**Leadership Excellence**

**Leading People**

**Dean Swickard:**

The foundation of leadership is integrity. (If) people sense that
you\'re a person of honor, or people can sense that you\'re a person of
truth, then they behave differently toward you than if they\'re suspect
about your integrity or suspect about your truthfulness.

**Mike Nedd:**

It\'s important that leaders be truthful in today\'s environment when
you\'re working with whether it\'s partners or employees. They want to
know that you\'re going to share information, especially in doing their
work. They want to make certain that you\'re giving them honest
feedback, and the most important is truthful, because when you look an
employee in the eyes, they want to know that \"I can count on your
word.\" And that truthfulness meaning, when you make an error, you say,
\"Look, I\'ve been wrong, I didn\'t have all the facts.\"

**Helen Hankins**:

The buying power of integrity and honesty is just substantial, and that
leads to trust, that leads to people willing to confide in you, and
ultimately, people willing to sit down and work with you. And I think
those commodities of truth, integrity, honesty are just invaluable in
working with the public, because they open the door to so many kinds of
things that we need to do, whether it\'s a simple partnership or whether
it\'s dealing with a controversial situation.

**Al Pierson:**

I think in any leadership position honesty and integrity are two traits
that simply have got to be there, and you just can\'t fake it. When
you\'re dealing with people on a day‑to‑day basis, both inside the BLM
as well as outside the BLM with our customers and the stakeholders, they
need to know that when you\'re talking with them and telling them
something that you\'re telling them the truth. They may not like what
you\'re telling them, they may not like the decisions you make, but they
need to understand that you\'re doing it for reasons that are either
related to law or regulations or good resource management. And they need
to know when that you tell them something, that\'s what you mean, that
you\'re not going to change your mind, and that you\'re telling them the
truth and you\'re doing it for the right reasons.

**Amy Lueders:**

Because BLM is such, probably, a small agency, it\'s also a very
reputation‑based agency, and so much in terms of sort of how people
react to you and that type of thing is based sort of on your reputation.
That\'s really founded on the principles of the integrity that you have
and the honesty that you have in terms of dealing directly with your
employees and with your publics and sort of telling them the truth even
if it\'s not news they want to hear and just being open and candid.

**Elaine Zielinski:**

A leader has to have very high integrity. You have to be honest with
people. You have to, again, respect people, and you know, treat them
with respect and with dignity.

**Fran Cherry:**

Be flexible, be firm, have fun, and don\'t ask anything of your
employees that you\'re not willing to do yourself. Above all, have
integrity. If you don\'t have your own personal integrity, you don\'t
have anything. And you don\'t have to impale yourself on a sharp stake
over your integrity at any one time, but you have to be honest to
yourself.

**Dean Swickard:**

Everything rides on your interrelationships and your personal
relationships, and over the years, my style of management was to keep it
personal. It\'s all about relationships and trust. I talk about trust
being the emotional glue that holds an organization together. So I
worked very hard at building trust. How do you build trust? By being
trustworthy, by being dependable, by being morally courageous when
you\'re faced with a tough situation. You handle it fairly. When you
need to reprimand, you do it justly.

**Eileen Zielinski:**

You want somebody who is very committed, who questions, who really wants
to do the best job they can, and those are some of the characteristics
that I certainly want in somebody that\'s working with me. So I think
approaching it that way, but also talking to them very openly about how
they feel about working in that organization and working with you in a
different kind of relationship, because loyalty is also something
that\'s very important, I think, in an organization. You have to have
colleagues that really question you and feel comfortable questioning
you, and that are very sharp and bright. No wallflowers, no \"yes\"
people. But you also want folks that when a decision is made, they\'ll
go and support that decision wholeheartedly. Getting a lot of folks with
different perspectives, I think, just makes it a stronger, healthier
vision and goal.

**Fran Cherry:**

The trick, I think, of being a manager, good manager, and even a better
leader, is how do I bring all those viewpoints together. It\'s bringing
all those groups together, making sure, because the collective wisdom of
the group is always greater than that of any one individual. A true
leader, in my estimation, doesn\'t have to have all the answers all of
the time. What they have to do is have the ability to bring their
employees and the public‑‑ and I\'ll keep coming back to the public all
the time‑‑ along with them, letting them help solve the problem. I think
a leader\'s job is to bring them all together and bring the employees,
your subordinate managers\... let them come up with the solution.

**Eileen Zielinski:**

To effect change in the agency, I think, while attempting to keep that
productivity and morale up, you have to really involve employees. You
have to, as a leader, set the objectives and the goals of the change and
kind of the \"what\'s\" and the \"why\'s\" of the change. But then you
really need to get employees involved and explain to them why there\'s a
need for change and what those goals and objectives are and then have
employees help you figure out how to get there.

**Les Rosenkrance:**

Probably the most important lesson I learned that burnt me several
different times is dealing with problem employees. You do what you can
do and try to motivate them\...

**Eileen Zielinski:**

Leadership now needs to have some more training in how to deal with
conflict, especially with the BLM again and its mission, there\'s just
more and more demands, as we know, on all the natural resources and land
management practices that are out there, and a lot of people are very,
very interested in what we do, and they have access to a lot more
information these days than they\'ve ever had before, and that\'s going
to generate a lot of differences of opinions on how lands should be
managed. So I think dealing with conflict is something that needs to be
more and more emphasized.

**Julia Dougan:**

I\'m also a really big advocate of mediation training and alternative
dispute resolution, because I think that gives you a set of skills that
you can use anywhere. You can use it with your children. You can use it
internally with your staff, you know, when you have those organizational
conflicts. And you can certainly use it to come to resolution over
conflicts with the public and with users.

**Mike Nedd:**

Part of negotiation is part of conflict management, because in order to
negotiate, you need to be able to watch body language, watch‑‑ you know,
just watch the reaction.

**Julia Dougan:**

I know exactly which lesson I wish I would have learned, or would have
known more about, and that\'s how to effectively delegate. You know, I
think, when I look at how people delegate, you usually see leaders at
the extreme ends of the spectrum. You either have people who try to do
everything themselves, because they were really good, sharp technical
professionals with a perfectionist streak, and they really think either
they can do it better than their staff or perhaps they\'re concerned
their staff doesn\'t have the skills or doesn\'t understand the
political situation. So you have people on that end of the spectrum.
Then you have people on the other end, leaders that delegate everything.
And, you know, both those situations create really frustrated staffs.
Either they don\'t feel like they\'re getting any self‑development or
they feel they\'re having to do all the work and why do they need the
leader? So that art of delegation is really somewhere in the middle of
the spectrum. And it also moves, because at times the issues are so
critical or sensitive, you need to pull that delegation back from your
staff. But you have to let them know why you\'re doing it and why only
you can make that decision.

**Amy Lueders:**

You have talent people and you need to use those people and build those
people and mentor those people so that they can step up for future
opportunities.

**Al Pierson:**

You need to recognize the skills that are surrounding you with your
fellow employees and understand very clearly that every one of those
employees know more about their job than you do. Their professional
excellence is there. Their education in their particular skill area is
certainly more advanced than what the leader typically will have. I
think he or she needs to recognize that and trust those people.

**Les Rosenkrance:**

I know in my management teams I liked people that were very outspoken,
sometimes abrasive, but I wanted people who would tell me what they were
thinking. I always felt and told my employees that if they really wanted
to sabotage me, all they needed to do is agree with everything I said,
because that would make me make some errors that I just couldn\'t\...
couldn\'t recover from. But the best way to help me was to tell me if
they thought I was really going up the wrong creek is to tell me that,
that I\'m really paddling the wrong way or that there\'s a better way to
do this, or have you thought about, or start questioning what I\'m
doing, what my decisions were. I always felt that any employee had every
right to come in and question me on a decision. When I made my decision,
was decisive on it, said, \"This is what we\'re going to do,\" then I
expected everybody to fall in line and do it. I didn\'t expect any
further argument. I like to listen to everyone, like to hear all sides
of it, and I like the good exchange with employees.