21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (24 page)

4.
Ignore your critics and always do what’s right
. The most memorable statement of character Theodore Roosevelt ever made was in a speech called “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910. This passage of the speech has come to be known as “The Man in the Arena”:

T.R. lived his life in the arena. He was complete in all Seven Sides of Leadership, and he excelled in the side called character.

In July 1918, Theodore Roosevelt and his wife, Edith, received the news that their twenty-one-year-old son, Quentin, a flyer in France, had been shot down and killed behind German lines. It was a devastating blow to T.R., who had suffered many sorrows over the years. One morning, not long after T.R. received the news, a servant overheard Roosevelt in his grief, murmuring the boyhood nickname of his late son—“Poor Quinikins. Poor Quinikins.”

On the night of January 5, 1919, less than six months after his son’s death, T.R. experienced breathing trouble. He called his doctor, who came to the Roosevelt home and treated him. The former president felt a little better and went to bed.

“Please put out the light, James,” T.R. said to his valet. Those were his last words.

He had evaded bullets during a Montana bar fight and while charging up San Juan Hill. He had survived a would-be assassin’s bullet outside a Milwaukee hotel. But at just sixty years of age, he succumbed to a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in his lung. He died peacefully in his sleep.
¹⁷

Vice President Thomas R. Marshall said, “Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight.”
¹⁸
It’s true. Death would have had a fight on its hands—because Death is a bully. And battling bullies was in Roosevelt’s character.

COMPETENCE

T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON

The Competent Polymath

Some men are born for the public. Nature, by fitting them for the service of the human race on a broad scale, has stamped them with the evidences of her destination and their duty
.

T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON

D
uring his eight years as America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson had a retreat home built at Poplar Forest, a plantation he had inherited in 1773. Poplar Forest was located about a hundred miles from his home at Monticello. After his presidency, Monticello became an attraction for sightseers, so Jefferson often sought refuge in his Poplar Forest retreat.

It took Jefferson three days to make the hundred-mile journey by carriage, and he would stay in simple country inns along the way. The innkeepers and the former president greeted each other as old friends, and the people along the way referred to him simply as “Squire.”

On one occasion, while traveling alone between Monticello and Poplar Forest, Jefferson stopped at Ford’s Tavern for the night. He passed the evening by the fire with a stranger, a clergyman. If they introduced themselves, they apparently only exchanged first names, because the clergyman didn’t realize he was speaking with the former president of the United States.

As they chatted, the clergyman mentioned some innovative mechanical operations he’d seen. Jefferson was familiar with the mechanical principles involved, and the clergyman became convinced (as he later told others) that this man was a professional mechanical engineer.

Their conversation turned to agriculture—and the clergyman decided that this stranger must be quite an accomplished farmer. Then the conversation turned to the clergyman’s own area of expertise, religion. As they talked, the clergyman decided his companion must have been a clergyman himself, though it wasn’t clear what denomination he belonged to.

The clergyman was curious about this stranger who seemed to be an expert in so many fields of knowledge. After Jefferson retired to his room, the clergyman asked the innkeeper the identity of the man.

“What,” said the innkeeper, “don’t you know the Squire? That was Mr. Jefferson.”

“Not
President
Jefferson?”

The innkeeper confirmed that, yes, the clergyman had just spent the evening with the third president of the United States and the drafter of the Declaration of Independence. That clergyman was Reverend Charles Clay, also known as Parson Clay of Bedford, Virginia. The next morning, Reverend Clay introduced himself to the former president, and they became friends and exchanged a number of letters over the years that followed.
¹

This incident illustrates the amazing competence of Thomas Jefferson. He had a depth of knowledge and experience in many spheres of human endeavor. His mastery of so many subjects contributed to his leadership ability. Competence is the fifth of the Seven Sides of Leadership, and the competence of Thomas Jefferson stands out as his most distinctive leadership trait.

In December 1962, President John F. Kennedy hosted a gathering of Nobel Prize winners at the White House. In his welcoming remarks, he honored the Nobel laureates as the most distinguished gathering of intellects to have dined at the White House, “with the possible exception of when Mr. Jefferson dined here alone.”
²

In 1948, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. of Harvard University surveyed fifty-five distinguished historians and asked them to rank the American presidents in order of their greatness. He repeated that survey in 1962, surveying an even larger number of historians.
³
In 1996, his son, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. repeated the poll, surveying thirty-two leading historians. In all three surveys, Thomas Jefferson ranked among the top five greatest presidents of all time.
⁴

Washington Post
columnist George Will offers an even more exalted assessment of Thomas Jefferson:

Widely considered one of the most important thinkers of the Enlightenment Age, Jefferson was a polymath—a person with knowledge and expertise that spanned many different subjects. True polymaths are rare and provide a special kind of competency, the ability to draw upon “cross-matrix” or “interdisciplinary” insight. There’s a saying that “to a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail.” A polymath like Jefferson has a huge intellectual toolbox to draw upon and is better equipped to solve problems that don’t respond well to hammering.

Jefferson was keenly interested in the arts, sciences, philosophy, history, literature, religion, and politics. Though never formally trained as an architect, he studied architecture from books. This self-taught expert became one of our nation’s most important architects in the classical tradition.

Jefferson was fluent in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish
before
he entered college. His language skills served him well as an ambassador and statesman. Though not a good public speaker, his writing skills qualified him to be the “great communicator” of the revolutionary era. His extraordinary mix of talents, knowledge, and skills made him the competent leader he was.

Effective leaders start with an inspiring vision; then they communicate their vision to others, motivate their followers with good people skills, validate their leadership role by their good character, and inspire confidence through their competence as leaders. As Warren Bennis observes, “The leader hasn’t simply practiced his vocation or profession. He’s mastered it…. Mastery, absolute competence, is mandatory for a leader.”
⁶

A leader of competence is able to function at a very high level and take the organization to increasingly higher levels of success. Competence is not a static condition, but a measure of continual growth and dynamic learning, both as a human being and a leader. People readily grant the authority of leadership to those who demonstrate competence; any sign of incompetence causes that authority to evaporate. An aura of competence is essential to your authority to lead.

“Competence goes beyond words,” observes leadership expert John C. Maxwell. “It’s the leader’s ability to say it, plan it, and do it in such a way that others know that you know how—and know that they want to follow you.”
⁷

Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, the third of ten children born to Peter and Jane Jefferson. Peter passed along to Thomas his knowledge of surveying, agriculture, and horsemanship. He died when Thomas was fourteen. Thomas inherited five thousand acres of land (including Monticello), and a number of slaves from his father.

In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson recalled that, at age nine, he was sent to a small private boarding school where his teacher, a Scottish clergyman named Reverend William Douglas, taught him “the rudiments of the Latin and Greek languages [and] taught me the French.” When he was fourteen, he was taught by “the Reverend Mr. Maury, a correct classical scholar, with whom I continued two years.”
⁸

In the spring of 1760, at the age of sixteen, Jefferson began his studies at William and Mary College, where he was mentored and instructed by a brilliant man named Dr. William Small. It’s impossible to overestimate the impact of Dr. Small on Jefferson’s life. Through his influence, Jefferson discovered the writings of the British empiricists—Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke.

Dr. Small was personally acquainted with such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, Erasmus Darwin (the English physician and grandfather of Charles Darwin), Scottish inventor James Watt, theologian John Ash, poet Anna Seward, and British abolitionist Thomas Day. In his autobiography, Jefferson said that Dr. Small’s impact was life-changing: