CHAPTER 16

BRINGING OUT THE BEST

MANY OF THE chapters in this section have discussed how a leader should deal with the quirks or shortcomings of the people around him—betrayal, failure, troublemaking, weirdness. But leadership is more than plugging leaks. Canceling out minuses doesn’t necessarily leave you with anything. How do you bring out the best in a person? In hundreds, or thousands, of people?

A leader must believe that there is some best to be brought out. If men are wretches, they have no best. If they are machines, you have to find the right “power” switches to get them going, and they may work quite well, but that is not quite bringing out the best either. The mechanic’s mode was common in the eighteenth century; it went along with the science of politics. Swatches of The Federalist Papers catalogue the passions of men in society with the thoroughness of a technician in a lab coat. In one paragraph, Alexander Hamilton ticks off attachments, enmities, interests, hopes, and fears. All too human, all too true. But Washington, and to a lesser degree his fellow leaders, also reached further, and looked deeper.

The near mutiny at Newburgh, in March 1783, showed Washington flipping a number of “power” switches—calling in chits, explaining consequences—but also looking for more.

He drew on the officers’ bond with him, and offered himself as a model of service. The gesture with the glasses accomplished both tasks: you have known me all the years I have been growing blind, and you should be as loyal as I have been. In his remarks he also warned them of the grave consequences of the step they were considering: you may “open the flood gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.” Hamilton, in his role as author of The Federalist Papers, might have said that Washington was invoking a deep attachment, and a powerful fear.

But at the end of his speech he said something else. “You will,” he told the officers, “by the dignity of your conduct,” allow “posterity to say . . . had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.” These men had been on the point of mutiny, and now he talks of perfection. What sense does that make?

The sense it makes is that as men can fall down, make mistakes, screw up, choose wrong, they can also choose right, which is what you men will do, and will be honored and admired for doing. You may not have looked so perfect at the beginning of this meeting, angry and grumbling, but by the end of it you will. Washington throws the burden of action on others, and tells them that they can and will pick it up.

This turn is a characteristic of Washington’s leadership, as unmistakable as a fingerprint, as persistent as a frog call. The man who was a master at holding people’s attention and at acquiring power turns the attention back on his audience, to show them their power, and their responsibility. It is a mixture of praise and exhortation, and it happens again and again. In the “Circular to the States,” issued three months after the Newburgh crisis, he told Americans, after a long description of their opportunities, that if they “should not be completely free and happy the fault will be entirely their own.” Get to work; it’s up to you. In his first inaugural address, in April 1789, after dilating on his own “inferior endowments,” he praised “the talents, the rectitude, and the patriotism” of the new Congress. He had been dealing, not always happily, with Congresses for eight and a half years, yet he spoke as if he believed this one would be better. In his Farewell Address published in September 1796 at the end of his presidency, he told Americans that “the constancy of your support” had been “the essential prop” of his “efforts.” He was retiring, but they weren’t. Keep it up.

The most consistent example of the turn is a battlefield phrase that appears in numerous memories of talks he gave or shouts he made before or during combat. Washington’s reported comments in the field cannot be accepted word for word: No one was taking notes; old men wrote them down, years after they had been young. Time and memory and Washington’s posthumous reputation put them in capital letters. We have the sense, not the exact sounds. But one phrase appears so often that it has the ring of accuracy—My brave fellows. My brave fellows, I ask you to reenlist. My brave fellows, fight. Each time Washington says it, he is asserting that which is to be proved. Maybe they will go home or run away, and not be brave at all. But he gets them to be brave by telling them they are.

It is not the only way to lead. At the Battle of Kolín in 1757, Frederick the Great, Baron von Steuben’s teacher, and one of the greatest generals of all time, spoke immortal words to his soldiers: Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? Do you dogs want to live forever? Shame, sarcasm, the realism of the grave—it worked then, and it works still.

Washington preferred to say, My brave fellows, meaning, My fellows, be brave.

Routine accomplishes a lot; so do the levers of interest, if they are skillfully pulled. But sometimes a leader has to see a person’s best, tell him what it is, and then let him do it—because, without the best efforts of others, what can a leader accomplish?