The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
ON THE FIRST DAY of summer in 2013, I found myself where I never thought I’d be again.
On the bright day when President Barack Obama announced my nomination in the Rose Garden to replace FBI Director Bob Mueller, the president, Mueller, and I stood alone in the Oval Office, waiting to walk out the glass door and into the garden, where the White House press pool already had gathered.
As we turned to step into view of the cameras, the president stopped us. With a serious look on his face, Obama turned to me and said, “Jim, there’s one thing I forgot to talk to you about.”
While I looked confused, the president nodded toward Mueller. “Bob long ago made a commitment to me, and I need you to honor it.” What could this possibly be? The president had assured me of my independence. Now I was being asked for secret assurances?
The president paused to signal the gravity of the moment. Then he went on. “Bob has always allowed me to use the FBI gym to play basketball, and I need you to commit to continuing that.”
I laughed. “Of course, Mr. President. It is your gym, in a way.”
Though I love basketball, I knew I would never join him in the FBI gym. I also love golf, but knew we would never play. FBI directors can’t be that way with presidents. Everybody knows why. Or at least I thought they did.
After leaving the Bush Justice Department in August 2005, I worked in the private sector. With five kids approaching college at about two-year intervals and fifteen years of government salary that hadn’t exactly been conducive to saving, it was time to save some money. I went to work as the chief lawyer—general counsel—at the defense contractor Lockheed Martin for five years, and then at an investment firm called Bridgewater Associates in Connecticut for three years. In early 2013, I left Bridgewater and joined the faculty at Columbia Law School as a fellow focused on national security, because I have always found teaching deeply rewarding.
That March, Attorney General Eric Holder called out of the blue to ask whether I would interview for FBI director. He wasn’t guaranteeing me the job, but said he wouldn’t be calling personally if I wasn’t going to be very seriously considered.
I was surprised. Maybe it was because I had become so hardened to the tribal loyalties of Washington, D.C., that it was difficult to believe a Democrat would choose someone who had been a political appointee of his Republican predecessor for such an important post. I also was on record as having financially contributed to President Obama’s political opponents.
I was cold to the idea. It would be too much for my family. I didn’t tell him why I said that, but Patrice was in graduate school and working as a counselor at a walk-in mental health clinic in Bridgeport; one of our kids was a senior in high school; and we were foster parents with continuing connections and obligations to young people who had been in our home. Holder asked me to think about it. I told him I would sleep on it, but the answer was likely to be no.
I woke up the next morning and Patrice was missing from our bedroom. I went downstairs and found her in the kitchen on her laptop. She was looking at houses for sale in the Washington, D.C., area.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’ve known you since you were nineteen. This is who you are, this is what you love. So go down there and do your best.” Then she paused and added, “But they’re not going to pick you anyway.” She liked President Obama and had voted for him, but she still thought this was just an exercise. Her interest, she later confessed, was in not having my sad face moping around for years afterward talking about what might have been. She, like me, doubted he’d pick someone who’d worked in the Bush administration.
After preliminary interviews with his staff, I met President Obama in the Oval Office. He sat in the same position President Bush always had—in an armchair with his back to the fireplace, on the side closest to the grandfather clock. I sat on the couch to his left, on the cushion closest to him. We were joined by the White House counsel, Kathy Ruemmler, who sat across from me.
I had never met President Obama before and was struck by two things: how much thinner he appeared in person and his ability to focus. As Ruemmler and I stood just outside the Oval Office waiting for the meeting to begin, I could see the president standing at his desk holding the phone. Kathy said he was talking with the governor of Oklahoma about the historic tornadoes that had torn through that state, killing two dozen people and injuring hundreds. Obama hung up the phone, waved me into the room, spoke briefly about the terrible tragedy in Oklahoma, and then shifted entirely to the new subject—the FBI.
The president was almost grave in explaining why he took the selection of the FBI director so seriously. “In a way, this and the Supreme Court are the two most important personnel decisions a president makes, because I’m choosing for the future,” he said. “You will be here after I’m gone.” He said he thought there was great value in that long tenure and hoped that if I were the director, I could help a new president. For example, he said he had been pushed to make military decisions as a new and inexperienced president and under great pressure from military leaders. Without saying so, he seemed to be expressing regret that he didn’t have the experienced counsel around him that he needed at the time. He thought it was good that I would be around to help a future, perhaps similarly inexperienced leader think about national security decisions better.
We talked about the natural tension between the need to investigate leaks of classified information and the need to support a free press. Recent Department of Justice efforts to investigate leak cases were much in the news at that point and the press was assailing the alleged “Obama administration crackdown.” We didn’t talk about particular cases, but I shared my view that the balance could be struck by thoughtful leadership; it simply was not sustainable to say the investigators would never seek information from reporters, and it was an exaggeration to say that we couldn’t have a free press if we investigated leaks. We could protect a free press and classified information at the same time.
What surprised me most—and led me in the moment to realize Patrice was likely wrong about this being a waste of time—was the president’s view of the FBI job. It turns out he had a different conception of the FBI director than either I or most partisans assumed. He said, “I don’t want help from the FBI on policy. I need competence and independence. I need to sleep at night knowing the place is well run and the American people protected.” Contrary to my assumption, the fact that I was politically independent from him might actually have worked in my favor.
I replied that I saw it the same way. The FBI should be independent and totally divorced from politics, which was what the ten-year term for a director was designed to ensure.
After my meeting with President Obama, I called Patrice with the wise-ass comment, “Your faith in their poor judgment may be misplaced.” Feeling good about my conversation with Obama, I agreed to the nomination when it was offered. My family would stay in Connecticut for two years to wind up all the things they were involved in, but I fully intended to serve as director of the FBI through the year 2023. What, I wondered, could possibly interfere with that?
* * *
After deciding I was his choice, but before he announced the nomination, President Obama surprised me by inviting me back to the Oval Office. We sat in the same seats and were again joined by the White House counsel. The president opened the conversation by explaining, “Once you are director, we won’t be able to talk like this.” What he meant was that for over forty years, the leaders of our government had understood that a president and an FBI director must be at arm’s length. The FBI is often called upon to investigate cases that touch on the president’s senior aides and affect the course of his presidency. To be credible—both in reality and in perception—the FBI and its director cannot be close with the president. So one final time, President Obama and I had the kind of conversation two college classmates might. We discussed and debated hard issues that were not under the FBI director’s purview, like using drones to kill terrorists. I was struck by the way he could see and evaluate a variety of angles on a complicated issue. And I suppose he wanted to make one last assessment of me and the way I thought through problems before my nomination was a done deal.
On the way out the door, I told Kathy Ruemmler how surprised I was by the interesting discussion, telling her, “I can’t believe someone with such a supple mind actually got elected president.”
President Obama and I would never have another casual conversation.
* * *
Before I took the job, the FBI had had only six directors since 1935, when it was officially named as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Its first, the legendary J. Edgar Hoover, had led the organization for nearly fifty years (including its predecessor organization, the Bureau of Investigation) and built a culture around himself that profoundly shaped the Bureau and its agents. For decades, Hoover used an iron hand to drive the agency and strike fear in the hearts of political leaders. He had “personal files” on many of them, something he let them know. He dined and drank with presidents and senators, letting them use the FBI when it suited him, and frightening them with the FBI when that suited him.
Inside the FBI, the director was the absolute center. His approach brought tremendous fame, attention, and power to the organization. It also created an environment in which the goal of most agents and supervisors in the FBI was to avoid being noticed by Mr. Hoover. Tell him what he wants to hear, then get on with your work. That mentality was hard to displace, even decades after Hoover’s death.
Before I was sworn in as FBI director in 2013, I spent a week shadowing Bob Mueller. Bob, a former marine, was a bit old-school as director, not given to what he saw as touchy-feely stuff. In the grueling days immediately after September 11, 2001, for example, his wife had prodded Bob to be sure his people were holding up under the stress. Early the next morning, or so I was told, he dutifully telephoned key members of his staff—whose offices were all within a ten-second walk of his—asking, “How’re you doing?” When each offered the perfunctory reply of “Fine, sir,” he replied, “Good,” and hung up.
Mueller was characteristically disciplined about preparing me to follow him as director. During the first morning of my week of shadowing, he explained that he had arranged for me to talk with the leaders of the FBI’s major divisions. I was to meet with them one-on-one, he said, and they would each brief me on their area’s challenges and opportunities. Then, Mueller explained, without a hint of a smile, he would meet with me after each of these sessions, “to tell you what’s really going on.” That comment rocked me. The FBI is an institution devoted to finding the truth. Why would the director need to tell me “what’s really going on” after each meeting? The assumption in Bob’s comment was that senior officials either weren’t aware of what was happening at the FBI or weren’t going to be truthful to me, their new boss, about it. My guess was the latter.
Many people, in my experience, hesitate to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth to their bosses—and for reasons that may make sense. I could hear the voices of jaded FBI veterans channeling a character in the movie The Departed: “What’s the upside to doing that? It can only hurt you. Bosses are like mushrooms; you keep ’em in the dark and feed ’em shit.” I admired Bob and marveled at the way he had transformed the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11, driving the organization to break down walls, overcome its heritage as solely a detective culture, and become a fully integrated member of the intelligence community. Bob had proven that it would be a mistake to break the FBI into a criminal investigative agency and a counterterrorism agency by making the FBI great at both. I was in awe of what he had done, but I also wanted to signal a more open style of leadership.
I was officially sworn in as the seventh director of the FBI on September 4, 2013. After delays caused by a congressional budget fight—complete with a shutdown of the federal government for lack of funds—we held a public installation at FBI headquarters in October. President Obama was present at the ceremony, and I caught an early glimpse at what made him a compelling leader.
Patrice and our kids were, of course, in attendance at the ceremony. My two older girls had brought their serious boyfriends along, and we all joined the president for a commemorative photo of the occasion. Remembering what he had learned about our group during the introductions, President Obama smiled for the first photo and then, gesturing toward the boyfriends, said, “Hey, why don’t we take another without the guys. You know, just in case.” He was playful as he said it, and he did it in a way that no one was offended. But I could tell he was also being thoughtful in a way few leaders are. What if things didn’t work out with one or the other of these guys? Would having them in a picture with the president ruin it for the Comeys forever? So Obama gestured the boyfriends out of the shot, to our great amusement. (I’m happy to report that one of the guys is now our son-in-law and the other soon will be.)
Though it was a small moment, what struck me about President Obama’s remark is that it displayed a sense of humor, insight, and an ability to connect with an audience, which I would later come to appreciate in the president even more. These are all qualities that are indispensable in good leaders. A sense of humor in particular strikes me as an important indicator—or “tell”—about someone’s ego. Having a balance of confidence and humility is essential to effective leadership. Laughing in a genuine way requires a certain level of confidence, because we all look a little silly laughing; that makes us vulnerable, a state insecure people fear. And laughing is also frequently an appreciation of others, who have said something that is funny. That is, you didn’t say it, and by laughing you acknowledge the other, something else insecure people can’t do.
President Bush had a good sense of humor, but often at other people’s expense. He teased people in a slightly edgy way, which seemed to betray some insecurity in his personality. His teasing was used as a way to ensure that the hierarchy in his relationship with others was understood, a strange thing given that he was president of the United States, and it was a sure way to deter his people from challenging the leader’s reasoning.
President Obama could laugh with others, and, as with President Bush, poke fun at himself in some circumstances, such as when Bush told fellow “C students” at a commencement address, “you, too, can be president of the United States.” Unlike Bush, though, I never saw a belittling edge to Obama’s humor, which in my view reflected his confidence.
* * *
The FBI director’s job is much broader than may be apparent from the outside, or as depicted in the movies, where most of the director’s work seems entirely focused on individual cases and capturing bad guys. The director is the CEO of an extraordinarily complex organization. Each day began very early, when the director’s protective detail would pick me up for the drive to work. Though I had a security detail of Deputy U.S. Marshals when I served as deputy attorney general during the Bush administration, my new team was made up of specially trained FBI special agents and was much larger and more intense, because the threat to the FBI director is greater.
Like the U.S. Marshals who protected me as deputy attorney general, the special agents who watched over me and my family became family. Which is a good thing, because we tested them as only relatives can. Once we were in Iowa for a wedding on Patrice’s side. I went to bed while Patrice stayed up late playing cards with our kids and their cousins. As it typically was, my hotel room was alarmed in all kinds of ways, and all around me in the hotel were agents. And as they typically did, the agents gave me a device with a button to push in the event of dire emergency. I was afraid of this thing and always put it far away from me in a hotel room, so I didn’t accidentally touch it during the night. This night, I put it on a countertop in the outer room and went to sleep in the bedroom, far away from it.
I didn’t tell Patrice I had put the button on the counter in the outer room, the exact place where she was changing quietly at 2:00 A.M. so as not to wake me. She must have put something on top of the button, because there was pounding on the door about five seconds later. She opened the door a crack to see the lead agent standing at an odd angle, wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts. He was holding his arm so she couldn’t see his hand behind his back. He looked very tense.
“Is everything all right, ma’am?”
“Yes. I’m just getting ready for bed.”
“Are you sure everything is all right, ma’am?”
“Yes.”
“Can I see the director, ma’am?”
“He’s sleeping in the other room.”
“Will you check on him, please?”
Patrice walked to the bedroom door, saw me, and reported back. “I see him there sleeping. He’s fine.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Sorry to bother you.”
What Patrice couldn’t see, but I learned the next morning, was that there were agents stacked down the wall on either side of the door, guns held low and behind their backs. She had touched the button. My bad.
The FBI boasts a strong gun culture. Guns, in the hands of the good guys, were a regular feature of FBI life. In every staff meeting, 80 percent of the attendees had a gun on them. I eventually grew accustomed to seeing a pistol in an ankle holster when the deputy director crossed his legs during a meeting. After all, the deputy director is the senior special agent in the organization and is always armed, except when he goes to the White House. As director, I too was permitted to carry a gun, but I figured that would only complicate my life. Bob Mueller had seen it the same way. Besides, I was surrounded by armed people all day long. If I wasn’t safe in the hands of the FBI, then our country was really in trouble. Sean Joyce, who served as my first deputy director, became famous in the organization for hitting “reply all” when some bureaucrat within the Bureau sent an all-employee message instructing personnel to shelter in place or flee in the event of an “active shooter” in the workplace. Sean replied that any special agent who took that advice and hid or failed to run toward an active shooter would be fired.
* * *
On my morning drives to work, I would read in the back of the fully armored black Suburban, preparing myself for the first two meetings of the day. But before any meetings, I would sit at my desk and read more, starting with the applications the Department of Justice was submitting to the court for electronic surveillance in FBI national security cases. Each application must be personally approved by the director or, in his absence, the deputy director. I would review the inch-thick applications, pulling from a stack that, on many mornings, was a foot high. After reviewing and signing the applications, I would read my classified intelligence briefing, bringing me up to speed on intelligence relevant to the FBI’s missions to prevent terrorism and defeat foreign intelligence threats in the United States. Then I would read unclassified material relevant to our many other responsibilities. With that homework done, I was ready to meet my senior team, starting with the six to ten most senior people to discuss the most sensitive classified matters, followed by a meeting where more of the FBI’s leaders were admitted.
I would ask the group questions and get their morning reports on subjects that covered the FBI’s span: personnel (including injuries to our agents), budget, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, weapons of mass destruction, cyber, criminal cases (including kidnapping, serial-killer, gang, and corruption cases), Hostage Rescue Team deployments, congressional affairs, press, legal, training, the FBI lab, international affairs, and on and on. Most days I would then go meet with the attorney general to brief her, or him, on the most important matters.
During the Obama administration, I worked with two attorneys general—Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. They were each intelligent and personable lawyers and I liked them both. Holder was close to President Obama and his senior team, and very attentive to the policy and political implications of the department’s work. By the time I became director, his relationship with Republicans in Congress was toxic, with the Republican-led House of Representatives having voted to hold him in contempt for his failure to provide information to their satisfaction about an ATF gun-trafficking investigation on the southwest border, known as “Fast and Furious.” The feeling of contempt seemed to be mutual.
Loretta Lynch was much quieter and new to Washington. She spoke little and when she did, frequently seemed tightly scripted. It always takes time to become comfortable in a high-profile job; I’m not sure Lynch’s brief tenure gave her that time. And where Holder had a close working relationship with his deputy attorney general, Lynch’s relationship with Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates seemed distant and strained. It was as if they and their staffs simply didn’t talk to each other.
My days were consumed by both emergencies and the disciplined execution of priority programs. I was trying to transform the way the FBI approached leadership, cyber, diversity, and intelligence, among other things, which required regular CEO—or director—focus to drive them forward. And the FBI is also an international enterprise, with people in every state and more than eighty other countries. That meant I needed to travel to see, listen to, and speak to the people of the FBI.
In my first fifteen months as director, I visited all fifty-six FBI offices in the United States and more than a dozen overseas. I went there to listen and learn about the people of the FBI. What are they like, what do they want, what do they need? I spent hours and hours meeting them and listening to them. The first thing that struck me was that two-thirds of the FBI’s employees are not gun-carrying special agents. They are an extraordinarily diverse array of talented people, from all walks of life, serving in the FBI as intelligence analysts, linguists, computer scientists, hostage negotiators, surveillance specialists, lab experts, victim specialists, bomb technicians, and in many other roles. The one-third who are special agents, especially the thousands who were drawn by love of country after 9/11 to service in the FBI, are similarly diverse: former cops and marines, but also former teachers, chemists, therapists, clergy, accountants, software engineers, and professional athletes. Many of them look like TV special agents—tall, attractive men and women in business dress—but they come in all shapes and sizes, from crew cuts to ponytails, from ankle tattoos to hijabs, from six foot ten to four foot ten. What drives them all is a palpable sense of mission. They helped me rewrite the organization’s mission statement to match what was already written on their hearts: they exist to “protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.”
I was amazed at the talent, but I was frightened by one trend. The special agent workforce since 9/11 had been growing steadily more white. When I became director, 83 percent of the special agents were non-Hispanic Caucasians. As I explained to the workforce, I had no problem with white people, but that trend is a serious threat to our effectiveness. In a country that is growing more diverse, which, in my view, is wonderful, if every agent looks like me, we are less effective. Eighty-three percent could become 100 percent very quickly, if the FBI became known as “that place where white people work.” I told the workforce that the challenge and the opportunity were captured in something one of my daughters said when I told her about our diversity crisis. “The problem, Dad, is that you are The Man. Who wants to work for The Man?”
My daughter was right, but also wrong. Because if people knew what the men and women of the FBI are really like, and what the work is really like, they would want to be a part of it. Almost nobody leaves the FBI after becoming a special agent. Whether white or black, Latino or Asian, male or female, the annual turnover is about the same—0.5 percent. Once people experience the environment and the mission at the FBI, they become addicted to it and stay until retirement, despite being paid government salaries and working under incredible stress. Our challenge, I told the FBI, is to simply get out there and show more people of color and more women (that number had been stuck just below 20 percent for years) what the place is like and dare them to try to be part of it. It’s not rocket science, I said; the talent is out there. They just don’t know what they are missing. So we made it our passion to show them, and in just three years, the numbers started to change in a material way. During my third year at the FBI, a huge new-agent class at Quantico was 38 percent nonwhite. Our standards hadn’t changed; we were just doing a better job of showing people the life they could make by joining us, which is contagious in a positive way.
My travels around the country and the world taught me something else: the FBI’s leaders weren’t good enough. In the private sector, I had learned that the best organizations obsess over leadership talent—they hunt for it, test it, train it, and make it part of every conversation. They treat leadership talent like money. At the FBI, though, leadership was largely an afterthought. For decades, the organization counted on good people volunteering to be leaders and then putting up with all the family moves and time at Washington headquarters that required. Fortunately, many good people volunteered. But that kind of approach was also a recipe for people becoming leaders to escape a job they weren’t doing well or people being promoted by their bosses to get rid of them. I discovered from listening to the employees that we had some great leaders, some crappy leaders, and everything in between. That was simply not acceptable for an organization as important as the FBI.
I told the organization that I had an ambitious goal: the FBI would one day be the government’s premier leadership factory, and private employers would count the days until an FBI leader could retire (age fifty for special agents) so they could hire them to lead. The FBI would become so good at identifying and growing leaders that all the burdens of government leadership borne by FBI families would be repaid by successful second careers in the private sector. I told our employees that the military services were great organizations, but there was no reason why the FBI shouldn’t be the dominant government supplier of America’s corporate leaders. I said we were going to paint a picture of what great leadership looks like, find and grow those who could be great, and teach or remove those already in leadership jobs who weren’t getting it done.
With broad support across the organization, I was going to drive leadership into every corner and every conversation in the FBI, until we were consistently excellent, across all roles and at all levels. We would teach that great leaders are (1) people of integrity and decency; (2) confident enough to be humble; (3) both kind and tough; (4) transparent; and (5) aware that we all seek meaning in work. We would also teach them that (6) what they say is important, but what they do is far more important, because their people are always watching them. In short, we would demand and develop ethical leaders.
I knew a bit about this because I arrived at the FBI having spent decades watching leaders, reading about leaders, and trying to lead. From all that learning and all those mistakes, I knew the kind of leader I wanted to follow and the kind I wanted to be. And I set out immediately to try to set that example.
On my first full day as FBI director, for example, I sat in an auditorium in front of a camera and spoke to all employees about my expectations for them and their expectations for me. I gave the talk sitting on a stool, wearing a tie but no jacket. I also wore a blue shirt. This might not seem like a big deal to outsiders, but Bob Mueller wore a white shirt every day for twelve years (Congress had extended his ten-year term for two extra years). Not some days, or most days—every day. That was the culture, and I thought shirt color was one early, small way to set a different tone. I said nothing about my shirt, but people noticed.
I laid out my five expectations that first day and many times thereafter. Every new employee heard them, and I repeated them wherever I went in the organization:
• I expected they would find joy in their work. They were part of an organization devoted to doing good, protecting the weak, rescuing the taken, and catching criminals. That was work with moral content. Doing it should be a source of great joy.
• I expected they would treat all people with respect and dignity, without regard to position or station in life.
• I expected they would protect the institution’s reservoir of trust and credibility that makes possible all their work.
• I expected they would work hard, because they owe that to the taxpayer.
• I expected they would fight for balance in their lives.
I emphasized that last one because I worried many people in the FBI worked too hard, driven by the mission, and absorbed too much stress from what they saw. I talked about what I had learned from a year of watching Dick Cates in Madison, Wisconsin. I expected them to fight to keep a life, to fight for the balance of other interests, other activities, other people, outside of work. I explained that judgment was essential to the sound exercise of power. Because they would have great power to do good or, if they abused that power, to do harm, I needed sound judgment, which is the ability to orbit a problem and see it well, including through the eyes of people very different from you. I told them that although I wasn’t sure where it came from, I knew the ability to exercise judgment was protected by getting away from the work and refreshing yourself. That physical distance made perspective possible when they returned to work.
And then I got personal. “There are people in your lives called ‘loved ones’ because you are supposed to love them.” In our work, I warned, there is a disease called “get-back-itis.” That is, you may tell yourself, “I am trying to protect a country, so I will get back to” my spouse, my kids, my parents, my siblings, my friends. “There is no getting back,” I said. “In this line of work, you will learn that bad things happen to good people. You will turn to get back and they will be gone. I order you to love somebody. It’s the right thing to do and it’s also good for you.”
I added something I learned from Stellar Wind and the torture struggle. When someone is tired, their judgment can be impaired. When they are dragging, it is hard for them to float above a problem and picture themselves and the problem in another place and time, so I gave them another directive: sleep. When you sleep, your brain is actually engaged in the neurochemical process of judgment. It is mapping connections and finding meaning among all the data you took in during the day. Tired people tend not to have the best judgment. And it is not as hard as you may think, I added with a smile. “You can multitask. You can sleep with people you love. In appropriate circumstances.”
* * *
One day during my first week, around noon, I walked out of my huge office, through my huge conference room, and past the desk of Bob Mueller’s administrative assistant, who would work with me for another few months. She had been there for decades and was an invaluable resource to me but was much more familiar with a different style of leadership.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To get a sandwich,” I said.
“Why are you doing that?”
“Because I’m hungry. I’m just gonna run up to the cafeteria.”
“What if people try to talk to you?” she asked with a bewildered look.
“I hope they talk to me.”
Whenever I possibly could during my three years, eight months, and five days as FBI director, I walked down a long hall and up a flight of stairs to the FBI headquarters cafeteria. I never wore my jacket. I asked my security detail to stay far enough away from me that people would think I was walking alone. I didn’t want FBI employees to think I needed to be protected from them.
No matter how I felt inside, I tried to walk with a bounce in my step, standing straight and smiling at those I passed. The way I looked at it, when the director of the FBI stepped into that cafeteria, hundreds of pairs of eyes turned to look, and every pair was asking, in some form, the same question: “So how are we doing?” The answer from my face and posture had to be: “We’re doing just fine. It’s all going to be okay.”
I also never cut the line. Even when I wished I could, or even when I was in a hurry. I stood and waited as people in front of me ordered panini (which take forever, by the way). I thought it was very important to show people that I’m not better than anyone else. So I waited.
The wait in line allowed me to interview people. I would turn to the person next to me and ask them to tell me their story, including what they liked about their job at the FBI. I learned a tremendous amount from these many conversations. One lesson was that I wasn’t the big deal I thought I was. One day after I had been on the job for close to a year, I turned to the guy behind me and asked him about himself. I learned that he worked on computer servers. He said he had been with the FBI for three years, and what he liked best about the agency was that he could get experience and responsibility far beyond what the private sector offered someone his age. There was an awkward pause, and he probably thought he needed to be polite. So he asked, “How ’bout yourself?”
“I’m the director,” I replied.
Bobbing his head side to side to emphasize his question, he asked, “Director of…?”
“Dude,” I said, “I’m the director of the FBI. You work for me.”
Another awkward pause. Finally, he said, “Oh, you look so different online.”
That evening I went home and told Patrice that story. “That should happen to you every day,” she said with a laugh.
* * *
Before I became FBI director, I worked at Bridgewater Associates—which aspires to build a culture of complete transparency and honesty. I learned there that I could sometimes be a selfish and poor leader. Most often, that was because I was hesitant to tell people who worked for me when I thought they needed to improve. The best leaders are both kind and tough. Without both, people don’t thrive. Bridgewater’s founder, Ray Dalio, believes there is no such thing as negative feedback or positive feedback; there is only accurate feedback, and we should care enough about each other to be accurate. By avoiding hard conversations and not telling people where they were struggling and how they could improve, I was depriving them of the chance to grow. My squeamishness was not only cowardly, it was selfish. If I really care about the people who work for me—if I create the atmosphere of deep personal consideration I want—I should care enough to be honest, even if it makes me uncomfortable. I should, of course, still consider the best way to deliver the message. There is a right time, and a right way, for every conversation. If someone’s mom just died, that is not the day to be accurate, but I was honor bound to find a way to have that conversation.
Effective leaders almost never need to yell. The leader will have created an environment where disappointing him causes his people to be disappointed in themselves. Guilt and affection are far more powerful motivators than fear. The great coaches of team sports are almost always people who simply need to say, in a quiet voice, “That wasn’t our best, now was it?” and his players melt. They love this man, know he loves them, and will work tirelessly not to disappoint him. People are drawn to this kind of leader, as I was drawn all those years ago to Harry Howell, the grocer. A leader who screams at his employees or belittles them will not attract and retain great talent over the long term.
At the FBI, I spoke often about LeBron James. Even though I don’t know the man personally, I talked about him for two reasons. First, I believe he is the best basketball player in the world today. Second, he is never satisfied he is good enough. I have read that he spends every off-season working on some part of his game to improve it. At first glance, that seems crazy; he’s already better than everybody else. But it makes complete sense when you consider his perspective: he isn’t measuring himself against the other players; he is measuring himself against himself. The best leaders don’t care much about “benchmarking,” comparing their organization to others. They know theirs is not good enough, and constantly push to get better.
Early in my term as director, when I had declared that the FBI’s leadership culture needed to improve, someone handed me a survey showing we had the second-best leadership survey results among the seventeen agencies in the United States intelligence community. I returned the survey, explaining that I didn’t care; I wasn’t measuring us against them. I was measuring us against us, and we weren’t nearly good enough. The tough and kind leader loves her people enough to know they can always improve their game. She lights a fire in them to always get better.
I knew there were other areas where we could improve, and I suggested to the entire workforce that they read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one of the most important things I ever read. Inspired in part by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, King’s letter is about seeking justice in a deeply flawed world. I have reread it several times since first encountering it in college. Because I knew that the FBI’s interaction with the civil rights movement, and Dr. King in particular, was a dark chapter in the Bureau’s history, I wanted to do something more. I ordered the creation of a curriculum at the FBI’s Quantico training academy. I wanted all agent and analyst trainees to learn the history of the FBI’s interaction with King, how the legitimate counterintelligence mission against Communist infiltration of our government had morphed into an unchecked, vicious campaign of harassment and extralegal attack on the civil rights leader and others. I wanted them to remember that well-meaning people lost their way. I wanted them to know that the FBI sent King a letter blackmailing him and suggesting he commit suicide. I wanted them to stare at that history, visit the inspiring King Memorial in Washington, D.C., with its long arcs of stone bearing King’s words, and reflect on the FBI’s values and our responsibility to always do better.
The FBI Training Division created a curriculum that does just that. All FBI trainees study that painful history and complete the course by visiting the memorial. There, they choose one of Dr. King’s quotations from the wall—maybe “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” or “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy”—and then write an essay about the intersection of that quotation and the FBI’s values. The course doesn’t tell the trainees what to think. It only tells them they must think, about history and institutional values. Last I checked, the course remains one of the highest-rated portions of their many weeks at Quantico.
To drive the message home, I obtained a copy of the October 1963 memo from J. Edgar Hoover to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy seeking permission to conduct electronic surveillance of Dr. King. At the bottom of the single-page memo, which is only five sentences long and without meaningful facts, Kennedy’s signature grants that authority, without limit as to time and place. I put the memo under the glass on the corner of the desk where every morning I reviewed applications by the FBI and the Department of Justice to conduct national security electronic surveillance in the United States. As Hoover did, I was required to personally sign an application. The difference was that our applications went to a court and were often thicker than my arm. As I would explain to employees, it is a pain in the neck to get permission to conduct that kind of surveillance, and it should be.
I kept the Hoover memo there not to make a critical statement about Hoover or Kennedy, but to make a statement about the value of oversight and constraint. I have no doubt that Hoover and Kennedy thought they were doing the right thing. What they lacked was meaningful testing of their assumptions. There was nothing to check them. It is painful to stare openly at ourselves, but it is the only way to change the future.
The FBI rank and file reacted very positively to this and other initiatives, something I could see in their annual anonymous rating of me across the organization. But I knew some FBI alumni were confused as to why I seemed to be “attacking” the organization I led. But transparency is almost always the best course. Getting problems, pain, hopes, and doubts out on the table so we can talk honestly about them and work to improve is the best way to lead. By acknowledging our issues, we have the best chance of resolving them in a healthy way. Buried pain never gets better with age. And by remembering and being open and truthful about our mistakes, we reduce the chance we will repeat them.
Harry Truman once said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” Humans tend to do the same dumb things, and the same evil things, again and again, because we forget.