Page 174 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ARE GREAT LISTENERS

have been interested in seeing Ray’s paintings had they been good ones,
but since she already had enough marginal paintings of her husband, she
would pass on these. Mrs. King just had an extraordinary capacity for
listening with an open mind.”
During his Fellowship year, Mitchell Reiss (WHF 88–89) also saw
how the ability to listen enhances a leader’s effectiveness. Reiss worked for
National Security Advisor Colin Powell, and he often marveled at his
principal’s willingness not only to hear dissenting views but to encourage
them actively. “It was an open-mindedness to get all ideas, all options, out
on the table without judging them in advance so that people wouldn’t
self-censor. He encouraged people to speak truth to power, because he
knew it was very hard to go in and tell a powerful person something that
you know he absolutely does not want to hear,” Reiss explained. “Powell
knew you can’t function in any environment—government, private sector,
academia, think tank, it doesn’t matter—unless you have a culture that
encourages people to come to you with problems, preferably while the
problems are still small. Powell was terrific at that. He knew he wasn’t going
to be effective if you couldn’t tell him the truth.”
Reiss recalled once giving Powell two short memos asking him to
reverse course on two different policies. Reiss was certain he was right and
confident that Powell would go along with his recommendations. Instead,
Powell lectured Reiss for almost half an hour, ripping apart the younger
man’s reasoning. “At the end of it he asked if we understood each other,”
said Reiss. “Of course I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He threw the memos at me as I was
leaving, but when I reached the doorway, he said there was one more thing
he wanted to tell me. I turned around, and he said with a smile, ‘Keep the
memos coming.’ He recognized that even though I had just wasted twenty-
five minutes of his time, there weren’t that many of us who were willing
to tell him stuff like that. Even if he disagreed, he still valued it. That
makes all the difference in the world.”
Like Reiss, Bill Cotter (WHF 65–66) learned a great lesson in listening
during his Fellowship. At the Department of Commerce, Cotter was
assigned to a task force charged with bridging the gap between the senior
civil servants and the political appointees. In that capacity he got to see a
wide variety of leadership styles in action among the department’s assistant
secretaries and undersecretaries. Cotter came away with a crystal-clear
picture of the leadership type that was the most effective.

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