Sarah Michael
March 07, 2013
news.com.au
IF you want your office to work more efficiently, take some lessons from the Cherokee Nation.
The tribe’s former Principal Chief Chad “Corntassel” Smith, who led the second largest Native American tribe in the US for 12 years, is an expert on successful management.
He says the strategies he used to lead a tribe of 300,000 can be applied to the running of a company, or even the management of a small office.
In his time as principal chief, he saw the Cherokee Nation grow its assets from $US150 million ($146.5 million) to $US1.2 billion, increased healthcare services from $US18 million to $US310 million and created 6000 jobs.
But when Chief Smith took office in 1999, the tribe was in disarray.
“There was political tension, political division, disorganisation – we didn’t know where we wanted to go,” he said.
Chief Smith credits the tribe’s turn around to his “Point A to Point B” leadership model, which is the subject of his recently released book Leadership Lessons from the Cherokee Nation.
“Effective leadership is being able to move people from where they’re at to where they want to go,” he said.
The role of principal chief is similar to being the governor of a state, providing governmental services to the nation as well as leading the Cherokee’s private sector businesses in the casino and gaming, hospitality and manufacturing sectors.
Chief Smith’s model is based on a traditional Cherokee prayer – “to learn from all I observe” – which encourages learning from different perspectives as the sun moves across the sky from sunrise to sunset.
“That came from the concept that if you got up in the morning to watch the sunrise, the sun would illuminate some aspects of the objects around you and cast shadows on others.
“Your perspective would change as the line of the sun would change.”
A leader running a business should be a student of all things around him, Chief Smith said.
“He can learn not only from his market, but from his employees, from his competitors – it helps you understand what that Point A is and how you get to that Point B.”
The idea of “Point A” is, he says, as simple as it sounds.
“‘Understand where you start. At Point A you have to have a tremendous amount of humility,” he said.
“You have to know where you’re at, what your resources and challenges are, and have a good sense of your environments and yourself.”
Point B is the end goal.
“You should never lose focus of the ultimate goal and if you can remember where you want to go it makes the effort of getting there much easier.”
Chief Smith said the last thing leaders should expect is gratitude.
“The value of leadership is in seeing things accomplished,” he said.
“If you’re in it for the glory or the money or some sort of self-promotion you’ll have a short tenure. You’ll alienate people and you won’t have the perspective to make things happen.”
Another important lesson Chief Smith tries to teach others is the idea that everybody is a leader, not just the boss.
“I think everybody should be a leader and everybody should be a teacher,” he said. “If you learn something you ought to share it with those around you.”
Chief Smith based his tribe’s end goal on the evaluation of late US Senator Henry Dawes, who in 1887 visited the Cherokee Nation and reported back to Congress that there was “not a poor person in the entire nation, that every family had their own home and the nation owed no debt”.
“That was the historical foundation for what we wanted to be in the future,” Chief Smith said.
“We wanted to be economically self reliant, have cohesive communities, all those things lead up to having a happy and healthy people.”
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