"Leadership and Ethics"
Opening lecture in "Leadership and Ethics Series" for joint Babson-Olin-Wellesley Course
President Diana Chapman Walsh
September 12, 2006

It is difficult to be a good person in the absence of a good society – so Robert Bellah and his colleagues wrote 15 years ago in a wonderful book entitled The Good Society. Perhaps the most familiar experience of that reality, they say, is a minor moral dilemma all of us know, all too well.

Let’s bring it home to Boston. Picture this. The traffic slows on the Storrow Drive ramp at the Allston-Cambridge entrance to the Mass Pike and you are face- to-face with an awkward moral choice. A homeless woman is looking you in the eyes, asking for a handout. Propped against a signpost on the ground behind her is a crude cardboard sign proclaiming her plight. She has children to feed; she’s down on her luck, she’s sober and not using drugs. She smiles directly at you, revealing a dental disaster, pleading for your help.

You’re on your way home from an exciting Red Sox game (they actually won) where you spent a lot of money and had a terrific time. And now you have a personal choice to make, and an instant in which to make it. The light’s about to change. You can roll down your window and give her a dollar – or five, or ten, or twenty – and assuage your guilt for a moment. Or you can tell yourself that to encourage panhandlers will just make the problem worse – look straight ahead, leave the window up, and drive resolutely on, feeling just a bit self-righteous, and just a bit ashamed.

Either way, you’ve made a decision that is truly beside the point. The plight that she has so inconveniently interjected into your triumphant ride home is a social failure, not a personal one. Homelessness is the endpoint of a series of political choices and institutional breakdowns – “de-institutionalization” is the specific policy term used in the homelessness case, a term that could apply more generically to many of the moral dilemmas of our modern life. Our institutions are in disarray. And that is a crisis of leadership and of morality.

So our two topics this afternoon and for this series all fall – Ethics and Leadership -- are inextricably intertwined. We need better leadership if we’re going to have the kind of society in which we can be ethical people; and we need to take more personal responsibility – each and every one of us – for the quality of the leadership that creates the institutions that shape our choices and possibilities day in and day out.

If there is a single message I would like you to take home this afternoon, this is it. One of our rallying cries in the 60s was “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” Adam Kahane, in another really good book called Solving Tough Problems, turns that saying around. If you are not part of the problem, he says, there is no solution. We are so radically interdependent now – each of us on all of us around the globe – that our most urgent challenge is to wake up and take up our piece of the work.

That reality was hammered home to us just a year ago in images from the Gulf Coast that will be seared forever in our memories. The devastation and despair in the wake of the hurricanes broke into our late August complacency to show us vividly and painfully a side of our nation – a long series of callous and shortsighted decisions -- that we had conveniently been keeping out of our field of vision. We were looking ahead, waiting for the light to turn, eager to get on home, on with our comfortable lives.

Ever since Katrina, there’s been a flood of trenchant analysis and commentary on the widening gap in America between the rich and the poor –and more specifically on the rise of the super rich. We’ve seen a doubling since 1970 in real income of the top 1% of the American wealth pyramid, and a 5-fold increase of the top 0.01% (those with incomes of $5M+) while all other groups’ incomes have risen slowly or not at all. The gap between the richest Americans and everyone else is growing wider every year, and is greater now than it has been in half a century. And that can be reversed; it’s public policy, tax policy, educational policy, un-funding of the public sphere – another form of deinstitution-alization.

What does this have to do – I hear you wondering – with leadership and ethics? Everything I would argue – again because the context matters so much, the “moral ecology” (Bellah’s term) that shapes our choices and our purposes and sustains our possibilities.

David Callahan has written a chilling book, called The Cheating Culture. In it, he argues that when people are forced into the position where they feel they have to put themselves at a competitive disadvantage if they choose to play it straight – “by the official rules rather than the real rules”— then a new ethical calculus emerges and gives rise to a “cheating culture, ” a culture in which the mantra “everyone does it” becomes the breezy rationale for cutting corners.

Callahan documents the degree to which “widespread cheating is undermining some of the most important ideals of American society” – the belief in hard work as the key to success, the ideal of justice and fairness, the sense that all of us are in the same boat playing by the same rules. “Cheating thrives,” he writes, “where unfairness reigns, along with economic anxiety. … Our noblest aspirations for America cannot be realized when we allow economic competition to grow too harsh.”

And neither can our hopes for a sustainable future. This summer’s inconvenient intrusion – Al Gore’s unnerving film – is another depressing reminder of how impotent we humans feel in the face of faceless large forces that we have unleashed but have no clue now how to control.

The forces of globalization are making us ever more interdependent but we have not even begun to come to terms with what it means to organize a society that is radically interdependent in all things. Gore repeatedly frames the crisis of global climate change as a “moral issue” – which it clearly is -- and I would argue that it is also an issue of leadership, one that I suspect will be at the very epicenter of your professional and personal lives.

Before I came to Wellesley as president, I was a professor of public health at BU and then at Harvard. I and my colleagues were addressing a number of important public health issues – alcohol abuse, tobacco control, cancer prevention, social inequalities as they affected health. And I will always remember the realization, as it gradually sunk in, that for our profession and our generation – whatever else we were doing -- there would be no issue more important than HIV/AIDS. Over time it became clear that all of us would be swept up into AIDS prevention and control in one form or another. And I would predict today that for you – future engineers, future business leaders, future entrepreneurs, future leaders of all kinds – the problem of global climate change will never be far off your radar screens.

So … whether we’re talking about the mundane moral choices you face every day (like whether to help someone in need), or the monumental ones that will shape your careers and your lives (like what part you are called to play in the struggle to slow global warming), you will always be confronted with a dual challenge – one that is both intensely personal and inevitably shaped by larger social forces that you alone cannot hope to fathom, much less control. We are in this together, now more than ever.

We’ll need to apply our creativity and our ingenuity to the work of creating a better public sphere if we want to have better private lives. And the quality of the public sphere we can have will depend on all of us. The institutions through which we live most of our lives – our schools and colleges, our places of work, the health care system, popular culture, the way we regulate markets and enact political life here at home and around the world – all of these institutions are our mutual creation – we ignore them at our peril. We need ethical leadership – leadership we can trust – if we are going to have a good society that enables its citizens to be ethical people who can live good lives.

But these are not such good times for leadership. The detritus of colossal failures of leadership is strewn all about: in the steady procession of graphic images of leaders being carted off in handcuffs or otherwise toppled from power, leaders who lost their moral bearings, took shortcuts, broke or bent the rules, violated their followers’ trust – powerful, successful leaders from virtually every sector of American society: the clergy, corporations, politics, athletics, broadcast and print journalism, entertainment, publishing, the law, education … on and on, a veritable parade of horrors. And now we have Hewlett-Packard and (in yesterday’s Times) the discovery of a new “little industry” rooted in a “shady subculture” doing “pretexting” which is a new and slick neologism for lying.

Callahan writes about business schools that are running ethics courses that take students on field trips to minimum security prisons to interview senior executives who are doing jail time for corporate crimes – an attempt to drive home the high cost of bending the rules. We won’t be doing that.

But we do have three brave presidents (brave or rash) – from Babson, Olin, and Wellesley -- daring to take on the challenge of asking students to give serious thought to what it might mean to bring moral purpose and commitment to your leadership when it is your turn, which it will be very soon.

In that spirit, I want to offer you a few reflections from my 14 years leading Wellesley – many of which I’ve learned in interaction with our student leaders – lessons about what we’ve come to recognize, in our small microcosm, about the characteristics of leadership that is worthy of trust.

And I want you to know that it’s not easy -- we shouldn’t delude ourselves. These practices are indeed practices; they require focus and dedication, just as any serious practice does. They require learning from experiments and from setbacks. I’ve had my share of those in my 13 years at Wellesley.

But from the mistakes, as well as the successes, it has become increasingly clear that if we want to play our part in creating the kind of good society of which I have been speaking, then we should try to live at least the following five commitments in our leadership roles.

First and foremost, we should remember, always, to question ourselves. Effective leadership comes from an inner core of integrity and yet is not fixed, stubborn, or implacable. Leaders we trust are open to our thoughtful influence. They are aware that they cannot possess all the answers because they can have only one perspective. They are eager to hear responsible critique, and the viewpoints of others.

When leaders inspire us, we experience them as consistently themselves – sure -- we sense in them a solid self-confidence, but not one that walls others out. Clear about who they are, they can open themselves to others. They stay attuned to their inner truth through disciplines that keep them honest, knowing, as the ancients did, that the first and most demanding obligation of a leader is the Socratic injunction to “know thyself.” Yeats wrote that “we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Trustworthy leaders are poets; they quarrel with themselves.
Second, since even if we know ourselves, we can’t know all we need to know from our own limited experience, we need to establish partnerships as the basic units for accomplishing work. And they have to be reliable partnerships, which means investing time and energy in preserving their integrity. Reliable partnerships help prevent the distortions of information that often result from perceived or real imbalances of power – distortions produced by projections on to the leader and/or the tendency to shield her from bad news.

My favorite example of this – because it seems so absurd – was the day my house at Wellesley (the president’s house) caught on fire. I was in my office and I overheard one end of what seemed like a strange conversation my assistant was having on the phone. She said a quizzical yes, and then an emphatic yes and she sounded a little shaken. When she hung up I asked her what was up and she said it was the campus police. They said, “The president’s house is on fire; do you think she would want to know?” I carry that query as a reminder that people around someone with power never want to be the one to have to convey the news that things are burning down.

Trustworthy leaders choose their partners wisely, for their courage to speak truth to power, for a range of perspectives, and for a sense of shared core values. They negotiate the common understandings at the heart of those partnerships, which they attend to regularly, and integrate into a larger understanding of the goals they are pursuing.

Throughout the 13 years I’ve been doing this demanding job, I’ve made a serious commitment to a network of partnerships that are honest and effective, solid and sophisticated and above all remain capable of receiving candid critique. Enlisting others – and not just loyal insiders -- in these mutual relationships has been a major part of my job: inviting a mutual exploration of what happened when things go awry, coming together to assess behaviors or beliefs that may be undermining the alliance, taking explicit steps to reinforce shared commitments, revisiting the inspiration from which the collaboration draws its meaning.

I often schedule special meetings with key members of my staff to do this work. We carve out extra time, go off campus and sit with a third-party consultant to harvest the information that has been coming at us as we’ve been meeting various kinds of resistance to a change we’ve been trying to lead.
Third, I’ve come to believe that trustworthy leaders must consciously resist the use of force except as a last resort. Leadership is by definition the exercise of power, and leaders are constantly called upon to deploy their power on one side or another of high-stakes disputes. As tempting as it is to wade in with what looks like decisiveness, in our hearts we really know that interventions imposed from on high seldom yield enduring peace.
Refusing to resort to force is never easy. It’s painful to look like a wimp or a waffler -- judgments our culture is quick to apply. We have such a stereotyped picture of strong leadership. But it’s even more painful (and far more destructive) to watch disputes smolder and re-ignite in debilitating cycles of repetition and escalation – as they are doing now all over the world.

Avoiding the use of force reflects a conception of leadership as nonpartisan, and of the leader as the person whose effectiveness depends on hearing all sides of a dispute, in essence taking in the many perspectives that make up the whole. If we become captive of one or more of these voices, then soon we are waging a war within ourselves.

The leader’s task is to create conditions in which disputes can be explored and transformed at the most local level where those most directly affected can assume responsibility and discover their own resourcefulness. I make it a practice to do that and I’ve often sent people back – after we’ve talked through a problem -- to work out their own differences as best they can and then come back to me.

Fourth, knowing that differences of opinion, perspective, and world-view are a crucial part of life and learning, we will be leaders worthy of trust only if we truly value differences, not only as an ethical imperative and a measure of respect for others (although surely for these reasons), but also as a unique creative resource. In any group, organization, or system, the voices from the margins hold the buried wisdom that can alert us to our self-deceptions.
There are aspects of any campus culture (of any culture anywhere) to which resistance is a healthy response. We need a new language, then, about how we understand differences, and a new kind of leadership that will engage identity struggles in diverse communities by appreciating their complexity and messiness, digging beneath the power dimensions, and opening to profounder meanings and deeper human connections.

Only when we produce leaders who understand healthy conflict in its inevitability and its productivity will we begin to develop the skills to mine it well. We ourselves need to hone those skills – and that tolerance for complexity -- so that others around us can. And it’s never easy.

That’s why, fifth, and finally, in our effort to be leaders worthy of trust, we need to create communities that can function as sustaining circles of mutual support. Leaders need places to which they can retreat to grapple with pressures and doubts and the assaults on confidence no one should have to confront alone. I know from years of experience how isolating leadership can be, how sudden, wide, and unnerving sometimes the swings can be from elation to despair, how often, even now, I lose and find myself again – my moorings, my equilibrium, my commitment, my heart.

If we can practice our leadership within supportive communities – if we can build and bind those communities -- then we can begin to define and experience leadership as a collective project that derives its power and authority from a cooperative attachment to mutually-defined commitments and values.

Having done so, we can perhaps come to understand that none of us can accomplish our goals on our own and to trust that we don’t have to carry the whole load, that we can co-create with each other, that we need do only what we can do, and bring only what is ours to give.

Now … I want to conclude this talk in a somewhat more personal vein, in the hope that my own story may encourage you to see that the disciplines of leadership can be learned, that leadership, in fact, is all about a continuous process of learning, more than it is about anything else.

When you are a leader, there’s no escaping that the work, often, involves deploying yourself. And the only way you can increase your effectiveness is to learn to know yourself better and better. That’s both the challenge of it, and the gratification of it.

In one of my favorite leadership books, On Becoming a Leader, Warren Bennis, writes that “full, free self-expression is the essence of leadership …The key to full self-expression is understanding one’s self and the world, and the key to understanding is learning – from one’s own life and experience.”

So here’s just a bit for you about my own life and experience and some insights that have helped me learn how to manage myself, lead myself.

I was privileged to have a Kellogg National Fellowship for three years from 1988-1990 and it provided me the opportunity to read widely in literature on leadership and to learn from leaders in many different venues. Before that, as a graduate student in sociology, I read widely in organizational theory and research. I taught at one time in the school of management at BU and for many years in the school of public health, there and at Harvard. Public health is an applied field that places a great emphasis on planned social change, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of social and behavioral interventions. So I’d thought a lot about large systems and done empirical work in many of them.

All of that was part of the mix that I brought to Wellesley. In addition, I’ve always loved poetry (I was an English major) and have written some of my own, and I’ve always been a person who loves words and ideas and turns to learning as an antidote to defeat or despair. T. H. White, in The Once and Future King, captures that spirit in a passage I love. Merlyn the magician is speaking to the young King Arthur:

"'The best thing for being sad,' replied Merlyn, 'is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, ... you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.'"

I was elected the 12th president of Wellesley on August 4, 1993, having been recruited from an endowed professorship at Harvard. I was chairing a department at the School of Public Health, not an especially big one, and I hadn’t had the extensive experience in the business of academic administration that might have been considered essential preparation for a management position of this scope and magnitude at an institution as distinguished as Wellesley.

But the search committee saw in me (I was later told) a resourceful and receptive person who seemed to have a capacity and an appetite for discovery and growth. They were intrigued by that, and confident enough in the solidity and strength of the institution that this learning edge they saw in me seemed to them worth the risk. The summer before I started at Wellesley, I was learning to rollerblade on the Cape, and I developed a private developed a mantra for myself for the new job: “Be tough, be clear, be honest, be fair, be true to yourself, and keep your own counsel.” These were all the things that I suspected would be hard for me in this demanding new job.

And the 13 years at Wellesley have been marked by a great deal of ferment and change, a lot of innovation, and many surprises. And they have provided extraordinary opportunities to learn many things – about money, about people, about diversity and difference, about management -- and intimate details about dozens of major issues we addressed and solved – from a toxic waste site, to a large new building complex, to dozens of complicated hiring and promotion decisions and tenure cases, to governance and relations with a board of trustees, to fund raising and donor relations, faculty relations, student relations, public relations, admissions, curricular change, leading a leadership team … on and on.

As interesting as all of that has been, I think I would say that the most valuable lesson in the end, oddly enough, was foreshadowed in that rollerblading mantra on the Cape. Learning to be “true to myself” has been the deepest gift, learning what that really means to me. It’s a homily, a cliché and something we are always being told to do -- be yourself, be true to yourself. And I think it’s one of the hardest struggles in life, and, in the end, one of the most liberating.

An article in the New York Times a couple of years ago caught my eye because it captured – from a very different context -- what I’m talking about. It was an interview with an opera star, Barbara Cook, about a master class she was teaching brilliantly. She told the interviewer that her goal was to help her students learn:

“To be as authentic as we know how to be at the moment, so that we can be more and more present in what we do. The more we can do that, the safer we are. The problem is it feels most dangerous because what I ask people to do is, in effect, undress emotionally, so that’s very frightening and new. But this very thing that seems most dangerous is where safety lies.”

Once you have your authentic self and can ground reliably there, find your way back to yourself when buffeted and thrown off course by the craziness of the day’s demands – all the curveballs that come at you even after years on the job -- then you have your values, your vision, and your voice. And that’s the heart of what you need to lead well. That and the willingness to work very hard, to be disciplined and organized, to be patient, and to persist at the task of mastering both the context and the content of your job, to be aware of what you do and don’t know, to trust and lean on other people, and to approach the world with genuine curiosity, with humility and with gratitude.

In conclusion, I think Andre Agassi said it all last week in his stirring and heartfelt farewell at Flushing Meadows – after playing through pain and losing a hard-fought match, the last of his career. He said this to his fans:

“The scoreboard says I lost today, but what the scoreboard doesn't say is what it is I have found. Over the last 21 years I have found loyalty; you have pulled for me on the court and also in life. I have found inspiration. You have willed me to succeed, sometimes even in my lowest moments. And I have found generosity. You have given me your shoulders to stand on to reach for my dreams; dreams I could never have reached without you. Over the last 21 years I have found you, and I will take you and the memory of you with me for the rest of my life.”

What a wonderful place to be at the end of a stellar career. We should all be so lucky. I wish you that kind of finale – years from now – wherever it is that your lives take you in the years ahead. I wish you many successes and satisfactions – and I wish for you the kinds of successes that will bring you long-term satisfaction long after the glow of the immediate victory has worn off. For that, in the end, is what a living good life means.

 

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