Assuming the Mantle of Leadership

In my years of working with organizations – both large and small – and dealing with leaders and managers, I’ve often wondered what makes a leader. Is it something they were born with, something they learn, or a little of both? How do people respond to their new role as leader when it is earned through years of dedicated, hard work? And how does that kind of leader compare with one upon whom the role is suddenly thrust?

            The question of comparison occurs to me as I read Passage of Power, the fourth book in Robert Caro’s planned five-volume biography of Pres. Lyndon Baines Johnson.

            This book covers Johnson’s life from 1958 into 1964, a period when he went from serving as one of the US Senate’s most effective and powerful Majority Leaders, to a stillborn presidential campaign, to a humiliating three-year role as Vice President, to the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy, which thrust him into the presidency, a position he had long craved.

            How he responded to the shock of suddenly assuming the world’s most difficult leadership job is a lesson that answers my question – at least anecdotally.

Behind The Scenes

Caro does an extraordinary job, both in writing the story as well as researching it. Certainly, no historical biographer that I’ve read to date can compare with Caro, whose eye for detail and ability to dredge up heretofore-unknown information about highly public people and events is unmatched. Perhaps his most compelling research concerned Johnson’s reactions and actions in the minutes, hours, days and weeks immediately following the assassination, when he assumed the weighty mantle of leadership.

            Lyndon Johnson was a driven man, always on a quest for power. Interviewed about his series and the nearly 40 years he has spent researching the man, Caro said that the books are as much about Johnson’s quest for power as about the man himself.

            Johnson was Senate Majority Leader from 1954 until he became Vice President in 1961. Johnson used the post to its full extent and more, becoming the most powerful Senate leader of the 20^th century, a man accustomed to giving orders and expecting them to be carried out.

            He was enticed into the job of VP believing that, in presiding over the Senate, he could finagle even more power than he had had as Majority Leader. But the Constitutional separation of powers limited the role and assured he would merely be casting tie-breaking votes.

            Once ensconced as Vice President, the power he had known and luxuriated in as Senate Majority Leader was gone. Instead, he became a mere figurehead with little to do. He grasped at roles for himself, but JFK and his coterie of aides and cabinet members, especially Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, nixed any meaningful role for LBJ.

            Johnson’s humiliating three years as Vice President was the most difficult and painful period of his life. And then fate intervened in the person of Lee Harvey Oswald. This is where the story of power and leadership gets interesting.

Passage of Power

Awaiting word of the gravely wounded president’s condition, Johnson, his wife and an aide were put in a heavily guarded private room at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Throughout the interminable minutes of waiting, Caro writes, Johnson stood with his back to the wall, completely silent and absorbed in his thoughts. The power of the presidency passed to Johnson the moment Kennedy was pronounced dead.

            Initially hesitant, Johnson soon took control. Caro’s narrative describing the re-emergence of his powerful personality is remarkable:

“…His demeanor was very different in moments of crisis, in moments when there were decisions – tough decisions – to be made … in those moments he became … ‘quiet and still.’ He had been very quiet during the long minutes he stood there in the little room… There was a stillness about him, an immobility, a composure that hadn’t been seen very much during the past three years. Though he had been for those years restless, unable to sit still, unable to keep his mind on one subject, unable to stop talking, he wasn’t restless in that little room.

“…the hangdog look was gone, replaced with an expression” described as “set.” … "Johnson’s oldest aides and allies, the men who had known him the longest, knew that expression; the big jaw jutting, the lips above it pulled into a tight, grim line, the corner turned down in a hint of a snarl, the eyes, under those long black eyebrows, narrowed, hard, piercing. It was an expression of determination and fierce concentration; when Lyndon Johnson wore that expression, a problem was being thought through with an intensity that was almost palpable – and a decision made.”

Very quickly, he was giving orders and making rapid-fire decisions of great import.

            For me, as I noted, it is an impressive story of one man’s passage into power. I doubt many people could rise to such an occasion, as did LBJ. The notion of having to succeed a highly popular president on the heels of his sudden, tragic death just staggers the imagination.

            Johnson did it. And he did it with grace, thoughtfulness (for Jackie Kennedy and the Kennedy family), intelligence and tact.

            But he was also aggressive and eager to get himself out from under the Kennedy shadow and mark the presidency as his own. He wasted no time. While he assured the nation he would carry forth Kennedy’s initiatives, he needed something of his own. He alighted on it within his first month in office, designating the “War on Poverty” as his signature cause.

            The central message is this: born leader or otherwise, Johnson had the makeup of a man who knew himself well, his strengths and his limitations, as well as the ability to maximize those strengths and find the right people to make up for the limitations. In other words, a leader.

Walking the Management Tight Rope

Being a manager is to walk a tight rope. It’s about finding and maintaining the right balance consistently, lest you fall and fail.

            By balance, I mean walking that fine line between over-managing people and giving them too much leeway in their jobs. I couldn’t illustrate this better than did Danish author Carsten Jensen in a passage in his well-crafted 2011 novel, We, the Drowned, about generations of seamen from the small Danish port of Marstal:

“Every sailing ship has miles of ropes, scores of blocks, hundreds of square yards of canvas. Unless the ropes are constantly pulled and the sails endlessly adjusted, the ship becomes a helpless victim of the wind. Managing a crew is the same thing.

“The captain holds hundreds of invisible ropes in his hands. Allowing the crew to take charge is letting the wind take the helm: the ship will be wrecked. But if the captain takes complete control, the ship will be becalmed and go nowhere: he strips his men of all initiative; they’ll no longer do their best and go about their work with reluctance. It’s all a question of experience and knowledge. But first and foremost, it’s about authority.”

Of course, modern organizations are not 19^th century sailing vessels. Plying the vast open waters of the world’s great oceans at the mercy of fickle winds, currents and weather, there was an ever-present danger of rogue waves, sudden storms and typhoons, and lapses in judgment that could and often did result in disaster: lost ships, drowned crew, and lost cargo.

            While there may be no such life-and-death dangers in today’s modern office buildings and factory floors, the metaphor works.

Tight Reins Stifle Excellence

Managers who keep a tight rein on their teams, who micro-manage and second-guess their employees’ every move soon create a disheartened workforce. I’ve seen these situations first-hand.

            Employees “check out.” They go through the motions of doing their jobs, waiting for their manager to correct them, admonish them, or figuratively reach over their shoulders and do their jobs for them.

            This approach begs the question of such managers: why do you hire people? And exactly what skills were you looking for when you hired them? Are your people interchangeable? Clearly, by their actions, this sort of manager telegraphs his/her own gross insecurity that often betrays a personal lack of confidence, an innate craving to be superior when, in fact, that is in doubt.

            Conversely, the other extreme can be just as bad. When the manager is hands-off, offering little or no feedback or coaching, employees are cut adrift. They are left to guess what is expected of them, what determines excellence. In their minds, what they do has little meaning. Their errors and mistakes may or may not bring harm to the company, but it’s unlikely they’ll realize it until it’s too late.

            The happy middle ground is a bit of both: mentoring and coaching, nurturing and building the self-assurance of one’s employees until they feel secure and confident in their own abilities. They eventually gain a larger understanding of the team’s challenges, better able to make independent judgments, acquiring the wisdom that comes with experience.

            As Jensen notes, a manager’s role is to exert authority – not by doing your team members’ jobs for them or second-guessing every decision they make, but rather driving them to improve their own individual performances constantly for the betterment of the larger effort. It is coaching them to ask the right questions and to strive for personal improvement in their individual quests for excellence.

            As a manager, it’s your responsibility to leverage your own knowledge and experience to guide and coach your employees toward the acquisition of the same in application to the unit’s and the business’ challenges. It is helping them make the links between what they do every day and the organization’s larger purpose and goals.