Press Room
You’re the White Knight
Good Judgment Is the Essence of Effective Leadership
Here’s the Wall Street Journal Headline I’d like to see: THEANSWER TO OUR ECONOMIC PROBLEM IS WITHIN
Don’t tell me who’s to blame for everything wrong with the world. Don’t tell me what kind of leaders you want.
Tell me you’re the leader. Find it within yourself to lead. Here’s a thought.
When hit with a crisis, the first thing to do is face up to the reality of the situation. Start seeing things as they are, not as you want them to be. Accept that things have changed and that they will continue changing. Fierce competition is here to stay.
Don’t ignore or resist the change; embrace it. That’s the only way you can get out in front of it and begin to lead the change.
“I skate to where the puck is going to be,” said retired ice hockey great Wayne Gretzky, “not where it has been.”
Denial Kills
The songwriter Warren Zevon, after learning he had inoperable lung cancer, said: “I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years. It’s one of those phobias that didn’t pay off.”
With cancer—as with almost any big problem in business—early detection is key. But how can you begin to see a big problem before (or as) it develops? That’s where judgment comes in.
Good judgment. Some people seem to have it. Others don’t. You aren’t born with good judgment. But you can acquire it.
Learn From Your Mistakes
It took several thousand years of civilization to get to the Internet and the iPad. Along the way a lot of wisdom made its way to the page. That’s why I enjoy quoting other people so much. And I’m going to use much of this column to commend another book to you: Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls. It’s by Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis. Both authors are business professors. Tichy has advised ceos around the world. Bennis has advised many Fortune 500 companies and world leaders.
With good judgment, Tichy and Bennis write, little else matters. Without good judgment, nothing else matters.
Not so easy, you’re thinking.
No, it isn’t. But all effective decision-makers learn from their mistakes. Each of our last eight elected U.S. presidents lost a political contest (in most cases, for a much-lower office) long before he won the big prize.
Curiously, our last elected president who never lost an election—John F. Kennedy—may have shown better judgment than any other president in modern history, in the way he handled the Cuban Missile Crisis (at least Tichy and Bennis think so).
But before he could spare us from nuclear doomsday, Kennedy, too, made blunders.
His decision to invade Cuba’s Bay of Pigs less than three months into his presidency was a fiasco. And though he was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for leading his crew to safety after a Japanese destroyer ran down PT–109 during World War II, his heroism wouldn’t have been necessary if he hadn’t steered his men into harm’s way in the first place.
Somewhere between the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the youngest man ever elected president of the United States developed better judgment.
Judgment Is a Process
Part of understanding good judgment is to recognize that it is more than good decision-making. Decision-making is something you do at a fork in the road. Judgment is a process.
According to Tichy and Bennis, there are three domains of good judgment: 1) people decisions, 2) strategy decisions, and 3) crisis decisions. But within each domain there are three phases: 1) preparation, 2) the call, and 3) the execution.
Bad judgment results from a dysfunctional three-phase process. It follows from 1) unduly delaying decision-making, 2) overreacting (to relieve anxiety), and 3) obsessing (gathering more and more information rather than making a decision).
On Picking the Right People
A good leader gets the best out of those he (or she) leads, but he also usually picks the right people. Not always—no one ever does—but people judgment lays the framework for doing everything else.
“Judgment calls about people are the most critical calls that leaders have to make,” write Tichy and Bennis.
Picking the right person for the job is hard. Jack Welch, esteemed for his record of hiring leaders during his two decades as ceo at General Electric, estimated that he picked the wrong person 20 percent of the time.
Among the hundreds of people Tichy and Bennis interviewed and polled for their book, most told them that their bad judgment calls on strategy and crisis decisions came when they went against their gut instincts—but not when it came to making people calls. Most leaders said that, when it comes to picking people, logic and intellect are much better guides than emotions.
Note: Be triply careful before hiring a friend or relative, for it may be triply traumatic to let him or her go. Loyalty is grand—without it, we’re bloodless. But let’s face it: many of us have blind spots about the people we hold most dear.
Leaders must place loyalty to the team before loyalty to the individual. You cannot hang on to someone who is sinking the ship. Think of Joe Paterno and Penn State University’s continuing crisis.
Selecting—and Revising—Your Strategy
Leaders tell their troops where they’re going—even though they frequently have to change the storyline.
Strategy takes place in three phases—but with several steps—and goes roughly like this:
- Preparation phase
- Identify what you’re going to do.
- Frame it (name it) for your staff.
- Mobilize.
- Call phase
- If necessary, reframe (as the landscape before you changes); then realign.
- Make the Call.
- Execution phase
On Acting in Crisis
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless,” a five-star general once said, before adding, “but planning is indispensable.”
On its face, that’s a paradoxical assertion. But when you consider it was made by Dwight Eisenhower, the man who planned the Invasion of Normandy, the statement explodes with meaning.
A battlefield is chaos. Nothing happens there as the strategists have modeled it. But amid chaos, muscle memory takes over. So it is with crisis in the business world. The truth is that, before the crisis presents itself, you really ought to know how you’re going to respond. And never lose sight of your ultimate mission.
All You Need Is Judgment
So what have we learned? Denial is deadly. Don’t resist change. Prepare. Learn from your mistakes. The way you do something determines what you achieve. Hire great people, but be careful about hiring friends and relatives.
Should that be a rule: ‘never hire a relative’?
Remember what we said about John F. Kennedy preventing nuclear war. At the moments of crisis, he had the right people in the room with him. Of those people, do you know who his closest adviser was?
His Brother. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
So who’s going to fix things for your sphere of influence? In your company? You are. Pick the best people you can find to help you. But if you remember anything from this article, remember this:
You’re the white knight who will come to the rescue. Assume that responsibility yourself - today.
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man (or woman) should be,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, the second century Roman emperor. “Be one.”