21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (15 page)

Though leaders
must
delegate authority, leaders
cannot
delegate responsibility. You should never say, “I take full responsibility—but my underlings are to blame.” A leader is always responsible for the results. You are responsible to set benchmarks, maintain communication, and assess performance. When things go wrong on your watch, you are to blame, like it or not.

Give your people permission to make decisions—and mistakes. And count on it: they’ll make some doozies. A wise leader will let them learn from mistakes. If you punish mistakes, you’ll punish initiative and imagination. Unleash the talent of your people, and you’ll be amazed at what they achieve.

People Skill No. 4: Be loyal
. Always stand up for the people you lead. Critique their performance in private, but always defend them in public. You and your people rise or fall as a team. Be loyal to your people even when they let you down.

People Skill No. 5: Manage conflict
. Great leaders face conflict squarely, resolve it fairly, and extract the lessons and benefits of it. Peter Drucker’s first law of decision making states, “One does not make a decision without disagreements.”
¹⁸
Let your people speak their mind and give them a chance to persuade you. Then you, the leader, must have the final say. Make sure everyone buys into your decision, agree or disagree. People have a right to their opinions, but they also have an obligation to implement your leadership decisions.

People Skill No. 6: Level with your people
. One of “Sam’s Rules for Building a Business” is “Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them.”
¹⁹
To lead people, you have to level with them. Great leaders speak the truth.

People Skill No. 7: Practice Sam Walton’s Ten-Foot Rule
. This is the rule he followed as a student at the University of Missouri. Whenever he was within ten feet of another person, he would speak to that person—calling them by name if he knew them. The Ten-Foot Rule is one of the cornerstones of Walmart customer service: whenever you come within ten feet of the customer, make eye contact, greet the customer with a smile, and offer assistance. Today many businesses observe the Ten-Foot Rule, but it originated with Sam Walton.

As the largest employer in the United States, Walmart has been continuously targeted by Big Labor for unionization. In 2009, the
American Prospect
, a pro-organized-labor publication, reported on Sam Walton’s opposition to a minimum wage increase in the early 1960s:

It’s true that Sam Walton opposed the federal minimum wage. But the claim that he responded with an illegal scheme to “divide his stores into individual companies” to avoid compliance is false. As Nelson Lichtenstein reports in
The Retail Revolution
, Sam Walton employed a business model in which each store was legally a stand-alone entity. He did so long before the change in the minimum wage law. This way each of his managers could invest in his own particular store and have a personal stake in the success of that store.

When the federal government more than doubled the minimum wage, Sam Walton used the
already-existing
structure of his business to avoid paying the higher wage. The courts ultimately ruled that Walmart’s decentralized structure did not exempt the company from paying the higher minimum wage. The company issued checks for back pay and penalties.
²¹

Sam Walton had sound fiscal reasons for resisting federal intrusion into his business. The federal minimum wage forces an employer to pay a store clerk in Bentonville, Arkansas, the same as a store clerk in New York City, where the cost of living is three or four times higher. Walton, who earned a degree in economics, believed market forces, not government fiat, should determine his labor costs. Still, he later regretted his opposition to the minimum wage. As he wrote in
Made in America
:

Long before he wrote those words, Walmart upgraded the compensation of its bottom-tier employees, offering profit-sharing plans and matching contributions to (401) k retirement funds. This incident was a “people skills” learning experience for Sam Walton.

Sam Walton maintained an open-door policy, which is still practiced today. He wanted everyone to know that they could take their ideas and concerns all the way to the CEO himself. Impractical? Maybe so. What if all 1.3 million Walmart employees in the United States decided to jam the CEO’s office at once? Yet somehow it has always worked.

Mr. Sam’s longtime associate, Michael Bergdahl, tells a story about Sam Walton’s open-door policy. It was told to him by a man who started as an associate in a store and went on to work for the corporate office. In those days, the corporate headquarters in Bentonville had a hallway called “executive row,” and all the executive offices literally had their doors open. “You could walk right into the executives’ offices,” this man told Bergdahl.

“I was taking a class one week at the corporate offices,” he recalled. “I wanted to get a shirt signed by Sam Walton while I was there, so I walked over to executive row.” He found that Mr. Sam was out visiting stores that day—but Sam’s executive assistant offered to get the shirt autographed for him.

The next day, this man was in the classroom when the executive assistant walked in and gave him the shirt, boldly signed by Mr. Sam. The man’s classmates ogled and envied his shirt.

“In all of my dealings with Mr. Sam,” the man concluded, “he was always accessible.”

When you are a complete leader with great people skills, your followers won’t just want to work for you—they’ll want to wear your name on their backs.

F
RANKLIN
D. R
OOSEVELT

Stricken and Strengthened

If you treat people right, they will treat you right
—
ninety percent of the time
.

F
RANKLIN
D. R
OOSEVELT

F
ranklin Delano Roosevelt was born into wealth and privilege—yet he became a hero to the poor and the working class.
FDR’S
years as president were turbulent years—the years of the Great Depression and the Second Great War. His policies defined American liberalism well into the twenty-first century. The world we live in today bears the imprint of his personality.

FDR was born on January 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, New York. Franklin’s father, James Roosevelt, was a politically well-connected businessman. Young Franklin once accompanied his father to the White House, where he was introduced to President Grover Cleveland. The president shook hands with Franklin, who was four or five at the time, and said, “I have one wish for you, little man, that you will never be President of the United States.”
¹

Roosevelt attended Groton, an Episcopal boarding school in Massachusetts, where he was influenced by Dr. Endicott Peabody, the headmaster. Peabody instilled in his students a sense of Christian duty toward people in need. Dr. Peabody officiated at the wedding of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and visited the Roosevelts at the White House.
²
As president, FDR wrote to Dr. Peabody, saying, “More than forty years ago, you said…something about not losing boyhood ideals in later life…. Your words are still with me.”
³

Roosevelt attended Harvard College, and though he didn’t excel as a student, he did become editor-in-chief of the
Harvard Crimson
. While Franklin was at Harvard, his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, was elected president of the United States.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were married in New York in 1905. Eleanor didn’t have to change her last name, because she was already a Roosevelt—Franklin’s fifth cousin once removed. Because Eleanor’s parents had passed away, her uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, gave the bride away.

FDR made a bid for the New York State Senate in 1910, running as a Democrat in a Republican district. An aggressive campaigner, he won the seat. He campaigned for Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and was rewarded with an appointment as assistant secretary of the navy.

In 1920, Roosevelt ran for vice president as the running mate of Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, but Cox was beaten by Warren G. Harding. After the defeat, FDR looked forward to spending the summer of 1921 at Campobello Island in New Brunswick. By this time Franklin and Eleanor had five children (a sixth died in infancy).

The Roosevelts owned a fifteen-room waterfront home on the island. The family spent time sailing, swimming, or sunning on the beach. After a few days, Franklin came down with an apparent cold, accompanied by chills and muscle aches. He went to bed and awoke with a fever, dragging his left leg as he walked. A local doctor examined Roosevelt and said he had the flu.

The fever lingered for days, the numbness spread to both legs, and his skin became painfully sensitive. Roosevelt believed he was dying. Eleanor sent for a specialist, Dr. Robert Lovett, an orthopedic surgeon from Boston. Lovett was a leading expert on infantile paralysis—otherwise known as polio. When he examined FDR, he recognized the symptoms. He sent Franklin to New York for treatment.
⁴

One of FDR’s longtime friends was Frances Perkins (he would later appoint her secretary of labor). In her memoirs, she described how the illness impacted FDR’s character:

FDR’s grandson Curtis concluded that the paralysis “provided the one thing we all need, deep frustration, that keen sense that you cannot do everything you want to do. The only thing that mattered to FDR [before his illness]…was his political ambition, and to have it thrown in his face that it looked impossible must have entered into his soul.”
⁶
In a paradoxical way, FDR’s disability had made him stronger as a human being.

Roosevelt refused to accept that his paralysis was permanent. He underwent every known therapy, but nothing helped. He purchased a resort in Warm Springs, Georgia, as a hydrotherapy center for himself and others afflicted with polio-related paralysis.

He told friends and reporters he was improving, though it’s doubtful he believed it. He wanted to run for governor of New York, and he thought his paralysis might cost him votes. He was careful not to be photographed in his wheelchair. While there are many photographs of Roosevelt seated at his desk, there are almost no photos that show his disability.

He was elected governor of New York in the 1928 election. By 1932, the country was in the grip of the Great Depression, and President Herbert Hoover was as popular as ants at a picnic. As the popular governor of a populous state, FDR was the logical choice for the Democratic presidential nomination. At the Democratic National Convention, he told the delegates he was committed to “a new deal for the American people.”
⁷