Doing the Right Thing is Hard. Do it Anyway.
Charles P. Edwards
It recently occurred to me that I had been a co-chair of my firm’s insurance coverage practice group since its founding in the late 1990s. Instead of being proud at this thought, I was ashamed.
I’m very proud of the group. It has grown from an idea to more than 40 lawyers across the country helping policyholders collect on insurance coverage claims. We have a magazine and an active blog. We have some of the best insurance lawyers in the country.
I was ashamed instead of myself. What had made me think I was the right person to lead the group for all this time? Why have I never considered stepping down? Haven’t all my ideas either been implemented or discarded by this point? Aren’t there others who would be great at leading the group? None of these questions had ever seriously passed through my mind until recently.
That these questions existed at all pointed to a clear conclusion. I contacted my firm’s management and told them I wanted to step down from leading the practice group.
Sometimes character is revealed by what you don’t do
I’ve written before that character is what you do, not what you say or what you write down in a strategic plan. But sometimes character is revealed by what you don’t do.
In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King comments that he had become “gravely disappointed with the white moderate.” He didn’t of course mean that white moderates were ill-willed or lacked support for his cause. He meant that while the white moderates believed in the cause, they were too content to do nothing to further the cause.
Dr. King’s statement was a harsh indictment for a group that supported his movement. But, he understood that sometimes life demands action. As the Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Examining whether our actions reflect good character is something we all should do from time to time. But, we also should ask what things we are not doing that reflect poorly on our character. Sometimes it is in the spaces between our actions that we find our true selves.
It isn’t about you
Thomas Ricks, in his book “First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country,” concludes that, “for the Revolutionary generation, virtue was the essential element of public life” and that virtue meant “putting the common good before one’s own interest.” Ricks notes that the founding fathers borrowed this belief from the Greeks and Romans, for whom “virtuous” meant “to be a public man with a reputation for selflessness.”
The Greek biographer Plutarch believed that leaders should be motivated by “judgment and reason” — not “rashly inspired by the vain pursuit of glory, a sense of rivalry, or a lack of other meaningful activities.” This is because leadership isn’t about the leader; it is about the institution he or she is leading, what it needs at any given time, and what the wider audience needs from the institution.
The best answer to the “great leader” debate about whether the times make the leader or the leader makes the times is that the two are inseparable. FDR isn’t FDR without the depression propelling his New Deal. LBJ isn’t a civil rights leader without JFK’s assassination and the civil rights movement propelling his Great Society. Churchill was considered a failure, or at least a has-been, until the Nazis reached Britain.
Our reflections should be broader than ourselves. We should consider what others need and what the times require. If the answers don’t point in our direction, we should accept that conclusion, however hard it may be.
Sometimes leadership means stepping aside
John Gardner wrote, “Every leader willing to take risks has moments when he isn’t sure whether his people are following him or chasing him.” The surest way to find out the answer to this question is to step aside and see if your people run by you. If they do, then you have done your job.
At the ecommerce company Shopify, every leader must “requalify” for his or her job every year. Chief Operating Officer Harley Finkelstein describes what that means for him as, “I still have to be the best possible Chief Operating Officer for Shopify. If I am not, that means that someone else should take my role.”
But, what does it mean to be the “best”? It means not only that you are qualified and still giving it your best. It also means the organization or group you lead would not be better served under different leadership — even if that simply means new ideas, more diversity, or just giving someone else a chance. Odds are that the group will survive and continue to thrive without you.
George Washington, America’s first and perhaps greatest leader, famously stepped aside twice: first as commander of the army and then as President of our newly formed nation. He wasn’t viewed as a quitter. He was instead hailed as a modern Cincinnatus — the Roman farmer who left his field to command the rescue of a Roman army, was given the title dictator, and then resigned his position to return to his fields.
If, like me, you are a certain age and have been given titles and helped build something, you want to believe that you earned the right to keep those titles. You want to think your team would be worse off without you. If you were lucky or good (or both), maybe you did earn the right to feel those things. Or, maybe someone just hung that sign around your neck and you never took it off.
Whatever the circumstances, everything has its expiration date. And life isn’t a milk carton; expiration dates aren’t stamped anywhere that you can read and follow them. It takes judgment, humility, and courage to discern them.
Stepping aside from a leadership role doesn’t mean the end of leadership. Shopify’s notion of requalifying for your existing job isn’t a way of firing people. It is instead a way of making sure each person in the organization is the right person at the right time to lead in a particular role. If someone is not suited for one role, he or she moves to another. This process keeps ideas fresh and energies high, it keeps leaders on their toes and constantly attentive to their role, and it allows others to shine when the time is right.
So, I’m moving on to other leadership roles and I’m looking forward to working with the new leaders of our practice group. It wasn’t easy stepping away, but it was the right thing to do. And, I’m grateful for the lesson learned: Doing the right thing is hard. Do it anyway.
