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The Choices of Leadership (Part II)
By Ray Blunt
Graduation address for the Navy’s Leadership Logistic Program, Port Hueneme, CA, in December 2006.
The third choice you make is where your energies take you at the end of the day. I’d like to illustrate this with a children’s story and a poem: Two leaders sit before you today, one here, and the other there. Oh, you say you can’t quite see them? Let me describe them to you, maybe you will recognize them. One is Ozymandius.
Ozymandius
by: Percy Bysshe Shelley |
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I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. |
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The other is Aslan. In Prince Caspian we find Lucy asking him after not seeing him for some time if he is bigger than before—he responds “no, but I am the kind of lion the more you know me the larger I become.” This is a question not of size or rank but of building character—the Greek word for a repeated etching of the stylus to embed a mark: in the organization and in you. Aslan left behind him four kings and queens whom he had shaped through many trials to rule Narnia. They became in the process good, wise, courageous, humble, and strong. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy grew into their roles as leaders because Aslan served as their example, their coach, their mentor and their teacher. He left his legacy not on a brag wall or a crumbling statue but in the lives of others.
And every day you walk through the door at work, the people there are going to leadership school—on you. Just the way you have learned the good, the bad and the ugly from the leaders you have worked for and talked about--perhaps in this course--and even silently cursed over the years. What will you leave behind and in whom? But that is your choice.
So in closing, what I’d like to do -- I hope kindly but urgently – is to encourage you in these times of such difficulty to be open-eyed about the choices before you as leaders. Don’t simply stumble along letting your in-box and your crowded schedule guide you.
Choose the humble purpose of public service over pragmatism and personal success.
Choose courageous truth over self deception and fear.
And finally, choose to serve others rather than to be served. Grow the next generation of servant leaders behind you. Build a great and safe place for people to work and find their purpose and calling.
Leave your legacy in the lives of others, not in your own triumphs.
It is in such a life that you will meet a true servant leader down the road one day and that leader will be you. Grown much larger in the ways that matter--perhaps forever. I wish you Godspeed.
WASHINGTON INSTITUTE RESOURCES
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