A Passion for Leadership (14 page)

The chief of protocol at the Pentagon has myriad responsibilities including arranging visits by foreign leaders, a wide range of ceremonies, and presidential visits. Mary Claire Murphy held the position when I became secretary, and she was a genius at it—warm, welcoming, creative, and attentive to detail. She had been doing protocol work for years and was offered a job at a major corporation to oversee its foundation and charitable efforts. It was a rare opportunity to broaden her experience and get into a field far less dependent on the political fortunes of her bosses. And so, with great reluctance, I encouraged her to take the job. How good was she? Years later, she was still being called back into service for major events—including organizing the memorial ceremony (at which the president spoke) at Fort Hood for the thirteen soldiers who were killed there.

For any leader in any business or public sector bureaucracy, blocking the advancement of his people is short-term, shortsighted thinking. If a leader's organization is seen as high performing and a place where promising people have a chance to grow and to see their careers fostered and advanced, the highest-quality individuals will want to work there. Such an office will soon acquire a reputation as a launching pad for further career success rather than a dead-end job. Believe me, a leader's own superiors will notice when a disproportionate number of highfliers seem consistently to come from one place.

Empowerment means taking care of one's subordinates in other ways as well, including bringing to their attention opportunities for professional education or broadening, as well as for advancement. Little things can mean a lot, such as including junior professionals in meetings with senior officials so they have an opportunity to demonstrate their skills or giving them face time with other leaders in the organization so they get known. One of the many reasons I admired Michèle Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy who worked for me during Obama's first term, was her determined effort to enhance the performance, career, and potential of all those who worked for her. She was a true leader in this regard.

As DCI, I relished sending a GS-13 analyst expert (an army major would be a military equivalent) to the Oval Office to brief the president. I had great confidence he or she would do well, whether I went along or not. I never had one let me down. As secretary of defense, on foreign trips sometimes I would have a young desk officer ride to the formal evening event in the limo with me and pass through the honor guard and welcoming ceremonies by my side. It was recognition of that person's hard work, but I also knew, from my own experience, he would never forget the occasion. It also had the ancillary benefit of making an impression on the senior foreign officials our desk officer would be dealing with long after my trip was over. It demonstrated that this mid-level American interlocutor had the ear of the boss, so those he'd be dealing with would pay better attention and show some respect.

From the vantage point of the corner office, whether you are a corporate CEO, the secretary of defense choosing the next generation of military leaders, or a middle manager, identifying talent and growing it are two of the primary responsibilities of a leader. Maybe one of the reasons I feel so strongly about these particular responsibilities of a leader is that I owe my career success to such an act of empowerment. The DCI Bill Casey and his deputy, Bob Inman, passed over dozens of more senior officers to appoint me as the CIA's deputy director for intelligence in January 1982 because they had the confidence I could succeed, and they were willing to let me go as chief of their executive staff to assume the new job.

A leader who looks out for his subordinates will almost always reap big dividends.

A successful leader must always be evaluating the people around and below her. She should empower the strong, try to help those who show promise despite shortcomings, and get rid of the deadwood.

One of the fundamental roles of a leader is to assess her people: Who is an asset, and who is a liability? In nearly all public bureaucracies, evaluating the performance of individuals and acting on that evaluation is a deeply flawed process. Determining someone's performance with some accuracy and fairness is often difficult. Telling someone in person about his shortcomings and weaknesses—areas for improvement—or even his strengths in a constructive way is even tougher. The result is often that a supervisor is so negative that the individual thinks he's about to be fired or, more commonly, the discussion is so anodyne that someone who is not performing up to snuff thinks he's doing just fine.

Written evaluations are even worse. In the military, individuals are scored on a number of different criteria, from worst possible performance (an
X
in the far-left-hand column) to best (an
X
in the far-right column). In practice, any mark not in the far-right column is disastrous and mostly a career ender. Similarly, if in the “comments” section the individual is not described as walking on water and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, the chances of promotion are slim. Supervisors are reluctant to provide honest comments precisely because they have such disproportionate consequences. Thus, to take a worst-case example, several supervisors would later acknowledge they saw disturbing behavior on the part of Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood soldier who killed thirteen people in a rampage, but they never recorded it in his evaluations. While that is obviously an extreme case, the failure to make an employee's problems and weaknesses part of the evaluation record is typical.

For subordinates, such an evaluation system encourages timidity and an unwillingness to challenge superiors or to be candid. If they just keep their heads down, they will be assured a good review and a shot at future promotions. Rocking the boat puts that future at risk.

Although the preparation of personal performance evaluations at the CIA was not quite as skewed as in the military, the same tendencies were prevalent. Indeed, when I was deputy DCI, from time to time I was asked by senior officials to approve early retirement for an individual based on poor performance. I would call for the individual's personnel folder, and, sure enough, the performance ratings for the preceding several years were always “strong” or “outstanding.” After years of failing to establish a paper trail of inadequate performance, supervisors wanted me to push someone into retirement. In such cases, I usually refused in the hope of forcing more honest appraisals. It was a forlorn hope. I encountered much the same situation at A&M, although I did ask the vice president overseeing human resources to devise a process that gave supervisors freedom to provide more substantive feedback to employees.

The ability of a leader in a bureaucracy to move people or fire them because of poor performance is significantly limited by failures of the evaluation system. Exceptions are few and far between. And, increasingly in business, you had better have a record of warnings and counseling over time if you want to fire someone, or you will face a problematic lawsuit. (The director of the CIA probably has the most comprehensive unilateral authority to fire someone in either the public or the private sector, an authority upheld by the Supreme Court. But even that authority can be challenged if it is deemed “arbitrary and capricious.” So, even at the CIA a paper trail is required.)

Early in my CIA career, after several successive positive annual evaluations, a new boss gave me a pretty crummy report. The good news was that he gave most others in our little unit crummy reports as well. We all objected up the chain of command, and, amazingly, some months later he was fired as our branch chief. The group of us, collectively and individually, had a strong performance record, and the powers that be apparently didn't want us transferring elsewhere because of a toxic boss. I would realize in later years what an extraordinarily rare action that was.

Evaluating performance is not only difficult but risky. A hard-ass boss who lacks objectivity can send talent flying away from an organization because of unfair appraisals. An easygoing boss can allow slackers and mediocrities to nest in a unit. And a boss who is careless with words can get you a lawsuit. I wish I could offer a way to evaluate people that isn't too hard or too easy but just right. But there isn't one. A leader probably can't do away with the formal review process, but there are several ways to mitigate its worst effects.

Evaluating subordinates in business has its own pitfalls, and judging intangible qualities such as people skills can be as fraught with difficulty as in the public sector. But many jobs in business at least have some unambiguous performance metrics. Did the employee make his numbers or not? Did he meet the sales or revenue target? Did he meet or beat his expense allocation? Did he receive fewer customer complaints? With additional effort, I think some of these kinds of metrics can and should be applied in the public sector. No evaluation should be entirely statistical, but neither should it be entirely subjective.

Candor is critical to a leader's success. Every boss needs to understand that creating a climate where people feel comfortable in being honest in their opinions is the cheapest possible job insurance for the person in charge.

Leaders who think they don't need frank, critical advice every day are usually doomed. I would never knowingly hire such a person. However, encouraging candor is one of those areas where rhetoric is meaningless; only actions over time have any impact in terms of persuading people a leader is serious and overcoming their concerns about the career risk of speaking up.

George Washington was pretty thin-skinned but recognized the importance of candor and criticism. He once wrote, “I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors. The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults, or remove prejudices which are imbibed against him.” Would that all leaders were as insightful. No one likes to be criticized or told of his or her shortcomings or errors, yet everyone needs to hear it—and welcome it.

One of the greatest American generals and statesmen was George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the army during World War II (considered “the architect of victory”), author of the Marshall Plan to save Europe after the war, and secretary of both state and defense. In September 1938, after the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had signed the Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler, the then brigadier general Marshall attended one of his first meetings at the White House. A number of more senior officials were present. As described by the historian Eric Larrabee, in that meeting President Roosevelt proposed a program to build some ten thousand airplanes a year but with no supporting forces. At the end of the meeting, Roosevelt asked Marshall if he thought that was the correct path forward. Marshall replied, “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don't agree with that at all.” Nearly everyone at the meeting thought Marshall had just ended his career. But less than a year later, Roosevelt named Marshall army chief of staff. Marshall had, in a phrase now famous, “spoken truth to power.” Equally as important as Marshall's courage and candor, however, was Roosevelt's understanding of the value of having a person at his side who would tell him what he needed to hear, not just what he wanted to hear.

Virtually all leaders tell their subordinates that they want and expect candor. The problem is that most don't really mean it. They fall more into the camp of Samuel Goldwyn, one of the founders of MGM, who allegedly once told his people, “I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.” No one, especially a person who has risen to the top of an organization, wants to be told he has just committed a huge blunder or is about to. Or that he just gave an awful speech. Or that his policies are failing. Or that he totally misjudged someone. More than a few professionals who have been assured candor was welcome have been sidelined or cast aside for offering unvarnished opinions on such matters. Just as the army general Eric Shinseki was sidelined by the secretary of defense after the general had the temerity to tell Congress that the occupation of Iraq might require several hundred thousand troops. And Richard Helms was fired as DCI for telling President Nixon candidly what he didn't want to hear—that the CIA would not take the fall for Watergate. Under more than a few modern presidents, candor and dissent such as Marshall demonstrated has resulted in the culprit being cast into the outer darkness—persona non grata in the Oval Office. (Although I must say that despite my disagreements, dissent, and candor with President Obama, he never once told me to back off or froze me out.)