The best leaders inspire. That’s what we teach the participants at the annual Poynter Leadership Academy, our signature seminar for up-and-coming news managers from around the world. To practice what we preach, it is our tradition to have veteran editor and wordsmith Gregory Favre send participants home with a benediction.
If you need a little inspiration today, here it is, straight from a passionate journalist’s heart, delivered to the most recent graduates of the Leadership Academy:
A few weeks ago I was reminiscing with some former colleagues about what used to be normal in our newsrooms and how things have changed since those days. And my mind wandered, as it often does, to something that our eighth-grade granddaughter had written for her English class.
The assignment was to write of a change in her life. And I was struck by her opening paragraph:
“My dog Kelsey died when I was only five years old,” she wrote, “it was an event that changed me. Until she died, I didn’t really know that death existed. I lived in a world filled with flowers and gumdrops and cotton candy—nothing ever went wrong.”
I don’t mean to leave the impression that for a half-century in newsrooms that my life was filled with flowers and gumdrops and cotton candy. I wish that were true.
There were many days in my newsroom career when my soul was bruised, as were the souls of others. Days that left an indelible mark on my memories; none more so than the day when, as managing editor, I turned the lights off for the last time at the Chicago Daily News, a newspaper we loved to death but we couldn’t love to life. But much, much more often my career was filled with days of joy and moments to celebrate and memories to cherish.
Certainly it helped that I grew up in newspapers in a vastly different time, long before the birth of almost everyone in this room. It was a time when the sound of typewriters rang out in the newsroom, when the yell of a copy boy bounced off the walls, when the perfume of ink permeated throughout the building and the roar of a press and the clang of linotypes tingled our nerves, when people smoked in the newsroom, and no one dared dream that readers could get their news and information any other way than ink on paper.
We didn’t have to wrestle with the avalanche of disruptive changes of today; or the deepest economic downfall since the great depression; or the loss of thousands of jobs in our newsrooms and the grief that accompanies those losses.
It indeed was a different environment with different expectations and it was much easier to visualize the future and to see what our roles would be in that future. It was a time of promise, a time of hope.
But so is today. And you can help create the future. You can help move what was and what is to what will be. You can help make this a time of hope for a business that has always yielded painfully to change.
Hope.
It has been said that we can live three to four weeks without food, days without water, several minutes without breath, but that we can live only one second without hope.
I remember a session at ASNE years ago when Elie Wiesel was speaking. As you know, Professor Wiesel is an author, teacher, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and as our colleague Roy Peter Clark once introduced him, witness — witness to the memory of truth, witness to the power of the language, witness to compassion and to hope.
During the question and answer period, my dear friend Tim McGuire, who was then editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and is now a distinguished professor at Arizona State, asked this question: “What exercises do you employ to create hope for yourself and for those you come into contact with?”
“My contacts are young people, I am a teacher,” Wiesel answered. “I have been a professor for more than 30 years. They are my joy. If you ask me what is my greatest reward I have received, it is my classroom. I love my students, because I feel I owe them something. I am a strange teacher. I have never given the same course twice. Never. I am always inventing new courses in order to be a student, just a little bit better than they, not much, just a little bit. I learn more from them sometimes than they learn from me.
“When I see a student understands, I am happy the whole day. What is hope? I see students get together in my class. It is a community. Some get married because they met in my class and now I see their children. That is my hope, to be real and complete.”
And he finished with these thoughts:
“In general, as long as I can preserve a moment of humanity in my life, you as well, that is the beginning of hope. But hope is never something that closes me in. Hope is what opens me up.
“In other words, like the conductor when he opens himself up to the violin and then to the cello. Hope must imply the other. I can be hopeful because of you, not because of me. That is what I think we should learn.”
I can be hopeful… because of you.
What a wonderful lesson in Professor Wiesel’s words for all who lead, or for all who serve as mentors or teachers or parents, or simply as friends.
Hope.
As I have watched the days of this week unfold, for me it has been a week of hope. Hope because I have seen a group of leaders who can inspire others by infusing their work with meaning and connecting them with a purpose. A group of leaders who understand that if you are to succeed you must begin the journey from a place of caring, a place where trust exists and where visions and goals are embraced by all. A group of leaders who grasp the need for respect and humility and transparency when dealing with readers and viewers and listeners and who have a shared determination to hold on to their standards and their visions and their idealism in these uncertain days in which we live.
I have seen a group of leaders who understand that we must question ourselves, just as we question others, who believe that values such as truth-telling, accuracy, fairness and ethical behavior must not change.
I have seen a group of leaders who have the humility to allow others to challenge and to engage in healthy dialogue, and who have the talent and the compassion and the imagination to craft a sense of direction that will heal fears and provide hope.
We are passing through a time when that kind of strong and inspirational leadership is needed more than ever before.
It is a time for you to take what you have learned this week, and what you have learned and experienced through the years, to create your own recipes for leadership.
I recently re-read an excerpt from a story written about Gene Patterson, one of my heroes in our business. Gene was president and editor of the St. Petersburg Times and chairman of the Times and the Poynter Institute. He received the Pulitzer Prize when he was editor of the Atlanta Constitution.
The article referred to a letter Gene received from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was in 1967. “I have come to the conclusion,” King wrote, “that the ultimate measure of a man is not where he finds himself in moments of comfort and moments of convenience, but where he finds himself in moments of challenge and moments of controversy.”
We know how Dr. King responded in those moments, with physical courage beyond our comprehension and with moral courage that truly lived into what he preached. And he left us so many incredible examples of leadership summed up in these words from one of his early speeches: “I cannot be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You cannot be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” Think about those words whenever you lead others. I know I did.
And if you want to know how Gene responded, take a moment, if you haven’t done so, to read the column that’s posted on the wall near the library. He wrote it when he was editor in Atlanta after the horrible Birmingham church bombing that tragically took the lives of four children; that is just one of the many examples of how he responded as an editor and as a leader.
Now the question is: How will you respond? How will you respond in your moments of challenge? How will you respond in your darkest moments? How will you respond in these constant moments of change?
You will take away many memories when you leave here this afternoon, ideas and thoughts that will allow you to open new doors to new adventures, that will help you enrich the spirit of creativity in your newsrooms, that will help you weather the turbulence of the struggles our industry faces.
And my hope is that you will leave here with more passion for what you do, because it will take passion to transform the ideas you have collected into something real in your professional and personal lives; it will take passion to remember, as Robert Kennedy once said, that only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
It will take passion to avoid being trapped in the net of fixed attitudes that are so prevalent in our society today, to embrace the joy of discovery; it will take passion to create an environment where no one is invisible and in which people of different cultures can have a chance to share their experiences, always keeping in mind that our world does not end at the ocean’s edge.
It will take passion to maintain a newsroom where a strong commitment to civil discourse and civic life can be found, especially in these days when we are plagued by incivility throughout society; a newsroom where there is a large repository of fresh ideas and intellectual vigor and common values among and between creative people.
When you return home from this extraordinary week set aside of learning and reflecting, life and all of its cauldron of challenges will be there waiting for you. The lessons of yesterday, the practices of today, and the dreams of tomorrow will be there. And bringing those together is what leadership is all about. Choreographing the steps in the dance of life is what leadership is all about.
Now the question is: What will be your recipe?
I am going to borrow mine from some words spoken centuries ago by another Martin Luther, this one the German theologian, and it is appropriate because of my hope in you individually and collectively, my hope in you as leaders.
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,” Luther said. “I would still plant my apple tree.”
When you return home, renewed and refreshed and raring to go, do you dare do anything less?
Go home and be the wonderful leaders we have had the privilege of watching and getting to know this week. Go home and build on the vitality and enthusiasm and fellowship we have experienced together. Go home and remember that you are the architects of the dreams and the memory makers of those you lead.
Go home and fulfill your own hopes and dreams. I will go home hopeful because of you.
Because the business I love so deeply is indeed in good hands. And for that, I thank you; for that, all of us here at Poynter thank you.
Delivered Friday, October 21, 2011 by Gregory Favre at the close of the Poynter Leadership Academy
