The ABCs of Leadership

The following story is an excerpt from Bob Stone's book Ostentatious Time-Wasting: Tales from the White House, Pentagon, and City Hall and is posted here with the author's kind permission.

I once wrote an essay called "Ten Lessons in Leadership:' I was pretty happy with it until somebody asked me what the ten lessons were. Oops. I had forgotten my own rule: no more than three.

So here, newly reorganized and rethought, are the ABCs of leadership.

A is for authenticity.

You could pretend you're something you're not, but it's a bad idea. First, it's hard work; second, it's likely to give you a stomachache; and third, you'll be found out. As a leader, you need followers, and people won't follow you if they don't believe you.

There's another benefit to being authentic: it trains new leaders. If people see you don't have all the answers, they'll know it's okay to not have all the answers. If they see you're uncertain, they'll know it's okay to be uncertain sometimes or even to be irritable.

I was once complimented by Candy Kane, an NPR (the National Partnership for Reinventing Government) staff member, about displaying some irritability during a staff meeting. "We loved the way you threw a childish tantrum you showed us it was okay to have a childish side."

B is for buoyancy.

This means resilience, bounce, lightheartedness, encouragement, unsinkable-ness, and uplift. People want purpose in their work, and that demands that a leader be buoyant. When Greg Woods headed Federal Student Aid, he buoyed up the spirits of six thousand workers when he inspired them with his vision, "We help put America through school."

Buoyancy was the value I contributed to Pete Daley, an air force officer who kept coming up with big ideas that made me nervous, until my sidekick, Doug Farbrother, took me aside.

"Whenever Pete gets an idea, the way to manage him is to slap him on the back and say, 'Way to go, Pete. Go with it.' Pete's enthusiasm will mqke his good ideas succeed, and his intelligence will let him find out faster than you can which are the bad ideas."

From then on, that's how I "managed" Pete and all the other talented people I was supposed to manage. People want to be in charge of their part of the world. When you're buoyant-encouraging, empowering-and give them the authority to do their work the way they want to do it, they respond with enthusiasm and creativity, and they produce things you would never dream of.

Buoyancy means to be positive, positive, always positive. Don't spend your time looking for things that went wrong; spend it looking for things that went right, and then build on them.

C is for conviction.

Putting people in charge of their part of the world doesn't mean letting them do whatever they want. The leader must guard the core principles and goals of the enterprise. So, if you're committed to trusting and empowering workers, you can't tolerate a subordinate who mistrusts and shackles people. If you're committed to excellence, you can't tolerate a comptroller who cuts funding somewhere because it only makes things a little worse or brings an organization back to an average level.

Conviction begins with clarity of message. Communicate your convictions using one-page statements, wallet-sized cards, and twenty-second speeches.

Conviction is demonstrated by stubbornness-show fanaticism in your beliefs. It's what Tom Peters calls a "seemingly unjustifiable overcommitment."

Finally, conviction means control over one's core principles and goals, not allowing anyone to violate one's non-negotiables.

There are a gazillion books on leadership, many worth reading and following. But the leader needs to have a leadership mantra to always keep in mind, and a book is too long. Most people have a hard time remembering more than three things. I certainly can't. It's easy to remember three. Four, not so easy.

A dean was describing the new curriculum at a reception celebrating the opening of a major American college of public administration. "There are four tracks;' he started. I smelled trouble. "The policy track, the management track, the finance track, and, uh, uh, uh, the fourth track."

Stick to three things. Authenticity. Buoyancy. Conviction.

Bob Stone practices revolution by storytelling. An MIT-educated engineer, he spent twelve years at the Pentagon strengthening bureaucracy, and then twelve years dismantling it. As Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Installations, he radically decentralized authority, cut regulations, and started a quality revolution. He then spent six years at the White House leading the effort to reinvent government, the most successful federal government reform effort ever. He's lectured at dozens of universities, and advised or taught mid-career government executives all over the US and in Europe and the Middle East.

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Books By Bob Stone

Confessions of a Civil Servant: Lessons in Changing America's Government and Military

By Bob Stone

As Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Installations, and later as chief of the Clinton Administration's Reinvention team, Bob Stone inspired and facilitated countless improvements in the way the government operates.  In his riveting book, Confessions of a Civil Servant, Stone uses many colorful stories from his career to describe how government performance can be dramatically improved by empowering front-line workers and aggressively cutting stupid bureaucratic rules.   While "reinvention" may no longer be the official catchphrase for improving government, this book is a great read and should be an inspiration to any government employee who wants to make a difference.  Read More...