Abraham Lincoln, Management Guru! Lessons for Library Leadership on Resilience, True Grit, and Bouncing Forward

This has been a big year for Abraham Lincoln. Museums, libraries, and re-enactors all over the nation continued to celebrate the Civil War sesquicentennial. Stephen Spielberg made a movie simply entitled Lincoln, Daniel Day Lewis won the Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Lincoln in that movie, and a recent article by Nancy Koehn in the New York Times entitled “Lincoln’s School of Management,” discussed his leadership qualities and drew a Twitter of comments hailing Lincoln as a prototype management guru.¹

As Koehn’s article points out, many CEOs and Presidents have drawn inspiration from President Lincoln. But what are the lessons we lesser mortals might gain from studying him? Very few of us are destined to be challenged by the larger issues of the country as Lincoln was – slavery, property rights, homesteading, and of course, the Civil War. Koehn’s article and other Lincoln-inspired writings offer a slew of reasons why Lincoln’s life and work offer meaningful lessons for today’s leaders and managers. Take a look at Spielberg’s Lincoln for instance – a movie tells a story. It is not offered to the public as a factual record of events. Artistic license is a given. And yet, some of the most stirring parts of the movie come from hearing Lincoln’s own words – his speeches, diaries, letters (and those of others), ably documented by Doris Kearns Goodwin and other prominent historians. It makes us long – not for a demagogue (we have seen and continue to see, plenty of those) – but a true leader who passionately articulates her causes, outlines her vision, and moves us, the listeners, to a higher plane.

Clearly, this is one lesson to be learned – a leader needs to be able to articulately and passionately outline a vision – whether it be of the 21^st century library, intellectual freedom, open access, or more equitable staff salaries – and to thereby inspire the group to buy into this vision and take appropriate action. But the movie also draws our attention to the fact that one of Lincoln’s greatest qualities, throughout his progress to the White House, eventual issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the passing of the 13^th Amendment, was resilience. He did not give up, ever, staying in for the long haul – which turned out to be shorter than anyone could have imagined. Goodwin describes him as “[m]ore accustomed to relying upon himself to shape events, he took the greatest control of the process leading up to the nomination, displaying a fierce ambition, an exceptional political acumen, and a wide range of emotional strengths, forged in the crucible of personal hardship, that took his unsuspecting rivals by surprise.”²

The importance of resilience, or the ability to rebound from the hardships of life, is emphasized several times in Koehn’s article. Her comments reflect a large body of work over the years on the superiority of resilience or grit over intellectual brilliance. Paul Tough, in his 2012 monograph How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, documents new childhood research studies, which show that this quality is much underestimated in creating scenarios for how children (and by extension adults) succeed.³ The children who survive adversity better are not necessarily those who are smartest, but those who do not give up, are resilient, and use a variety of internal coping mechanisms to achieve their goals. Perhaps the numerous familiar adages such as “A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner” (English proverb), or “Difficulties strengthen the mind as well as labor does the body” (Seneca), have a nugget of truth.

Elle Allison, in her work with educators, specifically focused on this quality – “In the face of change and crisis, the resource we need most is our resilience.” She describes resilience as “a personal quality that predisposes individuals to bounce back in the face of loss. Resilient leaders, however, do more than bounce back—they bounce forward. With speed and elegance, resilient leaders take action that responds to new and ever-changing realities...