The Choices of Leadership
By Ray Blunt
Graduation address for the Navy’s Leadership Logistic Program, Port Hueneme, CA, in December 2006.
The Three Toughest Choices a Leader Must Make
It is good to be back with you if only briefly on such an important occasion . . . you have stuck with it as an organization and continued to grow leaders. And in the best sense it is a case of the leaders of the Navy who are growing and serving the next generation--senior leaders have made the tough choices to continue to invest in the next generation. You are to be commended.
I want to make my comments brief since I’m the last man standing between you and your graduation. I’ve thought a lot about what would be if not memorable at least useful to say to you today as you complete your formal preparations for leadership, knowing much more lies ahead that may surprise you, dismay you, and even appall you.
A friend of mine who teaches leadership at the Air War College is fond of saying to a new class of colonels and GS-15s that “now that you’re a leader, the fun is over.” I don’t think it’s quite that bad, but he is onto something. It’s a tough challenge and not for everyone. It’s a sobering calling.
In that sense, let me focus on something we may not talk much about—what I believe are the three toughest daily choices a leader must make:
- Who or perhaps what will you follow—what will be your north star? Your telos or purpose?
- How will you focus the most precious, non-renewable resource a leader has. ??—time.
- Where will you arrive at the end of the day. What will you leave behind should that be your last day? Your legacy if you will. Will it be what the working class says in Les Miserables—“At the end of the day we get nothing for nothing”? Or will it be something that lasts?
Hear that I am saying they are three choices that you must make because you cannot avoid any of these. They are choices you will make one way or the other. What I hope to do is to persuade you that there are right and good choices to make that will make all the difference in your life but moreso in the lives of those you serve.
It is in the answers to these three questions, lived out every day, which you are laying pipe for what you will leave behind—what remains. Because I can tell you your career and your time in leadership, indeed your life will go surprisingly quickly.
An interesting commentary on that is provided by Richard Leider who spent something going on 20 years interviewing older adults—people over 65—asking them deep questions about life. One question he consistently asked was this: “If you could live your life over again, what would you do differently?” Strikingly, three themes were repeated over and over which he identifies in his book The Power of Purpose:
- I would be more reflective, take time to think because life passes so quickly and I was too busy doing to think adequately;
- I would be more courageous, take more risks; I played it too close to the vest;
- I would be clear, far earlier, on what my purpose was in life.
On this notion of purpose, what your north star is, let me begin with a bit of a story from history. But parenthetically note that these other two themes he uncovered—reflection and risk--will weave their way into what we’re discussing.
One of the most extraordinary and dramatic choices ever offered by a leader occurred over 3,000 years ago—a choice that continues to reverberate today in the world you have been called to lead in where ancient and modern civilizations are at war. The choice was thrown down on the plains west of Mesopotamia near the town of Shechem by a military, political, and religious leader to his long-suffering nomadic tribes numbering over a million people. They had been through a time of incredible change, from slaves to nomads and were about to become farmers and city dwellers in two generations. They had conquered or soon would conquer many of the most powerful nations of that day with this leader at their front. Battle hardened, tested by survival in a vast wilderness, forged into one by a miraculous escape from human slavery in a far off country, they were nevertheless uncertain.
Their leader was at the end of his career and giving his retirement speech. But now he was not mincing words. “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the people in whose land you are living. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” And, he might have added--the God and the laws of my mentor, Moses. For Moses was one of the first known practitioners of management including leadership development. Without a Moses there would have been no Joshua to utter these words or to preside over the fall of Jericho and the establishment of Israel as a sovereign nation.
In the words of that latter day prophet, Jim Collins, Joshua was saying that if this nation is going to be “built to last,” you will have to preserve the core values and beliefs and the core purpose on which we were founded. That is your choice to make. I’ve made mine and so has my family who will come after. That is the focus that has kept us unified and successful. When we lost that focus we came near failure. Don’t forget. The same is true for this nation.
Perhaps the most important choice you will make as a public service leader is what will be your telos, your enduring purpose —who and what will you follow--what will be at your core; what will you place before the people you lead as the purpose that gets them out of bed each morning, for it is leaders that connect people with purpose.
Maybe it’s because I am old, maybe it’s because I’m as idealistic as my wife says I am, but I would suggest for those of us called to this profession, what must lie at the core and guide the choices we make is public service. And that’s a tough one. We have all seen too many examples and some of us are those examples, myself included, where our north star is our own career, or the next promotion, or pleasing the boss, or a life that is safe from uncertainty.
There is no better place to go for our purpose than the place both Lincoln and Martin Luther King went for the core beliefs that drove them to keep the republic intact and to reach the dream that all people live together as created equals. It was not the Constitution that energized their calling but the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men were created equal. That they were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights . . .
. . . that in order to secure these rights governments were instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Our power and authority as leaders is not of self but conferred by those we serve. Our mission is to secure the rights to life, liberty and happiness by the commitment to serving others. This is often a choice that comes at a cost—to keep that focus true in the face of self interest and conflicting visions and often crushing pressure to conform to another course.
The second choice that you will be making as leaders is how you will use your most precious resource—not money but time. In teaching young leaders, I often refer to the 3Cs as the factors that must be steadily grown in them—competency, character and chronos—how they will use their time. If you are clear on your purpose, it makes it much easier to begin to focus the way you use your time. Sometimes we focus so much on competencies in developing leaders we forget that the reality on the ground is daily one of time priority. Look at your calendar if you want to know where your priorities lie in reality—maybe it’s meetings or e-mail or phone calls. These are all the things that eat our lunch if we let them.
The lives of Thomas Jefferson and William Wilberforce are illustrative for us. A few years ago I was struck after a visit to Williamsburg that Thomas Jefferson when he served in the House of Burgesses of Virginia helped to introduce as one of his first acts a bill to abolish slavery in Virginia. He was soundly defeated. But I had just begun reading a short biography of one of Jefferson’s contemporaries in England whose time and career were a remarkable parallel to Jefferson’s. For he, too, began his career as a legislator, a Member of Parliament, and he, too, introduced a bill to abolish the slave trade in England and its colonies. He also found his youthful purpose thwarted by his elders. But their stories ended very differently.
Some 40 years later, Wilberforce was notified on his deathbed that not only had the slave trade been abolished but slavery itself. He had spent those years tirelessly working in government for the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery and it had broken his health and derailed his career that should have ended as Prime Minister. Yet not one life was lost in a war that many thought was necessitated in England for such a monumental change to occur.
Jefferson would die on the 4 th of July, 1826, 50 years to the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence where he wrote ‘. . . all men are created equal.” Yet he lost his focus on that purpose and even as President and later as a revered senior statesman, he demurred from his earlier commitment and spent his remaining years building UVA as the first university free from religion in the curriculum. Whereas Wilberforce concentrated his time and energies on two great objects as he called them, Jefferson concentrated his time and creative energies on his own quiet candidacy for President as an opponent of central government that would dictate to the states. He achieved that office, Wilberforce did not, but 40 years later, 600,000 men would die to abolish slavery in America.
But my point here is this—how we spend our time impacts what we will ultimately accomplish with others. And how we spend our time depends on what we use as our purpose for living. If I could shift the balance of how you spend your time, I’d suggest two things:
(1) Focus on defining reality. What do I mean? Max De Pree says the first task of a leader is to define reality—what is true. Speak the truth to power, speak the truth to those who work for you, and be transparent about yourself. Don’t leave it to others to tell you that you are naked. I have yet to work with an organization that does not have what Annette Simmons calls “dangerous truths” that need to be spoken. Sometimes it requires what Thomas More did for Henry VIII—speak the truth to power. Sometimes it requires what we all hate to do, give someone honest feedback about their performance. Sometimes it means opening ourselves to honest feedback from our folks or saying “I screwed up.” But these “dangerous truths” require courage and they require that we devote time to talking honestly and openly to people and encouraging the same for ourselves. Truth helps in driving fear out of the organization by making it a safe place for truth telling. It is one of the most productive uses of your time you will ever experience. And it’s hard. As Solzhenitsyn said, “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”
(2) Focus on developing your most valuable assets. Max De Pree goes on to say that if the first task is to define reality, “the last is to say thank you and in between a leader becomes a servant and a debtor—the measure of your effectiveness is found in the lives of those that follow you—are they growing, adapting, being creative?” The coin of the realm in today’s organizations is resolutely human capital (a terrible term)—people--because the assets of an organization reside primarily between the ears and within the hearts of those who are in the organization. That’s why serving those who are in your organization, focusing on their development, their careers and not elevating yourself is such a good choice. It not only helps in building the real assets of an organization, it is transformative—it changes people and organizations by helping them become places of grace (and truth). And particularly I would add growing the next generation of leaders behind you—leaders of competence and character. Some call that servant leadership and it’s a soft skill that pays hard dividends. But that’s your choice.
The third choice you make is where your energies take you at the end of the day. I’d like to illustrate this with a children’s story and a poem: Two leaders sit before you today, one here, and the other there. Oh, you say you can’t quite see them? Let me describe them to you, maybe you will recognize them. One is Ozymandius.
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