A Passion for Leadership (9 page)

I dwell on these councils to highlight that I used the process of change and new structures at A&M to create a permanent institutional framework for policy making and shared governance. Sometimes radical action is required to tackle a tough structural and cultural problem.

Did all these councils, task forces, and working groups slow down the implementation of change? Probably. However, as I told the university community as I began my fifth year, “The results speak for themselves. During a period of dramatic changes at Texas A&M, a remarkably tranquil and productive partnership between faculty and senior administrators has emerged on the basis of mutual respect and open communication.”

There was hardly a facet of university life regarding which I did not initiate some kind of change, and the pace was breathtaking (at least by the standards of academia). Because I included so many faculty, administrators, students, and former students in the process, the changes were accepted with surprisingly little resistance and mostly endured after I left. The faculty and staff, in particular, felt the outcomes reflected their ideas, their suggestions, and their influence, and thus to a great extent they supported the changes and made them their own. Amid a whirlwind of change, broad participation in these efforts generated a sense of purpose, stability, and esprit.

At Defense, I used task forces quite differently, mainly as operational instruments to monitor implementation of my decisions on measures to support commanders and their troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially where I felt speed was critical and lives were at stake. They identified problems and logjams and brought them to me for resolution. In each of those cases, the bureaucracy either had been unwilling to move forward or was unable to do so.

When it came to budgetary and programmatic issues, I created senior-level, department-wide working groups to discuss and evaluate proposals prepared by my staff and the Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation—led by Christine Fox, a savvy leader—a group of very smart folks who serve as the secretary's personal number crunchers and bullshit detectors. Those groups, which I chaired, afforded the senior military and civilian officers frequent opportunity to debate specific ideas and make recommendations.

One option open to a leader is to form a task force made up entirely of people from outside the organization to examine a problem. Such groups can provide a different perspective, more easily propose out-of-the-box solutions, and provide credibility and independence an internal group cannot. One drawback of such panels, though, is that inside the bureaucracy they can create antibodies of resistance to their recommendations. And it is rare for an outside group to get organized, do its work, and report in a timely manner. But sometimes external credibility and the need to mollify public critics must override the drawbacks of such panels.

That was the case when I appointed an outside task force in the aftermath of the Walter Reed hospital scandal. I asked President Reagan's secretary of the army, Jack Marsh, and President Clinton's secretary of the army and veterans affairs, Togo West, to lead an examination of outpatient care for wounded warriors at Walter Reed and at other hospitals. I turned to an outside panel mainly because I thought such a group would have more credibility with the troops, the families of the wounded, Congress, and the media than a group of insiders.

When the group completed its work and I had approved virtually all of its recommendations, I appointed a follow-on internal task force to monitor implementation of my decisions—implementation, as I've made clear, being essential to leading change. Over time, the group identified other areas for improvement in the treatment of wounded warriors. Indeed, as new problems cropped up or old ones took on new forms, I decided to keep the task force in place. I had my own issues with how effectively the wounded and their families were being helped, and my regular meetings with the task force—meetings that included most of the senior military and civilian brass in the department—provided an opportunity to keep the heat on people and to ensure the problem would continue to have high-level visibility. Direct participation by any leader keeps his colleagues focused.

Similarly, after making decisions to provide the aforementioned MRAP vehicles to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as dramatically expanded intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) support, I kept active the task forces that had made the original recommendations. In the case of the MRAPs, it was to ensure quick resolution of production, funding, transport, and deployment issues—and, ultimately, to oversee development of an all-terrain variant for Afghanistan. In the case of ISR, it was to keep the pressure on elements of the Pentagon that were not as energetic in procuring these assets as I wanted. I disbanded the MRAP task force about three years after my original decision, but the ISR task force was still doing its job when I retired. Prior to that, I was briefed on a number of new ideas for detecting, disarming, or destroying improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which were being used increasingly frequently by the Taliban to attack our soldiers and marines on foot patrols. In response, I created the Counter-IED task force to identify new capabilities. It, too, was still working when I left the department.

While the ISR task force made a significant contribution in getting needed capabilities to commanders in the field, it also illustrated some of the potential problems a leader can face with such ad hoc groups. Over time, I had to change its leadership several times in search of the right chemistry. More troublesome, this task force I created to identify short-term responses to battlefield needs—delivery within a few weeks or months—spent more and more energy trying to broaden its mandate to get into long-range (multiyear) research and development projects, hired massive consultant support, and even paid to have its own “challenge coin” (a token used by military leaders to build esprit de corps and recognize superior performance, but a practice entirely inappropriate for such an ad hoc group). The task force kept fighting to become a permanent fixture with a long-term perspective in defiance of my direction to remain narrowly focused on short-term needs. It is a case study in the challenges inherent in managing ad hoc task forces. At a certain point, they need to close up shop and have their functions integrated into regular organizations and processes. I probably let that one go on too long.

Unlike the multitude of short-term task forces I created at the CIA and Texas A&M, most of those I established at Defense endured through much of my tenure as secretary, mainly because there was no other entity within the department through which I could continuously exert direct pressure on the entire bureaucracy to quickly meet the needs of the commanders and troops. I typically followed the recommendations of the task forces. One exception was whether to open to families and the media the ceremonies at Dover Air Force Base when the remains of service members killed in action were returned to the United States. That task force recommended a cautious approach, with extended outreach to veterans' groups, families, and service members. I disagreed but went along with a weeklong outreach effort, after which I simply directed opening the “dignified transfer” ceremonies to families and, with their permission, to the press.

One problem I tried to address using the normal bureaucratic process—not a task force—to assess the issue and come up with a new approach was whether to try to reduce the average medevac time in Afghanistan from two hours to one hour. The Joint Staff and others gathered numerous statistics on survival rates, medevac times, and related issues and recommended making no change in the existing standards. They concluded that changing the timeline would not materially affect survival rates, but I think underpinning their recommendation for no change was the cost and disruption associated with putting more medevac helicopters, field hospitals, and medical personnel into the country, which would be necessary steps. I responded that if I were a soldier or marine who had just been blown up, I'd want a helicopter on the way as soon as possible. I overruled the group and directed additional assets into Afghanistan to ensure medevac in an hour or less.

This issue vividly illustrates my comments earlier about what happens when you ask the normal bureaucratic structure to evaluate the need for change—in effect, to reform itself. Even if the issue at hand is elevated to a very senior level and is literally a matter of life and death, the answer is almost always that things are just fine as they are. That is what the task force led by the Joint Staff—a standing Pentagon organization of more than a thousand mostly mid- and senior-level officers from all the services working for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—did regarding medevac timing. I rejected the bureaucracy's recommendations outright. Opponents of the change were arguing the statistics; for me, it was a matter of morale and moral obligation.

Business leaders, in my opinion, do not use task forces and other such silo busters often enough. Divisions of big companies are often too much like our military services: they work together only when they must (or are forced to do so by their boss). Whether engineering, marketing, human resources, finance, different product lines or divisions, research and development, or other functions, different business units usually need to work together better than they do. As well, they can learn from one another. I have served on the board of directors of more than one company where the engineers, the financial gurus, and the marketing or sales folks didn't talk much to each other. (I'm no expert, but I think that was a problem with some of our automotive companies in the United States.) Especially in larger companies, significant change in one division or component will have consequences—usually unintended—on others. Too often, the same pyramidal, hierarchical structures, and lack of lateral communication, that pervade the public sector also negatively affect the private sector. Task forces are a tool in the leader's kit to address such problems. Also, as in the public sector, such groups are immensely useful in building personal relationships across a big organization that can only be beneficial in the long run.

So far, I have been talking about the value of task forces, councils, and working and review groups as a mechanism to develop specific measures for implementing change and increasing the odds of support within the organization—an offensive instrument for a leader. But there is another valuable purpose, particularly when a leader is confronted by an unexpected demand for change—one not on her agenda—that may involve real institutional risk. That purpose is defensive, to buy time to let passions cool and to gather information for smart decision making.

At A&M, a faculty-generated storm rose up in the fall of 2004 over the issue of a living wage for the lowest-paid university staff. While a job at the university was locally coveted because of pay, benefits, and security, there was no question those on the bottom rungs of the ladder had a real challenge making ends meet. Some eight hundred workers on campus made $9.00 an hour or less, or just shy of $19,000.00 a year. A&M's faculty was usually not broadly engaged with community issues, but this one generated quite a bit of heat. The faculty senate passed a resolution endorsing implementation of a living wage for all Texas A&M employees, a “living wage” defined as “meeting or exceeding 130% of the federal poverty level guidelines for a family of three, or $9.76 an hour plus benefits.” The faculty's concerns were legitimate, but the university was—as always—under financial pressure as our health care, energy, and other costs were rising.

To complicate the matter, there was little support for the initiative among local elected politicians, much less the governor-appointed, entirely Republican board of regents, who did not like being publicly pressured, especially on a “liberal,” faculty-driven issue. There was, as well, a considerable backlash among students, alumni, and others, who evinced little sympathy and opposed any action on the wage issue. “Screw the living wage, and too bad for the janitors if they don't like their jobs” was a representative e-mail I received.

Such sentiments notwithstanding, I wanted to show the faculty and the staff that I took the problem seriously, and I needed to cool the situation so we could look at the wage issue with facts in hand. A good leader is not going to be able to solve certain controversial problems until he can examine the issue without pressure being applied relentlessly. A leader sometimes needs to slow things down. I met with the Living Wage Coalition of the Brazos Valley, representatives from the community and faculty who were leading the effort to raise wages. Later the same day, I announced the creation of the Task Force on Wages and Benefits to review wages and benefits of lower-paid university employees and evaluate such compensation in comparison with local and statewide data, as well as with governmental guidelines and cost-of-living information. I appointed the retired dean of the business school Dr. Benton Cocanougher to chair the group, which included faculty members, administrators, a student, and representatives from both the custodial and the food services staffs.

The task force did its work while tensions abated, and with its recommendations in hand I found the money to provide a modest increase in the wages of our lowest-paid employees—not as much as the faculty senate had asked, but still a meaningful increase. This issue was not on my original agenda, but it would have been a mistake, both on the merits and in terms of my larger agenda, to politely listen to the concerns of the faculty and then do nothing. Creating the task force and appointing my closest adviser as chair demonstrated I was serious and responsive to faculty concerns but also that I intended to remain in control of handling the matter.

Similar, but far more significant, was my use of a review group as a means to win support for overturning the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” (DADT) law, which banned openly gay people from serving in the military. The review group provided the time and means to gather information crucial to effective implementation of repeal, paving the way for gays to serve openly. It also bought time for a first-ever dialogue within the military about gays in the services and time for the vast majority of service members simply to get used to the idea that change was upon them.