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Behind Open Doors
By Oren Harari, January-February 2002
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3. Share the Power
"Plans don't accomplish work," says Powell. "It is people who get things done." He adheres to two basic leadership premises: 1) People are competent and 2) Every job is important.
"Everybody has a vital role to play," he told his State Department staff when he took over as Secretary. "And it is my job to convey down through every layer to the last person in the organization the valuable role they perform."
The flip side to that leadership style is more responsibility on the part of those being led. The day he was promoted to lieutenant general and placed in command of V Corps in Germany, Powell received this letter from the Chief of Staff of the Army: "If in two years you have not heard from me offering you a second position or promoting you to four stars, I expect you to have your resignation on my desk." Two years later, four-star General Powell was in the White House as National Security Adviser.
"He expected me to retire if he couldn't use me anymore," Powell explains simply.
4. Know When to Ignore Your Advisers
Experts, advisers, and consultants will only get you so far. Eventually a leader must make the final decisions. In Vietnam, Powell recalls asking a Vietnamese army officer why an outpost had been put in such a vulnerable spot. The officer explained that some military experts wanted it there to supply a nearby airfield. So then, asked Powell, why was the airfield there? The officer replied, "To resupply the outpost."
"Experts often possess more data than judgment," says Powell. "Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world." The best leaders, he believes, should never ignore their own hard-won experience.
5. Develop Selective Amnesia
Too many leaders get so trapped in fixed ways of seeing things that they can't cope when the world changes. In the spring of 1988, Powell flew to Moscow to prepare for a presidential summit. Sitting across the table, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev delivered momentous news, saying, in effect: "I'm ending the Cold War, and you're going to have to find a new enemy."
As Powell recalls it, his initial mental reaction was, "But I don't want to!" After investing 28 years in seeing the Soviet Union as an enemy, he realized that "everything I had worked against no longer mattered." But he regained his footing, adjusted to the new world order, and helped guide modern U.S. foreign policy.
While we all have preconceived notions, Powell says, "Never let ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it."
6. Come Up for Air
Powell demands excellence from his staff, but he also insists they have lives outside the office. Again, he leads by example: He has always devoted as much time as possible to Alma, his wife of 39 years, and their children, Mike, Linda, and Annemarie. "I don't have to prove to anybody that I can work sixteen hours a day if I can get it done in eight," he told his State Department staff. "If I'm looking for you at 7:30 at night and you are not in your office, I'll consider you a wise person. Anybody who is logging hours to impress me, you are wasting time."
7. Declare Victory and Quit
"Command is lonely," says Powell. And so is the decision to withdraw from the position of authority—a choice he says not every leader makes soon enough. His own retirement from the military was, in his word, "traumatic."
"One of the saddest figures in all of Christendom," he says, "is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, once removed, driving around with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes, making his strategic choice as to whether it's going to be McDonald's or Taco Bell."
Powell didn't stay retired in 1993. Now in civilian clothes, he helps lead not only the military but the nation itself. He is equal to the task in no small measure because of the lessons he has learned and the principles he lives by.
"Leadership," he says, "is not rank, privilege, titles, or money. It's responsibility."
Oren Harari, author of The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell (McGraw-Hill, February 2002), is professor of management at the University of San Francisco's McLaren Graduate School of Business.
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