How the Most Powerful People Get Things Done: 4 Tips From a White House Staffer

When I would send an email, and it didn’t matter to whom, everybody would respond right away. It could have been the most senior person or the most junior. You make a phone call and know he’s not there, yet they respond right away and we make the decision. You had to be responsive rather than be an obstacle. I can’t tell you the number of times in private business or in the broader Navy where I sent something as simple as an email that needs input and I never heard back. Some are just not as conscientious about responding, whether it’s someone very senior or very junior. If the leaders of the organization are responsive it sets a good standard for everybody else.

… you can set up e-mail filters in most e-mail programs and phones, designating certain people whose mail you want to get through to you right away, while other mail just accumulates in your inbox until you have time to deal with it. And for people who really can’t be away from e-mail, another effective trick is to set up a special, private e-mail account and give that address only to those few people who need to be able to reach you right away, and check your other accounts only at designated times.

Wherever possible avoid paralysis by analysis. I think analysis and data are super important. No matter what organization you’re working in, you’ve got to get things right and know the data that backs it up. But too many organizations get paralyzed because they analyze for too long and they haven’t developed the instincts to make decisions. They end up postponing things in favor of more and more analysis. That’s frustrating for everyone in the organization. Being able to make decisions when you know you have imperfect data is so critical. I was always taught that “A good decision now is better than a perfect decision in two days.” Many people I know in business recoil at that statement. Many colleagues in graduate school had come from places where they were analysts at a company and their job was to analyze and analyze and analyze. They couldn’t believe somebody would say that you should actually encourage people to make a decision with imperfect information — but I firmly believe you should. I think that’s really important for leaders to incorporate. It’s something that the White House has to do all the time. It’s great to analyze things, but at some stage you’re just spinning your wheels.

The standard way of thinking about this is that more choice will help some people and hurt no one. But it turns out that when people have too many options, instead of being liberated by all these choices, they’re paralyzed.

If I had to give advice across many aspects of life, I would ask people to take what’s called “the outside perspective.” And the outside perspective is easily thought about: “What would you do if you made the recommendation for another person?” And I find that often when we’re recommending something to another person, we don’t think about our current state and we don’t think about our current emotions. We actually think a bit more distant from the decision and often make the better decision because of that.

The second you say, “Oh, this is just the way we’ve always done things,” you’re doomed to failure. I’m always looking for ways that we can improve what we’re doing, even if it’s something that we’re so reliant on. Maybe it’s because things are very fast-paced or because lives depend on it, but carrying out business as usual is just not an option at the White House. It becomes paramount to come in and help figure out how to constantly make things better.

One lesson I’ve taken from the White House is that it’s critical to provide mentorship to people who are junior to you. The second you’re too good to give time to junior people is the second you’re out of touch, and you’re missing an opportunity to assist somebody else’s personal development. In the Navy and in finance too, one of the things I’ve been shocked about is that you don’t necessarily have this culture of mentorship. Every once in a while you’ll come across somebody who is seriously interested in a junior person’s development, but it’s definitely not the norm.

In great mentorship relationships the mentor doesn’t just care about the thing that you’re learning, they care about how your life goes. They are with you for the long haul. They are willing to say no and to tell you what you’re doing is wrong. Those kinds of relationships yield outsized results in terms of future salaries and happiness.

The people who excelled were those who clearly knew their stuff. They read up — a lot — on whatever issue they were discussing. These guys would go into meetings about politics or policy or budget or international affairs, and they were so sharp that they knew how to speak the language and ask the right questions, no matter the topic. They became experts in the topic. They read all the time, and they would constantly work to learn more. A lesson I took away is that just because you’re a senior person doesn’t mean you should be disconnected or not involved or not intellectually curious. You don’t see that push to be an expert in a broad array of topics as often in business or in the military.

The question that ended up being the most predictive of skill was “How long are you going to be doing this?” Commitment was the difference maker. The people who combined commitment with a little bit of practice, their skills went off the charts.

I think one of the most important things is finding something you’re passionate about doing. People get burned out working at the White House. I did, too. It’s so intense for so long, there’s no letup, and you don’t get paid anything — you’ve really got to have passion for what you’re doing. If you don’t, you might as well leave. There’s no point. I was passionate personally about doing something service-oriented within a particular administration at an incredibly difficult time for the country. I always encourage people to find that passion as early as they can. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, you should get out.

Elderly individuals who were harmoniously passionate scored higher on various indicators of psychological adjustment, such as life satisfaction, meaning in life, and vitality, while they reported lower levels of negative indicators of psychological adjustment such as anxiety and depression.

You’re not there because of the paycheck. You’re definitely not. Yet I look back at my White House days, and I’m so satisfied that it was a great experience; I loved every second of it. The lesson I draw from that is just because you’re not getting paid a ton of money, doing something that’s service-oriented, that’s for the greater good, that can make your job so satisfying. We had a summer where we worked 18-hour days, seven days a week. It was rough, but we were there with a bunch of people we liked and we believed in what we were doing. It was completely worth it.

“Our results were quite startling,” the researchers wrote. “The commissioned works were rated as significantly less creative than the noncommissioned works, yet they were not rated as different in technical quality. Moreover, the artists reported feeling significantly more constrained when doing commissioned works than when doing noncommissioned works.”