Page 94 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ACT WITH INTEGRITY

right and wrong is. “When you’re a junior officer in the Navy or a junior
plant manager in a company, there is either a written or unwritten ‘book’
for you to follow. If you go by the book and work harder than other people,
you can be a good leader,” Blair said. “But as you get higher and higher,
the books sort of fall away, and when you get to the very top of the big
organizations, there just aren’t any books at all. Then it all boils down to
your internal gyroscope and your character and what you’ve learned up
until then. The leaders I admire are the ones like Carla Hills who strive to
keep it simple, consistent, and honest and who don’t try to look for the
easy way out. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out what the right
course of action is, and you don’t have to come up with elaborate, brilliant
strategies. You just have to pick out the simple, hard things to do and decide
you’re going to do them. The reason it’s so hard to do those things is
because the trappings of leadership will give you lots of ways to avoid them,
and you’ll have lots of other people who will be glad to take that burden
from your shoulders and make it all seem very easy and comfortable and
pleasant for you as a leader. But if you want to last, you can’t fall for that.
You have to take it upon yourself.”
Blair recalled one occasion when doing the right thing cost him dearly.
Although he did not want to provide details—a true leader does, after all,
practice discretion—he did reveal that because of his leadership role he had
a shot at becoming vice chairman or even chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. To be considered for one of those jobs, he would have had to modify
his philosophy and change his leadership style to please a new administra-
tion. He chose to stick with the methods and values he had developed
throughout his career even though he knew he would not be considered for
either position because of that. “It wasn’t that difficult a decision,” he said.
“Certainly I would have relished the chance to make more of a difference in
that higher position, but I was still not willing to change my philosophy or
my style. I had too much confidence in my approach to change it even though
I knew that meant I wasn’t going to move up further in the organization.”
At the time of this writing, President-elect Barack Obama has
appointed Blair to serve as his Director of National Intelligence.
Another former White House Fellow who was not afraid to do the
right thing was Jane Cahill Pfeiffer (WHF 66–67). It was 1978, and
although more than a decade had passed since Pfeiffer, the nation’s first
female White House Fellow, had completed her Fellowship, many of her

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