Ep 398: Marty Baron - "The Journalist"

Fearless Creative Leadership

Here’s a question. What do you have a responsibility to?

This week’s guest is Marty Baron. He’s the former editor of the Boston Globe, and the former executive editor of the Washington Post. The newsrooms under his leadership won 17 Pulitzer Prizes. At the Globe, he instigated the investigation into the sexual abuse conducted by the Catholic Church in Boston, and which was turned into the Academy Award winning movie, Spotlight.

The list of seminal stories that were reported under his watch would fill an entire podcast episode by themselves, from Elián Gonzalez, to the Snowden files, to the 2000 Supreme Court decided election to name but a few.

His new book, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, describes his 8 year leadership journey during one of the most tumultuous times in the paper’s history.

Along the way, he has learned a staggering amount about leadership.

Leadership, done well, is all about responsibility.

The trouble is that often, the definitions of leadership responsibility are too narrow and shallow. Too quickly defined and too quickly redefined when things get bumpy.

When you meet a leader who sees their responsibility as clear, for whom that responsibility is deeply held, whose commitment to it is pressure tested, and for whom their definition of responsibility has withstood the fury of time, it often feels as though they are fearless.

You ask them about being afraid and they shake their head. Not brashly, or boldly. But quizzically, almost as though they don’t understand the question.

And when you are asked to describe that person’s leadership qualities, the words that come to the fore are integrity, self awareness, and courage.

They are not words they ascribe to themselves. These are words that the rest of us use to help explain what sets them apart.

But what sets them apart is not, as I have come to learn, their integrity, their self awareness, or their courage.

What sets them apart is the absolute certainty that they will do the right thing, because their leadership is not about them.

Their leadership is about something that they believe is more important than they are.

Which might be the purest definition of leadership that I’ve heard so far.

Judge for yourself.