A Passion for Leadership (6 page)

Most new bosses—both in business and in the public sector—who want to change things don't make much of an effort to reach out to these folks. Especially in very large organizations, the leader is usually a remote figure seen at ceremonies or special occasions. One summer at the CIA, an upper-echelon boss who rarely visited our office was spotted in the vicinity. One office wag loudly commented that because the boss was visiting us, “it must be Christmas.” College students, like their contemporaries in the military, are especially skeptical about the intentions of older people and cynical about authority figures.

At A&M, I became a sort of ombudsman for students, lending my personal support to individuals when I believed the bureaucracy was being unfair or too inflexible (with grades, fees, and university rules, among other issues). One August, I voided three thousand parking tickets given out on freshman move-in day by overly zealous campus police. I was persuaded by a group of students not to convert their small residence hall into offices, and I agreed to student pleas to delay for a year a similar move involving another dorm. There were numerous other such actions.

I gave student leaders a lot of my time at A&M. I invited the president of the student body to attend all my regular staff meetings—like the speaker of the faculty senate—and I routinely went before the student senate to answer any and all questions. I showed up at virtually any event student leaders suggested. I appointed students to every university search committee, task force, and council. They became strong advocates for a number of my initiatives for change, including especially the push for greater diversity.

I think my approach to winning the confidence of students worked, because when I left the university to become secretary of defense, ten thousand of them turned out to say good-bye.

My chief of staff at Texas A&M was a young lawyer, Rodney McClendon. Rodney brought many skills to the position, but one special asset was that he knew—by name—nearly every staff person at A&M, whether secretaries, members of the grounds crew, people in food services, or custodians. When I would walk across campus with him, he would make sure to introduce every one of these folks to me when our paths crossed. Perhaps more important, he made sure I was aware of issues that affected them, their concerns, and their complaints. He arranged for their leaders to meet with me to discuss problems. Rodney also kept me informed about key events in the community in which many of these employees participated, and I would often attend them. Through his efforts, I was able to establish a connection to those who played a critical role in the life of the university even if they were on the lowest rungs of the rank ladder.

On every visit to a military post or base around the world, and on every visit to the front lines, I would have breakfast or lunch with enlisted troops, noncommissioned officers, and junior- and middle-grade officers. In these get-togethers, too, I learned a lot, but they—like the other actions I have described—were also calculated gestures of respect. From my actions to help wounded warriors and their families, to get needed lifesaving equipment to the war zones, and more, the troops came to have confidence I had their backs—that I was truly there for them.

I also would regularly visit offices in the bowels of the Pentagon that no previous secretary of defense had ever seen. I visited workers in the mail room, the loading dock, the communications center. I attended the morning briefing for the Pentagon police. I visited offices of professionals many links down the chain who did critical work but never saw the boss. They were always forewarned of my visit to ensure that most who worked there were present. I stayed just long enough for each person to tell me briefly about his or her job, to have a photograph taken with each employee, to shake hands, and to thank them for their work. Such visits have an impact.

My efforts as director to reach out to lower-ranking employees at the CIA included eating lunch most of the time in the cafeteria and inviting myself to join several of them at their tables. On one occasion, this led to an embarrassing situation. I had engaged a group of young spies in a lengthy conversation, and during the course of it I dismissed my security detail, telling them I would just return to the office on my own. I had forgotten that there was a security guard post between the cafeteria and the main building and, as director, I had no identification badge. The young guard on duty properly refused to let me pass. He did agree to let me use his phone, and I called my office to arrange a rescue. The senior officers on my detail rushed to the guard station and escorted me through. As they did so, I overheard one of them talking about reporting the guard to his superiors for treating me disrespectfully. I turned on the man, telling him in no uncertain terms the guard had done exactly the right thing, and if anybody called his superior, it would be me to commend him for doing his duty.

The thinking behind the steps I took to meet and cultivate support among employees at every level is universally applicable, even if my exact steps aren't. Other organizations offer different opportunities to gain the support of the people in them. These gestures are all a part of leadership, a means of connecting with those you seek—and need—as partners.

The wise leader's strategy for change must include a concentrated campaign to make as many friends and allies as possible as early as possible before he starts taking actions that will inevitably make enemies. To be an effective leader, one must demonstrate from the start an understanding of and respect for the role and views of the career employees in an organization and be clear that the new boss intends to make them participants and partners in reforming the place. This is the best possible preparation of the bureaucratic battlefield.

As mundane as it might seem, another important aspect of a new leader's strategy from her first days should be to quickly seize control of her calendar. No matter the size of an organization, a boss's time is her most precious commodity. It is her “capital,” and she only has a finite amount to spend. Every day there will be innumerable demands on a leader's time that have nothing to do with her agenda for change. Indeed, be warned: the most effective defense of every bureaucracy to keep the boss from meddling, interfering, or changing the status quo is to fill up her calendar with meetings.

A leader must make time to think and to plan—to strategize.

Leading reform of bureaucracies requires constant attention and effort. A leader attempting transformational change must dedicate herself to the endeavor wholeheartedly. During the waking hours, a leader must always be thinking about what she is trying to do and how to do it. Nothing must be left to chance, and hardly anything is unimportant. For every problem and every challenge that arises, the leader needs to formulate a strategy on how to deal with it, eliminate it, or use it. Before any meeting, press conference or public presentation, I was always calculating how I could advance the reform agenda. Reforming bureaucracies is so complex and support for change often so tentative that loose ends have the potential to unravel the entire effort.

All this strategizing takes time, and it is a common failing of leaders of big institutions that they get so trapped in day-to-day issues, meetings, and travel, they neglect their own agenda—change. I always tried to set aside an hour or so every day to work on
my
agenda. In the normal course of affairs, the demands of others filled up most of my day. If I wasn't careful, routine matters would consume the entire day. But during that daily “quiet time,” I could think about what progress was being made, what the problems were and how to tackle them, how various individuals were performing and whether that was good enough, and think through strategies for implementing the change agenda.

I mentioned earlier that a new leader's strategy needs to include carefully choosing his lieutenants. This is important because he must delegate leadership and implementation of specific initiatives on his agenda for change whenever possible. Those surrogates must be chosen carefully to ensure that they can deliver results that accomplish the established goals on time and then can lead the effort to gain acceptance and, where necessary, approval.

However, on some initiatives, a leader must lead the effort personally, must be seen doing it—and must take the time to do so. Most of the challenges I faced at the Defense Department were rooted in a structure so complex, cutting across so many organizations, that no one person or entity below the secretary had the authority or resources to solve most problems, including getting the right equipment to the front lines and canceling major programs. Accordingly, more than at either the CIA or A&M, I had to be personally and routinely involved in virtually every consequential initiative and change on my agenda. As an example, in selecting the thirty-odd major acquisition programs to cut in early 2009, I chaired forty meetings over a period of just two months. I met with the task force charged with overseeing the production of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) armored vehicles every two weeks; the same was true of most other initiatives related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the chairs of the task forces were exceptionally able, it routinely required my personal involvement to keep the bureaucracy from smothering their efforts. When we set out in 2010 to reduce projected Pentagon overhead spending—by $180 billion, as I mentioned earlier—between mid-May and mid-December I chaired sixty meetings ranging in length from one to eight hours.

The situation was completely different at A&M and the CIA. In both places, I made wide use of task forces and councils, but other than periodic updates I spent little time with them until their work was complete. The important thing in these circumstances is to prepare a strong and detailed charter for the work of such groups and then to choose men and women to lead them who not only agree with the overall agenda for change (if not the particulars; after all, you do want creativity and give-and-take) but also by virtue of their institutional role and personal reputation can win wide support for those changes. Also, in both places, I assigned my special assistant at the CIA and my chief of staff at A&M responsibility for monitoring the task forces and reporting to me whether they were on track and coming to conclusions compatible with my agenda.

A transformational leader needs to set priorities in his reform agenda, decide how to sequence his initiatives, and develop creative strategies for change well suited to the specific institution he heads. One size does not fit all. In doing these things, a leader is able to shape the bureaucratic battlefield in ways that significantly enhance the chances for success.

The greatest American presidents have three or four major accomplishments for which they are remembered. If a leader is too ambitious, he will dissipate his energy and focus, lose momentum, and fail. Within the broader agenda for change, a leader must choose his priorities with great care.

Too many leaders give too little thought to which change initiatives ought to be launched early and which should wait. When a leader initially surveys the bureaucratic battlefield, he needs to determine which of his initiatives for change are going to be greeted with enthusiasm and broad support and which are going to provoke the greatest opposition. Whenever possible, the popular changes should be made first and the tougher ones later. By successfully effecting changes that are broadly welcome, a leader creates a positive climate for further change. In doing so, he generates political capital and credibility for when he takes on the controversial or more difficult issues.

This worked especially well for me at A&M. I felt strongly about creating a new undergraduate degree that would reflect twenty-first-century reality by allowing a student, with a faculty adviser's oversight and approval, to design a degree program that cut across multiple colleges and disciplines. Because this kind of degree was new and nontraditional in that it involved several colleges and no specific major, there was substantial faculty skepticism. So I waited nearly three years to launch it, until I had built up considerable capital with the faculty by, among other things, implementing the program to hire hundreds more faculty and beginning construction of several hundred million dollars' worth of new academic facilities. I named Elsa Murano, dean of the agriculture school, and Jerry Strawser, dean of the business school, to lead the task force studying the proposal and added as members several former speakers of the faculty senate who I knew would be supportive. It was still a tough slog, but ultimately the degree program was approved.

To achieve especially challenging goals, a leader should always be prepared to tailor his reform strategy to the culture of the institution. This requires investing much thought in tactical creativity—as well as unorthodox approaches and the element of surprise—in developing strategies for implementation.

My determination to increase diversity at A&M required just such a tailored, unorthodox strategy. While the number of minority students there had grown over the years, the percentages significantly lagged the changing demography of the state. I was determined to change this, but I knew I had to shape the initiative carefully to win broad support among conservative former (and current) students, the board of regents, and others important to the university. More than a few among them saw no value in greater on-campus diversity and certainly no value in spending money to achieve it. So, my strategy had to be designed specifically for Texas A&M and its culture.

In December 2003, a few months after the Supreme Court approved limited use of affirmative action in college admissions, I announced a number of measures we would take to increase minority recruitment and enrollment. We would establish a statewide network of “prospective student centers”—permanent recruitment, admissions, and financial offices (with bilingual staff) in predominantly minority areas of major Texas cities and along the border with Mexico. I announced twenty-four hundred new four-year scholarships (six hundred per year) of $5,000 per year for first-generation college students who came from homes with $40,000 or less in family income. For families at that income level, we could stack other scholarships and grants so those students could go to A&M virtually free. Demographically, about two-thirds of those scholarships would go to minorities, the remainder to poor whites.