Page 161 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

Since leaving his Fellowship, Gallagher has been using that tool daily in his
role as Director for the War of Ideas and Strategic Communications at the
National Security Council’s Office of Iraq and Afghanistan Affairs.
Another former Fellow who is determined to energize her team every
day is Court TV news anchor and legal analyst Jami Floyd (WHF 93–94).
Floyd, who earned a juris doctor degree from the University of California–
Berkeley and a master of law degree from Stanford Law School, spent the
bulk of her Fellowship year working in the office of Vice President Al Gore
alongside his chief domestic policy advisor, Greg Simon. From both men
she learned the power of positive energy.
“Greg was the kind of person who inspired energy. Even if you were
exhausted, he lifted you up with his good spirits and his positive attitude.
I know he had to be tired, but he never seemed tired,” Floyd explained.
“Greg and Al Gore had very different personalities, but they were both
energizing leaders. Greg was lighthearted and jovial, a very talkative and
friendly person. He’d encourage you to take your lunch break and go for
a walk around the block or to the museum or the Corcoran Gallery of Art
to get out and stretch your mind a bit and then come back reenergized.
How many bosses do that? Then there was the vice president’s energy,
which was much more focused and directed, and you felt its intensity even
without words. When I think back to all the great people the vice president
had working for him, I realize they were all people, like Greg, who gave
energy more than they drew it away. So obviously the vice president
appreciated those who motivated through enthusiasm rather than fear and
dissension, and he selected people who thrive under stress, who cope well
with it without taking it out on others.”
It would take seven years and a horrific event for Floyd to understand
the full power of that lesson. As Floyd strolled through the streets of New
York to her job as the law and justice correspondent for ABC News one
sunny morning in September 2001, terrorists crashed two hijacked planes
filled with innocent passengers into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
Floyd’s first instinct was to rush home to her two-year-old daughter, but
knowing the toddler was safe with her husband, she placed her duty as a
journalist before her own interests and dashed to the newsroom to receive
her assignment. “I was immediately dispatched to the World Trade Center
with a single producer and a crew—one cameraman and one soundman,”
Floyd recalled. “We were about to cover the biggest story of our lives and

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