The 15th Principle

Throughout this volume, I have stressed that most of the core principles presented here are applicable in most situations. There is, however, a 15th principle, applicable in all circumstances—a precept for action without which no Leader’s Checklist should be considered complete.

Let’s revisit a scene from the beginning of this volume, but before we get there, we will need to set the clock back to April 12, 1861. At 4:30 that morning, rebel forces in South Carolina opened fire on a federal fort in Charleston Harbor. The garrison commander gave up the fortress with no fatalities, and though a minor clash compared with what would follow, that opening salvo on Fort Sumter triggered a four-year civil war that would leave more than 620,000 dead.³⁷

On both sides, hundreds of thousands stepped forward to serve their cause, including a Maine resident and Bowdoin College professor named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Rising from lieutenant colonel to major general, he would see combat at the battles of Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Petersburg, and he was with the Union Army of the Potomac when Robert E. Lee’s Army of North Virginia surrendered to the Union Army at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865.

To mark the moment, General Ulysses S. Grant, who had accepted the formal surrender on behalf of the Union, ordered a follow-up ceremony for April 12, with more than 4,000 Union soldiers to be lined up at attention on one side of a field. Lee’s defeated infantry units were then to march onto the field to place their regimental flags and firearms at the foot of a Union officer in charge. For the honor of orchestrating the event and taking charge of it, Grant designated Chamberlain.

As the first Confederate brigade approached Union forces at the field on April 12, four years to the date since the Rebel firing on Fort Sumter, Chamberlain ordered a bugle call that told Union soldiers to “carry arms”—a posture of respect in which soldiers hold the musket in their right hand with the muzzle perpendicular to their shoulders. Both Union and Confederate soldiers understood its meaning, since their military traditions had emanated from the same sources.

A Southern general riding near the front of the Confederate forces, John B. Gordon, appreciated the respectful signal that Chamberlain’s soldiers displayed toward the Rebel soldiers on their day of ignominy, and Gordon ordered the same posture to be returned by his own troops. As described by Chamberlain himself, “Gordon, at the head of the marching column, riding with heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound of the shifting arms, looks up, and, taking the meaning,” instructed “his successive brigades to pass us with the same position.”³⁸

The incident became known as a “salute returning a salute,” a moment remembered for years by those who witnessed or heard of it, and one that implied reconciliation. Some of Chamberlain’s fellow officers were angered by witnessing such a fraternal act after fighting the same soldiers on so many killing fields. And for Chamberlain himself, it was a matter of saluting those who had tried to kill him only two weeks earlier. In a skirmish on March 29, Confederate soldiers had wounded Chamberlain in the arm and chest. A year before that, they shot him through the hip and groin during the Union siege of Petersburg. In all, through 20 battles and numerous skirmishes during three years of service, Chamberlain had been wounded six times and would eventually succumb to the Petersburg injury.³⁹

For President Abraham Lincoln, the South’s capitulation at Appomattox constituted not only an ending point for the armed rebellion but also a starting point for national reconciliation. Even for him, however, the road to reunification was a bitter pill given the Union’s grievous losses on the battlefields. Events would take a horrible personal turn just two days after Chamberlain’s salute to the Rebel army as the president and his wife watched a performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington.

For both sides, though, gestures of reconciliation were more important than the hostilities that remained. The latter were natural, the former learned, and Chamberlain’s moment at the conclusion of the Civil War serves to remind us of the vital importance of a final Leader’s Checklist principle: placing common mission ahead of personal interest or animosity, especially when its seems least natural to do so. This last checklist precept is expressed in our oft-used phrases of “servant” or “selfless” leadership, and it is well captured in a U.S. Marine Corps dictum: “The officer eats last.” In business, it appears in Jim Collins’s appraisal as one of the defining qualities of those who lead their companies from “good to great.”⁴⁰ And thus the 15th, final, and most vital of all leadership principles:

15. Place Common Interest First. In setting strategy, communicating vision, and reaching decisions, common purpose comes first, personal self-interest last.

This 15th principle could also be heard in the White House on November 16, 2010, when President Barack Obama presented the Medal of Honor to Army Staff Sergeant Salvatore A. Giunta. During the sergeant’s second combat tour in Afghanistan, his team had been ambushed by a well-armed insurgent group. Giunta had raced forward under fire at great risk to himself to render aid to the wounded and to rescue an injured GI being dragged away by insurgents. The United States cited Giunta for his “unwavering courage, selflessness, and decisive leadership while under extreme enemy fire” and for his “extraordinary heroism and selflessness above and beyond the call of duty.” When the president detailed this selfless act of leadership during the White House ceremony—with Giunta’s wife and parents and the survivors of his unit present and the Medal of Honor recipient himself standing at the president’s side—the East Room, according to one reporter, “was so silent you could hear a rustle from across the room.”⁴¹