A
Lesson from President Eisenhower
Managers in the Make-You -Happy Management System are seen as coaches,
facilitators, cheerleaders and, nurturers of champions rather than
cops, referees, and nay-sayers. This column is dedicated to
teaching this by learning from great leaders of the past.
This article we’ll learn from Dwight D. Eisenhower when he
was
Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces on D-Day. This excerpt
is
from the book D-Day, by Stephen Ambrose.
Despite the disappointments and personal exhaustion, Eisenhower was
consistently-optimistic. He wrote his wife, “When
pressure
mounts and strain increases everyone begins to show the weaknesses in
his makeup. It is up to the Commander to conceal his: above
all
to conceal doubt, fear and distrust.” How well he
was able
to do so was indicated try a member of his staff, who wrote from North
Africa, “Eisenhower was a living dynamo of energy, good
humor,
amazing memory for details, and amazing courage for the future.
He made a study of leadership, which in his view was not an art but a
skill to be learned. “The one quality that can be developed
by
studious reflection and practice is the leadership of men,”
he
declared. He wrote that it was at his first command post, in Gibraltar
in early November 1942, “that I first realized how inexorably
and
inescapably strain and tension wear away at the leader’s
endurance, his judgment and his confidence.” No matter how
bad
things got, no matter how anxious the staff became, the commander had
to “preserve optimism in himself and in his command. Without
confidence, enthusiasm and optimism in the command, victory is scarcely
obtainable.
Eisenhower realized that “optimism and pessimism are
infectious
and they spread more rapidly from the head downward than in any other
direction.” He learned that a commander’s opti-mism
“has a most extraordinary effect upon all with whom he comes
in
contact. With this clear realization, I firmly determined that my
mannerisms and speech in public would always reflect the cheerful
certainty of victory-that any pessimism and discourage.
This is another great book that I can't recommended enough.
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