Trimmers as Leaders

When I was a high school principal, we had a list of all our students and the school activities they were involved in. Whenever we had kids whose activity space was blank, we knew we had a potential problem. We knew “busy minds were happy minds” when it came to kids being involved in school activities. We also knew that being involved in school activities gave kids the chance to build their leadership skills, a character trait much needed in today’s world.

I read with interest this week an article written by David Brooks for The Atlantic titled “America Needs a Trimmer.” Brooks distinguishes between the two most popular leadership styles throughout history – the heroic-visionary model and the technocratic model.

The heroic-visionary model is where a leader sees further into the future than anyone else. “He goes with his instincts. He takes big risks and makes bold choices. This model seems inspiring and romantic until the heroic leader leads you off a cliff. Napoleon seemed all-knowing until he pursued his invasion of Russia into the wintertime.”

The technocratic model is where “[t]he technocrat is taught not to go with his gut but instead to use reason, amass data, and weigh evidence using a formal and impersonal decision-making methodology, like a decision tree, matrix, or spreadsheet.”

The problem with the technocratic model is that “the world is complicated, and most of it cannot be quantified and put into a spreadsheet. You wind up with Robert McNamara leading a disastrous war in Vietnam. You wind up with all those finely trained executives at Kodak who didn’t foresee that the future of photography was going to be digital. In their own bland way, the technocrats can be even more arrogant than the heroic visionaries because they don’t have any humanistic insight into how people behave.”

Brooks suggests there is a third leadership style available to all of us – especially our young, in-training leaders. Brooks calls this leadership style “a trimmer,” since it teaches leaders how to trim their proverbial sails to take advantage of shifts in the prevailing winds.

Brooks points to the 1680’s and a British aristocrat named George Savile, who became the first Marquess of Halifax, as possibly the first leader to embrace “trimming.”

“He lived during one of the most treacherous periods in his country’s history. The Catholic king, James II, was bitterly opposed by the Protestant aristocrats, who feared Catholic domination and French influence. A bundh of Protestant nobles invited the Protestant nobles invited the Protestant Dutch prince, William of Orange, to invade England and take over the throne. He did so, sending James into exile in France, from where James launched his own invasion to recapture power, which failed. Halifax managed to be a senior adviser to both King James and King William, seeking national conciliation. He then became speaker of the House of Lords during the Parliament that resolved the crisis and brought forth a series of reforms that increased the power of Parliament and reduced the power of the crown.”

Halifax was “the very picture of prudent moderation – and in those polarized times, people hated him for it.”

“Halifax shot back with an essay titled ‘The Character of a Trimmer,’ which essentially said: You accuse me of being a Trimmer? You’re damn right I am! He held up the Trimmer as a social ideal. And in that essay, he gave us our third and best model for how to make good decisions about the future.”

So what if we were to build a leadership curriculum to train all of those high school kids referenced above, whether they had blanks in their activity column or not, in the art of Trimming? What would that curriculum look like?

Well, Brooks suggests seven parts of a “trimming curriculum”:

Goal Setting – “A Trimmer is not neutral about ends. Whether it’s running a business or making a work of art or loving a country, she asks: What moral purpose are we trying to serve? Trimmers do not believe you can make decisions about means and strategy unless these ultimate questions of purpose are answered first.

Contact with reality – Leaders don’t lead in a vacuum. Instead, a Trimmer mentality “demands that you transcend technocratic calculations and draw on insights from history, psychology, literature, and the social sciences. Most importantly, it demands you apply those general insights on this particular day, in this particular context, with this particular individual – which is where the science of management is surpassed by the practical wisdom of craft.

Situational awareness – Trimmers believe that “[d]ecision making has to begin a careful examination of the environment. What’s really going on here? What does this situation allow?

Humility – When researching his book Good to Great, Jim Collins found that most of his “Level 5 leaders” – those leaders that developed new leaders – were “quieter and less colorful executives who combined fierce personal resolve with deep humility.” Trimmers learn humility.

Timing – “The Trimmer understands that knowing when to make a decision is usually as important as what decision is made. The Trimmer understands that a strategic delay is not procrastination, but a patient wait until the situation clarifies itself. If you decide too early, you’re operating in a fog; too late and you’ve missed your opportunity. The crucial skill, therefore, is the ability to read the wind, to sense when the timing is ripe. The Trimmer’s life is marked by long periods of observation interrupted by bursts of decisive action.”

Judgment is a process – Trimmers believe in the power of iteration. “They see what emerges around them and then adjust; see what emerges, adjust; see what emerges, adjust.” As educator Michael Fullan once wrote, “Leadership is nothing more than having the confidence to change from ‘Ready, ready, ready’ to “Ready, fire, aim.’”

Reflection – “Trimmers know that everything they do could have been done better, and so insist on after-action reviews. Trimmers have the ability to break contact with reality and reflect.”

The world needs more Trimmers! And if I was an adult learning leader, working with a group of young learners, I would spend time during our learning day creating more and more Trimmers, along with smarter and stronger readers, writers, and problem-solvers. Trimming seems to be a character development outcome that is much needed in this country and the world these days. And our young learners are the ones to adopt it and lead it.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB