I’m wearing another of my “Rebel Archives” t-shirts that I bought at the National Archives Shop. But still tapping into some holiday glow. And feeling more upbeat today because of a piece on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and a book I am reading. The NPR piece is about a case study that looked at why employees at the Taj Mahal hotel reacted as they did during the attacks in Mumbai in 2008. The book is about the leadership style of the late Steve Jobs.
Writing about “archival purgatory and hell” was sobering. Looking back at my experiences working with the Nixon tapes as an employee at the National Archives often is! My generation responded to a legislative mandate to disclose to the American public “the full truth” about Watergate only to become targets in the “Nixon wars.”
NARA management should not have been surprised that we reacted as we did, by thinking in long-term arcs, standing fast, and taking beatings and bullets for our successors during the G. H. W. Bush administration. Supervisory archivists Fred Graboske and Joan Howard and their team members had been recruited for particular qualities. I should know! I helped engineer that.
An extract from notes of a meeting about our recruiting that I attended early in my career at the National Archives explains that. I wrote in 1977 that my boss, Deputy Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries Richard A. Jacobs, who met with me and a personnel specialist, and I agreed on what the National Archives was looking for in staffing up the Nixon project. “People with a sense of responsibility and integrity.”
I thought of that as I considered Harvard business professor Rohit Despande’s examination of the behavior of employees at the Taj hotel while it was under attack in 2008. Many acted bravely, selflessly; some ended up sacrificing themselves. Despande specializes in business ethics and global branding. The NPR account, “Heroes of Mumbai’s Taj Hotel: Why They Risked Their Lives,” said of many of the Taj employees, “they were the very models of ethical, selfless behavior. What could explain it?”
Managers at the hotel later pointed to employees’ behavior with seeming astonishment. Just as the Wilson era NARA management team should have anticipated that the people recruited by Dick Jacobs would react as they did to adverse circumstances, so too could hotel management have anticipated employees’ reactions. You really do get what you recruit for.
“In their search to find maids and bellhops, the Taj avoids big cities and instead turns to small towns and semi-urban areas. There the Taj develops relationships with local schools, asking the leaders of those schools to hand-select people who have the qualifications they want.
‘They don’t look for students who have the highest grades. They’re actually recruiting for personal characteristics,’ Deshpande says, ‘most specifically, respect and empathy.’
Taj managers explained to Deshpande that they recruited for traits like empathy because that kind of underlying value is hard to teach. This, he says, is also why recruiters avoid hiring managers for the hotel from the top business schools in India. They deliberately go to second-tier business schools, on the theory that the people there will be less motivated by money.
And this strategy, as Deshpande points out, is highly unusual in India.
‘Let me put this into a little cultural context for you,’ he says.
‘India is a country where people are almost obsessed about grades. In order to get ahead, you have to have really high grades. But here is an organization that is doing just the opposite — they’re recruiting not for grades, they’re recruiting for character.'”
A rewards system that focused on kindness–yes, kindness, a quality often disdained in the political world and consequently all too ofaten also in the reactive rather than values based enviro of Washington–reaped huge benefits when disaster struck. The stories about what some of those recruits did while the Taj hotel was under attack are just astonishing. Management recruited for character. They got it.
Steve Jobs recognized that how you recruit matters, matters a great deal. Peter Sander explains in his new book, What Would Steve Jobs Do?, that
“diverse, seemingly off-task questions often bring diverse answers, and Steve was known to rely not so much on what people said as on how they said it, and on the meta-data that came in around the actual answer. Again, from the Fortune interview: ‘Recruiting is hard. . . . in the end, it’s iultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? Why are they here? I ask everybody that: “Why are you here?” The answers themselves are not what you are looking for. It’s the meta-data.”
Jobs worked in the private sector. Not all private sector principles can be imposed into the public sector. Roy L. Ash, Nixon era director of the Office of Management and Budget, explained to us at the Nixon project during the 1980s why his experiences at Litton Industries differed from what he could do in government. I quoted what he said in the first comment I ever posted at AOTUS blog, in April 2010.
Yet some lessons definitely do apply. Sander lists these traits that Steve Jobs possesed or believed in:
Respect – “As an individual or a leader, you gain respect by being right, by admitting when you’re wrong, and–this is what most leaders forget–by respecting others.”
Optimism – “A person who is optimistic looks forward and is willing to move forward, and is less likely to be bound by the norms of the past.”
Passion — “Mix optimism with perseverance and spend every waking hour thinking about it and evangelizing it, and you’ll win the hearts of your followers.”
Confidence — “A confident and self-assured leader makes others around him more confident.”
Altruism –“Good leaders think about others and try to put themselves in their place. They want everyone to succeed, not just themselves.”
Sounds like my late sister, Eva, a NARA declassification unit supervisory archivist and team leader, who was eulogized for taking pleasure in others’ accomplishments as if they were her own.
Professional style — “Good leaders develop a consistent work and communication style that everyone knows and learns to work with. As we saw with Steve, it doesn’t have to be an easy style, but it has to inspire confidence. When a leader is difficult to work with or keeps others off balance, those people tend to focus on their relationship with the leader, not on the product or the project.”
Personal style – “Everything from your clothing and attire to your desire for privacy to how you present yourself inside and outside the organization defines personal style.”
My personal style at Nixonara is exemplified by my laughing post, “I made a mistake,” after I erred in a comment I submitted at Ferriero’s blog this summer! Oops. Boy, do I know I’m not perfect. Whatcha gonna do. Me? I laugh about it! And sometimes, I try to learn. Yes, really! Always open to teaching moments.
Jobs sounds as if he could be temperamental and brash and difficult at times. Yet he understood a lot, less through education than intuitively and through experience. I don’t hero worship Jobs, any more than I hero worship anyone. Know too much about Washington, have too many battle scars.
I’m a huge fan of AOTUS David S. Ferriero. But although David and I are friends, he and I don’t see eye to eye on everything. Yeah, we match up on some things. Others, maybe not. I’ve chatted with him about some issues at those receptions I attend at NARA and in other in person encounters. I’ve spelled out how I see things here at my blog. Yet we’re fine. That reflects well on the Big Dude.
I do admire and respect David, tremendously. I like the fact that as I debate with NARA employees what he is all about, and tell them that I support and admire him, the one consistent through line is that more often than not, people believe he is trying to do the right thing. Getting there won’t be easy, some tasks will be easier to check off as successes than others. But David Ferriero does seem to have something very valuable, as perceived by a number of internal and external stakeholders, as far as I can tell. Respect. And not just from me.
Sander explains that respect matters, a lot. It turns out, recruiting for character matters upwards as well as downwards.
“Leaders who have earned the respect of their followers are far more likely to be willingly followed. Their goals are more likely to be assumed to be important. The means to accomplish these goals are more likely to be put in place. Most of all, the team will be more willing to contribute. Respect breeds trust, trust breeds respect, and the cycle continues.
Respected leaders get chances to fail, because they know that most of their efforts will result in success. They get people to follow them even if those followers don’t 100 percent understand the vision. They get the benefit of the doubt, and the benefit of the doubt can be a huge tailwind when someone is leading a large organization through uncertain waters. Respected leaders also tend to respect and trust their followers. When leaders respect their followers and followers respect and trust their leaders, the gates are open for success.”
I like that! Words to live by. And something supportive for David and his team and all at NARA to keep in mind as we go into a New Year! Fingers crossed that you all succeed.
