Page 130 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ARE GREAT COMMUNICATORS

everybody on the back and talking. He’d sit in the employee cafeteria and
talk with a lower-level employee about her children. The employees loved
him. If you’re trying to do things of the magnitude that we were trying to
do back then, that I guess any cabinet officer is trying to do today, you’ve
got to build political capital. You’ve got to give people a sense of being
involved, of having a bond, because the forces against what you’re doing
are just too great. Hardin was brilliant and a wonderful mentor for me, but
he just couldn’t establish that bond because of his aloofness.”

The bond between Marsha “Marty” Evans (WHF 79–80) and her princi-
pal, U.S. Treasury Secretary William “Bill” Miller, was strong from the
moment Evans arrived for her Fellowship. At that time, Evans was a U.S.
Navy lieutenant commander who never had held a job outside the Navy.
Secretary Miller had a soft spot for people in the military, having served
in the Coast Guard. He gave Evans the title of Executive Secretary of the
Treasury and, along with it, the opportunity to do meaningful, demand-
ing work that built her self-confidence and inspired her to pursue even
greater challenges as the year progressed. Miller invited Evans to attend
important meetings and called on her to write speeches and prepare mate-
rials for congressional testimony. He also tapped her to write the weekly
Treasury Department summaries for President Carter, who often would
send handwritten feedback to her.
“Here I’m thinking, I’m a lieutenant commander in the Navy—I’d
been in the Navy about eleven years at that point—and here’s the Secre-
tary of the U.S. Treasury, a principal economic officer of the government,
and he believes that I can do this significant work for him,” Evans said. “I
had never had a real job other than the Navy, so it was an amazing time of
confidence building for me, and it reinforced in my mind that I could do
anything I set my mind to do. Secretary Miller was a wonderful, inclusive
boss. He always communicated in a positive way—praise in public, criti-
cize in private—and he always communicated that there’s a way to get over,
under, or around every problem.”
Having worked in such a positive environment with an effective com-
municator like Secretary Miller during her year in Washington had a strong
and lasting effect on Evans. At the end of her Fellowship she returned to
the Navy and continued to move up in the ranks. In 1986, former Fellow
and Naval Academy Superintendent Chuck Larson (WHF 68–69) tapped

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