The Leadership Choice: Designing Climates of Blame or Responsibility

By Grady E. Bogue

The Choice is an engaging and informing collection of concise and lively essays designed to deliver core leadership concepts in journalistic style for quick reading and easy understanding. Leaders in corporate, civic, governmental, educational, non profit and other organization settings will find these reflective nuggets attracting and compelling. Chapter titles such as Demonizing Dissent, Executive Soul Erosion, Virtuosos of Avarice, Leader as Guerilla, Windows into the Soul, Choice as Instrument of Freedom anticipate ideas and values designed to enhance leadership effectiveness and moral impact.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2010
• ISBN: 9781449702427

Book preview

1

The Power to Do Evil, the Duty to Do Good: The Leader’s Choice

Leaders have the power to do evil and the duty to do good. They continually grapple with the temptation toward duplicity and the responsibility to integrity. So, what does the leader ethics scorecard look like? Even the hardiest of optimists must face the daily media chronicle of leaders choosing paths of darkness rather than light.

A military officer selling secrets to a foreign power, a governmental official misusing public funds, an attorney helping prisoners escape, a preacher or priest engaged in lavish personal spending of parishioner funds, a college president engaging in an illicit sexual liaison, a physician ripping off the Medicare system, a corporate executive conspiring to fix prices, a law-enforcement official taking bribes from criminal sources, a journalist falsifying a Pulitzer story, a professor falsifying research data.

Are these disappointing stories of wayward leadership behavior the dominant reality in our society? No! There are leaders in every organization daily exemplifying moral commitment in quiet acts of courage and moral fortitude. Now the most obvious question is this: How do some leaders find the courage to stand by their moral principles when under pressure to abandon them and others do not?

One answer to this question is that some leaders enter into their work without a set of constructive moral values guiding their behavior. They have no commitment to candor, courage, or compassion, nor do they pursue honesty, empathy, truth, justice, and honor. They may be intellectually brilliant but empathetically empty—conceptual giants but moral dwarfs, masters of technique but navigators without moral compass. We should not be surprised that such leaders abandon their integrity because there was no integrity to abandon.

But what of those leaders who know what is right and do what is right, who have moral conviction and act on that conviction? What moves a life like that of military officer/strategist General Billy Mitchell, Russian dissident/physicist Andrei Sakharov, the Indian activist/Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, South African dissenter/Prime Minister Nelson Mandela, Burmese dissident/Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, or American suffragette Alice Paul?

Beyond these more visible and better-known leaders, what motivates the saints of the rank and file, the great host of leaders of whom no media stories will be crafted and no biographies written, but who furnish an everyday reality of leadership goodness?

This question has been engaged by researchers Anne Colby and William Damon and reported in their book Some Do Care. With an interesting nominating process, they identified a cluster of moral exemplars over the nation and conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-three such inspiring souls. These exemplars were not all highly visible folks that we might expect to read about in the news. Many were quiet and relatively uneducated in a formal sense.

Yet these exemplars held certain behavioral attributes in common: a sustained commitment to moral ideal and principle, a disposition to act on those moral commitments, a willingness to risk self-interest in service of moral principle, a tendency to be inspiring to others, a sense of humility about one’s importance to the world about them, and absence of fat egos.

So what did Colby and Damon find? What was revealed in the lives of these moral exemplars that caused them to stand to duty?

1. They were not a grim collection, but were positive, cheerful, and optimistic.

2. They remained open to growth throughout their lives.

3. They disavowed personal courage as the basis of their behavior and spoke of unswerving devotion to moral principle.

4. They exhibited a capacity for charity and forgiveness rooted in spiritual faith.

5. They were men and women of self-knowledge and awareness but sensitive to the needs of others.

6. They were folks with a strong integration of their own personality and moral commitment.

7. They acted spontaneously with moral certainty and with little fear, doubt, or agonized reflection when confronted with moral challenge.

8. They reflected an inseparable concordance between self and morality.

Author Bruce Barton wrote that each of us helps to write the history of the human race every time we make a choice. We either add to the dignity of our race by making choices that promote goodness, or we further degrade it by making those that promote evil. The exemplary moral leader does not wait on favorable circumstances nor blame unfavorable circumstances but makes The Choice to play with honor whatever hand is dealt.

2

A One Line Leadership Legacy: Leading in the Interrogatory

Good advice is often brief advice.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is remembered for his inspiring leadership of Great Britain during and after World War II and his scholarship contributions over a lifetime of public service. He is also remembered for notably brief collegiate commencement advice when he arose and advised graduates to Never, never, never, never give up. And he sat down. This quick lesson on leadership persistence, an oft neglected value of leadership, is one to be remembered and practiced. Effective leaders invest for the long run and not just for the current quarter.

Former Saturday Review editor and well known American intellectual Norman Cousins edited a book in the 1960s entitled What I Have Learned. Comprised of essays from a number of world renowned leaders at that time, the essays were spiced by splendid lessons and lines. One that remains fixed in my memory is South African writer Alan Paton’s lesson and quote in his essay The Challenge of Fear: . . . active loving saves one from a morbid preoccupation with the shortcomings of society and the waywardness of men. This accent on leadership compassion is also a legacy to be treasured and practiced.

Do I have a one-line legacy to share with young leaders? Of all the ideas that might be engaged on leadership knowledge, value, and skill, what one idea would I want to share with young leaders—with those whose achievement has already been recognized, but who have years of promise ahead?

There’s a story of a young private assigned by his sergeant to duty in the kitchen and asked to sort a large group of potatoes into three piles of small, medium, and large. Returning after three hours, the sergeant found that the private had only moved one potato. Responding to a profane diatribe from the sergeant, the private said Sarge, it’s not the work that’s killing me. It’s the decisions.

Well here’s my decision and my one-line legacy . . .

The most important skill that leaders in any setting will develop is the inclination and the ability to frame and deploy a good question.

While serving as Chancellor of LSU Shreveport, I was phoned one summer day by the CEO of the largest manufacturing enterprise in the region, asking if I could arrange to get his daughter admitted to the university following her academic suspension from Vanderbilt University with a cumulative GPA of 0.6 and less than a D average after one year. We required a 2.0 or C average for transfer, which I carefully reported to my civic and CEO friend, a friend I had to look in the eye every Tuesday at Rotary.

Grady, are you the CEO of the university and can you make exceptions to policy? the corporate CEO asked.

The answer to both questions is ‘Yes,’ I responded.

Well, without giving me a lot of academic and philosophical crap, can you tell me whether or not you will make an exception for my daughter? he queried.

Bill (a pseudonym), I responded, let me see if I understand what you want me to do. Is it that you want Vanderbilt to maintain its academic standards but you don’t want your public university here to do the same? Is it that you want Vanderbilt and other universities to honor their academic standards but you want your public university to become an academic halfway house?

Doesn’t sound good when you put it that way, he replied. I was then treated to a stream of lively and colorful invective and a hang up.

But, as former TV/radio commentator Paul Harvey would say, here’s the rest of the story. The parent called back two days later, apologized, and said Grady, the answer to both of your questions is ‘No.’ You stick to your standards at LSU, and we will have our daughter deal with the consequences of her own decisions.

Good questions may be used to return to the offense when you are put on the defense by questions that may have entrapment and accusatory intent. They may be deployed in a premier role and duty of leaders in any organizational setting—calling others to responsibility for their own goals, actions and decisions. They may be employed to stimulate curiosity and promote self reliance, to challenge arrogance and confront duplicity. They can be gentle instruments of discovery, evaluation and encouragement.

A few leaders (One is too many!) will leave tragic legacies of defeated spirits, corrupted organizations, betrayed trust, and shameful ethical models. Most will leave legacies of worthy goals achieved, co-workers lifted to new plains of promise and performance, and value cultures that honor curiosity, courage, civility, and compassion.

What’s the most important skill a leader will develop and exemplify to bequeath a constructive leadership legacy?

That’s a good question!

3

Pedigree, Prejudice and the Sensible Advantages of Diversity

Early in my career, I was appointed director of a new research office. I inherited in that assignment a staff member of distinctive but dubious demeanor. From my assessment and prejudice, he appeared to have several problems. First, he did not wear a tie to work and second, he wore a long beard. From my narrow and initial prejudicial perspective, these matters of outward appearance projected troubling