I remember events through the personalities who shaped or responded to them. The examples they set, the decisions they made, and sometimes the price they paid are the lens through which I view the sliver of history I shared. The leaders I studied inspired me. The leaders whom I knew, those who touched me directly, share a special place in my mind, and often in my heart.
As a child I’d been fascinated with heroes, first fixating on their talent, bravery, and commitment. I read again and again of the new American John Paul Jones on the deck of the Bonhomme Richard declaring he had “not yet begun to fight,” and of the Scot Robert Bruce regaining lost hope by watching a spider spinning a web fail six times without giving up. I’d listened to my father’s letters from Vietnam and seen occasional photographs of his lean frame in green jungle fatigues and combat gear. It was a romantic, sometimes two-dimensional model of leadership, embodied in heroism, wrapped in service, most often in uniform.
Over the years, through age, experience, and example, my model of a leader matured. My mother was raised in the south and deeply admired Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, stubborn leadership of the civil rights movement. She made me understand how someone breaking the law and disrupting an orderly way of life could represent leadership, while those in uniform holding water cannons might not. She taught me that leadership is not command. Some of the greatest leaders commanded nothing but respect. And I learned of, and sometimes saw, commanders who never tried to lead.
So, after a lifetime, what had I learned about leadership? Probably not enough. But I saw enough for me to believe it was the single biggest reason organizations succeeded or failed. It dwarfed numbers, technology, ideology, and historical forces in determining the outcome of events. I used to tell junior leaders that the nine otherwise identical parachute infantry battalions of the 82nd Airborne Division ranged widely in effectiveness, the disparity almost entirely a function of leadership.
“Switch just two people—the battalion commander and command sergeant major—from the best battalion with those of the worst, and within ninety days the relative effectiveness of the battalions will have switched as well,” I’d say. I still believe I was correct.
Yet leadership is difficult to measure and often difficult even to adequately describe. I lack the academic bona fides to provide a scholarly analysis of leadership and human behavior. So I’ll simply relate what, after a lifetime of being led and learning to lead, I’ve concluded.
Leadership is the art of influencing others. It differs from giving a simple order or managing in that it shapes the longer-term attitudes and behavior of individuals and groups. George Washington’s tattered army persisted to ultimate victory. Those troops displayed the kind of effort that can never be ordered—only evoked. Effective leaders stir an intangible but very real desire inside people. That drive can be reflected in extraordinary courage, selfless sacrifice, and commitment.
Leadership is neither good nor evil. We like to equate leaders with values we admire, but the two can be separate and distinct. Self-serving or evil intent motivated some of the most effective leaders I saw, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In the end, leadership is a skill that can be used like any other, but with far greater effect.
Leaders take us where we’d otherwise not go. Although Englishmen rushing into the breach behind Henry V is a familiar image, leaders whose personal example or patient persuasion causes dramatic changes in otherwise inertia-bound organizations or societies are far more significant. The teacher who awakens and encourages in students a sense of possibility and responsibility is, to me, the ultimate leader.
Success is rarely the work of a single leader; leaders work best in partnership with other leaders. In Iraq in 2004, I received specific direction to track Zarqawi and bring him to justice. But it was the collaboration of leaders below me, inside TF 714, that built the teams, relentlessly hunted, and ultimately destroyed his lethal network.