Community & Government
Leading Your Team
Lesson time 16:37 min
Secretary Rice breaks down the three essential elements of leadership. She also shares tips for delegating, earning trust, and dealing with dissent when leading a team.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Styles of Leadership * Learning to Delegate * Building Trust * Putting Your Team First * Dealing With Dissent * Mistakes in Leadership
Teach Diplomacy
Former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice teach you to settle differences in everyday life like a diplomat.
Sign UpPreview
[MUSIC PLAYING] - Leadership is-- I would break it down into three important elements. The first is to have a vision of the world as it should be not the world as it is. And that can mean anything from being the leader of a country or a movement to being the leader of a company that is trying to make it back from a difficult quarter or are possibly losing market share. It can mean being president, a provost of a university that is trying to have vision. You have to have vision. I think the best example of this that I ever saw was Nelson Mandela. I had the great honor of meeting him when we were in the White House. When he walked in, you could just see it in his visage that this was somebody who commanded respect, one of the elements of leadership; who had integrity, another element of leadership; and who had vision. And I kept asking myself, how could somebody who had been in jail for more than two decades, clearly oppressed by white South Africans, how could he come out and together with F.W de Klerk say, now that Blacks are going to be the majority vote, we're not going to oppress whites? We're going to build a multiethnic, multiracial South Africa. How do you do that? That, to me, was a sign of incredible vision for a leader. Secondly, as a leader, you have to have the ability to manage things. We often have this conceit that there are two-- that you have leaders, and you have managers. In my love of sports sometimes we will talk about a quarterback as a field manager as opposed to a great leader. So we separate those two. They're actually halves of the same walnut. If you are a great leader with vision, but you don't know what's going on in your organization, you're not going to get very far. When I was secretary, I wanted to have a vision for where the State Department fit in this world in which terrorism was a principal concern, in which we were fighting two wars. And so I talked about the importance that diplomacy had played in our history, for instance, in the Cold War. But I also had to be a manager and know enough about the organization. We were having trouble getting Arab speakers in the Foreign Service to go to Iraq. So let's say they were serving in Egypt or in Kuwait. We were not getting volunteers to go to Iraq. We were actually getting very young Foreign Service officers. We were getting very senior Foreign Service, but nobody in the middle, nobody in that 35-, 40-, 45-year-old category. The explanation people were giving me was, well, they really don't want to be a part of this war. It's Bush's war. Well, it turned out on examination, that if I asked you to leave Kuwait or Egypt and go to Iraq, your family had to go back to the United States. Now, who did that affect most? People with children, 35, 40, 45 years old. The minute we made it possible for you to leave your family in Kuwait or Egypt, where you could visit them, by the way, we got plenty of volunteers. That's getting down...
About the Instructor
Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice stood toe to toe with dictators, counseled presidents, and managed to find common ground on issues that still polarize us today. Sit down with two legendary secretaries of state as they reveal how to build bridges, hold boundaries, and apply history’s lessons to everyday challenges. The class presents an intimate portrait of the late Dr. Albright’s legacy for the next generation.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Madeleine Albright & Condoleezza Rice
Former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice teach you to settle differences in everyday life like a diplomat.
Explore the Class