Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It: Why People Demand it

Find Common Ground

Leaders are challenged to achieve what the late John W. Gardner, leadership scholar, founder of Common Cause, and adviser to six U.S. presidents, called “wholeness incorporating diversity.” In his commencement address to the centennial graduation class at Stanford University, he told graduates:

[The goal is] not to achieve wholeness by suppressing diversity, nor to make wholeness impossible by enthroning diversity, but to preserve both. Each element in the diversity must be respected, but each must ask itself sincerely what it can contribute to the whole. I don't think it is venturing beyond the truth to say that “wholeness incorporating diversity” defines the transcendent task for our generation.4

One of the most common mistakes ...