Read 21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence Online
Authors: Pat Williams
21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (29 page)
I listened, and I didn’t volunteer anything because, after all, my war was over in Europe and it wasn’t up to me. But I was getting more and more depressed just thinking about it. Then he [Stimson] asked for my opinion, so I told him I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon. Well…the old gentleman got furious. And I can see how he would. After all, it had been his responsibility to push for all the huge expenditure to develop the bomb, which of course he had a right to do, and
was
right to do. Still, it was an awful problem.
10
America dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, then dropped a second on August 9, 1945. The surrender of the Empire of Japan on September 2, 1945, brought World War II to a close.
EADERSHIP
L
ESSONS FROM A
C
ONFIDENT
, C
OMPETENT
L
EADER
In 1948, Eisenhower accepted a position as president of Columbia University. In December 1950, he accepted an appointment as supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He retired from active service as a general in the army on May 31, 1952 so he could run for president. He was inaugurated president of the United States on January 20, 1953, and served two terms, from 1953 until 1961. I could write volumes about Ike’s presidential years, and I haven’t even touched on them. But the example he set in his military career is rich in leadership lessons:
1.
To learn competence, practice being decisive
. The fate of great nations and countless lives depended on Ike’s lonely D-Day decision. Where did he find the strength to make that decision? The answer may sound paradoxical, but it’s true: He learned decision making by making decisions.
With every decision you make, the decision-making process gets easier. Every time you make a good decision, your confidence ratchets up. And every time you make a bad decision, you learn how to fix it with another decision and go on. As your responsibilities increase, the magnitude of your decisions grows—and so does your confidence.
Eisenhower observed, “Without confidence, enthusiasm, and optimism in the command, victory would scarcely be obtainable.”
11
To obtain victory in all your leadership arenas, build your decision-making competence by increasing your confidence. And confidence comes from doing.
2.
Pay your dues
. Douglas MacArthur knew that Dwight Eisenhower had the makings of a great leader. He said so in an early fitness report. Yet MacArthur held back Eisenhower’s career and prevented him from being promoted. Ike did his job without complaint. Even while his career was stalled, he was building his competence. One of his most important leadership lessons was learning how to deal with a prima donna like MacArthur. If he could endure seven years under Douglas MacArthur, dealing with de Gaulle or Churchill would be a cinch. Ike paid his dues and earned his leadership authority the hard way.
3.
Take on tough challenges
. In early 1942, General George Marshall appointed Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower to the War Plans Division, where he was placed in charge of preparing invasion strategies. Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower probably would not have felt competent to make the D-Day decision. He needed to spend time mapping strategies. Then he had to get out in the field and take on the decision-making responsibility for the invasions of Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy. Each job tested him in new ways; each job was a little harder than the one before. Every new challenge built his competence and boosted his confidence.
When the time came to launch Operation Overlord, he was already in the habit of making momentous, life-and-death decisions. D-Day was his biggest challenge by far—but by the time he reached that stage in his career, he was up to it.
4.
Build trust in your leadership through personal caring
. In the lead-up to D-Day, Eisenhower visited his troops on a regular basis. He wanted to make sure that when those brave soldiers hit the beaches of Normandy, they had confidence in themselves, confidence in their mission, and confidence in the leaders who sent them there. If the soldiers had any doubt in themselves or their leaders, the mission could be lost.
Eisenhower was a “soldier’s general” who loved spending time with his troops. “I belonged with troops,” he said. “With them I was always happy.”
12
And in a wartime speech at the British Royal Military Academy, he said: “You must know every single one of your men…. You must be their leader, their father, their mentor.”
13
The more you genuinely care for the people you lead, the more they will trust you—and the farther they will follow you.
5.
Remind your people of the cause they fight for
. Instead of saying, “Do what I say,” give them a compelling reason to follow you. Stephen Ambrose gives us this glimpse into Eisenhower’s thinking:
Discipline and training “lie at the foundation of every success in war,” he explained to a friend, but morale was just as important. In the prewar Army it was axiomatic that morale came from
esprit de corps
. Eisenhower still believed this, but he now realized that something more was needed. The battlefields of Tunisia and Sicily and Italy had made a deep impression upon him. So had talking with the men at the front and seeing the conditions under which they lived and fought. Eisenhower had decided that for an army to have morale “there must be a deep-seated conviction in every individual’s mind that he is fighting for a cause worthy of any sacrifice he may make.”
14
To those who think that leadership requires us to scream and belittle our followers, Ike says, “You do not lead by hitting people over the head—that’s assault, not leadership.”
15
Eisenhower didn’t assault or insult; he inspired.
As the troops boarded their transports for the Normandy invasion, each soldier was handed a sheet of paper, the Order of the Day signed by General Eisenhower. It read, in part:
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you….
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
Stephen Ambrose interviewed many soldiers who received a copy of Eisenhower’s Order of the Day for the D-Day invasion. He recalled, “I cannot count the number of times I’ve gone into the den of a veteran of D-Day to do an interview and seen it framed and hanging in a prominent place.”
16
That piece of paper told those men what they were fighting for, and Ike’s order sustained them through the battle.
6.
Decide firmly, and don’t look back
. People want to follow confident, competent leadership. If they sense in you the slightest doubt about the decision you’ve made, they’ll have second thoughts about following you. Ike once said, “History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.”
17
Competent leaders make confident decisions; then they look straight ahead to the successful outcome of that decision.
Ike’s wife, Mamie, once asked him how he summoned the nerve to make the D-Day decision. He told her, “I had to. If I let anybody, any of my commanders, think that maybe things weren’t going to work out, that I was afraid, they’d be afraid too. I didn’t dare. I had to have the confidence. I had to make them believe that everything was going to work.”
18
The next time you face a big decision, first gather your facts, then listen to your intuition, and finally take a moment to remember Eisenhower’s lonely D-Day decision. Then decide—and don’t look back.
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it
.
D
WIGHT
D. E
ISENHOWER
BOLDNESS
R
OSA
P
ARKS
Tired of Giving In
I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear
.
R
OSA
P
ARKS
A
lot of people have Rosa Parks all wrong.
Take, for example, the
New York Times
. After Mrs. Parks died in October 2005, the
Times
published a story about the mourners at the Capitol rotunda, where her body lay in state. The story referred to Rosa Parks as “the accidental matriarch of the civil rights movement.”
1
Accidental? There was nothing accidental about Rosa Parks and her leadership role in the civil rights movement. Long before that December day in 1955 when she refused to surrender her seat on the Cleveland Avenue bus, Rosa Parks was fighting for civil rights. Throughout her life, Rosa Parks was a role model of bold leadership.
That’s why I placed Rosa Parks first in the section on the Sixth Side of Leadership: boldness. Rosa Parks epitomized bold leadership. Boldness means committing yourself to action, confronting danger, enduring hardship, and withstanding opposition in the pursuit of a worthwhile goal. There was nothing accidental about the way Rosa Parks lived her life.
She once told an interviewer, “I did not get on the bus to get arrested. I got on the bus to go home.”
2
That’s true—but long before the incident on the bus, she had been fighting for the right to vote. She had raised money to defend the Scottsboro Boys (nine black Alabama teens who were railroaded on rape charges in 1931). A dozen years before the bus incident, she had been serving as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. And she had taken part in organizing activism following the murders of teenager Emmett Till and activists George W. Lee and Lamar Smith.
“The
accidental
matriarch of the civil rights movement”? Rosa Parks was a bold, determined civil rights leader. Her actions were no accident. She
led
.
TANDING
U
P TO
P
HARAOH
Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, where Booker T. Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute. For as long as she could remember, Rosa McCauley was drawn to the church and to her deep Christian faith. “The church,” she once said, “with its musical rhythms and echoes of Africa, thrilled me when I was young…. God is everything to me.”
3
Raised in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Rosa loved to sing hymns and memorize Bible verses. In her book
Quiet Strength
, she recalled:
My belief in Christ was developed early in life. I was baptized when I was a baby in the African Methodist Episcopal church…. I was never pressed, against my will, to go to church—I always wanted to go. I enjoyed dressing up and meeting people. During the service, I paid close attention to the minister’s words, the prayer, and the other speakers….
Daily devotions played an important part in my childhood. Every day before supper, and before we went to services on Sundays, my grandmother would read the Bible to me, and my grandfather would pray. We even had devotions before going to pick cotton in the fields.
4
The same scriptures that brought young Rosa McCauley such peace and joy also gave her a sense of worth and dignity, and taught her to take a bold stance against injustice. “From my upbringing and the Bible,” she said, “I learned people should stand up for rights, just as the children of Israel stood up to the Pharaoh.”
5
Rosa’s father, James McCauley, was an itinerant carpenter, builder, and bricklayer. Her mother, Leona Edwards McCauley, was a schoolteacher who blessed Rosa with a love of learning. Leona was an admirer of Booker T. Washington, and she kept two books in a place of prominence in the house: the Bible and Booker T. Washington’s
Up from Slavery
. Leona preached Washington’s values of hard work, thrift, and moral living to young Rosa. She also taught Rosa that the segregationist state motto of Alabama—
Audemus jura nostra defendere:
We dare defend our rights—can also stand as a statement of African-American pride.