The Buck Stops With You
Advice from Women Who Lead
I run a center at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C. And as I’ve got this British accent, it’s very unlikely for me to be there, as well as here in Aspen, in the first place.
I want to say that one of the reasons that I’m here is because I come from an environment where women weren’t publicly empowered, but where women were always the strong people privately, behind the scenes.
My dad was a coal miner. My dad, in fact, left school at 14, to become a coal miner. My mother left school and became a nurse and a midwife at 16. So, they were both people who took responsibility for their lives early. But they also always went out of their way to help other people.
My father, who came from a very macho environment in the coalfields, only had girls as children, but he also grew up in a significantly female environment. He was close to his mother and aunts. And my father always said to us:
“Well, I’m surrounded by girls, but I also know women can pretty much do everything just as well.”
So, my dad said to me, “You can go out into the world and you can do what a man can do — except play soccer.”
Time has proven my dad wrong on that one. Plenty of girls play soccer now! But the other points that my dad always tried to make were that you have to be credible, and you have to be authentic, you have to be true to yourself, and you also have to be caring to get ahead in life.
So, I set out in my life to prove that girls could be just as good and credible as anybody else. I tried to study harder than anybody else, and do all the things that I saw other people doing. I kind of over-fulfilled the plan there.
On the caring side, this was and is very important to me, because what I was taught in my family environment, and by someone like my dad who came from a very humble background, and by my mother as well, was that the buck — although in England we didn’t say the buck of course, we would say the blame, or the responsibility — always stops with you.
I think that this is one of the most important aspects of leadership, taking responsibility for whatever happens, the bad and the good. And what I’ve learned over the years is that you can lead people by leading by example. You’re true to yourself; you never try to be something that you’re not. You always strive to be the best at what you’re out there trying to do; you never ask someone to do something that you wouldn’t do yourself; and you always work just as hard as, or harder than, anyone else.
And you care about the people that you work with. In the community in which I grew up, everybody had to watch everybody else’s back and help them out in hard times. I basically went to university against the backdrop of the 1984 miners’ strike in the United Kingdom, where everybody was out of work and everybody was having to look out for everyone else. It left a big impression.
I think that’s leadership. You work with your community, your network, your team, and you always watch everybody’s back. You care about the people you work with, and you motivate them by caring. You bring out the best in everybody by all working together in the same way, with the same spirit.
And I think women can do that just as well as men can.
