General Grant, upon receiving the telegram announcing Lincoln’s assassination and deciding on how to break the news to his wife, said, “First prepare yourself for the most painful and startling news that could be received.” And I cannot think of worse news for America in its history. Lincoln’s assassination was a pivotal moment, and 150 years later we still deeply feel the scars from his loss, which paved the way for a less than ideal reconciliation between North and South after our most trying time as a nation. It’s difficult to speculate just how much smoother Reconstruction would have gone with Lincoln but undeniable that Lincoln was the person best equipped to lead the country through the Reconstruction process, because of his extraordinary empathy which gave him his ability to understand how people think. And empathy is the first quality that we learn in management lessons from Abraham Lincoln in Doris Goodwin Kearn’s Team of Rivals.
Lincoln’s ability to assuage differences between his rivals with his empathy would have made the herculean task of Reconstruction that much more possible. 3 years later, during his VP Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial, we get a sense of just how fractured the country was and how difficult Lincoln’s task was during the Civil War. But those closest to him, like Grant, instantly recognized that Lincoln’s death was “an irreparable loss to the South, which [needed] so much both his tenderness and magnanimity.” Elizabeth Blair, southerner with family in the Cabinet, remarked, “Those of southern sympathies know now they have lost a friend willing—& more powerful to protect & serve them than they can now ever hope to find again.” When we think of leaders, we commonly do not think of words like tenderness, friend, empathy or clemency. But those characteristics are what made Lincoln more than a common leader.
At 7:22 AM on April 15th, 1865, time of death for Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton gave the most concise and perfect tribute to Lincoln: “Now he belongs to the ages.” His cabinet members, who Lincoln carefully picked to have views different from his own, were, like Grant, the first to realize just how damaging the loss was, because they knew how he brought together their differing views, representing the different opinions of the country, to form his own views and carefully craft his decisions, which were famous for their timing, because no man had a better barometer of what was going on in his country than Lincoln. When most “great leaders” are known for their ability to speak, Lincoln’s empathy and ability to listen made him superhuman.
In all organizations there are warring factions—sales versus engineers at a tech company, administration versus faculty at a university. What a great leader can do is tap into all of the points of view to form a more whole view of a situation and tap into strengths and dampen weaknesses to make the whole much better than the sum of parts.
Team of Rivals carefully crafts the story of the 4 Republican candidates for president in the 1860 election—Seward, Bates, Chase and Lincoln—and how the little known rail-splitting lawyer from Sangamon County, whose most famous act was losing a Senate race, not only beat out the 3 other much better known candidates but then brought them together in his Cabinet, almost undeniably the most qualified Cabinet in our country’s history. Indeed, Lincoln's strategy of being everybody's second choice worked out, as he never disparaged the other candidates, but worked with them.
The contentiousness of his Cabinet members (Chase coveted the presidency in the 1864 election so badly that he campaigned against Lincoln in his re-election efforts, even while Lincoln wouldn’t let him leave the Cabinet, knowing that Chase was the most qualified Treasury Secretary, because he funded the war and filled the nation’s coffers at a time when it should have gone bankrupt). One of Lincoln’s great coups takes place when he refuses to accept the resignations of his two most brilliant Cabinet members, Chase and Seward. In the “public interest,” he required both men to remain in office, despite their mutual despise of each other. By retaining them, Lincoln was able to maintain a balance in the Cabinet. Mary Lincoln believed that all of the Cabinet members were stabbing Lincoln in the back, but Lincoln understood just how important it was to keep a broad view of what was happening in the country. By balancing his team of rivals, he had consolidated his leadership. “If I had yielded to that storm & dismissed Seward the thing would have all have slumped over one way & we should have been left with a scanty handful of supporters. When Chase gave in his resignation I saw that the game was in my own hands & I put it through.” Lincoln’s careful chess moves are brilliant, though nobody suspected him of using his Cabinet members in such ways.
Lincoln uses what I call the “Colombo Method,” named after the hard-boiled detective of 1970s TV fame. Colombo (Peter Falk in his most iconic role) was so good at “playing dumb” when speaking with his murder suspects that he let the criminals put themselves in jail. Colombo made the suspects think he was a bumbling idiot, so they start talking. Just as he would walk away, Colombo would say something like, “There’s just one more thing...” This is where Colombo would nail the murderers.
In many ways, being an unknown rail-splitter from Illinois helped Lincoln, because people assumed he didn’t know what he was talking about. Early on in Lincoln’s presidency, just about all of the nation assumed that it was Seward who was running the show, though Seward was the first to understand Lincoln’s genius and to later realize just how much Lincoln was in charge in his quieter, more unassuming way. Seward himself thought he was calling the shots with Fort Sumter, the first debacle of Lincoln’s presidency and the beginning of the Civil War. While Seward wanted Lincoln to surrender Sumter, under the guise that southerners would be appeased by its abandonment, Lincoln knew better. Looking back, this theory looks more like Seward’s folly than the purchase of Alaska, but Lincoln had already taken Seward’s good advice of holding, occupying and possessing property belonging to the government; Lincoln just wasn’t going to cede Sumter per Seward’s prescription.
Following Seward’s harsh criticism that Lincoln didn’t cede Sumter, Lincoln wrote a memo that he never sent. Here is another pointed lesson that good leaders follow: writing emails that they never send. Lincoln realized that, though he was the most gifted of our presidential writers, it was best to approach Seward in person and quietly defuse the situation, rather than write a memo he would later regret.
Perhaps Lincoln’s first great feat was branding the war as an effort to keep the Union together rather than a war to free the slaves, much to the chagrin of radical Republicans and abolitionists who, had they gotten their way, would have imperiled the cause by losing important border states like Kentucky. While radical Republicans wished that he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation earlier, Lincoln wisely understood that the north would not fight to end slavery but to preserve the Union.
But it was more complicated than that. Once Seward realized that it was Lincoln who was in charge, he also became an ally to the President in balancing the warring factions. Radicals thought Seward a conservative influence on the president, but both he and the president were engaged in the same task of finding a middle ground between the two extremes of radical Republicans and conservative Democrats.
Where Lincoln shines above most leaders is his ability to recognize his errors. Fred Seward wrote, “Presidents and Kings are not apt to see flaws in their own arguments, but fortunately for the Union, it had a President, at this critical juncture who combined a logical intellect with an unselfish heart.” And errors Lincoln did commit, making him more human and credible and therefore more beloved by his countrymen.
Though Lincoln was not experienced in war nor did he like it at all—his opposition to the 1848 war with Mexico probably lost him previous political positions—he was, in his own way, a fantastic war strategist. His perfectly timed visits to troops—he was totally unafraid of being on the front in dangerous situations—rallied them. He was also wise to understand his popularity with the troops, going to great lengths to give them time off to vote (they favored Lincoln in extraordinary numbers in his re-election campaign over the braggadocio General McClellan). One soldier wrote that he had to lower his cap “to cover a smile that had overmastered him” at the “ludicrous sight” of Lincoln riding along on the front, with his lanky, tall frame, almost bigger than the horse. But, the soldier wrote, the troops loved Lincoln. “His benignant smile as he passed on was a real reflection of his honest, kindly heart; but deeper, under the surface of that marked and not all uncomely face, were the unmistakable signs of care and anxiety...In fact his popularity in the army is and has been universal.”
Goodwin Kearns notes the most surprising contemporaneous evaluation of Lincoln’s leadership, which appeared in the extreme secessionist paper, the Charleston Mercury. “He has called around him in counsel, the Mercury marveled, “the ablest and most earnest men of his country. Where he has lacked in individual ability, learning, experience or statesmanship, he has sought it, and found it... Force, energy, brains, earnestness, he has collected around him in every department."
Leaders set direction and achieve outcomes not only because they are able to get
other people to do things but because they themselves make a powerful message when
they do things. Leaders have a magnetic quality; people gravitate towards leaders and
espouse their ideas. Leaders communicate effectively, though not necessarily in a verbal sense. Through their actions and their body language, people inherently know who a leader is. The first person I think of when I think of a leader is Abraham Lincoln, who gave his “last full measure of devotion” to this country in its most difficult time. Acting as both a rudder and a motor through a massive sea change that would divide this country, even while he attempted to hold it together, Abraham Lincoln is the epitome of transformational leadership.
But the most concise definition of a leader comes in General Sherman’s evaluation of Lincoln: “greatness, combined with goodness.”
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| I found this Escuela Abraham Lincoln in Havana, Cuba, where there are many memorials to Lincoln because Castro, despite his dislike of most things American, could appreciate the magnanimity of Lincoln. The popularity and recognition of Lincoln’s unparalleled leadership qualities are nearly universal, even in places not know for appreciation of the United States. Tolstoy commented that "Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together. We are still too near to his greatness, but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.” It is Lincoln’s character that makes him powerful: “He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.” |
