Many organizations have recognized the need to enhance their data management capabilities. The traditional response has been to centralize these efforts, often by appointing a Chief Data Officer (CDO). However, this well-intentioned approach often leads to challenges and resistance within the organization.
Read MoreWho Is Eileen Fisher? Getting To Know The Fashion Designer & Seeker
This is part of my short series on the thinkers, leaders and craftsmen and women featured in Developing Modern Craft (pending publication late 2020). Here you will find a short introduction to Eileen Fisher, featured work, three exercises/lessons from her (and ways to apply them), as well as a selection of quotes. You can also read more about the Look to Craftsmen Project if you are not familiar with the work and check out Profiles in Craft for examples of people applying craft principles in the modern world.
Introduction
For more than 20 years, Eileen Fisher has been designing clothes that make women feel good about themselves. When Eileen Fisher started her namesake company in 1984, she had $350 in the bank and a basic idea: that women wanted chic, simple clothes that made getting dressed easy. The modular line -- pieces can be mixed and matched from season to season -- is now available in department stores and 52 Eileen Fisher stores, including one in Irvington, New York, where Fisher, 60, lives and the company is headquartered. In 2005, Fisher sold the $300 million company to her 875 employees through an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP. She is now the chief creative officer.
Eileen grew up in the Midwest. She’s the second oldest of five sisters and one brother. Her father worked as a systems analyst at Allstate Insurance, and their life was modest. Her mother sewed their clothes—and in the sixth and seventh grade, it was all about a red shift dress. Today, Eileen sells chic, simple clothes that make getting dressed easy. She creates modular pieces that can be mixed and matched from season to season, and is now available in department stores and 52 Eileen Fisher stores. Her business has over 1200 employees and grosses over $400 million in sales.
When I went off to college I was going to be a math major. It was my best subject in high school, but then I got a D in Intermediate Calculus. I had no idea really what I wanted to do or what my options were.
One of my college roommates was an interior design student. We would hang out and I would play with colors and fabrics and that kind of thing—and then I would have to go and do my own work. At that point I realized that I wasn’t going get through college if I was going to do my work like that. I should do something fun. I studied interior design, in those days it was in the Home Economics department.
Many craftsmen appear to stumble on their fascinations and obsessions. Even with her background in sewing, her love of clothing, and her affinity simple styles, Eileen believed she found her interest in design by accident.
Eileen never pictured designing clothing for a living. She moved from interior design to graphic design. Involved with a Japanese boy, traveled to Japan to work on a projects. While there she became fascinated with the kimono.
After moving to New York, she bought a sewing machine and tried making a few things in her spare time. It was a disaster. But her mind kept seeing simple shapes made with good fabric. Living among artists in New York, one of them suggested she take over his booth at a trade show where buyers came to buy clothes for their stores. With three weeks to produce a clothing line, $350 in the bank, and no idea how to make a pattern—she got to work. Another friend knew someone who volunteered to make the samples. The first line was a pair of flood pants based on ones I'd seen in Japan, a simple top with a three-quarter sleeve, a V-neck vest, and a sleeveless shell.
Like every master craftsman I’ve interviewed for this project, Eileen never had a moment where she thought “I’m a designer now.” She never had that kind of clarity and her fascinations were ever-evolving—from shift dresses and uniforms, to symbols of design like the kimono, to modular women’s wear.
Eileen has used mediums of design, clothing, and leadership as modes of self-expression. Constant attention and deep reflection to her own awareness, to what is actually driving her awareness, directs her actions and guides her decisions.
By stepping back and viewing the business as a whole, Eileen gains perspective on how she can use the business to creatively express her interests and manifest her values. She also views the business as a reflection of herself. Eileen uses her medium (in this case the business itself) to define her own standards for success and make her unique mark.
In addition to focusing inward on her own awareness, and stepping back to get the big picture, Eileen gets perspective through the passions of others. Interest in recycling among employees led to Green Eileen (now called Renew). Working with and through other people is a unique quality of leadership. Taking culture, climate, and purpose of an organization into account impacts the outcomes the leader is able to produce with their unique signature.
Notable Work
Eileen Fisher Renew RENEW, part of EILEEN FISHER Inc., is a take-back program that embodies our commitment to build a circular design system and create a future without waste.
Eileen Fisher Leadership Institute The Eileen Fisher Leadership Institute brings young people together to explore their passions; learn from pioneers of industry, the arts and beyond; and discover their unique leadership style. When you support EFLI, you are ensuring that young women of all backgrounds will have access to EFLI's unique leadership education that unlocks their personal potential, transforming them into the leaders we need in our communities, and the world.
VISION2020 The EF vision is for an industry where human rights and sustainability are not the effect of a particular initiative, but the cause of a business well run. Where social and environmental injustices are not unfortunate outcomes, but reasons to do things differently.
3 Lessons from Eileen
Increase awareness.
“For me, communication was a problem. For me it was my ex husband. The sound of his voice would shut me down and I wouldn’t speak around him. After really processing and understanding my trigger with him, when I saw him again two days later, I was talking. I tried to understand what opens me up and what shuts me down.”
Identify and understand your triggers.
“Once I started to notice what was going on inside myself, the feelings of anxiety or my heart beating, faster I would notice when I was triggered (like when I heard the sound of my ex-husband’s voice). It was like my energy was captured and I was not able to be present. I noticed and that I could actually make a different choice. I could say, “oh there's that triggered feeling” and I am talking fast. I'm not really where I want to be. I'm not really saying what I want to say because I'm caught in my anger or frustration or my energy spin around this person. The more I notice, the more I can cut that cord and show up more.”
Cultivate Curiosity: Bring meditation into everyday moments and meetings.
“One of the things I struggle with is listening. I use listening as a meditation practice. When someone speaks, I try to pay attention in a way that's fully present which is actually opening a lot of possibilities. As a company we are going through a massive transformation. We realize we need to bring in outside talent. When interviewing someone, I watched myself not listen. Here was this incredibly talented person. She was talking so fast and so full of information and I felt myself collapsing internally. Did she know more than me? Would she overshadow me? I don’t know if I went that far in my thoughts, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to work with her. After the interview was over, I realized I had completely missed her. So I decided to give her another chance and this time I practiced listening. And I realized, wow, she’s smart. If we don’t hire her we are going to miss something amazing.”
Quotes by Eileen
“Personal growth and development is so critical, because we get in our own ways and it impacts everyone in the workplace. It's almost like some crazy percentage of what do everyday isn't really just what's happening in the moment, it's what's happening that comes from my childhood.”
“You may have to approach your leadership challenges intuitively to make sense of them.”
“The difference between thinking things and trying to solve problems rationally all the time, sometimes you just get stuck.”
“First, we have to know who we are...which is really hard. We have to know what we care about and what we want, and what matters to us. Those are things I work on every day.”
"Everything is about listening. That's how I started. I started listening to buyers in ways that others don't. When we listen, things shift."
"I try to follow energy. Where is it going, and why did it go there? And it's a balancing at to decide whether to go with it or bring the energy back to that moment."
"Not being a fashion designer by trade or training, I saw a different kind of picture."
"A lot of what I did in the early days was very spontaneous or had some kind of common sense as I moved from day to day. Although that is still very much in play for me, I've come to be more clear about what matters to me."
“Running a business with small children is really hard. The advice I would give my younger self would be to be work when you're at work and be at home when you're at home. Be present where you are."
“We live in our heads. Every day, every minute, we are getting messages that open us up or shut us down. Every time we close down we find tension in our necks or shoulders and that shuts off some of the energy going to our brain, and we’re less creative as a result.”
P.S. Visit my page on Quotes on Craft for more wisdom on the principles of craftsmanship and how they apply to the modern world.
Why Quality of Thinking Is So Important
Some facts are chilling. Consider this one: the quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. It is chilling because its implications are enormous. The critical takeaway is that there is nothing – nothing—more important in developing organizational effectiveness than ensuring that people think for themselves with rigor, imagination, and courage. Every day, in every meeting, and in every interaction.
It begs the question: In hierarchical structures often driven by the alternation between reward and reprisal, what does it take for people to think clearly and for themselves? And how do we find the time?
The answer is not in our innate intelligence, education, experience, or power. It is not even the amount of time we allot to thinking. The main factor in whether or not people can think clearly for themselves is the way they are being treated by the people with them while they are thinking. The impact of our behavior on people’s ability to think is, whether we realize it or not, that big.
The ability to hold our attention is a meditative and psychological tool that helps us perceive the subtle patterns continuously occurring between others and ourselves. These patterns determine our behavior and the automatic ways in which we react. When we do not hold our attention we cannot be fully aware of our impact, nor can we perceive the unconscious subtle pulls continually placed upon us by others.
When we hear or watch any story, our brains go wholly into perceiving mode, turning off the systems for acting or planning to act, and with them go our ability to see reality clearly. This is one reason why humans have such trouble recognizing lies. First, we believe what we are told. Then, we have to make a conscious effort to assemble facts and disbelieve. Only when we stop perceiving to think about what we have seen or heard, only then do we assess its truth-value.
In other words, we have to fight the tendency to form opinions immediately, work to deconstruct what we’ve learned, and reconstruct it through a more objective stance.
Would you or your team benefit from a consultation? Let’s talk!
The Importance of Relationship Currency
Carla Harris, Vice Chairman and Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, discusses the importance of Relationship Currency in your career as a keynote speaker at this year’s Judson Women’s Leadership Conference.
“Invest in relationships in your environment if you want to ascend to higher and higher levels”, advises Carla Harris, Vice Chairman at Morgan Stanley. Listen to Carla’s advice on how building “relationship currency” is a game-changing investment in your success.
Leadership Lesson In 3 Minutes Or Less
There are two kinds of leaders in this clip: the movement maker, and the leader-follower.
Watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under 3 minutes, and take notes:
A movement maker needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he’s doing is so simple making him easy to mimic.
LESSON 1: Being easy to mimic means you are naturally instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!
Soon comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to be a good follower. Notice the movement-maker embraces him as an equal. It’s not about just him anymore — it’s about them, plural. Notice the leader-follower calling to his friends to join in.
LESSON 2: It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower provides legitimacy. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.
LESSON 3: The second follower is the turning point, providing proof the first has done well. It’s not about a lone wolf or even two wolves. One more and three is a crowd. A crowd is news.
A movement must be public. Make sure outsiders see more than just the leader. Everyone needs to see the followers because new followers emulate followers — not the leader. Now here come two more, then three more. Now we’ve got momentum. This is the tipping point! Now we’ve got a movement!
LESSON 4: As more people jump in, it’s no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there’s no reason not to join now. They won’t be ridiculed. They won’t stand out. They will be part of the in-crowd if they hurry. Over the next minute, you’ll see the rest who prefer to be part of the crowd, because eventually they’d be ridiculed for not joining.
And ladies and gentlemen that is how a movement is made!
To Recap:
Be easy to follow. Keep your message simple.
Nurture your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement, not you.
Be public and inclusive.
But the biggest lesson here — did you catch it? Leadership is over-glorified. Yes it started with the shirtless guy, and he’ll get all the credit, but you saw what really happened: It was the first follower that transformed a lone wolf into a leader of a pack. There is no movement without the first follower.
We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.
The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.
When you find a lone wolf doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.
A good read related to this:
Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders (Center for Public Leadership) by Barbara Kellerman
General McChrystal’s Failure of Followership, Barbara Kellerman
Book Shelf: Turn the Ship Around
Overview
The US Navy operates with a traditional “leader-follower” management structure. Corporations call this command and control. In the Navy, officers make decisions and enlisted personnel carry them out. This structure is a tremendous source of frustration and inefficiency while giving leaders the illusion they are “in charge.” These limitations were at a breaking point aboard the USS Santa Fe – once the worst performing nuclear submarine in the US fleet. In 1999, Commander L. David Marquet assumed command of the Santa Fe and developed an innovative management system known as “leader-leader.” This transformed the Santa Fe into a top-performing sub. Marquet explains how to implement leader-leader and how to use his “deliberate action” and “I intend to” management strategies. Applicable lessons for executives, HR managers, entrepreneurs, business students and professors, and anyone at sea.
Key Points
Captain L. David Marquet inherited the worst-performing, worst-morale submarine in the fleet and turned it into the best-performing by deviating from the traditional “leader-follower” (command and control) model and implementing a “leader-leader” model.
In the leader-leader model everyone thinks and acts like a leader.
Over the next 10 years, more submarine captains came from the Santa Fe than any other submarine. The new system improves morale and performance and builds leaders.
Telling people they are “empowered” is inherently contradictory as it presumes you are the one giving them power. It reminds them that they have no power.
Instead of telling sailors what to do, Marquet had them state their intentions. The “leader” gives intent, not instructions, and the team gives its intentions.
Giving control like this rests on technical competence and organizational clarity.
Giving control is fundamentally scary for leaders and needs to be done in small steps.
Organizations based on intent generate a bias for action, not permission.
“Deliberate action” – a process in which the Santa Fe’s sailors plan their work and say aloud what they are going to do – became an effective strategy for preventing mistakes.
Marquet moved “authority to information” instead of moving “information to authority.”
Summary
How Bosses Kill Motivation
Most people are enthusiastic when they begin new jobs. They have innovative ideas and suggestions to share with their supervisors. But most inadvertently shut down their new employees pretty quickly, telling them to be “team players” and follow instructions. Such top-down direction destroys initiative and turns motivated, positive employees into depressed cynics who go through the motions. This frustrates both bosses and followers. Such disengagement costs US firms $300 billion annually. As a former commanding officer in the US Navy’s submarine fleet, Captain L. David Marquet has firsthand experience with disenchanted employees who perform at substandard levels.
“A nuclear-powered submarine is an unlikely place for a leadership revolution…it operates in an unforgiving environment.”
The Navy’s attitude about leadership – like the approach of the typical boss – can also foster disenchantment. The Navy divides people into “leaders and followers,” the traditional leadership model. The leader-follower model promotes rote followership. It functions particularly badly for intellectual work. When people see themselves as followers, they stop thinking and do as their bosses say. Some leaders get around the leader-follower dilemma through “empowerment” of their employees. But providing empowerment – arbitrarily telling someone they can make limited decisions for a short period of time – only reminds people that they have no real power.
Everyone’s a Leader
As the captain of the USS Santa Fe, a $2-billion nuclear submarine with a crew of 135 men, Marquet replaced leader-follower management with “leader-leader,” a system he developed based on treating everyone as a leader. When each employee is a leader, agility, efficiency, productivity and morale improve. Leader-leader organizations are more resilient than leader-follower ones. Yet everything about a submarine is unforgiving. Deadlines shape all decisions and actions. Mistakes can be deadly. No one is ever more than 150 feet away from the control room. In this challenging environment, hierarchy is unavoidable, but how hierarchy is used can be shaped. Most hierarchies push information (at the bottom) to authority (at the top). Onboard the USS Santa Fe, Marquet pushed the authority for making decisions toward the bottom, where the information is native.
“People who are treated as followers treat others as followers when it’s their turn to lead. A vast untapped human potential is lost as a result of treating people as followers.”
When Marquet assumed command of the Santa Fe, it was the poorest-performing nuclear submarine in the fleet. It had the worst retention rate of all submarines. A candid photo of crew members not paying attention to their duties became notorious – a prime example of what sailors on submarines must not do. Within a year of taking over, thanks to changes Marquet made in its management and operations, the Santa Fe became the fleet’s top-performing submarine in numerous categories – including, most satisfyingly to Marquet, the number of crew members who re-enlisted at the end of their service.
Before Deploying
Submarines operate at sea away from their home ports for deployments that last six months. They may sail 30,000 miles during a deployment, stopping at in-transit ports only for repairs and resupply. Submarines represent the tip of the naval spear and often operate in “hostile waters,” ready to take the fight to the enemy at all times.
“Followers… have limited decision-making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy and passion.”
On December 15, 1998, 25 days prior to formally assuming command, Marquet first boarded the submarine. As he walked through his inspection, the crew’s downtrodden demeanor made a strong impression on him. He knew that feedback constantly reminded the crew members that they served on the submarine with the fleet’s worst reputation. They were humiliated, embarrassed and dejected.
“People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act like followers.”
Marquet’s lack of deep technical knowledge about the ship’s sophisticated onboard systems proved to be a catalyst to discover a better approach than telling people what to do. Marquet asked the men: “What are the things you are hoping I don’t change?” “What are the things you secretly hope I do change?” “If you were me, what would you do first?” “What will be our biggest challenge to getting Santa Fe ready for deployment?” “What are your biggest frustrations about how Santa Fe is currently run?”
The Minimum Required
To familiarize himself with the sub, Marquet had the chief petty officers escort him around the spaces they supervised and explain their jobs. He learned that the crew members were obsessively concerned about not making mistakes, which biased the organization even more strongly toward waiting to be told what to do and not taking initiative.
“When you follow the leader-leader model, you must take time to let others react to the situation as well.”
One conversation Marquet had with a crew member deeply disturbed him. When he asked the sailor what his job was, the man cynically replied, “Whatever they tell me to do.” This was an insulting response to an honest question from a superior officer. The sailor communicated that he saw himself only as a follower avoiding responsibility for his work.
“Create a space for open decision by the entire team, even if that space is only a few minutes, or a few seconds, long.”
Marquet learned that this was a typical attitude among Santa Fe crew. The men on the Santa Fe felt that they were trapped. Pervasive faulty work under stress caused mounting errors, which in turn lowered the already poor morale. In turn, bad morale worked against anyone who tried to take the initiative to make things better. On the Santa Fe, things had been going from bad to worse. Marquet had his work cut out for him.
The New Commanding Officer
On January 8, 1999, Marquet assumed command of the Santa Fe, operating out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. His plan included changing how information moved on the Santa Fe. Normally, in the Navy, information moves up the chain of command from the enlisted men to the officers, who then make decisions according to what they’ve learned. Marquet intended to keep the decision making close to the crew level, where information originates. Marquet describes this strategy as “Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.” He was determined to change the crew’s orientation from “error reduction” to excellence.
“We were going to deconstruct decision authority and push it down to where the information lived.”
Marquet began this transformation with the Santa Fe’s chief petty officers. Tradition holds that “the chiefs run the Navy,” and that’s how Marquet wanted operations to flow onboard the ship. To make sure the chiefs had the necessary authority, Marquet changed the navy regulation for who authorized vacation – and gave them the authority to control vacation for their sailors. Previously this rested with the second in command. From now on, enlisted men would only have to get the chiefs’ permission to go on vacation. For men stuck on ships for months at a time, the person who decides vacation carries great authority. In return for this concession, the chiefs agreed to be responsible for performance in their divisions. This would include their crew’s “watch bills, qualification schedules, and training school enrollments” – just about everything important to how Santa Fe operated.
“Chiefs in Charge”
This major change – putting the chiefs in charge – vastly improved performance. Directly connecting the chiefs, who were responsible for making sure work got completed, with the enlisted ranks, who did the work, proved to be very effective. It resulted in “greater commitment” and “greater engagement.” The principle was to “push authority to information” not information to authority. A leading chief, Andy Worshek, assisted Marquet with the initiative to place the chiefs in charge.
“In our modern world, the most important work we do is cognitive; so, it’s not surprising that a structure developed for physical work isn’t optimal for intellectual work.”
Marquet also changed the way the crew greeted visitors as they boarded the Santa Fe. The standard greeting became the “three-name rule.” Now, a sailor would say, “Good morning, Commodore Kenny, my name is Petty Officer Jones, welcome aboard Santa Fe.” Marquet also began to engage in “short, early conversations” – as short as 30 seconds – with members of the crew. In these conversations, he didn’t tell sailors what to do. Instead, he provided a helpful perspective that clarified their role and gave them more control over their own actions and activities.
“I Intend To”
One of the fundamental leader-leader changes Marquet instituted was the practice of having subordinates say “I intend to” and then explain the actions they planned to undertake. Marquet stopped giving explicit orders to his subordinates. Instead, they would muster the organizational details they were responsible for, say, “I intend to” to him, and then detail their specific plans. At this point, if he agreed with their intentions, Marquet would say, “Very well.” With this confirmation, the subordinates could proceed with their work.
“As you work with individuals to develop their vision for the future…establish specific, measurable goals.”
For example, an officer might say, “Captain, I intend to submerge the ship. We are in water assigned to Santa Fe, water depth has been checked, all men are below, the ship is rigged for dive, and I’ve certified my watch team.” And Marquet would say, “Very well.” This seemingly minor change to the conversational interplay between the crew and the commander shifted ownership to his subordinates.
“With emancipation we are recognizing the inherent genius, energy and creativity in all people, and allowing those talents to emerge.”
Initially, Marquet wouldn’t ask questions about the proposed action. This dynamic prompted subordinates to communicate their thoughts and explain their thought process up front. Subordinates had to consider their actions as if they were the commander of the ship. Rather than one officer thinking, one leader giving orders, the sub now had “135 independent, energetic, emotionally committed and engaged men thinking about what [they] needed to do and ways to do it.”
No “Top-Down Monitoring”
Initially, the Santa Fe relied on a “tickler system” that was a check on the status of all tasks. The officers kept their various status reports in a binder in the executive officer’s stateroom. Every week, the Santa Fe’s officers would conduct a “tickler meeting” to go over the status of each operation or project, and to categorize what the ship needed to do and what it had not yet done.
“Leaders like to hang a list of guiding principles on office walls for display, but often those principles don’t become part of the fabric of the organization.”
The tracking system’s message to the crew that someone above them was tracking, monitoring and evaluating their performance poached ownership of their jobs. Monitoring suggests that those lower in the hierarchy don’t truly own their jobs. Marquet got rid of the tickler system. He put department heads in control of their own departments. This allowed them to own their jobs and focus on the work, not on cataloging and monitoring tasks. Sailors and officers became “responsible for their own performance and the performance of their departments.”
“When the performance of a unit goes down after an officer leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.”
Another innovation Marquet introduced was “thinking out loud.” This involved not just permitting but actively encouraging the delivery of information in context among enlisted personnel and officers. This ran counter to the standard system of communication, which is to focus on a “formal atmosphere” that discourages chatting. But an excess of context is far better than too little. Quality decision making involving the team requires context.
“Deliberate Action”
“Mistakes just happen” is a common excuse when things go wrong. But mistakes come from a lack of focus, and the crew learned to avoid them. On a sub, serious problems can develop quickly if someone inadvertently happens to “turn the wrong valve” or “open the wrong breaker.” If a crew member doesn’t pay attention and acts “automatically,” the ship could face an unexpected and completely avoidable problem – maybe even an emergency.
“When you’re trying to change employees’ behaviors, you have basically two approaches…change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior; or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.”
Following one mistake, instead of punishing the crew member, Marquet repaired the environment by instituting a policy of deliberate action. Before any crew member would take an action, he paused briefly and stated aloud precisely what he intended to do – and then did it. This brief pause and clear statement forces the crew member to think about what he is getting ready to do. This prevents people from acting on autopilot and making mistakes due to inattention. The introduction of deliberate action was “the single most powerful mechanism” for eliminating mistakes and increasing excellence.
From Worst to Best
Thanks to Marquet’s development and institution of the leader-leader strategy, the Santa Fe transformed from the worst nuclear submarine in the US Navy to the best. It developed a record number of new leaders. Leader-leader became a path for attaining excellent performance and developing a solid cadre of superior leaders.
About the Author
A 1981 US Naval Academy graduate, L. David Marquet served in the US submarine force for 28 years. He is the former captain of the USS Santa Feand a highly requested global keynote speaker.
Book Shelf: Strength Based Leadership
Overview
This leadership book supports its advice, guidelines and recommendations with solid research. Gallup Inc. is a well-known polling company and has done far more research on leadership and the social sciences than any author could do alone. Here, Gallup executives Tom Rath – already a best-selling author – and Barry Conchie extrapolate significant findings on leadership from their company’s mountain of research. They explain what, from their perspective, superior leadership requires and what a leader’s followers seek. Their book comes with unique access codes to leadership strength assessment. In a world of mixed opinion and vaguely defined authority, this is an empirical approach to understanding leadership by way of consistent data. It also approaches the concept of leadership with the idea of “followership” (a term coined by Barbara Kellerman) which it doesn’t really address directly.
Key Ideas
Over the years, Gallup Inc. has conducted massive research about leadership, which has led to several findings:
The most effective leaders remain true to themselves.
Superior leaders ensure that they have quality people to lead.
Mediocre leaders often mistakenly try to become expert in all leadership areas.
In contrast, great leaders always concentrate on their individual, landmark strengths.
Leaders must understand their personal assets and liabilities.
These attributes can be clustered under “executing, influencing, relationship building” or “strategic thinking.”
The StrengthsFinder program helps leaders identify their primary leadership strengths.
While no one leader can possess all the primary leadership skills, you can assemble work teams that have the entire palette.
Leaders learn what their followers need and then supply it.
Summary
Accentuate Your Strengths
Gallup Inc. knows about leadership. Its staffers have conducted more than 20,000 interviews with key leaders. In 50 years of polling people about their leaders, Gallup studied more than one million workplace teams. Its researchers asked 10,000 followers about the leadership characteristics that matter most to them.
“A leader needs to know his strengths as a carpenter knows his tools.”
Based on its research, interviews and studies, Gallup lists the three most significant factors in exercising strong leadership:
“The most effective leaders are always investing in strengths”– Managers must concentrate on their own strengths and on those of their employees. Some 73% of employees say they are more engaged when their firms focus on their personal abilities. Only 9% of staffers feel engaged when companies fail to make this effort.
“The most effective leaders surround themselves with the right people and then maximize their team” – Well-rounded individuals do not make the best leaders. This may sound like abject heresy, but Gallup research shows that well-rounded individuals turn out to be mediocre leaders. However, the best work teams always are well-rounded.
“The most effective leaders understand their followers’ needs” – These leaders work extremely hard to fulfill their employees’ requirements.
Knowing Your Strengths
As a leader, you must know your strengths and capabilities so you can work to get the most from them, and to expand and enhance them. Leaders who are self-aware can leverage their primary assets. But many leaders lack self-awareness. Often, managers are completely in the dark about their own personalities, or their leadership assets and liabilities. Gallup researchers routinely encounter leaders who don’t know where they are strong or weak. For instance, many leaders tell researchers that they are particularly good at developing their employees, but Gallup’s interviews with those employees sometimes show the exact opposite: The leaders in question more often demoralize, instead of developing, their followers.
“While two leaders may have identical expectations, the way they reach their goals is always dependent on the unique arrangement of their strengths.”
Prominent leadership researcher Dr. Donald O. Clifton was the “father of strengths psychology.” Starting in the 1960s, he and his Gallup and academic colleagues initiated more than 20,000 90-minute interviews with business and government leaders, including some former heads of state. Clifton’s researchers used performance data to determine how successful the interviewed business leaders were and how they carried out their work. The most startling finding was that these leaders did not share any particular strength. As Clifton explained, “What great leaders have in common is that each truly knows his or her strengths...There is no definitive list of characteristics that describes all leaders.”
StrengthsFinder
Clifton and his team developed the StrengthsFinder program, a tool you can use to assess your strongest skills. The more you know about yourself and your leadership abilities, the more self-confident you will be. Such confidence leads to greater earnings, more satisfying careers and fewer health problems.
“At a company-wide level, nothing creates stability as quickly as transparency.”
No single leader can possess every leadership quality, but you can organize executive leadership teams whose members muster an array of complementary skills. Although organizations should customize teams to pursue particular goals, few companies approach team building this way. Instead, many leaders try to make their work teams mirror their personal traits. They seek members who resemble them. When you organize a team, that’s the wrong way to go.
“You are a leader only if others follow.”
Instead, realize that:
“Strong teams are magnets for talent” – Good employees want to join successful teams.
“Conflict doesn’t destroy strong teams because strong teams focus on results” – Debate is a source of strength, not weakness.
“Strong teams prioritize what’s best for the organization and then move forward” – They adopt a long-range view.
“Members are as committed to their personal lives as they are to their work” – Team members find time for their families.
“Strong teams embrace diversity” – Focus on individual members’ leadership strengths, not their demographic characteristics.
The Four Primary Areas of Leadership Strength
Gallup’s research indicates that the most successful leadership and work teams unite individuals with complementary strengths and assets.
“I’ve never met an effective leader who wasn’t aware of his talents and working to sharpen them.” (Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander)
The StrengthsFinder system identifies 34 individual leadership themes, which can be sorted into “four domains of leadership strength”:
“Executing” – Leaders who are strong in this domain get things done. They can turn airy plans into concrete reality. How they execute depends on their particular leadership abilities. The themes associated with these leaders are: “achiever, arranger, belief, consistency, deliberative, discipline, focus, responsibility” and “restorative.”
“Influencing” – Leaders who are strong influencers can rally backing for an idea or develop political support for a project. Their paths to building influence depend on their particular capabilities. For example, a leader with strong self-assurance does not have to go overboard to sell a concept. This leader radiates inner confidence, so people automatically assume that his or her ideas are good. A leader with strong communication skills will create compelling word pictures about a new idea to impel others to support it. Themes and traits associated with this area are: “activator, command, communication, competition, maximizer, self-assurance, significance” and “woo.”
“Relationship building” – These leaders can turn a group of disparate individuals with different backgrounds into a finely honed team that works toward a common goal. A leader with strong “harmony” skills can keep a group enthusiastic about its team efforts, while leaders with strong “developer” skills may act as mentors to spur their team members to grow. The themes in this area are: “adaptability, developer, connectedness, empathy, harmony, includer, individualization, positivity” and “relator.”
“Strategic thinking” – This leader helps his or her team maintain its long-range focus. For instance, a content-oriented leader can explain how a team can use the past to shape the future. The themes in this area are: “analytical, context, futuristic, ideation, input, intellection, learner” and “strategic.”
“A leader is someone who can get things done through other people.” (Warren Buffett)
Each of the following leaders illustrates one of these four facets:
Executing – Wendy Kopp
As a senior at Princeton, Wendy Kopp chose “educational inequity” as the subject for her senior thesis. Studying this subject showed her that many children in depressed urban areas receive inferior education. A leader who strongly emphasizes responsibility as her theme (as well as putting energy into achievement, competition, strategy and relating to other people), Kopp organized other students to discuss the issue. She learned that while many of them would willingly volunteer for postgraduate teaching assignments in urban areas, they had no straightforward way to do so. Kopp decided to establish a “national corps of teachers” to organize such volunteers. After securing financial support, she started Teach for America, a national teachers’ program that college graduates have embraced. One year, it received in excess of 25,000 applicants for teaching posts, and it has already assisted more than three million students.
Influencing – Simon Cooper
In 2001, Simon Cooper became president of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, a prestigious luxury hotel chain. Most of its customers ranked the Ritz-Carlton in Gallup’s “95th percentile” for “customer engagement.” Cooper wanted more. Driven by his strong “maximizer theme” (along with “woo, arranger, activator” and “significance” themes), he told his employees that any Ritz-Carlton hotel in the “94th or 95th percentile” of customer engagement was operating in a dangerous “red zone.” The “yellow zone” was for hotels “in the 96th or 97th percentile.” He set a goal that all hotels should achieve “green zone” status, reaching the 98th percentile or above. The results? In his first seven years of leadership at Ritz-Carlton, Cooper set new records in customer engagement – and in profitability.
“Relationship Building” – Mervyn Davies
Standard Chartered is a huge international banking firm. Headquartered in London, it has a workforce of 70,000 people and operations in 70 countries. Mervyn Davies is the firm’s chairman and former CEO. He has a strong futuristic leadership theme, along with strengths as an achiever, relator and learner with positivity. At a time when most international banks were trying to expand in North America and Europe, Davies focused on Africa, India and the Middle East. Thanks to his vision, Standard Chartered is one of only a few large banking firms that not only survived the 2008-2009 economic crisis but actually expanded during it. In terms of leadership, Davies says, “You must know yourself, know the people around you and then get on with it.” Much of his success is due to his relator theme. As the head of Standard Chartered, he constantly went out of his way to communicate openly about his activities and his reasoning. This transparency enabled Davies to develop crucial “relationships with key shareholders, business partners, customers and employees.”
“Strategic Thinking” – Brad Anderson
Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson’s primary leadership strengths are context, ideation, input, learner and connectedness, all in the leadership area of strategic thinking. Before Anderson became president of Best Buy, the big box electronics chain paid its salespeople on a commission basis like most consumer electronic companies. The result? As soon as customers entered the store, anxious salespeople surrounded them and quickly tried to sell them high-priced and high-commissioned equipment. Using focus-group research, Anderson learned that, as a result of this policy, customers did not trust Best Buy. They felt that entering a store was like strolling onto a used-car lot. Anderson, then a member of the firm’s board, and Dick Schulze, the chain’s founder, recommended moving “away from a commissioned sales model.” This was a very successful move for the company, and many of its competitors quickly followed suit.
Following Up with Followers
The best way to learn what followers think about leadership is to ask them, so Gallup did. From 2005 to 2008, it asked 10,000 respondents, “What leader has the most positive influence in your daily life?” Gallup asked these participants to “list three words that best describe what this person contributes to your life.”
“The best leaders get to live on.”
More than a tenth of those Gallup polled used the same words to describe what they seek from their leaders:
“Trust” – In leadership, nothing matters more than trust. Without it, only one in 12 employees feels a sense of engagement with their firm. With it, “better than one in two” workers feel connected. Associated concepts include “respect, integrity and honesty.”
“Compassion” – Employees want their leaders to care about them. When staffers know that their leaders care, productivity and profitability expand. However, most leaders do not exhibit compassion toward their employees. This is a big mistake. Closely associated concepts include “caring, friendship, happiness and love.”
“Stability” – Employees want leaders they can depend on, for example, in knowing they will get paid reliably and on time. Associated concepts include “security, strength, support and peace.”
“Hope” – Most employees (69%) who feel buoyant about their future prospects at their companies become fully engaged in their work. Without this positive feeling, only 1% feels a sense of engagement. To improve this, leaders must guide people to feel positive about the future. Associated concepts include “direction, faith and guidance.”
What All This Means
Your success as a leader depends entirely on the people who follow you. To gauge your achievement, consider the number of other leaders that you train and develop. That is the ultimate measure of effective leadership.
About the Authors
Tom Rath heads Gallup’s workplace research activities. He is the author of StrengthsFinder 2.0. and Wellbeing, and the co-author of How Full Is Your Bucket? Barry Conchie leads Gallup’s executive leadership consulting practice.
GREAT SPEECHES: “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz
Background
This speech was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009. This speech was originally published on The American Scholar.
Speech Transcript
My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading. When we think about leadership in American history we are likely to think of Washington, at the head of an army, or Lincoln, at the head of a nation, or King, at the head of a movement—people with multitudes behind them, looking to them for direction. And when we think of solitude, we are apt to think of Thoreau, a man alone in the woods, keeping a journal and communing with nature in silence.
Leadership is what you are here to learn—the qualities of character and mind that will make you fit to command a platoon, and beyond that, perhaps, a company, a battalion, or, if you leave the military, a corporation, a foundation, a department of government. Solitude is what you have the least of here, especially as plebes. You don’t even have privacy, the opportunity simply to be physically alone, never mind solitude, the ability to be alone with your thoughts. And yet I submit to you that solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership. This lecture will be an attempt to explain why.
We need to begin by talking about what leadership really means. I just spent 10 years teaching at another institution that, like West Point, liked to talk a lot about leadership, Yale University. A school that some of you might have gone to had you not come here, that some of your friends might be going to. And if not Yale, then Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and so forth. These institutions, like West Point, also see their role as the training of leaders, constantly encourage their students, like West Point, to regard themselves as leaders among their peers and future leaders of society. Indeed, when we look around at the American elite, the people in charge of government, business, academia, and all our other major institutions—senators, judges, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth—we find that they come overwhelmingly either from the Ivy League and its peer institutions or from the service academies, especially West Point.
So I began to wonder, as I taught at Yale, what leadership really consists of. My students, like you, were energetic, accomplished, smart, and often ferociously ambitious, but was that enough to make them leaders? Most of them, as much as I liked and even admired them, certainly didn’t seem to me like leaders. Does being a leader, I wondered, just mean being accomplished, being successful? Does getting straight As make you a leader? I didn’t think so. Great heart surgeons or great novelists or great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn’t mean they’re leaders. Leadership and aptitude, leadership and achievement, leadership and even excellence have to be different things, otherwise the concept of leadership has no meaning. And it seemed to me that that had to be especially true of the kind of excellence I saw in the students around me.
See, things have changed since I went to college in the ’80s. Everything has gotten much more intense. You have to do much more now to get into a top school like Yale or West Point, and you have to start a lot earlier. We didn’t begin thinking about college until we were juniors, and maybe we each did a couple of extracurriculars. But I know what it’s like for you guys now. It’s an endless series of hoops that you have to jump through, starting from way back, maybe as early as junior high school. Classes, standardized tests, extracurriculars in school, extracurriculars outside of school. Test prep courses, admissions coaches, private tutors. I sat on the Yale College admissions committee a couple of years ago. The first thing the admissions officer would do when presenting a case to the rest of the committee was read what they call the “brag” in admissions lingo, the list of the student’s extracurriculars. Well, it turned out that a student who had six or seven extracurriculars was already in trouble. Because the students who got in—in addition to perfect grades and top scores—usually had 10 or 12.
So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would indeed take them far in life. They would come back for their 25th reunion as a partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an assistant secretary in the Department of State.
That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about training leaders. Educating people who make a big name for themselves in the world, people with impressive titles, people the university can brag about. People who make it to the top. People who can climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.
But I think there’s something desperately wrong, and even dangerous, about that idea. To explain why, I want to spend a few minutes talking about a novel that many of you may have read, Heart of Darkness. If you haven’t read it, you’ve probably seen Apocalypse Now, which is based on it. Marlow in the novel becomes Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen. Kurtz in the novel becomes Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. But the novel isn’t about Vietnam; it’s about colonialism in the Belgian Congo three generations before Vietnam. Marlow, not a military officer but a merchant marine, a civilian ship’s captain, is sent by the company that’s running the country under charter from the Belgian crown to sail deep upriver, up the Congo River, to retrieve a manager who’s ensconced himself in the jungle and gone rogue, just like Colonel Kurtz does in the movie.
Now everyone knows that the novel is about imperialism and colonialism and race relations and the darkness that lies in the human heart, but it became clear to me at a certain point, as I taught the novel, that it is also about bureaucracy—what I called, a minute ago, hierarchy. The Company, after all, is just that: a company, with rules and procedures and ranks and people in power and people scrambling for power, just like any other bureaucracy. Just like a big law firm or a governmental department or, for that matter, a university. Just like—and here’s why I’m telling you all this—just like the bureaucracy you are about to join. The word bureaucracy tends to have negative connotations, but I say this in no way as a criticism, merely a description, that the U.S. Army is a bureaucracy and one of the largest and most famously bureaucratic bureaucracies in the world. After all, it was the Army that gave us, among other things, the indispensable bureaucratic acronym “snafu”: “situation normal: all fucked up”—or “all fouled up” in the cleaned-up version. That comes from the U.S. Army in World War II.
You need to know that when you get your commission, you’ll be joining a bureaucracy, and however long you stay in the Army, you’ll be operating within a bureaucracy. As different as the armed forces are in so many ways from every other institution in society, in that respect they are the same. And so you need to know how bureaucracies operate, what kind of behavior—what kind of character—they reward, and what kind they punish.
So, back to the novel. Marlow proceeds upriver by stages, just like Captain Willard does in the movie. First he gets to the Outer Station. Kurtz is at the Inner Station. In between is the Central Station, where Marlow spends the most time, and where we get our best look at bureaucracy in action and the kind of people who succeed in it. This is Marlow’s description of the manager of the Central Station, the big boss:
He was commonplace in complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold. . . . Otherwise there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy—a smile—not a smile—I remember it, but I can’t explain. . . . He was a common trader, from his youth up employed in these parts—nothing more. He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust—just uneasiness—nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a . . . a . . . faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. . . . He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him—why? . . . He originated nothing, he could keep the routine going—that’s all. But he was great. He was great by this little thing that it was impossible to tell what could control such a man. He never gave that secret away. Perhaps there was nothing within him. Such a suspicion made one pause.
Note the adjectives: commonplace, ordinary, usual, common. There is nothing distinguished about this person. About the 10th time I read that passage, I realized it was a perfect description of the kind of person who tends to prosper in the bureaucratic environment. And the only reason I did is because it suddenly struck me that it was a perfect description of the head of the bureaucracy that I was part of, the chairman of my academic department—who had that exact same smile, like a shark, and that exact same ability to make you uneasy, like you were doing something wrong, only she wasn’t ever going to tell you what. Like the manager—and I’m sorry to say this, but like so many people you will meet as you negotiate the bureaucracy of the Army or for that matter of whatever institution you end up giving your talents to after the Army, whether it’s Microsoft or the World Bank or whatever—the head of my department had no genius for organizing or initiative or even order, no particular learning or intelligence, no distinguishing characteristics at all. Just the ability to keep the routine going, and beyond that, as Marlow says, her position had come to her—why?
That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.
I tell you this to forewarn you, because I promise you that you will meet these people and you will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other reason. As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institution—I realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution. Not just in government. Look at what happened to American corporations in recent decades, as all the old dinosaurs like General Motors or TWA or U.S. Steel fell apart. Look at what happened to Wall Street in just the last couple of years.
Finally—and I know I’m on sensitive ground here—look at what happened during the first four years of the Iraq War. We were stuck. It wasn’t the fault of the enlisted ranks or the noncoms or the junior officers. It was the fault of the senior leadership, whether military or civilian or both. We weren’t just not winning, we weren’t even changing direction.
We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders.
What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.
Now some people would say, great. Tell this to the kids at Yale, but why bother telling it to the ones at West Point? Most people, when they think of this institution, assume that it’s the last place anyone would want to talk about thinking creatively or cultivating independence of mind. It’s the Army, after all. It’s no accident that the word regiment is the root of the word regimentation. Surely you who have come here must be the ultimate conformists. Must be people who have bought in to the way things are and have no interest in changing it. Are not the kind of young people who think about the world, who ponder the big issues, who question authority. If you were, you would have gone to Amherst or Pomona. You’re at West Point to be told what to do and how to think.
But you know that’s not true. I know it, too; otherwise I would never have been invited to talk to you, and I’m even more convinced of it now that I’ve spent a few days on campus. To quote Colonel Scott Krawczyk, your course director, in a lecture he gave last year to English 102:
From the very earliest days of this country, the model for our officers, which was built on the model of the citizenry and reflective of democratic ideals, was to be different. They were to be possessed of a democratic spirit marked by independent judgment, the freedom to measure action and to express disagreement, and the crucial responsibility never to tolerate tyranny.
All the more so now. Anyone who’s been paying attention for the last few years understands that the changing nature of warfare means that officers, including junior officers, are required more than ever to be able to think independently, creatively, flexibly. To deploy a whole range of skills in a fluid and complex situation. Lieutenant colonels who are essentially functioning as provincial governors in Iraq, or captains who find themselves in charge of a remote town somewhere in Afghanistan. People who know how to do more than follow orders and execute routines.
Look at the most successful, most acclaimed, and perhaps the finest soldier of his generation, General David Petraeus. He’s one of those rare people who rises through a bureaucracy for the right reasons. He is a thinker. He is an intellectual. In fact, Prospect magazine named him Public Intellectual of the Year in 2008—that’s in the world. He has a Ph.D. from Princeton, but what makes him a thinker is not that he has a Ph.D. or that he went to Princeton or even that he taught at West Point. I can assure you from personal experience that there are a lot of highly educated people who don’t know how to think at all.
No, what makes him a thinker—and a leader—is precisely that he is able to think things through for himself. And because he can, he has the confidence, the courage, to argue for his ideas even when they aren’t popular. Even when they don’t please his superiors. Courage: there is physical courage, which you all possess in abundance, and then there is another kind of courage, moral courage, the courage to stand up for what you believe.
It wasn’t always easy for him. His path to where he is now was not a straight one. When he was running Mosul in 2003 as commander of the 101st Airborne and developing the strategy he would later formulate in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual and then ultimately apply throughout Iraq, he pissed a lot of people off. He was way ahead of the leadership in Baghdad and Washington, and bureaucracies don’t like that sort of thing. Here he was, just another two-star, and he was saying, implicitly but loudly, that the leadership was wrong about the way it was running the war. Indeed, he was not rewarded at first. He was put in charge of training the Iraqi army, which was considered a blow to his career, a dead-end job. But he stuck to his guns, and ultimately he was vindicated. Ironically, one of the central elements of his counterinsurgency strategy is precisely the idea that officers need to think flexibly, creatively, and independently.
That’s the first half of the lecture: the idea that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions. But how do you learn to do that? How do you learn to think? Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.
One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.
Now that’s the third time I’ve used that word, concentrating. Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?
You and the members of the other service academies are in a unique position among college students, especially today. Not only do you know that you’re going to have a job when you graduate, you even know who your employer is going to be. But what happens after you fulfill your commitment to the Army? Unless you know who you are, how will you figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life? Unless you’re able to listen to yourself, to that quiet voice inside that tells you what you really care about, what you really believe in—indeed, how those things might be evolving under the pressure of your experiences. Students everywhere else agonize over these questions, and while you may not be doing so now, you are only postponing them for a few years.
Maybe some of you are agonizing over them now. Not everyone who starts here decides to finish here. It’s no wonder and no cause for shame. You are being put through the most demanding training anyone can ask of people your age, and you are committing yourself to work of awesome responsibility and mortal danger. The very rigor and regimentation to which you are quite properly subject here naturally has a tendency to make you lose touch with the passion that brought you here in the first place. I saw exactly the same kind of thing at Yale. It’s not that my students were robots. Quite the reverse. They were intensely idealistic, but the overwhelming weight of their practical responsibilities, all of those hoops they had to jump through, often made them lose sight of what those ideals were. Why they were doing it all in the first place.
So it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.
But let me be clear that solitude doesn’t always have to mean introspection. Let’s go back to Heart of Darkness. It’s the solitude of concentration that saves Marlow amidst the madness of the Central Station. When he gets there he finds out that the steamboat he’s supposed to sail upriver has a giant hole in it, and no one is going to help him fix it. “I let him run on,” he says, “this papier-mâché Mephistopheles”—he’s talking not about the manager but his assistant, who’s even worse, since he’s still trying to kiss his way up the hierarchy, and who’s been raving away at him. You can think of him as the Internet, the ever-present social buzz, chattering away at you 24/7:
I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt. . . .
It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to . . . the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. . . . I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.
“The chance to find yourself.” Now that phrase, “finding yourself,” has acquired a bad reputation. It suggests an aimless liberal-arts college graduate—an English major, no doubt, someone who went to a place like Amherst or Pomona—who’s too spoiled to get a job and spends his time staring off into space. But here’s Marlow, a mariner, a ship’s captain. A more practical, hardheaded person you could not find. And I should say that Marlow’s creator, Conrad, spent 19 years as a merchant marine, eight of them as a ship’s captain, before he became a writer, so this wasn’t just some artist’s idea of a sailor. Marlow believes in the need to find yourself just as much as anyone does, and the way to do it, he says, is work, solitary work. Concentration. Climbing on that steamboat and spending a few uninterrupted hours hammering it into shape. Or building a house, or cooking a meal, or even writing a college paper, if you really put yourself into it.
“Your own reality—for yourself, not for others.” Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.” Notice that he uses the word lead. Leadership means finding a new direction, not simply putting yourself at the front of the herd that’s heading toward the cliff.
So why is reading books any better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, you need to put down your book, if only to think about what you’re reading, what you think about what you’re reading. But a book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is the result of his solitude, his attempt to think for himself.
Second, most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they’re not from today. Even if they merely reflect the conventional wisdom of their own day, they say something different from what you hear all the time. But the great books, the ones you find on a syllabus, the ones people have continued to read, don’t reflect the conventional wisdom of their day. They say things that have the permanent power to disrupt our habits of thought. They were revolutionary in their own time, and they are still revolutionary today. And when I say “revolutionary,” I am deliberately evoking the American Revolution, because it was a result of precisely this kind of independent thinking. Without solitude—the solitude of Adams and Jefferson and Hamilton and Madison and Thomas Paine—there would be no America.
So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”
Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.
This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.
I know that none of this is easy for you. Even if you threw away your cell phones and unplugged your computers, the rigors of your training here keep you too busy to make solitude, in any of these forms, anything less than very difficult to find. But the highest reason you need to try is precisely because of what the job you are training for will demand of you.
You’ve probably heard about the hazing scandal at the U.S. naval base in Bahrain that was all over the news recently. Terrible, abusive stuff that involved an entire unit and was orchestrated, allegedly, by the head of the unit, a senior noncommissioned officer. What are you going to do if you’re confronted with a situation like that going on in your unit? Will you have the courage to do what’s right? Will you even know what the right thing is? It’s easy to read a code of conduct, not so easy to put it into practice, especially if you risk losing the loyalty of the people serving under you, or the trust of your peer officers, or the approval of your superiors. What if you’re not the commanding officer, but you see your superiors condoning something you think is wrong?
How will you find the strength and wisdom to challenge an unwise order or question a wrongheaded policy? What will you do the first time you have to write a letter to the mother of a slain soldier? How will you find words of comfort that are more than just empty formulas?
These are truly formidable dilemmas, more so than most other people will ever have to face in their lives, let alone when they’re 23. The time to start preparing yourself for them is now. And the way to do it is by thinking through these issues for yourself—morality, mortality, honor—so you will have the strength to deal with them when they arise. Waiting until you have to confront them in practice would be like waiting for your first firefight to learn how to shoot your weapon. Once the situation is upon you, it’s too late. You have to be prepared in advance. You need to know, already, who you are and what you believe: not what the Army believes, not what your peers believe (that may be exactly the problem), but what you believe.
How can you know that unless you’ve taken counsel with yourself in solitude? I started by noting that solitude and leadership would seem to be contradictory things. But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.
Looking for more? You might like Leadership Lessons and Learning How to Think posts.