**Leadership Excellence**

**Other Thoughts**

**Deane Swickard:**

Bearing is very important, and I train the people that I work with,
especially when you\'re in an acting situation, bearing is the
leadership trait that will carry you the furthest, because as you walk
into a new situation, all people see is your behavior. They don\'t see
the depth yet of your skill or your abilities. So I think bearing is was
always very important because you\'re constantly meeting new people.
You\'re meeting new organizations. They\'re wondering what you\'re like.
How you carry yourself and how you communicate and how you project, the
presence you have, is very important.

**Elaine Zielinski:**

I\'m inspired by people who I think are enthusiastic, who really are
convinced that what they\'re doing is important and will make a
difference. So I guess that\'s how I would think about inspiring people.
And I\'m not saying that you should be phony about it, because that\'s a
loser. People see right through that. You have to sincerely believe that
what you\'re doing is really important and that what they\'re doing is
really important, and fortunately for me, working for BLM, that isn\'t
hard to do. A lot of motivation comes from inside the individual, and
that\'s something that ‑‑ there has to be that seed inside the
individual, but leaders in the work environment, I think you can maybe
nurture that, and by that again, I think, there\'s just some common
themes.

**Deane Swickard:**

People want to be inspired. They want to be motivated by their leader.
They don\'t want to be managed. They don\'t want to be systematized.
They don\'t want to be processed. They want to be led as individuals by
somebody that\'s competent. They want their leader to be one of them.
But they want their leader to be the best of them.

**Fran Cherry:**

Good leadership is a constant thing. I think the individual times and
circumstances dictate how you might act on any one particular problem or
exercise that needs to be completed. But your personal integrity, your
ability to lead the employees, should be a constant and should never
change.

**Amy Lueders**:

Leadership is more sort of situational driven in terms of the skills
that you need are sort of specific to that situation. So the leadership
skills that you need in a time of war, in a time of, you know, internal
crisis, are different in different situations.

**Elaine Zielinski:**

Leadership is definitely a dynamic process, and certainly your style of
leadership, in my opinion, you do adjust that to the times, the needs,
the circumstances. But I do believe that there\'s some basics of
leadership, some basic qualities, that never change and that are really
important.

**Helen Hankins:**

Leadership is going one step beyond management, and it\'s looking at
what the standard is, what the problem is, and determining whether the
standard or the defined way of doing things is really the best way of
doing things.

**Mike Nedd:** First and foremost, we recognize that leadership is an
art.

**Elaine Zielinski:**

I consider the leader as someone who sets the vision, sets the goals,
objectives of the organization. Kind of where they need to go, where
that organization needs to go, you know, what their mission is, and is
able to articulate that vision to employees and, hopefully, bring them
to buy into that, support that mission. And a manager, to me, spends
much more of their time kind of in the operational side, getting it
done, kind of getting the work done, making sure that work gets done.
They do have a role, I believe, in certainly helping shape the vision,
because I\'m ‑‑ I believe in kind of a team player here, it\'s not just
one person sitting there developing a vision for an organization.

**Les Rosenkrance**:

There\'s lot of difference between being a manager and being a leader.
Managers are, in my view, administrators. They look at things that need
done. They carry out roles and responsibilities of their job as far as
what the requirements are. And I see as a leader that starts questioning
what we\'re doing, why we\'re doing it and how we\'re doing it and
starts thinking about better ways to make it ‑‑ get the same things
done. But not just getting by from day to day and making sure you have a
good annual review and those kind of things, good PIP\'er as we used to
say. That\'s not nearly as important as thinking about where do you
really want the program to go? Where do you want to be a few years from
now? And how you make that work.

**Fran Cherry:**

I think there\'s a world of difference between managing and leading, and
both are necessary. There are a lot of jobs that have to be done within
this agency and within government and private industry that require a
manager to make the tough decisions, make the tough decisions at the
right time, to decide fiscally how you\'re going to operate or not
operate, how to allocate resources. But I think more important is the
task of leading people. If you go down the management track, and that\'s
great, too, is realize that management and leadership go together, and
anyone can be a manager, but not everyone can be a leader. And if
you\'re going to be a leader, be a leader.

**Elaine Zielinski**:

I never really thought about whether I wanted to be a leader or not. I
think it just evolved. As I got into the organization, as I worked more
and more, I wanted to have more of an influence on the organization, and
I felt that getting in leadership roles would really allow me that. And
it doesn\'t have to be a formal leadership role, you know, as a
position, but just being the leader in a group when you\'re working on a
task, those sorts of things. And I found that was really fun, and you
could direct things, sometimes, the way that you thought they needed to
go.

**Al Pierson:**

I think it is correct to say that not everybody does want to be a leader
of people, and that\'s okay, because there are ‑‑ there are many people
who are better suited, I believe, to doing their professional job as a
biologist or a mining engineer or ‑‑ you know, they get ‑‑ they get
satisfaction from that. They\'re extremely good at it. And the BLM
couldn\'t function without those kinds of people that want to be the
specialist that they trained to be and be the very best that they can be
at that. It\'s incredibly important for the function of the BLM.

**Elaine Marquis‑Brong:**

We as a country are blessed like no other country to have these public
lands with these natural resources, and having lived in emerging,
developing countries that are completely depleted of their natural
resources, I am committed and always have been committed to the fact
that we will manage these for sustainability, for future generations,
for the richness of this country, and I am passionate about that. I
think we have a great mission. It\'s not an easy mission. It\'s not for
the weak of heart, but it is an exciting and very fulfilling mission and
organization to work in.

**Amy Lueders:**

Within BLM, to speak specifically about BLM, you know, one is clearly
going to be sort of ‑‑ dealing with a growing, diverse and interested
public. You know, we have gone from sort of being the lands in the
middle of nowhere to lands that are in everyone\'s backyard, and where
we have lots of people looking to use the public lands for lots of
different reasons. So I think trying ‑‑ how we\'re going to deal with
more people, people who are very different with very different
expectations and very different cultures and who are very sort of
engaged in terms of what the public lands are used for will be a
challenge.

**Deane Swickard:**

I think the biggest challenge is that the public wants their public
lands to be managed, not administered. They want to see us out on the
public land. They want to see abuses on the public land stemmed. They
want to see the resources of the public lands improved. And we are not
organized and staffed to do it. So I think there\'s going to be a big
breach between public expectation and the BLM\'s capability to perform.

**Fran Cherry:**

We\'re an executive branch of the government. Our job is to carry out
the policies and the wishes of the executive branch of the government
consistent with the laws of the land. Your values, your feelings should
reflect where the BLM is going and the multiple‑use mission of the
Bureau.

**Elaine Zielinski**:

The other challenges that leaders have are going to be the adaptation to
the younger people\'s work ethics and, you know, what they think is
important in life, what their values are, how they operate in a business
or work environment.

**Marilyn Johnson:**

They\'re going to have a different workforce. They\'re not going to be
people like me that came in and worked for 30 years for the organization
and can\'t think of working for anywhere ‑‑ anyplace else. They\'re
going to have employees who really do care about balance. They want
flexible hours. They want to be able to go in and out of the agency.
They\'re going to go where they can make the most money. They don\'t
particularly care about staying with an agency for 30 years. So we\'re
going to have to deal with a younger organization that may not have the
same ethics as some of the baby‑boomers had.

**Mike Nedd:**

The challenge for leaders is how do we create the kind of environment
that interests people to come work? How do we create the kind of
environment where they\'re motivated to give their best?

**Helen Hankins:**

If you decide that you want to go into a management position or
leadership position, or you evolve into that, however you arrive there,
you have to accept that with that is going to come an expectation and a
requirement that you\'re going to have to work more than a 9 to 5 job
and that you\'re going to have to commit time that maybe in your
previous jobs you didn\'t have to, but I do think the critical word that
applies is balance. I think that you need to make sure that you do
provide time to spend with your family.

**Pete Culp:**

Watch for balance in your life and keep a balance between work and
family and outside activities.

**Amy Lueders:**

The first thing people have to recognize is you really couldn\'t get it
all done, even in 20 hours a day. So it\'s very important to set your
priorities in terms of what\'s important for me to get done this day,
what\'s important for me to get done this week, and really identifying
what things will make the most difference if I get them done.

**Deane Swickard**:

Put your ego aside, and if you\'ve trained your staff correctly, you
don\'t need to be there for every little thing. They should be able to
take care of it. Then you\'ve got to decide on priorities, when you\'re
needed most where. So there\'s times when clearly your family needs you
and you need to be there, and there\'s times when work needs you and
your family can maybe be without you for a little bit, and you\'ve got
to decide those. But the idea that \"My office just can\'t get along
without me\" just is really contrary to good leadership and good staff
development.

**Helen Hankins:**

Do things in your private life that aren\'t the same kinds of things
that you do in your work life so that, you know, if you are involved in
organizations that, you know, you do things that are maybe a little bit
different than what you might do at the job.

**Marilyn Johnson:**

I have to be perfectly honest with you and say, I have not found that
balance. I still find myself doing and thinking more on the work side
than I do for my personal growth and health, and as I grow closer toward
retirement, I\'m trying to amend those ways. So I\'m not going to sit
here and say it was easy, and I\'m not going to tell you that I did it,
but I\'m working on it.

**Amy Lueders:**

You know, at the end of the day you\'re not going to say you wish you\'d
spent more time at work, but you are going to say, \"I wish I hadn\'t
missed that opportunity with my child or my husband,\" and so I think
it\'s just a matter of keeping perspective.

**Les Rosenkrance:**

Trying to balance the needs of the family with the needs of the job is
one of the most difficult problems I think you have as a manager and as
a leader. The job you\'ve got as a manager in the Bureau is extremely
important, no question about it. The job is short term when you talk
about your life. It\'s something you have, that you\'re doing now, and
you do the best you can at it, but your family is forever.