5. Recruit your staff to your (real) team,and shower them with the perks of office.
The workload of the White House staff is inhumane, so maintaining morale must be a constant concern. Public matters, such as a media consensus that the president will not be reelected, or private ones, such as pressure from an irate spouse, can evolve into serious problems.
No easy solutions exist, but team spirit can be boosted in a few simple ways. For staff members, nothing can substitute for meetings with the president and other high officials. As Niccolò Machiavelli advised in The Prince, a leader "ought to entertain the people with festivals and spectacles at convenient seasons of the year."
These perks matter: invitations to state dinners for the official and his or her spouse, to events at Blair House or other private gatherings, and to public events the president is attending. Ceremonies to which parents and other family members can be invited are also valuable; they constitute a form of psychic income to substitute for the income lost while working for the government. "[T]o keep his servant honest the prince ought to study him, honoring him, enriching him, doing him kindnesses," Machiavelli wrote.
Direct contact with the president is also an essential element of power and influence for White House staff and loyalist officials throughout the bureaucracy. It is critical for White House aides to be able to say, "The president said," and "No, no, the president thinks" on the right occasions. As Acheson explained in his memoir, witnessing presidential decision-making firsthand "meets a fundamental, almost primitive, need of the staff."
Hearing the president himself make a decision also short-circuits staff attempts to subvert or sabotage policies. As Acheson put it, learning about decisions secondhand sows doubts within officialdom: "Did [a policy] have that authority behind it which demanded obedience, or would a plot or a protest, a discreet leak by 'unimpeachable' sources to the press or to the Hill -- if that is not tautological -- upset it?" he wrote. "In a city where, since the Gettysburg Address, few public men have written their own utterances, one should not underestimate the importance of the chief's announcing, explaining, and, on occasion, discussing his decisions in the presence of his staff."
The most valuable and scarcest commodity in Washington is the president's time, but some of it must be used to "jolly up" staffers and maintain their morale. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley made sure that Bush met with the entire senior NSC team periodically, and he tried to bring junior NSC staff members to the Oval Office or to lunches with foreign heads of government. It paid off not only in morale, but in the irreplaceable ability to start a rebuttal of unwelcome bureaucratic proposals with: "The president said to me last week.…"
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