Quotations from Colin Powell

Editor’s Note: As a student in last year’s Peoria Area Chamber of Commerce Community Leadership School (CLS), I was fortunate to hear presentations on various aspects of leadership from many of the finest leaders in the Peoria area. One of these presentations, given by Col. William P. Robertson, commander of the 182d Airlift Wing of the Illinois Air National Guard, stuck with me through its use of leadership lessons from the playbook of former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell.

The Colonel’s presentation was based on a 1996 article by Oren Harari, as published in Management Review, membership magazine of the American Management Association. Harari, current professor at the University of San Francisco, put together this compendium of advice based on quotations from Colin Powell’s 1995 autobiography, My American Journey.

Harari presents Powell’s words verbatim in bold—“18 priceless lessons, to be exact”—after which he attached his own commentary expanding upon each lesson. What follows are the 18 leadership lessons of Colin Powell, excerpted from Harari’s article. You may already be familiar with these lessons, but the wisdom contained herein is timeless, with many relevant lessons for the business community, and is worthy of periodic review.
-Jonathan Wright, Managing Editor

 

LESSON 1: “Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.”
Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your decisions. It’s inevitable if you’re honorable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity: You’ll avoid the tough decisions, you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, and you’ll avoid offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some people might get upset. Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying not to get anyone mad, and by treating everyone equally “nicely” regardless of their contributions, you’ll ensure that the only people you’ll wind up angering are the most creative and productive in the organization.

LESSON 2: “The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”
If this were a litmus test, the majority of CEOs would fail. One, they build so many barriers to upward communication that the very idea of someone lower in the hierarchy looking up to the leader for help is ludicrous. Two, the corporate culture they foster often defines asking for help as weakness or failure, so people cover up their gaps, and the organization suffers accordingly. Real leaders make themselves accessible and available. They show concern for the efforts and challenges faced by underlings—even as they demand high standards. Accordingly, they are more likely to create an environment where problem analysis replaces blame.

LESSON 3: “Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.”
Small companies and startups don’t have the time for analytically detached experts. They don’t have the money to subsidize the lofty elite, either. The president answers the phone and drives the truck when necessary; everyone on the payroll visibly produces and contributes to bottom-line results, or they’re history. But as companies get bigger, they often forget who “brung them to the dance”: things like all-hands involvement, egalitarianism, informality, market intimacy, daring, risk, speed, agility. Policies that emanate from ivory towers often have an adverse impact on the people out in the field who are fighting the wars or bringing in the revenues. Real leaders are vigilant—and combative—in the face of these trends.

LESSON 4: “Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own backyard.”
Learn from the pros, observe them, seek them out as mentors and partners. But remember that even the pros may have leveled out in terms of their learning and skills. Sometimes even the pros can become complacent and lazy. Leadership does not emerge from blind obedience to anyone. Xerox’s Barry Rand was right on target when he warned his people that if you have a yes-man working for you, one of you is redundant. Good leadership encourages everyone’s evolution.

LESSON 5: “Never neglect details. When everyone’s mind is dulled or distracted, the leader must be doubly vigilant.”
Strategy equals execution. All the great ideas and visions in the world are worthless if they can’t be implemented rapidly and efficiently. Good leaders delegate and empower others liberally, but they pay attention to details, every day. Bad ones—even those who fancy themselves as progressive “visionaries”—think they’re somehow “above” operational details. Paradoxically, good leaders understand something else: An obsessive routine in carrying out the details begets conformity and complacency, which in turn dulls everyone’s mind. That is why, even as they pay attention to details, they continually encourage people to challenge the process. They implicitly understand the sentiment of CEO-leaders like Quad/Graphic’s Harry Quadracchi, Oticon’s Lars Kolind and the late Bill McGowan of MCI, who all independently asserted that the job of a leader is not to be the chief organizer, but the chief dis-organizer.

LESSON 6: “You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.”
You know the expression “it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission”? Well, it’s true. Good leaders don’t wait for official blessing to try things out. They’re prudent, not reckless. But they also realize a fact of life in most organizations: If you ask enough people for permission, you’ll inevitably come up against someone who believes his job is to say “no.” So the moral is, don’t ask. I’m serious. In my own research with colleague Linda Mukai, we found that less-effective middle managers endorsed the sentiment, “If I haven’t explicitly been told ‘yes,’ I can’t do it,” whereas the good ones believed “If I haven’t explicitly been told ‘no,’ I can.” There’s a world of difference between these two points of view.