Leaders need to adapt to changing conditions. They need to communicate their ideas. And if you ask Dee Dee Myers, the first woman to serve as a White House press secretary who spoke Thursday night as Elon's sixth Isabella Cannon Distinguished Visiting Professor of Leadership, she’ll tell you that leaders can’t be afraid to fail.
Hundreds of students, faculty, staff and community members attended the evening speech in McCrary Theatre, where the former public face of the Clinton administration offered tales of her days in the White House briefing room while listing qualities she said she has found in several prominent leaders.
“Leaders have to be flexible,” Myers said in her lecture, the first of three public events scheduled for January as part of the professorship. “You have to make a plan and work a plan, but you have to be prepared for the unexpected. You have to be able to pivot, to regroup, to rethink, to keep your eye on the objective. That is an indispensible quality for leaders.”
Myers shared stories with her audience, from her first job out of college with Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign, to her days in the White House from 1993-1994. She explored the qualities of leaders she admired – Bill and Hillary Clinton, President Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Meg Whitman and rock star Bono – and common among them was an insatiable curiosity, a command of knowledge on myriad topics, and a willingness to try repeatedly to reach a goal if their first attempts fall short.
“It’s not whether people fail, because everybody does. We fail. We’re disappointed. We fall short, all of us,” Myers said. “The question is how do you deal with that? People who are strong leaders and make a difference are people who get up and try again.”
Myers was the first woman and one of the youngest individuals to serve as White House press secretary. Since leaving the White House, she has worked as a political analyst, commentator and writer. She currently is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine and a frequent guest on broadcast and cable television networks. An original consultant to the NBC series The West Wing, Myers contributed story lines and technical advice throughout the show’s award-winning run.
Her work on the West Wing was part of her conversation in both the lecture and in a question-and-answer appearance on Friday in Whitley Auditorium. The fictional West Wing character C.J. Cregg was loosely based on Myers, but what the real-life press secretary discovered was the writing for a Hollywood drama doesn’t match the absurdity of real events.
“You can’t make up the stuff that happens in real life. If I’d come here a few months ago and said, ‘Let me tell you what’s going to happen. A crazy socially ambitious couple from Virginia is going to crash a White House state dinner, not to meet the president but to get a slot on the reality TV show ‘Real Housewives of DC,’ you couldn’t make that up…
“Or if I said a terrorist is going to nearly bring down an American jetliner by planting a bomb in his underpants, right? If we had to take off our shoes in the wake of the show bomber, I hate to think what’s coming next. But it just goes to prove you can’t make that up.”
Not all of her remarks showered praise. On Friday in the public Q&A, she assessed Obama after his first year in office, saying “if there’s a weakness in his leadership, it’s that he sometimes comes across as being aloof.” Because Obama doesn’t feel the need to be loved like her former boss in the White House, Myers said, he doesn’t work hard at soliciting that affection – and it can make Americans feel like he doesn’t care.
In 2008, Myers published the New York Times bestseller, Why Women Should Rule the World, the title of her scheduled Jan. 19 lecture. In her book, Myers makes the case that the increasingly powerful role of women in public life is reshaping the world for the better.
Myers is Elon’s sixth Isabella Cannon Distinguished Visiting Professor of Leadership. Former visiting professors are John Alexander, William W. “Bill” George, Ben Bradlee, Christine Todd Whitman and David Gergen. The professorship brings nationally recognized authorities to campus to share insights about the nature, potential and responsibilities of leadership.
In addition to offering major public addresses, the Isabella Cannon Distinguished Visiting Professor of Leadership holds seminars and meets with students participating in Elon’s leadership programs. This professorship was a dream of the late Isabella Cannon ’24, who requested that her estate be used to enhance the leadership programs that are central to the Elon student experience.
“Leaders are human beings first, and they bring their own experiences, they bring their own hopes, and dreams, and fears, and strengths, and weaknesses to the job. Nobody is good at everything. And nobody is perfect,” Myers said. “When we expect too much of our leaders we are inevitably disappointed. Sometimes, we as a culture, we’re not very good at moderating these expectations. That’s not to say we shouldn’t hold leaders to high standards. We should.
“That’s one of the things you accept in a visible role of leadership, that you are held to a higher standard. That said, we need to allow room for our leaders to be human because to do otherwise not only sets us up for disappointment, it sets our leaders up to fail.”
