The Backbone of Leadership by Gus Lee

Gus Lee’s Courage
In Gus Lee’s Courage: the Backbone of Leadership, several stories are told of leaders in real world settings—WorldCom, Whirlpool, IntegWare, and so on—to show how actual leaders face challenges with moral intelligence and the courage needed to apply solutions and cop to failures with honesty and integrity. The aim of the book is not so much as to show what works and what does not but rather to provide an exploratory experience for readers so that they can put themselves in real-life leaders’ shoes, see and feel what it is like to be in the situation at the moment, and better understand how it all turns out in the end. Lee notes that a River of Fear runs between the shores of safety on one side in the world of business and the shores of bad business decisions, “crises, bad hires, weak ethics, questionable acts, misreporting, anger, jealousy, regrets and character-challenged managers” (Lee & Elliott-Lee, 2006). Courage is what a leader needs to get across that river and challenge those issues. Unless the leader has the courage to go over and address the problems that exist in every organization, those problems will continue to amass on the other shore before they inevitably pile on a raft and make their way over to where the organization has tried to get along as though all were calm and all were bright. Courageous leaders take the opportunity to clear out the opposite shore and get both sides of the river looking good.
However, there are a few things a courageous leader has to be mindful of—and that is what the bulk of the book focuses on. One of the main concepts that Lee defines is “Point of Decision” (POD). A POD is a critical intersection within an organization where a leader’s core values are put to the test. They test one’s ethics, one’s moral character, one’s backbone, and one’s commitment. Every courageous leader has to tackle a POD to earn his stripes, Lee states. To illustrate this point, he takes a look at how leaders at Whirlpool, MCI and WorldCom all faced PODs. Whirlpool’s problem, for instance was that it was not meeting its revenue objectives. MCI’s problem was that it was faced with the issue of whether to merge its fiber-optics with WorldCom’s infrastructure. Through facing PODs, however, courageous leaders can “realize sustainable and outstanding results.” If they never face these points of decisions, they never clear out those shores where all the troubles exist.
Lee defines courage as a universal quality that everyone can recognize and possess. He uses real life examples to show how different leaders in different situations approach courage. First comes the story of Chris Kay at IntegWare. Lee gives examples of what happens when courage to face decisions is missing—and then at what happens when courage is acquired and implemented. Chris Kay’s story is educational for showing how fear can get in the way of leading courageously, and for showing how fear can be overcome by summoning up one’s own core values. When one acts upon one’s values, the fear of failure evaporates because values allow one to transcend fear.
Lee defines values as low, middle and high. The low core values are those impulses in human nature that the Old World described as being a result of man’s fallen nature. These values are represented in behaviors like back-stabbing, self-interest, pride, manipulation, misrepresentation, isolation, hostility, posing, ruthlessness, sexism, revenge, too great a focus on a results, and too great a focus on short-term planning. These types of values are what up sinking companies eventually. They gather on the other shore of the business, across the River of Fear, where they are protected. Lee states that these values are too often ignored. Ironically, Lee notes that in the public sphere, we often deny these values even exist—but in the real world of business, they all too often exist and are all too often followed “behind closed doors.” The low core values are the place to start for business leaders. They have to be expelled and replaced by high core values. The problem is that leaders and businesses, recognizing low core values as problematic, set about selecting only middle core values to replace them—not realizing that these are really no matter (because they are byproducts of high core values—and if not rooted in high core values then they are not sustainable long term). Lee makes this point very clear over the course of the book but especially with Kay’s struggles with his POD.
Lee also notes that Kay was able transfer his experience of working in a company with high core values to his experience of working at InegWare where high core values were not prominently placed. Kay had worked at Hewlett-Packard when HP was doing tremendous things, prior to its meltdown in the 21st century. Thus, even as he was challenged to deal with the problems on the other shore of the River of Fear, Kay saw which low core values were traps: productivity, results and profits. He spotted them expertly and saw them not as values that one should pursue but rather as outcomes that occur as a result of high core values and solid practices. Or, as Lee put it, “They’re not our reason for being but the consequences of applied high principles.” In short, low core values tend to be quick-fix solutions or outcomes that are misrepresented as high core values.
Middle core values are also discussed, which is an important part of the book, for these values can often seem confusing. Lee defines middle core values as being “visible best business practices” that are really just good values but not great ones. They are tricky because they can seem like the right road in terms of espousing good values (who does not want good values to lead by, after all?). However, they are not the quality of actual excellence and for that reason, middle core values will actually keep a leader from excelling and doing great things. Lee identifies middle core values as the offspring of high core values—the things that high core values produce—such as customer focus, good communication, compassion, consideration, creativity, diversity, duty, education, humility, honor, loyalty, teamwork, respect, support, innovation and so on.
Lee shows that principles—not middle core values—have to be the main basis of action. He uses the example of the company that says one of its main nonnegotiable core values is customer focus. On the outside this appears like a great core value to have because it means the customer will always come first and the customer’s satisfaction will be what the firm always strives to deliver. However, Lee asks what happens when an immoral customer or a customer under pressure shows up at a business that is responsible for doing the accounting. The customer wants the accounting firm to help cook the books or look the other way at accounting errors—similar to what happened with Enron and Arthur Anderson. Since customer focus is nonnegotiable, the company could be tempted to do as the customer wants just to retain the client, thinking it will only happen once and no one will get caught. It is this type of thinking, however, that leads to the other shore getting littered up with low core values. It is all one big slippery slope of bad ideas and actions.
The more appropriate way to build leadership is to make principles, not outcomes, the core values of the company. Customer focus is what will naturally come when a company is committed to providing quality, honest accounting, for example. It is the principle that determines the action—not the action that determines the quality of values of the company. Without principles in place, the company is rudderless and can only go where the winds of the times are blowing. The principles of leadership are what promote courage, and one must have courage to insist on principles. It is a reinforcing concept, but ultimately one has to make the decision to be courageous and to move towards the highest core values of all.
In the end, the book then shifts to a discussion of how to be courageous in broader terms. Communicating with courage, leading with courage and solving problems with courage are all discussed. Lee provides some examples here as well, touching on the stories of the leaders in the book—leaders at WorldCom, the FBI, West Point, IntegWare and many others. During this section, the book provides real world situations to help bring the concepts to life.
Overall, this is where the book succeeds best in terms of narrative: the stories are helpful and illustrative and provide depth and insight into the individual’s psychology. They show how everyone essentially faces the same challenges and struggles to overcome issues in their lives that can impact their leadership abilities. These issues have to be dealt with, first and foremost, however, by starting from within and looking at what the individual character can do inside his own person to address and affirm his core values. Making the core values the high values is what Lee says the backbone of leadership is all about. Once the high values are there, the rest comes easy—the communication, the decision-making, all of it. The books stories help to illustrate these ideas in clever and revealing ways, making the read enjoyable, easy and interesting for any student of leadership and business.
References
Lee, G., & Elliott-Lee, D. (2006). Courage: the backbone of leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.