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"Well," said my friend Barbara, "it would be hard to say that you have taken any leadership on the issue!" There it was again. That illusive term - leadership! The one that was always used by someone unhappy with the status quo. And once again, it spurred me to action and caused me to reassess my responsibilities. In this case the issue was the AIDS epidemic that had gripped the city of Houston and taken a huge toll in human suffering. The year was 1987 and I was in my third term as mayor. While the problem was obviously very significant, I was not sure what I could do about it. After all, the city government did not have a role in the research needed to find a cure. And it was the county government that operated the public hospital system and the state government that regulated the insurance industry. But people expect their Mayor to do something -- and that something is usually described as leadership. It was the same refrain I had heard when other very difficult issues challenged our city -- when the bottom fell out of our local economy, and when a hurricane roared through downtown Houston. In my early years as Mayor I had slowly come to terms with the enormous expectations citizens have for their top elected officials. When I first ran for the office, I felt well prepared and eager to bring a businesslike approach to managing the city. But eventually I realized that managing the organization called city government was only one part of a three-part job.
My other two jobs were to chair the city council and to lead the community at large. These were the tasks for which I had the least preparation. So for ten years, I studied leadership in the school of hard knocks. In the past six years I have returned to private life and now my work at the Burns Academy of Leadership gives me the opportunity to reflect on the leadership lessons I learned as Mayor and to convey some of them to students and others who will take leadership on public issues in the future. Moreover, since the Academy has brought together leading scholars in the field of Leadership Studies, my work here has allowed me better to understand my mayoral experiences in the context of leadership theory. I have concluded that for me the central component of leadership is responsibility. In our world of competing and conflicting interests, getting things done is rarely easy. It requires continuous effort on the part of someone willing to take responsibility for the outcome. And more often than not, it is that feeling of responsibility that inspires the best leadership. To give just one example, after years of debate the city council of Houston passed an ordinance requiring street trees in new developments and plantings in parking lots and other commercial areas. I knew the legislation would never have passed without the tenacious work of citizen activists who felt personal responsibility for improving the visual environment and livability of our city. As Mayor I learned to define my own responsibility more broadly. No matter that my position did not give me a vote when Congress considered the Ryan White bill providing funding to care for people with AIDS. I knew that my responsibility was to provide leadership on the issue, raising the subject with numerous audiences, personally lobbying members of Congress, and making sure that the Conference of Mayors and the League of Cities passed appropriate resolutions. And while the city government certainly could not directly improve the economic conditions in Houston, as Mayor I took responsibility for our economic situation. And once I was willing to assume the responsibility for improving the economy, it became much easier to build a coalition that could get the job done. I also learned the importance of tapping leadership in all parts of thecommunity. In each neighborhood in our city, people willing to takeresponsibility for their own circumstances were the people who got things done. My experience as mayor convinced me that their is leadership within each person. My goal now is to take this message to national and international audiences, and to encourage more people to take responsibility for the state of our communities, our nation, and our world. |
