On Leadership

In her book, Leadership in Turbulent Times, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about how to be a good leader using the examples of four Presidents--Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and Johnson. The book is divided into three parts, each with one chapter per President. The first tells of their childhoods and the events that shaped them into the men they would become. The second tells of pivotal moments and strong discouragements, of doubt and reshaping their stories. The third tells of a groundbreaking moment in their presidencies, and how and why they made the decisions they did. The third part is broken into smaller sections with leadership principles as headings to guide the reader through the analysis of each President’s leadership abilities.

Leadership is something we all want to talk about in every line of work. From kindergarten on, my children were told to be leaders and were given lists of principles to help them be better leaders--pick up after yourself, treat others with respect, finish all your work and do your best, etc. These are all excellent principles, and I’m glad my kids learned them. They all contain seeds of what makes great people and great leaders. It’s a wonderful place to start, but it feels like what it takes to be a good leader of a country or a business or a classroom must go deeper than this.

But the truth is that leadership principles are universal, applying just as much to being a good student as to teaching in a classroom as to running a company or to leading a country. Good leadership does the same things--it takes risks, values people, takes responsibility, weighs the outcome, makes the difficult decisions. 

I have tried many times to write out what I think a leader does, and how I see my own role as a leader. I’ve never been very successful. While I can see how all the principles apply to any leadership position, it’s difficult to distill the principles of good leadership into short bullet points. This is part of why Goodwin’s book is so brilliant. She doesn’t try to distill complicated leadership into quippy statements. She breaks down stories of full human beings in difficult scenarios and shows what we can learn from them. 

All of us are leaders somewhere and somehow, and the necessity of good leaders only increases. I found the glimpses into the minds of some of our most important leaders instructive and fascinating, and they are powerful models for learning, both in their successes and failures.