Leadership:Comments delivered to Snelling Center Leadership Champlain Graduating Class June 5, 2004 Basin Harbor Club
Imagine a solar system map as a bright sun in the center of five concentric circles – a bull’s eye if you will. You are that star in the center of your sphere of influence. The smallest and innermost planetary orbit is your family and your loved ones; the second further out is your neighborhood or community; the third is your state. Beyond that are your country and the wider world. You will influence these concentric orbits in various ways in your life. Leadership radiates light and warmth outward.
You have just finished a study of the elements of leadership with the goal of becoming more effective in your chosen work. You want to follow the path of leadership or you would not be here today. You would not have taken this first step had you not been willing to accept responsibility for yourself, for who you are and how you behave. This is, in fact, what leadership is all about. Some of you will be community leaders, some of you will be state leaders and a few of you may go on to being national leaders.
If you are familiar with astronomy, you will know that each of the orbits around you has a force field. They affect you. Centrifugal forces pull you out into the outer spheres challenging you to accept leadership at higher levels of governance. Centripetal forces pull you back to the center, reminding you of who you are and your primary responsibility to yourself, your family and friends. You will be pushed and pulled by these force fields all your life. Listen to them. They will constantly remind you that you cannot be successful as a leader if you lose your center, but also that you must be aware of those you serve.
Your own behavior and your willingness to accept responsibility for who you are and what you choose to do will be the single most important factor in whatever leadership role you assume. The senator who neglects or mismanages his or her own private life ultimately diminishes his or her own leadership capacity and becomes less effective as a leader.
We are held accountable for all our actions in life. To be effective, our acceptance of responsibility must emanate outward from the center, from self to family, then to community and beyond. If we fail in the center, we will be seen as hypocritical so that when we demand more of others our leadership authority is diminished.
That is because in a vital democracy, leadership is given. It is the gift of the governed. When fear and cynicism prevail, civic passivity or laziness set in and we as a society run the risk of letting demagogues or other self-appointed people take power. Strong local leadership is one insurance that citizens will be energized to be active and responsible in our democracy. Reintroducing civics and government into our grade school classrooms is another. If we, as citizens, compromise and place people in leadership positions who reflect fear and cynicism and whose ethical inconsistencies we overlook, we all suffer.
I am genuinely concerned that a growing failure to read about, discuss, question and understand public policy issues, coupled with the declining voting rate both diminish the democratic process and reflect a decline in the caliber of our leaders.
This is all is made worse by the virtually unregulated roll-up of news, media, entertainment, network and consumer electronic companies into partisan behemoths who gather and present just enough news to meet FCC licensing requirements and pander to the interests of politicians who control the deregulatory purse strings.
At the outset of broadcasting, the deal was simple, the government told the broadcasters that they might use the nation’s airwaves to entertain and sell advertising if they could regularly prove that they were serving the information needs of the people who own the airwaves by providing a thorough and objective news service as well as meeting other public service criteria such as non-profit announcements and public access.
Today we are left with fewer and fewer “of record” news sources such as The NY Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Rutland Herald/Times Argus, the steadily improving Burlington Free Press, VPR, the BBC, and The Times of London – news services trying to varying degrees, to adhere to rigorous journalistic standards of fairness and objectivity.
The rise of “partisan news” and “infotainment” diminish tremendously the value and quality of civil discourse. There are those in America who believe that Rush Limbaugh, Entertainment Tonight, People Magazine, Air America and Phil Henry are, in fact, news services.
This accelerating trend towards merging news, opinion, entertainment and marketing erodes our society as a whole. The results will take years, perhaps generations, to correct.
The erosion of the democratic process is, in act, more often a failure of the electorate, than of elected leaders. And we may also losing prospective leaders who hold their responsibility to themselves and their family sacred because the atmosphere and tone of today’s politics makes them fear compromising their own life and that of their family.
Leadership still, however, begins with the self…emanates from it. If we are not informed ourselves, not open-minded and willing to think honestly about solutions to problems, we are not fit to lead.
An essential tenet of leadership, one that our current national leadership seems in large part to have missed, is that leadership is not about pride and certainty; it is about humility and openness. It is about seeking and exploring new and divergent ideas, not sequestering them. It is about listening to the governed, not lecturing them. It is about seeking the advice of trusted colleagues and friends, not marginalizing them. It is about partnerships that are honored, not power exerted. It is never unilateral. It leads by example and principle rather than politics. As FDR said, it is about conquering fear rather than engendering it. As I said earlier, leadership is given, not commandeered.
We live together in Vermont as a pretty small community of just over 600,000 people. There are more people between 42d Street and 72st Street on the East Side of Manhattan than we are here in all of Vermont. We have a few large businesses and countless small ones. We have a few large institutional non-profits and 2800 small ones, and we have a sizeable government sector.
Vermont does rely on voluntary leadership to an extraordinary degree and Vermonters contribute to the needs of their state in many ways. From local cemetery commissions to government task forces, to non-profit boards and simple volunteerism, Vermonters are extraordinarily generous with their leadership skills as well as in their philanthropy.
You will be called upon to lead in one or several of these sectors. That is why you are here. If we did not have this venerable tradition of volunteer leadership, I-89 from Montpelier to Burlington would look more like the Grand Canyon than it does today.
As you exercise your leadership muscle, my advice to you is to stretch yourself as well, especially your imagination. Good leadership is about stretching, “thinking outside the box,” setting new goals. “Status quo” and “leadership” are incompatible. In Vermont we revere tradition, but we must also question it, so that we build on what we have rather than being restricted by it.
We must not confuse principle with tradition. We value the “principle” of a citizen legislature but that shouldn’t be an excuse for not improving its process. One can honor the principle while still improving the process.
In closing here are some challenges to think about as you begin to put your new skills to work:
Do we in fact need and can we sustain 2800 non-profits or could some of these serve their missions to much better effect by merging their non-mission related operations to reduce overhead? The Vermont Community Foundation and United Way have done much to hold groups accountable to their missions and to stress results-oriented programs. This is good leadership.
Do we really want to preserve the two-year re-election term? It’s quaint and fun to be different from 48 other states, but does it really serve us well. The short election cycle costs money and it pulls legislators and the executive branch away from much more important work, including careful study of the State’s needs and getting good legislation through as quickly as possible.
Is the public educational administration system with its myriad superintendancies providing effective cultural leadership in education, which is what our children need or has it become a self-sustaining bureaucracy – carried on in the name of “local control” – which we can no longer really afford? Is quality in education purely a function of money, control and administration or is it, as the Snelling Center suggests, real institutional leadership that engenders a culture of learning in the school and teacher quality in the classroom?
“Community” is an important value in Vermont. I would also like to urge that for large, expensive social-service delivery systems like healthcare and education that we think of community as Vermont, not Hardwick or Dorset. Our population transplanted to Manhattan, after all, would be a neighborhood.
To look more closely at healthcare: Is it best use of our resources to have two competing Academic Medical Centers and fourteen overlapping community hospitals or will we serve our community better by having an integrated and cost-efficient health care delivery system with diverse specialties in our community hospitals and tertiary and quaternary care managed at our regional centers in Burlington and Hanover?
And, in an area that I am much concerned with—economic development, might we think more strategically about who we are as a state and what assets we have as well as what our reigning principles are with regard to the environment, so that we determine what are real niche growth areas, that we can build on to create jobs while still protecting the environment we all value? I think there are a number of key questions, when we talk about “economic development.” For example, is agriculture part of our future and if so how? Is our thinking about economic development consistent with our state regulatory process? This is a good example where the problem is not one of principle but of process.
Finally, leadership is not democracy run amok. It is not a referendum on every issue with everyone weighing in. Good leaders listen, draw out diverse opinions, edit, filter, and derive consensus based on trust in the fairness of the leadership. They then act.
I hope these thoughts and questions will stimulate your thinking as you address the issues that arise in your areas.
We have much to be proud of in Vermont and your leadership will only augment our rich heritage. But don’t get too comfortable. Read, write, think, question and challenge tradition even as you celebrate it.
Best of luck to you all. And be great leaders!
Bill Schubart
