You Can Lead, Too!

You went on to create an entity, a leadership program in the government called WHA Leads. Why was it so important to you to create that?

So this is really great. The wonderful thing about WHA Leads is that I deserve absolutely zero credit for creating it. It was an employee led initiative where all I had to do as the leader of this bureau was say, you know what, that's a great idea. Let's do it and run with it and make sure that the front office supported everything that we were doing. But what we would do in that initiative and again, led by employees, and the idea was you don't have to be the head of the bureau to be a leader. You can lead from anywhere you are. And the people who thought this up and organized it are doing exactly that. Every time they hold a seminar, they are leading from exactly where they are. And I encouraged them. I said, look, I will open the WHA Leads with a speech. But then after that, you can get speeches from everybody across the bureau who's leading from where they are. It's really a powerful thing to talk, to come offline away from the daily flow of information and activity and talk for a day about integrity or resilience or some of the broader values that we all share. And how do you model that? It's a fantastic initiative. And because it's employee led, I know that it will continue long after my departure.

How do you instill that sense in people, though? Because sometimes people feel stuck where they are right on the job. They want to move to the next level, but they don't know how to get unstuck, if you will. So how do you instill that sense of you can lead exactly from where you are?

I think part of it was not just saying it, but doing it right and modeling that behavior so that the founder of this initiative was able to get up in front of the whole bureau and be the founder of this initiative and show that this was his idea and that he had brought it forward and had gotten the support of the front office.