"Never walk past a mistake." (interview with America's Promise Chairman General Colin L. Powell)(Interview)

A conversation with Colin Powell about the leadership lessons of his military career from which any executive - and any kid - can learn.

Colin Powell cannot stop talking about children. Except to go on at length about young adults. When faced with questions about the ways in which the acclaimed general and former presidential adviser applies his military leadership lessons to his fairly new role of chairing a nonprofit organization, this Army star delivers on-the-mark answers while bringing everything back to his favorite topic: the empowerment of America's future leaders. As a result, the following interview offers executives insights about leading an organization effectively and focuses on the critical part of leading that has to do with nurturing the young people who one day soon will be running the show.

Powell reveals his New York upbringing by talking very fast and displaying less control than one might expect from a multidecorated, four-star general. He is outgoing, assertive, and funny - traits that also come across clearly in his bestselling autobiography, My American Journey (Ballantine Books, 1995).

Powell wrote the book after retiring in 1993 from a 35-year career in the Army. He served the nation in various command and staff positions around the world; early years of his career were spent in Vietnam, and later years included his oversight of Operation Desert Storm in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Powell's final assignment, from 1989 to 1993, was as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military position in the Department of Defense.

In April 1997, Powell chaired the President's Summit for America's Future, and since then has been chairing the nonprofit organization launched at the summit. America's Promise - The Alliance for Youth, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is a national campaign dedicated to improving the lives of at-risk youth. The campaign outlines five goals for every young American:

* an ongoing relationship with a caring adult - mentor, tutor, or coach;

* safe places and structured activities during nonschool hours;

* a healthy start;

* a marketable skill through effective education; and

* an opportunity to give back through community service.

As anyone who heard Powell's keynote address in August at ASAE 1998 Nashville knows, the witty general turns serious and passionate when dis, cussing the needs of at-risk youth. While a main goal in his life is to help youth by promoting America's Promise, Powell switches gears for portions of this interview to address the needs of some adults: association executives who are looking for organizational leadership advice.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: Tell me what lessons you learned in the military that are specifically helping you with your leadership role in a nonprofit organization, and one military lesson that maybe doesn't pertain at all.

Powell: My whole military career really had to do with young people: training young people, leading young people, managing young people, managing resources that were used to put young people in the best position to accomplish their mission. Their mission, of course, was to go into combat. The reason that they had to be very well prepared was because their lives were at risk. It turns out that with America's Promise I'm doing essentially the same thing in a slightly different way. I'm trying to get resources from around the country to put into the lives of youngsters who need these resources to be successful in life. With most of [these youngsters], it's not a life-or-death thing, but with many of them it is a life-or-death thing. They either succeed now or they go into lives of crime and violence or drugs, and that means death just as surely as if you'd been killed on the beaches of Normandy.

So the leadership techniques that I used in the military are very applicable. Obviously I can't order people around the way I used to. You asked, what wouldn't I do. One thing everyone thinks generals do is say to people, 'That's an order! Do it!" And that doesn't work anymore, and it didn't really work in the military. I didn't order people around that much. It was a matter of persuading people that this is the right thing to do. If they didn't understand, then I ordered them. But those same techniques of getting people to do the right thing and to do it in the right way, I can use in the nonprofit world. In fact there are very few lessons from the military that I haven't been able to apply here.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: Who's the youngest person you've ever learned a leadership lesson from?

Powell: Probably one of my kids, but here's a leadership lesson that I've learned from lots of young people, including my own children, and that is in leading young people - either as a parent or as a teacher - you can't lecture them as to what they're supposed to do. The way they really learn what the right things to do in life are is by watching. They're not always listening; they're not always paying attention to what you're saying. In fact, they take every opportunity not to pay attention to what you're saying, but they're always watching.... And if they see from adults - parents, grandparents, teachers, and others with influence in their lives that those people are living lives of value, the children will tend to follow that same value system, because they see it works, not because it's taught to them. So the [adult] who tells the child to be honest, but who is himself or herself dishonest in dealings with other people - the lesson the child learns is that dishonesty works.

Set expectations; assist in achievement

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: That ties into one of the major components of America's Promise: mentoring.

Powell: Exactly, but mentoring is almost too narrow a word. The first two goals of America's Promise mentoring and safe places - both of those together mean putting adult presence in the lives of our children. And adult presence means not only just to be there, but to be an example to teach, to lecture, but also to be watched and to put expectations into the hearts of children.

We have a young boy interning with us this summer. He had some difficulty in school. He's from a broken family. So he came here and he was a bit of a smart aleck, and it was a defensive mechanism: He had to deal with the strange world of uptown neighborhoods and a lot of white folks. It was a little threatening to him, so he had to throw out this defensive shield.

After he'd been here a week and settled down and realized that no one was after him or out to get him and he was going to be able to do what was required, he was brought up to meet me. He's a good-looking young man - very bright - and he was afraid of coming into the general's office, but he sat here and we chatted for a few moments. I said, "Let me tell you, I'm really expecting you to have a good summer here, and we're going to try to teach you a lot, but you have to work a lot. And I expect you to be here every day at the appointed time." And he said, "Oh, I'll be here every day when I'm supposed to be here. I'll be early." I said, "Fine, but don't tell me what you're going to do, just do it and make sure you do. And there's no 4:30 or 5:00 - you work until the work's done. And I want you to do what you can to improve your writing. And take every opportunity to speak or brief somebody, so you can master the use of the English language in a business setting. And I always want you to dress properly." He said, "Got it." And he left.

A few days later, someone on my staff who works with this boy said that when he came back downstairs and was asked, "How'd it go with the general? What did you and the general talk about?" he put a smile on his face and put his chin up a little and said, "The general has expectations."

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: And no one ever had before.

Powell: Bingo. No one ever expected this kid to do anything. And all that children need are expectations and the resources so that they can achieve those expectations. You can't say, "I want you to do this, but I'm going to give you a lousy school system. We're not going to give you the books you need, and we're not going to have people helping you in school - not only teachers but mentors and tutors - but then we're going to complain that you don't graduate from high school or you don't get into college or you can't speak English well."

I was with a youngster not too long ago who kept using bad English, and every time another bad sentence came out, I stopped the person and said, "No. You can use anything you want in the neighborhood..." and I use anything that I feel like using in my own little circles - there's a language I use with my infantry buddies that should not be used publicly, and there's another set of words and expressions I use with my family and others, "... but when out in business, you use the English language. And I expect you to use the English language properly." And he said, "Oh." And I said, "I'm going to correct you constantly, because in the military we are taught: Never walk past a mistake - correct it on the spot."

The youngster was a little unhappy that he was going to get corrected all the time, but he also felt proud that somebody cared enough to correct him.

So we have to put expectations into the lives of our children and give them the resources they need to reach those expectations and help them along the way, even when we have to correct them, discipline them, and show them the limits and the structure they have to live in. The greatest gift we give to our children is putting them in a place in the world and not just letting them wander around - do what you want, see what you want, watch anything on television you want. They need structure.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: Throughout your book, in describing so many of your experiences, you point out lessons learned. Would you speak to the apparent commitment you have - and that you seem to believe all leaders should have - to continuous learning?

Powell: More than ever before, continuous learning has to become a tenet in every association and corporation, for the simple reason that the world is changing so rapidly that the set of information you work with is changing every five years. And in order to stay on top of that, you simply have to continue to educate yourself.

Downsize carefully

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: From your involvement in ending the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, what insights can you offer to executives who face overnight changes in the environment that dramatically affect their organizations?

Powell: The simple answer is, you deal with it. The simple answer is that when your environment changes, you have to change with it and try to get ahead of it. But, I've seen many management situations where people just pretended that nothing was really happening, and they just sat there with their fingers in their ears and their brains in Alabama, not doing anything, and the whole environment changed.

In the military, to put it in corporate terms, [the end of the Cold War meant] our product line was now out of date... and no longer were we going to get 6 percent of the gross national product to spend. I could no longer have 4 million employees, I could no longer have the nearly $2 trillion worth of real estate and capital investment that I had had around the world, and I could no longer have all those bases overseas that I had enjoyed for the past 40 years. I had to restructure in a way so that, at the end of the process, the new, smaller force, with a new mission, had the same quality and efficiency as the larger force and the same morale. And we did that.

And it wasn't just a matter of not bringing soldiers into the military.... There were no draftees to send home. These were career people who had to be eased out. The whole organization had to be shaped properly - not just by cutting out those at the bottom, but, those at the bottom, those at the top, those in the middle - so that the organization that resulted was just as effective as the one that we started with, only smaller.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: Do you have a key piece of advice from that downsizing to relate to other downsizing organizations?

Powell: The most important assets you have in all of this are the people, and if you don't put people at the center of your process, you'll fail. Not profit motives, not size of the organization's headquarters, but people - the individuals who are most affected.

Corporate leaders spend a lot of time in boardrooms and don't always understand the anxiety that's taking place in the workplace. When we were going through our downsizing, the focus of all of our efforts was: How do we take care of our people while all of this is going on? For those who have to be put out of the military, can we go to Congress and get bonuses to buy them out so that they have a little bit of cushion as they find a whole new life, a whole new career? Soldiers had just come back from Desert Storm - career officers, West Point graduates, Annapolis graduates who had just served the nation in war - and four months after they came home, they were told, "You're out."

"Why? Is something wrong with my record?"

"Your record's good."

"Then why?"

"We have to get smaller."

And after the trauma of that, we had to help them... with bonuses, with transition help, with all sorts of other things. So the one big lesson is that at the center of every reorganization or downsizing effort has to be the total commitment on the part of the leadership to the welfare of the people affected - both those who are leaving and those who are staying. [Downsizing] is not only bad for the people who were loyal to you; it doesn't engender loyalty among those who stay and could be next.

Stick to the mission

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: From dealing with the politics in the military and in the White House, what advice do you have that translates into the management of a nonprofit organization?

Powell: My whole life, especially when I became senior in the military, revolved around managing office intrigue and office politics. My own approach to that was essentially to always keep my focus on the mission: What is it the organization's trying to do?

I always made sure that I had channels of information and insight into the whole organization through nontraditional means. Don't sit there up on the top deck or in the corporate headquarters waiting for your staff to tell you what they want you to know. The way I dealt with office politics was to keep the focus on the mission.

Make sure everyone in the organization knows what you are trying to do, and keep an open mind to other ideas. Allow everybody, including your opponents in the organization, [to] get a hearing. Try to beat them on the basis of the quality of your position and the strength of your position.

One of the rules in my book is: Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. The point is that today's adversary can be tomorrow's friend, so never make an adversary an enemy, and never turn a friend into the enemy if that friend can just be an adversary for a while when you debate the position.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: When talking about Vietnam in your book, you said you learned not to be "buffaloed by experts and elites." Does that lesson apply to organizations today, which rely so heavily on consultants?

Powell: Consultants are useful, and I've used them. But I've very often seen commissions and consultants used as an excuse for people who can't say, "I'm the leader, I know what's right, and this is what we're going to do."

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: That takes a lot of guts.

Powell: I think that's why people are paid to be the leaders, but I've seen too many leaders who say, "Oh gosh, this is scary. I don't know what to do. Go hire some consultant," or "Go form a committee. Go study this for a while. Go away." And consultants come back six to eight months later with a huge package of obvious solutions, and you wonder why the leaders didn't know this stuff in the first place.

I don't think consultants help a leader who uses outsiders as an excuse not to lead. Good leaders know how to use a consultant for the purpose of helping them lead.

Following at times

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: Do you ever relish the opportunity to just follow, to not be the leader after all of these years of being the person in charge?

Powell: Oh, yeah. I follow my wife wherever she wants to go.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: I bet that people assume you will be the leader in every situation. It must be a lot of pressure.

Powell: I've reached a stage in my life where I've had important positions, and I've reached a level of celebrity-slash-notorious recognition, and it's hard to just kick back and let somebody else... it's hard to follow and just sit there.

I don't have that option very often, except when I just withdraw and spend my time at home. When I'm looking for the opportunity not to be on stage, I do it at home. I spend a lot of time there - as much as I can. And believe me, nobody follows me at home.

RELATED ARTICLE: Colin Powell's Rules

During his military days, Colin Powell made a point of keeping the main lessons he learned about life close enough for easy reference. If he needed a reminder, he had only to look down at his collection of notes under the glass cover of his desk. In 1989, after Powell was nominated by President Bush to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Parade magazine ran a cover story on the general and included 13 of his desktop notes. Here's a reprint of the resulting list, "Colin Powell's Rules."

1. It ain't as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.

2. Get mad, then get over it.

3. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

4. It can be done!

5. Be careful what you choose. You may get it.

6. Don't let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.

7. You can't make someone else's choices. You shouldn't let someone else make yours.

8. Check small things.

9. Share credit.

10. Remain calm. Be kind.

11. Have a vision. Be demanding.

12. Don't take counsel of your fears or naysayers.

13. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.

Gerry Romano, CAE, is senior editor of ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT.