Page 179 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

him to always make a salient business case for any proposed strategic
policy decision.”
Rodriguez, who currently serves as chief clinical officer and medical
director of Harmony Behavioral Health, knew that since he aspired to be
a leader of a health care organization someday, he needed to understand
more than just facts. He needed to understand the people and the processes
he would lead, and he knew that one important tool for achieving that level
of understanding would be active listening. Engaging in active listening
entails trying to understand more than just a speaker’s words. Active listen-
ing involves responding to the speaker in a way that demonstrates that he
or she has been heard and that his or her feelings have been considered.
Rodriguez, who served in the Naval Reserve, said the military offers
great examples of why the technique is so important and why every leader
should learn to use it. “One of the lessons we had learned in all the debrief-
ings following the U.S. experiences in Vietnam was that the best field
leaders at the platoon and company levels were those who listened actively
to their noncommissioned officers before making life-and-death decisions,”
Rodriguez said. “The leadership objective was not to lead the unit through
a truly democratic process. But it was critical to form up a team of follow-
ers by tapping into the unit’s best collective judgment in order to lead those
people toward a common objective that might even kill them but could
only be achieved with a clear plan and a commitment to teamwork for their
collective survival. So it is that even in more mundane situations, leaders
best achieve their objectives through active listening—always with a clear
goal in mind. It is imperative for the functioning of any effective group
that each participant, including the leader, must sacrifice some part of the
individual self to the larger group identity and purpose. Effective leadership,
then, requires an extraordinary talent—to be able to steer each member of
a group to psychologically give up his or her narcissistic needs to a shared
group need. This can be accomplished in any number of ways: verbal
eloquence, appealing to people’s sense of self-worth or purpose, or appealing
to just their sheer greed, their narcissistic negative needs. Leaders can take
people down the right path or the wrong path. They can take them to a
higher social level or a lower one, including criminal acts. Some of the best
leaders are leaders of psychopathic groups. Fortunately for me, I had the
benefit of role models who led by inspiration toward higher group goals,
including Secretary Schweiker. Like all effective and inspiring leaders, he

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