question that had puzzled me: “When the cars come in every morning, how do you decide who ends up first to get out, and who ends up second and third?”
They gave each other knowing looks and little smiles. “Mr. Secretary,” one of them said, “it kinda goes like this. When you drive in, if you lower the window, look out, smile, and you know our name, or you say ‘Good morning, how are you?’ or something like that, you’re number one to get out. But if you just look straight ahead and don’t show you even see us or that we are doing something for you, well, you are likely to be one of the last to get out.”
I thanked them, smiled, and made my way back to where I had abandoned my now distraught bodyguard.
At my next staff meeting, I shared this story with my senior leaders. “You can never err by treating everyone in the building with respect, thoughtfulness, and a kind word,” I told them. “Every one of our employees is an essential employee. Every one of them wants to be viewed that way. And if you treat them that way, they will view you that way. They will not let you down or let you fail. They will accomplish whatever you have put in front of them.”
It ain’t brain surgery. Every person in an organization has value and wants that value to be recognized. Every human being needs appreciation and reinforcement. The person who came to clean my office each night was no less a person than the President, a general, or a cabinet member. They deserved and got from me a thank-you, a kind word, an inquiry that let him or her know their value. I wanted them to know they weren’t just janitors. I couldn’t do my job without them, and the department relied on them. There are no trivial jobs in any successful organization. But there are all too many trivial leaders who don’t understand this oh so simple and easy to apply principle.
Taking care of employees is perhaps the best form of kindness. When young soldiers go to basic training they meet a drill sergeant, who seems to be their worst nightmare. He shouts at them relentlessly, he intimidates them, he makes them miserable. They are terrified. But all that changes. Their fear and initial hatred turn into something else by the end of basic training. The sergeant has been with them every step of the way: teaching, cajoling, enforcing, bringing out of them strength and confidence they didn’t know they had. At the end, all they want is for their performance to please him. When they graduate, they leave with an emotional bond and a remembrance they will never forget. Ask any veteran the name of his drill sergeant and he will know it. My ROTC summer camp drill sergeant almost fifty-five years ago was Staff Sergeant (SSG) Artis Westberry.
Being kind doesn’t mean being soft or a wuss. Kindness is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of confidence. If you have developed a reputation for kindness and consideration, then even the most unpleasant decisions will go down easier because everyone will understand why you are doing what you are doing. They will realize that your decision must be necessary, and is not arbitrary or without empathy.
As the old saying puts it, “To the world, you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.”
CHAPTER SIX
I’m All Caught Up
One of my early mentors, Captain Tom Miller, a wonderful man, commanded Company B, 2nd Armored Rifle Battalion, 48th Infantry in Germany in the late 1950s. I was one of his lieutenants. It was my first assignment. Tom was one of several World War II and Korean War veterans commanding companies in those days, mostly reservists or sergeants who had been promoted during the wars. None of them was destined to be a general, but, boy, they knew a lot about soldiering.
We didn’t call it mentoring back then. It was just what senior officers were supposed to do—train and guide young lieutenants just starting out and try to keep them out of trouble until they were weaned. We learned a lot during the day, but the learning that took place at the officers’ club bar at night was a lot more important and a lot more fun.
Late one night Captain Miller and several lieutenants were sitting at the bar drinking beers. We’d all had more than one, but Tom was way ahead of us as usual. He looked over at us and said, “Now, listen you guys, I wanna tell you about leadership. You all think you are pretty sharp. And at the end of the day you leave the company thinking you’ve got everything in great shape. All the rifles are accounted for, no troops are AWOL, everyone has made bed check, and you’ve had a good day of training. You think everything is squared away. You’re patting yourselves on the back. Then, in the middle of the night, when no one is looking, things get bad screwed up. The next morning you discover a fight had broken out, four windows are broken, two guys are in the hospital, one is missing, a jeep is gone, and the MPs are there waiting for you. You know what? You just suck it up and get started again. It’s a new day in which to excel.”
I had many mornings like that over the next fifty years. We all do. Problems come with just being alive, and even more come with responsibility. When they come, you just suck it up and get started again. You are never caught up. I’ve lived by the proposition that solving problems is what leaders do. The day you are not solving problems or are not up to your butt in problems is probably a day you are no longer leading. If your desk is clean and no one is bringing you problems, you should be very worried. It means that people don’t think you can solve them or don’t want to hear about them. Or, far worse, it means they don’t think you care. Either way it means your followers have lost confidence in you and you are no longer their leader, no matter what your rank or the title on your
door.
So go walk around and look for a problem; you will find some.
Don’t stop there. Try to instill a problem-solving attitude in your subordinates and staff.
In 1973, I was a battalion commander in Korea. One day I lit into all my commanders and senior sergeants about problems that kept popping up with the troops. I didn’t think my leaders were watching and listening closely enough to the troops, and I let them know I wasn’t happy. Later that afternoon I was taking my customary walk through the battalion area. As I came around the back of a Quonset hut, I heard SSG Walker, one of my best noncommissioned officers (NCOs), talking to his platoon in formation. It went something like this: “Now listen up! I got chewed out this morning by the CO about your problems. That ain’t gonna happen again. Now, if any of you clowns got a problem I want you to fall out and meet me in my hootch to tell me what it’s all about and I’m gonna solve it right now. Any questions?” I shook my head, laughing. SSG Walker’s troops seldom had problems he didn’t know about.
I’m a restless guy. I like to move. I don’t like spending long periods of time at my desk. In all my assignments, from lieutenant to Secretary of State, I always spent time going on walkabout, as our Australian friends call it. Sometimes I would wander around with no particular route in mind, and would show up in unexpected places—the State Department boiler room, for example, or the Pentagon Police Station. In my commands, I sometimes wandered where the spirit moved me and sometimes I followed precise paths through troop areas at predictable times. Junior officers, NCOs, and troops knew when and where they could ambush me with their problems. I found out things that would never or not easily flow through the staff or up the chain of command.
I followed up on every problem I got, but did it in a way that didn’t undercut the chain of command. I tried to make sure my subordinates knew not to be threatened by my roaming around, and I gave them first shot at solving the problem . . . unless they were the problem.
Problems have to be solved, not managed. You can’t get away with burying them, minimizing them, reorganizing around them, softening them, or assigning blame somewhere outside your responsibility. You have to make real and effective changes. You can’t fool a GI, you can’t fool a floor worker, and you can’t fool a store cashier. They know when something is wrong, and they know it first. They know when someone is not a good follower, not getting the job done. They are waiting for you to find out and do something about it. If you don’t, they will start slacking off. If you don’t see it, or having seen it, don’t care enough to do something, why should they care about you? Good followers who know you care not only do a good job, they take care of you.
There is a very old story from the days before Amtrak when we had passenger railroads all over the country. One day the president of the New York Central Railroad got an outraged letter from an irate passenger who’d taken a sleeper from New York City to Buffalo. The bed was full of bedbugs. Within a week, the passenger got a profusely apologetic letter from the president. “We greatly value your patronage,” it said. “We promise to have the problem fixed.” The passenger was momentarily satisfied . . . until he read the handwritten note from the president to his secretary that had slipped out of the envelope. It said: “Send this jerk the ‘bedbug letter.’ ”
I have thrown a lot of unsigned letters into my outbox over the years. “Solve the problem,” I’ve told my staffs again and again. “I don’t do bedbug letters.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Where on the Battlefield?
Shortly after I became Secretary of State, I received an insightful—and surprising—letter from Ambassador George Kennan, the Grand Old Man of American Diplomacy. I had never met Ambassador Kennan, but I knew him as the most highly regarded, influential, and prophetic American diplomat of the last century. A letter from Kennan was like a report from the burning bush by the Moses of diplomats. When I opened it I expected wise commentary on the great geostrategic issues of the day. Instead, he gave me three pages of heartfelt advice about my new job.
Though then ninety-seven (he died, aged 101, in 2005), he could still produce clear, succinct, powerfully argued prose. As if I needed it, he began by establishing his credentials—oldest living member of the original Foreign Service of 1925–75; seventy-five years of foreign affairs experience as a diplomat and historian; protégé of George Marshall; one of the chief architects of the plan that bears Marshall’s name; and author of the famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow, which laid the foundation of the containment policy that shaped America’s strategy toward the Soviet Union until it collapsed. Kennan was a man of strong opinions and a speaker of hard, unpalatable truths, a lone voice driven more than once into the wilderness. He was always revered, but not always listened to.
After his personal history came the heart of the letter, which started with a reminder of the Founding Fathers’ intention in the years after our nation’s birth regarding the two principal duties of the Secretary of State. The first was to function as the President’s most intimate and authoritative advisor on all aspects of American foreign policy. The second was to exercise administrative control over the State Department and the Foreign Service. He then cut to the chase: you can’t properly perform either of these duties if you are constantly running around the world in your airplane. Recent Secretaries of State, in his view, had been spending too much time flying to other countries for face-to-face meetings with foreign leaders and dignitaries. The role of the Secretary of State is principal foreign policy advisor to the President, not highest-ranking roving ambassador. Surely modern communications made it possible to conduct diplomacy without flying off to meetings all over the world. He had no quarrel with brief travel away from Washington when official duty required it. But absences should be held to a minimum and avoided when suitable alternatives were available.
The problem of Secretaries traveling too much, he continued, was not limited to questions about his presence or absence in Washington. Ambassadors are the President’s representatives to the other nations of the world—the official, institutional, government-to-government links between countries. Because he is there every day, the ambassador’s position should be enhanced as the main channel of diplomatic activity. The too-frequent arrival of the Secretary and assorted special envoys tends to undercut that role. Why spend time with the ambassador when you can persuade the Secretary to drop by?
Well, the Kennan letter pretty much matched the way I wanted to approach the job, and I embraced its recommendations. In my four years as Secretary I traveled a great deal, but not as much as some of my predecessors and nowhere near as much as my successors. Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton set world records.
For some unknown reason, the media, led by the New York Times, started clocking my frequent flyer miles. I didn’t travel enough, they claimed. I should be making more waves out there in the world rather than spending so much time in Washington or at the UN headquarters in New York.
None of them answered the obvious question: Is this trip really necessary? What national purpose is served by having me out there? And none asked me if I might have good reasons for remaining in Washington.
Truth is, in my first year I traveled to thirty-seven countries and logged 149,000 miles . . . not exactly hiding in a bunker.
For years I’ve been a frequent traveler. Even today I’m on the road as much as 50 percent of the time. But I don’t long to travel. Years ago travel lost any glamour it may have had. I travel for work, not for pleasure. Any trip I take has to be necessary. It has to have a purpose and a function. I am not by nature a good tourist; I’ve seen most of the world’s sights that I’ve wanted to see. When I was Secretary, I met with leaders, visited schools, talked to kids, and was a spectator at cultural events, but I seldom lingered to tour and shop. I used telephones, the then-newfangled email system, and cell phones to stay in touch with my foreign counterparts around the world. I attended every NATO and European Union meeting, every official gathering of A
sian leaders, every Organization of American States meeting, and made more trips to Africa than any of my predecessors.
In fact, during my four years as Secretary some of the biggest problems and decisions made back in D.C. occurred when I was twelve hours away in some hotel overseas. I was in Peru on 9/11. I was in Asia when important decisions were made concerning our detention and interrogation policies. I wish I had been in Washington at such times.
My way of managing my time and travel is not the only way. Other Secretaries may have the better argument. Today more frequent overseas travel may be a better and more appropriate use of a Secretary’s time than watching over State Department business in Washington. The presence of the Secretary in other countries shows the flag in a very special way. This in itself can be as important as private meetings or attending conferences. The world has changed since the eighteenth century. Travel between countries now takes hours, not weeks or months. Face-to-face presence is easy. We all have to adapt to the age we live in. One could argue that Kennan was trying to bring back to life a vanished age.
There is no single best way to do the job. Every Secretary and, for that matter, every leader has to make a judgment about where to focus his efforts.
The right answer for a Secretary of State is, of course, to balance the requirements to participate in international forums, maintain bilateral comity with other nations, and be present to run a large department and serve the President. Deputies, assistants, staff, and communications help, but the leader can only be physically in one place at a time. And physical presence trumps electronic presence.