Read 21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence Online
Authors: Pat Williams
21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (13 page)
His unhesitating reply: “His ability to communicate. They called him the Great Communicator, and it was absolutely true. Not only was he the commander in chief, but he saw himself as the communicator in chief. He used his communication skills to teach, to preach, and to get the American people on his side. Their support enabled him to plow right through the opposition. That’s how he got things done.”
You cannot lead effectively if you cannot communicate effectively. Some would say, “I’m the boss. I give orders; they comply. That’s all I need to know about communication.” But any dictator can demand compliance. Leaders inspire enthusiasm and motivate people to go beyond compliance. Only a real leader can cast a vision then energize followers to turn that vision into a reality.
Ronald Reagan changed the world through the power of communication. If you want to change your world and change your organization, you must become complete in the Second Side of Leadership.
2.
Communicate hope and optimism
. Ronald Reagan dared to believe that America could win the Cold War. History has validated his optimism. Michael Reagan describes how his father’s optimism impacted the nation:
My father communicated hope and optimism even in hard times. Long before the economy turned around, people felt good about America because Ronald Reagan was president…. In the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, the energy crisis, and stagflation, just changing the mood of America was an enormous achievement. Ronald Reagan always lifted America up. When he spoke about this land, you could see America through his eyes. He was like a child on Christmas morning—that’s how he felt about his country, and he never tired of telling people how wonderful America is.
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Stephen F. Knott teaches national security affairs at the United States Naval War College. He contrasts Reagan’s leadership style with that of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter:
Ronald Reagan’s…sunny optimism helped restore the people’s faith in their nation and in the American presidency. Gone was the talk from the Carter years of a crippled presidency and the need to revamp the Constitution and import a parliamentary system to replace our system of checks and balances. Ronald Reagan’s words will remain with us long after his policies are forgotten….
In the end, Reagan’s words, like those of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, may prove to be his most durable legacy.
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If you are too young to remember the Carter years, take note of this excerpt from President Carter’s Oval Office speech of July 15, 1979:
The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.
This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning….
I’m asking you for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel.
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President Carter thought he could lead the American people by scolding them and confronting them with a pessimistic vision of the future. When Reagan arrived, with his irrepressible charm and infectious optimism, the American people were eager to follow. As Warren Bennis observed in
On Becoming a Leader
, “The leader’s world view is always contagious. Carter depressed us; Reagan, whatever his other flaws, gave us hope.”
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Every day, you as a leader have a choice to make: “I am going to be a leader of optimism” or “I am going to be a leader of pessimism.” As Colin Powell has said, “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.”
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A positive outlook can take all the resources you possess and multiply them exponentially. Here’s why optimism wins:
• Optimists are more confident, so they accept challenging goals.
• Optimists believe setbacks and problems are temporary, so they don’t give up.
• Optimists have confidence that their decisions will turn out right, so they are more decisive.
• Optimists don’t take rejection personally, so they don’t waste time on resentment.
• Optimists know that failure is never final, so they bounce back from adversity.
• Optimists enjoy life and love their work.
Where others see obstacles, look for opportunities. To lead successfully, become a communicator of optimism and hope.
3.
Communicate grand ideas in vivid, visual terms
. Ken Khachigian, Reagan’s chief speechwriter, explained his boss’s effectiveness this way:
He “educated” America throughout his presidency. In an early speech to a joint session of Congress, he made clear the dimensions of an approaching one trillion dollar national debt by saying: “…if you had a stack of thousand-dollar bills in your hand only four inches high, you’d be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high.” (When I questioned where he came up with that number, he smiled and said: “by long division.”)…
He told Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall—symbolism which spoke more loudly then the rest of his speech. He not only educated his country, he educated a world…. He was the Great Communicator because he was the great educator and great illustrator.
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In your leadership communication, be as vivid and visual as possible. Create word pictures. Use props and visual aids. Use motion and gestures, light and color, images and video to make your message come alive. At the same time, keep it simple. It’s easy to overcomplicate your presentation but hard to oversimplify it. Become an educator and an illustrator.
4.
Always tell the truth
. People didn’t always agree with Ronald Reagan, but even his enemies believed he was telling the truth as he saw it. In the foreword to his book
Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches
, Reagan said:
Some of my critics over the years have said that I became president because I was an actor who knew how to give a good speech. I suppose that’s not too far wrong. Because an actor knows two important things—to be honest in what he’s doing and to be in touch with the audience. That’s not bad advice for a politician either. My actor’s instinct simply told me to speak the truth as I saw it and felt it.
I don’t believe my speeches took me as far as they did merely because of my rhetoric or delivery, but because there were certain basic truths in them that the average American citizen recognized. When I first began speaking of political things, I could feel that people were as frustrated about the government as I was. What I said simply made sense to the guy on the street, and it’s the guy on the street who elects presidents of the United States.
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As a leader, you must earn the trust of your followers. To earn that trust, always tell the truth.
5.
Become a storyteller
. Ronald Reagan’s son Michael told me, “Judge William Clark told me something about my father that I had never understood before. ‘Michael,’ he said, ‘your dad was not just a storyteller. He spoke in parables. Even his jokes were parables. Whenever he wanted to teach an important truth, he would put it in the form of a story.’
“I had lived with Ronald Reagan all those years and had never seen that before. I had always thought of dad’s stories as funny and entertaining. But Judge Clark was right—if you pondered what he was saying, you could always find a deeper truth beneath the surface.
“During the Cold War, Dad joked about life in the Soviet Union. One of his favorite stories went like this: In the Soviet Union, you had to wait ten years to buy a car. A Soviet citizen went to the government showroom and plunked down his savings for a car. The bureaucrat at the showroom said, ‘Come back in ten years, comrade, and you can pick up your car.’ The citizen said, ‘Morning or afternoon?’ And the bureaucrat said, ‘Ten years from now, what difference does it make?’ The citizen said, ‘The plumber’s coming in the morning.’
“Dad was giving us an insight into the harshness of the Communist system. It was a painless way of teaching us that people had to put up with shortages and red tape under Communism. Now, if all you got out of that story was a chuckle, that was fine with him. But if you listened closely, he’d always give you something to think about.”
Dinesh D’Souza offers a similar insight, relating an encounter between President Reagan and former President Nixon:
Nixon had visited Reagan in the White House and tried to engage him in a discussion of Marxist ideas and Soviet strategy, but Reagan simply wasn’t interested; instead, he regaled Nixon with jokes about Soviet farmers who had no incentive to produce under the Communist system. Nixon was troubled to hear such flippancy from the leader of the Western world. He wrote books during the 1980s criticizing Reagan’s lack of “realism” and warning that “the Soviet system will not collapse” so “the most we can do is learn to live with our differences” through a policy of “hard headed détente.” Yet two and a half years after Reagan left office, Nixon admitted that he was wrong and Reagan was right.
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To be a great communicator, become a storyteller. History shows that great storytellers often make the best leaders.
6.
Trust your instincts and convictions
. In 1987, when Reagan was preparing to give his speech at the Berlin Wall, he circulated his speech to advisers in the State Department and the National Security Council. Dozens of advisers read the speech, and almost without exception, they went apoplectic over one line: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Secretary of State George Shultz opposed it, and so did National Security Adviser Colin Powell. One diplomat said that line was “in bad taste.”
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Every review copy of the speech came back with that sentence crossed out. But Ronald Reagan knew that it was the heart of the speech, the signature line.
Reagan called Deputy Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein, into the Oval Office and said, “I’m the president, right?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” said Duberstein.
“So I decide whether the line about the wall stays in?”
“That’s right, sir. It’s your decision.”
“Then it stays
in
.”
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Even that conversation didn’t settle the matter. While President Reagan was on Air Force One, flying to Berlin, both the State Department and the National Security Council faxed him new versions of the speech without the “tear down this wall” line. As historian Steven Hayward observed, many who opposed that line later tried to take credit for it.
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But that line was pure Reagan.
As a leader, you should solicit advice and consider it—then make your own decision. Have confidence in your instincts and convictions. Even if all your advisers say you’re wrong, listen to that still, small voice within—and do what that voice tells you.
Then go out and give a speech for the ages.
I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn’t spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation
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PEOPLE SKILLS
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The Ten-Foot Rule
Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish
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n March 17, 1992, President George Herbert Walker Bush went to Bentonville, Arkansas, to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart. “Mr. Sam,” as Walton was known to his employees, was dying of cancer and not well enough to attend a White House ceremony, so the ceremony was held at Walmart headquarters before a crowd of senior Walmart officials, employees, family, and invited guests.
