What a Leader Looks Like

Like most of us, I continue to reflect on this past session, and track what’s going on nationally – debt ceiling debate, interest rates, workforce challenges, etc. The Pew Research Center out of Washington D.C. describes the U.S. as having become “exceptional in our political divide.” And what I’m looking for is leadership to get us through. So I listen. And read. Today, my thoughts on leadership are those of David Gergen, a political independent, a senior political analyst for CNN, and the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. Gergen is a former presidential advisor who served several administrations and he wrote about those experiences in his New York Times best seller, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton. His thoughts on what it takes to be a good leader might surprise you.
 
David Gergen on leadership, in an interview at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in 2014:
 
I always thought that the best leader would be the smartest person in the room. Follow the smartest person and you’ll get the best results.
 
What I’ve learned:

1. Being bright, competent, is the threshold requirement for leadership. The basic bottom line. Other qualities are required to be a complete leader. Being bright is helpful, but not sufficient. The two other qualities I feel are very important:                                                    
2. You need a lot of drive, a lot of vision. Leadership is about change. And change is never easy. The people who benefit from the status quo will oppose you automatically. And the people who will benefit from change are going to be fearful. They’re not going to believe in the benefit of change at first. So big change is really, really hard. And that means you’ve got to have the capacity, the drive, fire inside, the vision to push through resistance. To help lift people there. You’ve got to wake up every day thinking about how we’re going to get a little further along towards our goals.                                             
3. I can’t overstate the importance of character and the qualities, the temperament, that go with it. Personal inner qualities… and soft skills are the hardest to develop. You need to go through a personal journey to acquire character. It’s something you work on over time, build up over time. What we know about leadership today, how it’s changed from what it was: leadership used to be about ordering from the top down. Command and control. Today we are moving to a new model of leadership, which is about influence. Persuasion. If you’re going to persuade people, they’re going to have to trust you. And to earn trust, you have to have character. They need to know you know what you’re talking about, that you’re being transparent, and that you’re telling the truth. Consistency across time. So then, others are willing to invest themselves, put their own reputation on the line, to engage and follow that vision.

 
I hope you know leaders like this; I hope you vote for them. My encouragement is that you strive to be one of them because we need you!
 
See you in the trenches,
B