Leadership, Ronald Reagan and Listening.

So what is leadership?  There must be thousands of answers to this question. Actually, the great oracle of Google tells me there are about 362,000,000 answers. It is in this very popular question that I found the inspiration to today’s Monday Morning Motivational Minute.

This weekend I was looking through my office library and I came across a copy of Dutch – a Memoir of Ronald Regan by Edmund Morris and I began to think about whom he was and what he meant to our nation and the world.  Who was this man who led our great nation from 1981 to 1989?  What kind of man was he?  What kind of leader was he?

Margaret Thatcher summarized what she believed to be the essence of the man in her eulogy on June 11, 2004. “In his lifetime, Ronald Reagan was such a cheerful and invigorating presence that it was easy to forget what daunting historic tasks he set for himself. He sought to mend America's wounded spirit, to restore the strength of the free world and to free the slaves of Communism.”

Ronald Reagan once said that, “America is too great for small dreams.”

Whatever else you may believe about him, President Reagan was passionately committed to his beliefs. I believe that Reagan’s secret was that he gave people exactly what they needed in a leader.  Not what they wanted but what they needed. What I believe made him so unique is that despite being so passionate with his beliefs he still knew how to listen. It was, however, the unique nature of his listening that made him different.

It would have been easy for him, committed to his vision and enjoying popular support to stop listening at any time during his presidency.  He could have argued that listening would have seemed like following the polls, pandering to special interest and caving to the whims of public opinion just for the sake of reelection and the maintenance of his presidential legacy.  He could have reminded the nation that there is an old saying that if Henry Ford had listened to advice we would all have better buggy whips today and not cars.  So listening can indeed have a dark side.

Yet listening was Reagan’s secret. To listen, and to truly value both the person speaking and what they had to say.  The irony is that often enough, he could be expected to make a decision that contradicted the very people he was listening to.  He impressed his advisors, his enemies and the voters by actively listening to everyone.  He believed that people wanted to be sure that he heard what they had to say and that he cared that they said it and that they were less focused on whether or not he actually did what they asked.

As a result, he often received criticism for accepting campaign contributions from special interest groups whose agendas, many of his other supporters found objectionable. Reagan listened to everyone, and then proceeded to act on his own internal moral compass. Sometimes this agreed with a petitioners request and sometimes it did not.

To truly illustrate the respect his enemies had for him you need look no further than his relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev.  In 1983, Reagan publicly called the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire” and he deeply believed it.  By 1985 he was signing a peace treaty with Gorbachev eliminating the entire class of medium range nuclear tipped missiles and in 2004, Gorbachev remembered President Reagan as, “an honest rival and a friend”.

How will you be remembered?

Value everyone, be inspired and have a great week.