Page 32 - Harvard Business Review, November-December 2018

he was doing. You learned to take care of each other, move quickly, and exercise command

decisions.

What should every leader do on his or her rst day in a new role, whether it’s navy captain or

secretary of state?

Listen. But also come in with clearly defined standards and goals that people understand right up

front. One of the greatest deficits of leadership is to not command respect for knowing where you

want to go. If people have doubts about what the mission is or how it will be carried out, you’ve

got a problem. That’s true whether you’re on a military mission or in politics or in business.

But when you’re listening and getting different advice from all sides, how do you set that agenda?

That’s what executive leadership is all about. You collect the opinions, but you’ve also got to have

your own instincts and the ability to choose the input most relevant to the decision you need to

make.

When the roles get more complex—chairing the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, or

serving as secretary of state—how do you prioritize your work?

Well, when you’re a Cabinet secretary, the principal priorities are set by the big boss, the
president. In the Obama administration we had a very, very large agenda: refugees, nuclear

weapons, extremism, terrorism, human trafficking. In that role you also have an agenda that’s

thrust on the U.S. by virtue of our role as the leader of the free world. We’re in crisis on that right

now, because we don’t have the kind of executive leadership we need or deserve. We don’t have

the in-depth analysis and curiosity and intellectual capacity and credibility that motivates other
people.

You’ve served as a change agent over the course of your career—as a Vietnam War protester and
as a senator when your party was in the minority. How do you go into a big bureaucracy and begin

to x it?

You jump in feet first. I’ve always believed that the role of government is to take care of people, to

represent them, to be thoughtful about and responsive to their needs. That’s who you work for.

Unfortunately, we’ve watched a slow, deep, insidious corruption from too much money and a

lack of accountability driven by the gerrymandering of election districts. Right now I think the

single most important strategy is to recognize the power of voters to make a profound course
correction in the midterm elections. I saw it in 1972. We took Earth Day and translated it into a

targeted campaign. We labeled 12 congressmen who’d voted badly on environmental issues the