| Leading in Crisis |
| Features | |
| Written by Bill George | |
| Wednesday, 31 March 2010 | |
 Former Medtronic CEO and author Bill George says this economic crisis will become a defining moment for many leaders.  Taking office on March 5, 1933, Roosevelt inherited a collapsing economy, 25% unemployment, banks closed in 34 states, and business investment down 90%. He eventually rose to the challenge, leading the country out of the Great Depression and later victoriously guiding the Allied forces through World War II. Many have written that President Barack Obama faced a set of circumstances on January 21, 2009 similar to FDR’s. I believe the defining moment of Obama’s professional life occurred on March 18, 2008. For days previous, Obama had been under attack by conservative commentators and rival Hillary Clinton for his association with radical pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Night after night, news stations ran clips of Wright’s sermons in endless loops, raising racial fears across the country. Obama had never used his race as a campaign issue. Now he recognized he could no longer avoid it, as racial fears threatened to sink his campaign. Obama did not flinch. He confronted the issue head-on with a major address under the shadow of Philadelphia’s Constitution Hall. Squarely facing the people’s fears while describing his own mixed-race history, Obama took the discussion to a higher plane by proposing a unifying theme: “We cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together—unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes…We all want to move in the same direction—toward a better future for our children and our grandchildren.” Look in the mirror My defining moment came in 1988 on a beautiful fall day in Minnesota, with the maple trees ablaze in reds and oranges. Driving around the lake near our home, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw a person in agony who was in the midst of a crisis. I asked myself: “How could this be?” I had an amazing life partner of twenty years (my wife, Penny), two wonderful sons, and a great job as executive vice president of Minneapolis’ leading company. But what I saw in that mirror was a person striving so hard to become CEO of a large company like Honeywell that he was rapidly abandoning his “true north.” I was caught up in the politics and appearances at Honeywell, which were rampant at the time, rather than ignoring them as I had done in the past. I was even wearing cufflinks to impress senior people. I never wore cufflinks before. In that instant, I recognized that Honeywell was not the right place for me, as I was not proud of what was happening to me in this environment. I decided to stop striving to become CEO of Honeywell and get back to focusing on values-centered leadership. Arriving at home, I told my wife what I was feeling. She said wisely, “I’ve been trying to tell you this for a year, but you weren’t prepared to hear it.” How right she was. Often, it is the person closest to us who looks through our blind spots and sees us as we really are. Just three months before, I had turned Medtronic down for the third time in 10 years to become its president, most likely because the company wasn’t large enough to fit my image of what I should be doing. When I walked through Medtronic’s front door six months later as its new president, I felt like I was coming home—to an organization where I had never been before. It felt like home, a place where I could grow personally and make a difference in helping to fulfill our shared mission of “restoring people to full life and health.” Everything that has happened in my professional life in the past 20 years followed from that one decision in the car, from my 13 years at Medtronic to my focus the last seven years on helping leaders develop themselves. Are you on course? Is the crisis you are facing right now your defining moment? Are you being true to your beliefs and your values, or have you been pulled off course by the seductions of the moment? In answering these questions, you are defining the authenticity of your leadership. This moment defines you to others as well. People remember how leaders respond in a crisis because they know this is the authentic test of the person. That’s why people acknowledge New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani for his leadership following the attacks of September 11. Likewise, people only recall Richard Fuld as the leader when Lehman went bankrupt, not the successful executive who built the organization for 30 years. In 1966, Robert F. Kennedy said, “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation.” The world is crying out for your leadership. We face six major problems so large and intractable that no organization can possibly solve them on its own: global peace, healthcare, energy and the environment, job creation, income disparities, and education. We must face them now. Ask yourself: “How can your leadership help resolve these problems and others?” But don’t try to do it overnight. Instead, get committed to lead people in changing a small portion of these events, and providence will move with you. It’s time for you to step up and lead people through the current crisis. Be bold in your leadership because boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. If you stay on course of your true north, you can make a lasting difference in the world. This is the ultimate fulfillment of leading people through a crisis. Bill George is professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and author of True North and Authentic Leadership. The former chair and CEO of Medtronic, he currently serves on the boards of ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs. Read more at www.BillGeorge.org, or follow him on Twitter @Bill_George. This article was excerpted from his latest book,7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis. |
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