Page 216 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS LEAD BY WALKING AROUND

their unique perspectives on the business. “It’s so very important that you
keep in touch with your constituencies. People should never wonder what
the bosses back in the world headquarters are thinking. They should know.
So I spent a lot of time working with them so they understood our prior-
ities,” Padilla said. “Listen, the action is not in the headquarters. The action
is on the ground. Your people should feel comfortable that every decision
they make is in sync with the priorities of the organization. By going
out there and talking with them and by making sure they understood my
perspective, I think that enabled people to take initiative, which was
critical to the overriding priorities that we had laid out.”
Empowering people to take initiative is what leadership is all about, as
Dr. George Ruiz (WHF 06–07) learned by working at Veterans Affairs
during his Fellowship year. Truthfully, though, Ruiz already knew a bit
about initiative thanks to his dad, a Colombian tire mechanic who often
told Ruiz and his little brother Carl, “I do this kind of work every day so
you don’t have to.” Spurred on by his father’s words—and at one point
during his college days the whizzing noise from a hydraulic drill at the tire
repair shop near his apartment—Ruiz graduated from Brown University
and Albert Einstein College of Medicine and became a cardiologist
specializing in the management of congenital heart defects in adult
patients. From his principal, Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson, Ruiz
saw how important it was to get out from behind the desk and hang out
with the team. “One of the lessons I learned early on is what I call the
lunchroom rule. I loved it when my secretary would go down and eat with
us in the lunchroom,” Ruiz said. “I was impressed by that. Whenever I saw
him sitting there, I thought, ‘You’re the man!’”
Ruiz spun that lesson in another direction and came to the conclusion
that if he was going to be a leader in the VA during his Fellowship, he
would have to emulate his principal and get out from behind his desk. “If
you really want to understand something, you need to go to where they
make the sausage,” he explained. “So I started going around asking stupid
questions like ‘How do you guys buy things?’ I figured they must have
an office there that bought the stuff for all of the VA, but everyone kept
looking at me like I was crazy. And that was another thing I learned that
year—that some of the smartest people I met during my Fellowship asked
the simplest questions. It wasn’t that they were simple people or that they
had simple thought processes. It was because they were able to dissect

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