This post will be different from any other I've written in the last two years. There will be no links to news stories, nor quotes to draw from nor manuals to reference. This one has been building for awhile now. It will be hard to write and parts will be painful. But it is mine and it will be true. It will be as close as I ever come to diary writing. Its' point though is not to bare my soul to elicit any emotion from you. Its' point is to put down some things and show you how easily I got seduced by my successes and limited by my failings and trapped by my own baggage. It is important to think about. It is a very real feeling for me and one I have struggled to understand for a long time. Hopefully, my journey will give you some insight into your own. Make you reflect on what is real and true for you. Those are the parts of you that people will follow. Where will you stand your ground? What is your bedrock?
To lead people you have to have a purity of purpose. You need to know beyond a shadow of a doubt why you are making the decisions and choices you make. There cannot be any artifice or falseness to your narrative. It must be your truth, as you know it, as clear and concise and authentic as you can be. You have to have examined yourself and understood what you serve for. Not just the institutional things, but the very personal things. What need is filled by your service? What hole does your service fill in your life? Why are you making the choices you make? Are they really yours, or are they an attempt to cover yourself up to the outside world? Are you seeing yourself clearly, or defrauding yourself with a carefully constructed picture of perfection and control? A beautifully painted mask that hides any faults. A picture of something that isn't really there?
Failure is hard to take. It is hard to hear someone label you a failure. It is hard to see the failure honestly. We mostly spend time trying to prevent failure rather than ensure success. And when we do fail, most of us - certainly me - run around telling anyone who will listen why we didn't fail. How it wasn't our fault. How we got screwed somehow along the way. How others are to blame. And we tell that story over and over and over until it becomes as true as anything we know. As true as the color of our eyes or swirls in our fingerprints. As true as our DNA.
22 months and 117 blog posts have led me to this point:
I failed to lead my platoon correctly in 2006.
There. It is on the page and when I hit send, I will not be able to take it back. It will be there forever.
It deserves to be seen. Not for you, but more for me. But it is a hard reality to face. And I want to be clear. This is not a mea culpa designed to elicit anything from you. I am not falling on my sword here for redemption or absolution or sympathy or empathy or anything. I am not and will not accept it. I am telling my truth because I want to show others what happened and why. This is the manner by which my personal absolution is made real. Today is not for you. Today is for me.
I failed to lead my platoon because I was not, and could not at the time, be authentic. I didn't know how to be. I had not done the hard work of staring at myself and seeing me accurately. I was not self-aware. I had not staked out my own territory and defined myself only for myself. I was only a reflection of what I thought others wanted me to be. I had created a person who could cover up my fears and weaknesses and inadequacies and for many years, he held up well. He garnered me success and accolades and awards and respect and admiration. But, in a crucible moment he failed. I played a role using a set script that did not meet the requirements I faced. And when he failed, I failed as well. I relied on something that was not what was needed at the moment and I was not clear enough to recognize that.
As Winston Churchill once said, "Sometimes it is not enough to do your best. You must do what is necessary."
I managed that platoon expertly. I took the very best care of those Soldiers I knew how. I did everything I could to ensure their well-being. I gave every ounce of myself to getting them back to the States in a way that would allow them to carry on with their lives. I used every bit of my resources to protect and defend them and to help them navigate something that none of us had any experience with. I did all that extremely well. I know that. I am sure of that. I believe in that. I will stand my ground on that. I could not have done any more and I believe that many of them are better off today because of my efforts.
I did not create and could not have stopped what happened to 1st platoon. Soldiers made choices long before my arrival. In their hearts and souls they lost their way. Got sucked into a vortex of fear and evil and darkness. A pit so deep that you cannot see the bottom. I do not know why. But, I could not have known that. I could feel it, but not see it's depth. I did not then, and do not now, have the capacity to look into another man's soul and read his intention. No one does. That is the sole purview of whatever higher power you believe in. I am not responsible for those crimes and I never have been. Those souls who committed those crimes are responsible for them. Only they know why and how they slid into that dark place. I know that to be true and will stand my ground on that firmly. It is possible that the greatest leader ever could not have stopped that chain of events. The rest of us were along for the ride. For too many years I bought into someone else's narrative I had to carry this burden forever and suffer it's weight. I had to wrap myself up in it and wear it like my own scarlet letter. The truth is, it was never mine to bear in the first place.
And yet I did fail. What they needed was a leader. An authentic voice. Someone they could place their faith in. Someone who could pull them back from the edge. Someone in whom they could trust. And I did not provide those things. I could not provide those things in the measure that they required. Not because I didn't possess them, I did. But because I had already split myself in two and didn't give them all of me. The true measure of leadership they required. I wasn't listening to my true voice. I was playing a role. I was playing a part. I was not authentically me. A portion of me - and not a small one - was looking out and trying to make sure that they didn't see any cracks. Working from a position of fear. Trying to hide a weakness. And they knew it. They could sense it. And in running around doing all of that, I didn't provide the one thing they needed. A true leader to guide them. I had the title, but the straw man was stuffed. I had the accolades and badges and honorifics but they didn't mean much in that crucible moment.
Again, I am not saying this to fall on my sword, I promise you. As I look at my life I am becoming aware of places where I have not been true to myself. Some are in the Army and some very important ones are outside of it. I am seeing things now that I could not have seen then. And that is the true meaning becoming self-aware. That you always keep looking. Keep staring. Keep trying to understand who and what you are. And why. To learn to listen only to the voice inside you and believe completely in that voice. That narrative. That person. And what I know today is this: The man I am today is infinitely stronger than the man I was then. And the man I am today is infinitely more aware than the man I was then. And the man I am today is much more complete than the man I was then. I am finding my authenticity. And that search will allow me to be a far better leader than I ever could have been then. When I gain that measure of self-awareness and can balance it with a fair measure of self-scrutiny then I will be able to lead Soldiers again without fear. Each day brings me one step closer.
Today is a cause for me to celebrate. I can put down the mantel of sufferer. I know where I succeeded and can identify where I failed. I can say that I failed and face it head on. I no longer have to fear judgment from others. I know what I did and I know what I didn't do. I am longer prey to anyone else. And that makes me already a better leader than before. I have faced a fear, seen it's potential, and know that I can step past it. And that is self-awareness. The hard part that we all have to do.
We will all face a crucible moment sometime in our lives. In that moment, all that you will have to rely on is yourself. That is not the moment to figure out that you don't know who you really are.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
#117 Authenticity and Showmanship
I received an email yesterday from a deployed Company Commander who asked the following question in reference to Post #106 "The Three of You":
"My only question that may cause more writing is, what happens when one of the three of "You" dominates? How do you balance or should you balance? Sometimes leadership involves acting like you know what you are doing, even when you don't have clue. I do believe some of this acting is for the benefit of the group you are leading. Leadership is often times "showmanship" until you can catch up on the learning curve."
And then this morning I received a comment on #116 from JD that caught my eye as well. I'll include the exchange here as well.
I had written:
"I think one of the interesting parts of this whole line of discussion has to do with how little of it has anything to do with the Army. Becoming properly oriented and self-aware has become the study of my entire life - not just my time in the Army. I think this is a critical area for leader development - recognizing that who you are as an Army leader will have a lot more to do with who and what your formative experiences have created in you, and a lot less of what the Army may or may not have taught you. My orientation to the world is derived from the totality of my life, its' successes, failures, joys, sorrows, hurts, losses etc. Those form me, they form the narrative that is me. I then take that narrative and bring it to the Army. I conform the Army value system and ethic into my orientation, not the other way around."
JD replied with this:
Fen..I love what you just wrote!...really nicely written and thought out....mind if I cut and paste it?!....looks to me like "content and curriculum" for teaching and practicing self-awareness. And you are right, it has nothing to do with the Army...but if leaders in the Army know it and practice it, they will be better leaders....and will serve our Soldiers much better."
Last night I was thinking over the showmanship piece with a friend of mine and she asked me what my thoughts were. I told her that I thought that a lot of times this showmanship equaled the public 'You' that I had spoken of in #106. The persona developed to instill confidence in others and live up to the expectations of the organization. The persona that you take on that you think meets the expectations of senior, peers, and subordinates. The person you become once you get immersed into the organizational culture so much that you cannot exactly remember who you are.
My friend didn't necessarily agree that the showmanship portion of a leader equaled a second persona. Her point was that people ultimately follow someone else because they believe strongly in their narrative. They believe in their authenticity. The have faith in their message. Sometimes though, in order to move or motivate people it's necessary to 'go big'. It's not a false representation of you, it's just giving them the parts of your authenticity that they need to hear in a way they need to hear it.
Those things that are truly me have very little to do with my time in the Army. Those formative experiences both inside and outside of the profession are the parts of me that are most true, most real and most authentic. They all have helped create the person I am as a leader.
And that got me thinking about authenticity. It's not a word we often use to describe people, but maybe it ought to be. Have I been an authentic leader? Have you? If we find a way to get Soldiers and leaders to discover and build upon their authentic selves, to draw upon the totality of their lives, to focus on those things that are core components of who they are, we might end up with a lot better leaders and a lot less need for the creation of a second persona designed only for outside consumption. It's a question of people following you, or following a caricature of you. Have you ever thought about that?
As I continue to discover the parts of my authenticity - those things that make me uniquely me, the question of showmanship becomes less and less important. If the truths of my character, motivations, desires, successes, failures, trials and tribulations are something that I no longer fear or try to hide away, then the public 'You' begins to melt away. I do not need that actor as much as I once did. He doesn't serve to enhance my ability to lead. In fact, he detracts from it. He makes my narrative less clear to those who are looking to me for leadership. He hides me from them instead of inspiring them with my authenticity. My true self. Who I am in the dark, alone where no one else can see. That person is the one who moves someone to believe and follow me, not some store-bought creation that I think is what they want. How much of your leadership is influenced by giving people what you think they want?
My commander friend wanted to know how to inspire people or provide them a clear answer when possibly he didn't have one himself. Is there value to acting a part until more information becomes available to advance the mission, or meet an objective? Prior to last night, I would have wholeheartedly said there was. Sometimes you give them an answer that you really don't have and you cover it up with a false-confidence and bravado and hope they do not see through it. If it begins them moving, then that is enough.
This morning however, I'm not so sure. I don't think you have to try to convince anyone of anything that you do not believe yourself. By doing that you end up taking your eye off the mission and placing it on them, worrying that they might find out that you don't know what the correct answer is. I think what must be done is that you have to discover your own authenticity. That is what they are actually investing their faith in anyway. That you know who and what you are and are not hiding that reality from those you lead. That it is OK to say you don't know when you don't, or that you don't have the answer sitting at your fingertips. Or that you are unsure. Those things may be all the case, and the authentic answer may be, "I don't know what the outcome will be right now, but I know that we have to get this done and that together we will do it. Here is what we are going to do right now. As the situation unfolds, we might have to make adjustments and changes, but ultimately we will get to our objective. We will accomplish our mission."
My friend's question about what happens when one part 'dominates' you, is equally important. That's what happens when you start to believe your own bullshit. You start to place more emphasis on keeping the created 'You' alive than you do on seeing the problem at hand. I think a lot of Army leaders fall into that trap and it is certainly one that dictated a large portion of the middle of my career. The further you fall into that trap, the further away you end up from your authentic self.
The question of personal authenticity is actually a critical component in leader development. Will you become a ringmaster in the three-ring circus of your life trying to keep private and personal and outside versions of yourself away from those you lead, or will you take the time do really discover your authenticity and then rest assured that people follow you because they know you are real? Which will dominate you? The creation, or your true self? While it might seem a strange question to some of you right now, I promise that it is not. Sooner or later you will run into yourself somewhere and it will be interesting to see if you are comfortable with that person or have you become a stranger over the years who lost sight of who you really are and why?
Authenticity is the truest sense and understanding of ourselves. We ought to spend most of our time in leader development looking exactly at that. The more we are authentic, the more we seek out and understand and care for our true selves, the more we can set aside the showman and the circus master. He doesn't do anything but confuse those we lead. Ultimately if my Soldiers have faith in my authenticity they will follow me. If they think I am only acting to cover a flaw they will not. The mission - and their lives - may hang in that balance.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
"My only question that may cause more writing is, what happens when one of the three of "You" dominates? How do you balance or should you balance? Sometimes leadership involves acting like you know what you are doing, even when you don't have clue. I do believe some of this acting is for the benefit of the group you are leading. Leadership is often times "showmanship" until you can catch up on the learning curve."
And then this morning I received a comment on #116 from JD that caught my eye as well. I'll include the exchange here as well.
I had written:
"I think one of the interesting parts of this whole line of discussion has to do with how little of it has anything to do with the Army. Becoming properly oriented and self-aware has become the study of my entire life - not just my time in the Army. I think this is a critical area for leader development - recognizing that who you are as an Army leader will have a lot more to do with who and what your formative experiences have created in you, and a lot less of what the Army may or may not have taught you. My orientation to the world is derived from the totality of my life, its' successes, failures, joys, sorrows, hurts, losses etc. Those form me, they form the narrative that is me. I then take that narrative and bring it to the Army. I conform the Army value system and ethic into my orientation, not the other way around."
JD replied with this:
Fen..I love what you just wrote!...really nicely written and thought out....mind if I cut and paste it?!....looks to me like "content and curriculum" for teaching and practicing self-awareness. And you are right, it has nothing to do with the Army...but if leaders in the Army know it and practice it, they will be better leaders....and will serve our Soldiers much better."
Last night I was thinking over the showmanship piece with a friend of mine and she asked me what my thoughts were. I told her that I thought that a lot of times this showmanship equaled the public 'You' that I had spoken of in #106. The persona developed to instill confidence in others and live up to the expectations of the organization. The persona that you take on that you think meets the expectations of senior, peers, and subordinates. The person you become once you get immersed into the organizational culture so much that you cannot exactly remember who you are.
My friend didn't necessarily agree that the showmanship portion of a leader equaled a second persona. Her point was that people ultimately follow someone else because they believe strongly in their narrative. They believe in their authenticity. The have faith in their message. Sometimes though, in order to move or motivate people it's necessary to 'go big'. It's not a false representation of you, it's just giving them the parts of your authenticity that they need to hear in a way they need to hear it.
Those things that are truly me have very little to do with my time in the Army. Those formative experiences both inside and outside of the profession are the parts of me that are most true, most real and most authentic. They all have helped create the person I am as a leader.
And that got me thinking about authenticity. It's not a word we often use to describe people, but maybe it ought to be. Have I been an authentic leader? Have you? If we find a way to get Soldiers and leaders to discover and build upon their authentic selves, to draw upon the totality of their lives, to focus on those things that are core components of who they are, we might end up with a lot better leaders and a lot less need for the creation of a second persona designed only for outside consumption. It's a question of people following you, or following a caricature of you. Have you ever thought about that?
As I continue to discover the parts of my authenticity - those things that make me uniquely me, the question of showmanship becomes less and less important. If the truths of my character, motivations, desires, successes, failures, trials and tribulations are something that I no longer fear or try to hide away, then the public 'You' begins to melt away. I do not need that actor as much as I once did. He doesn't serve to enhance my ability to lead. In fact, he detracts from it. He makes my narrative less clear to those who are looking to me for leadership. He hides me from them instead of inspiring them with my authenticity. My true self. Who I am in the dark, alone where no one else can see. That person is the one who moves someone to believe and follow me, not some store-bought creation that I think is what they want. How much of your leadership is influenced by giving people what you think they want?
My commander friend wanted to know how to inspire people or provide them a clear answer when possibly he didn't have one himself. Is there value to acting a part until more information becomes available to advance the mission, or meet an objective? Prior to last night, I would have wholeheartedly said there was. Sometimes you give them an answer that you really don't have and you cover it up with a false-confidence and bravado and hope they do not see through it. If it begins them moving, then that is enough.
This morning however, I'm not so sure. I don't think you have to try to convince anyone of anything that you do not believe yourself. By doing that you end up taking your eye off the mission and placing it on them, worrying that they might find out that you don't know what the correct answer is. I think what must be done is that you have to discover your own authenticity. That is what they are actually investing their faith in anyway. That you know who and what you are and are not hiding that reality from those you lead. That it is OK to say you don't know when you don't, or that you don't have the answer sitting at your fingertips. Or that you are unsure. Those things may be all the case, and the authentic answer may be, "I don't know what the outcome will be right now, but I know that we have to get this done and that together we will do it. Here is what we are going to do right now. As the situation unfolds, we might have to make adjustments and changes, but ultimately we will get to our objective. We will accomplish our mission."
My friend's question about what happens when one part 'dominates' you, is equally important. That's what happens when you start to believe your own bullshit. You start to place more emphasis on keeping the created 'You' alive than you do on seeing the problem at hand. I think a lot of Army leaders fall into that trap and it is certainly one that dictated a large portion of the middle of my career. The further you fall into that trap, the further away you end up from your authentic self.
The question of personal authenticity is actually a critical component in leader development. Will you become a ringmaster in the three-ring circus of your life trying to keep private and personal and outside versions of yourself away from those you lead, or will you take the time do really discover your authenticity and then rest assured that people follow you because they know you are real? Which will dominate you? The creation, or your true self? While it might seem a strange question to some of you right now, I promise that it is not. Sooner or later you will run into yourself somewhere and it will be interesting to see if you are comfortable with that person or have you become a stranger over the years who lost sight of who you really are and why?
Authenticity is the truest sense and understanding of ourselves. We ought to spend most of our time in leader development looking exactly at that. The more we are authentic, the more we seek out and understand and care for our true selves, the more we can set aside the showman and the circus master. He doesn't do anything but confuse those we lead. Ultimately if my Soldiers have faith in my authenticity they will follow me. If they think I am only acting to cover a flaw they will not. The mission - and their lives - may hang in that balance.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
#116 The Truth as I Know It
I have always written this blog to try and highlight some of the difficulties and complexities of human being leadership. Leadership is not easy and it cannot be learned solely learned from a textbook. While the basic framework can often times be codified, the nuance and art have to generate from within each individual. It is their own personal narrative. People will only follow you because of their faith in your character, your vision and your truth. I have most often called this your self-awareness. Something that the Army says is important, but actually spends very little time developing. Most times, I have tried to spread this message by citing a document and then adding my personal thoughts about it - testing out my ideas against yours. Trying something on for size. Seeing if I could hear a grain of truth in the words someone else wrote or clarifying mine in my own head. If my writing has had any worth whatsoever, I would hope it has been to do that for you. To provide you an opportunity to think about yourself and how you lead and the effect of your leadership on those above and below you.
I have spent a lot of time in the last few posts on some much more personal aspects of my journey toward self awareness. How I got to this point in my life, the influences that impacted and formed me - both in the Army and out - and my desire to understand them in such a way that I am ultimately made a better leader and person. While parts of my journey are very personal, I have thankfully found someone who is willing to help me do the hard work required to gain a more complete understanding of who I am. The idea of being willing to take this journey however, should be universal to every Army officer and NCO. Everyone who calls themselves a leader should want to take a hard look at themselves and their influences every now and again, to ensure that they have a clear understanding of who they are and why. To find someone who will question your baseline assumptions and not settle for easy answers. Someone who will help you test whether what you think to be true about yourself, is actually so. If we are not made to take a hard look in the mirror it becomes too easy to believe your own bullshit and, sooner or later, we will fail. Not because we want to fail, but because we lack a more informed frame of reference. I believe very strongly that the high profile firings of so many of our senior officers and NCO's in recent months is a direct reflection of a lack of properly balanced self-awareness. In many ways, while what I'm doing right now is a personal inspection, in many ways, it is also for the betterment of those I serve and the Army overall. If we can ensure that the leaders we are developing are true in their narrative, and clear in their understanding of themselves, then the leadership they provide will be more honest and that honesty inspires those both above and beneath them.
If you find this line of thinking to be a little foreign or strange or uncomfortable, consider the following: In the cover story of The Army Times dated April 25th is an interview with the new Chief of Staff, General Dempsey. Below is part of that story:
"Dempsey acknowledged that building the nation's Army is not simply a matter or supplying tanks, trucks and fully equipped Soldiers. It is also ensuring those Soldiers have and become the leaders the Army desires and the nation deserves....Dempsey said, "What you want to learn is if there is something we could have, should have, done along the way in their development." Dempsey said he would not "accept the notion that there are simply bad apples out there" and move on. Instead, he has a plan to remove the bad apples from the barrel of command."
I have mentioned this many times before. How do we determine when and how someone becomes a bad leader? And if they were 'bad apples', how did they get to be that successful in the first place? What were they presenting to the world that mislead it into believing that they possessed the desirable qualities of leadership, when the baseline behaviors were so far off track? By bad, I'm not necessarily talking about technical competence either. That is important to the overall success of a leader, but ultimately it is not the critical component in this day and age. We have too many specialized positions with highly technical requirements to demand that every leader be able to do every task that every one of their Soldiers can. It's simply impossible to expect that. What is critical however, is that leaders speak the truth to their Soldiers. Their truth. What they know and believe to be true. What they hold dear and value. What their narrative is. This component is actually more important in a technically advanced age than any other skill set development.
What is your truth? Do you know? Have you ever considered the question? I can tell you that since starting my own search, I have uncovered a lot of things that I didn't know existed before and some of them have been hard to look at. Ultimately though, they are valuable. They will make me a better leader. Why? Because once you strip away the artifice and layers of survival skills and pretense that we all walk around with to one degree or another, and find a more clear picture of yourself - your strengths, weaknesses, passions, idiosyncrasies etc, then your truth become more real. Your narrative more complete. And that is the person and leader who inspires people. Your leadership is enhanced as you become more self-aware and less worried about hiding so much of yourself from the world.
General Dempsey is challenging the leader development paradigm in the Army. He initiated the year long look at our institutional ethic - what it means to be a professional Soldier in the United States Army. He was right after a decade at war to do so. A lot has changed in the world and the Army since 9/11. If you boiled that Army-wide study down to each Army leader however, what we all need to do is take a hard, uncompromising look at ourselves and find out what it means to be a leader of truth, character and vision. Are we speaking the truth about ourselves to our subordinates? Is our narrative clear and strong? Are we hiding or embracing our selves? These are important questions to consider. They are also something very few do, and most, at some point, pay a high cost for. I certainly did. Now, however, I have been given the opportunity to look at myself from another vantage point and I am grateful for the opportunity. What the Army can do for all of it's leaders is demand that each of them spend most of their development time focusing on themselves. The understandings they gain will provide them a much greater and easier way to ensure that those they hope to lead and inspire have a clear understanding of their truth. That, after all is why we lead. To provide purpose, direction, and motivation. In times of great danger or difficulty, it will not be the technical ability of the leader who inspires the Soldier. It will the real faith the Soldier has in who the leader truly is.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
I have spent a lot of time in the last few posts on some much more personal aspects of my journey toward self awareness. How I got to this point in my life, the influences that impacted and formed me - both in the Army and out - and my desire to understand them in such a way that I am ultimately made a better leader and person. While parts of my journey are very personal, I have thankfully found someone who is willing to help me do the hard work required to gain a more complete understanding of who I am. The idea of being willing to take this journey however, should be universal to every Army officer and NCO. Everyone who calls themselves a leader should want to take a hard look at themselves and their influences every now and again, to ensure that they have a clear understanding of who they are and why. To find someone who will question your baseline assumptions and not settle for easy answers. Someone who will help you test whether what you think to be true about yourself, is actually so. If we are not made to take a hard look in the mirror it becomes too easy to believe your own bullshit and, sooner or later, we will fail. Not because we want to fail, but because we lack a more informed frame of reference. I believe very strongly that the high profile firings of so many of our senior officers and NCO's in recent months is a direct reflection of a lack of properly balanced self-awareness. In many ways, while what I'm doing right now is a personal inspection, in many ways, it is also for the betterment of those I serve and the Army overall. If we can ensure that the leaders we are developing are true in their narrative, and clear in their understanding of themselves, then the leadership they provide will be more honest and that honesty inspires those both above and beneath them.
If you find this line of thinking to be a little foreign or strange or uncomfortable, consider the following: In the cover story of The Army Times dated April 25th is an interview with the new Chief of Staff, General Dempsey. Below is part of that story:
"Dempsey acknowledged that building the nation's Army is not simply a matter or supplying tanks, trucks and fully equipped Soldiers. It is also ensuring those Soldiers have and become the leaders the Army desires and the nation deserves....Dempsey said, "What you want to learn is if there is something we could have, should have, done along the way in their development." Dempsey said he would not "accept the notion that there are simply bad apples out there" and move on. Instead, he has a plan to remove the bad apples from the barrel of command."
I have mentioned this many times before. How do we determine when and how someone becomes a bad leader? And if they were 'bad apples', how did they get to be that successful in the first place? What were they presenting to the world that mislead it into believing that they possessed the desirable qualities of leadership, when the baseline behaviors were so far off track? By bad, I'm not necessarily talking about technical competence either. That is important to the overall success of a leader, but ultimately it is not the critical component in this day and age. We have too many specialized positions with highly technical requirements to demand that every leader be able to do every task that every one of their Soldiers can. It's simply impossible to expect that. What is critical however, is that leaders speak the truth to their Soldiers. Their truth. What they know and believe to be true. What they hold dear and value. What their narrative is. This component is actually more important in a technically advanced age than any other skill set development.
What is your truth? Do you know? Have you ever considered the question? I can tell you that since starting my own search, I have uncovered a lot of things that I didn't know existed before and some of them have been hard to look at. Ultimately though, they are valuable. They will make me a better leader. Why? Because once you strip away the artifice and layers of survival skills and pretense that we all walk around with to one degree or another, and find a more clear picture of yourself - your strengths, weaknesses, passions, idiosyncrasies etc, then your truth become more real. Your narrative more complete. And that is the person and leader who inspires people. Your leadership is enhanced as you become more self-aware and less worried about hiding so much of yourself from the world.
General Dempsey is challenging the leader development paradigm in the Army. He initiated the year long look at our institutional ethic - what it means to be a professional Soldier in the United States Army. He was right after a decade at war to do so. A lot has changed in the world and the Army since 9/11. If you boiled that Army-wide study down to each Army leader however, what we all need to do is take a hard, uncompromising look at ourselves and find out what it means to be a leader of truth, character and vision. Are we speaking the truth about ourselves to our subordinates? Is our narrative clear and strong? Are we hiding or embracing our selves? These are important questions to consider. They are also something very few do, and most, at some point, pay a high cost for. I certainly did. Now, however, I have been given the opportunity to look at myself from another vantage point and I am grateful for the opportunity. What the Army can do for all of it's leaders is demand that each of them spend most of their development time focusing on themselves. The understandings they gain will provide them a much greater and easier way to ensure that those they hope to lead and inspire have a clear understanding of their truth. That, after all is why we lead. To provide purpose, direction, and motivation. In times of great danger or difficulty, it will not be the technical ability of the leader who inspires the Soldier. It will the real faith the Soldier has in who the leader truly is.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
#115 The Risk/Trust Nexus
Earlier this week, General Martin Dempsey was installed as the 37th Chief of Staff of the Army, it's top position. The next day he published a document entitled, "Thoughts on Crossing the Line of Departure" and sent it to the force. You can find the link to it here:
http://www.army.mil/-images/2011/04/11/104815/index.html
What struck me about the paper was the last paragraph.
"One other thing you need to know about me. In my 37 years, I've been deployed several times, to several different kinds of conflict. In each case, upon notification to deploy, I was able to requisition nearly everything my unit needed. What I couldn't requisition was Trust, Discipline and Fitness. These qualities have to exist in every unit, and in every Soldier of our Army all of the time. When I come to visit your organization - whether a tactical unit or part of our institutional Army - I'll want to know what you're doing to develop a climate of trust, to ensure the discipline of your Soldiers, and to increase the fitness of the Force."
What are you doing to develop a climate of trust? Interesting question. I think it will be instructive, and somewhat amusing, to watch different levels of command from the individual Soldier all the way through Divisions and Corps try to answer his question. I've got a suspicion that there will be a lot of dancing around at the podium if that one comes up during a briefing....
What does it take to develop a environment of trust? To arrive at a mutual understanding such that the leader and the led both enjoy the same feeling that they have the tools and support to carry out their assigned missions, or to address an emerging challenge? And, important to the discussion, who determines whether or not that climate truly exists?
In his book, "On Becoming a Leader", Warren Bennis had this to say about the role of a leader in developing a trusting organization:
"There are 4 ingredients that leaders have that generate and sustain trust:
1. Constancy - Whatever surprises leaders themselves may face, they don't generate any for the group. Leaders are all of a piece. They stay the course.
2. Congruity - Leaders walk their talk. In true leaders their is no gap between the theories they espouse and the life they practice.
3. Reliability - Leaders are there when it counts; they are ready to support their co-workers in the moments that matter.
4. Integrity - Leaders honor their commitments and promises."
I think these 4 simple ideas are key to developing trusting organizations across the Army. These belong to both the leader and the led equally. First, be constant. Be there. Be engaged and be proactive. See the problems, and provide a rock for your people to lean on when they lose their way. Expect the crisis to arise and prepare yourself mentally and physically for it. Learn to listen to the discordant sounds in your head that alert you to an impending change of course and then prepare your people for it. Second, congruity. Be who and what you say you are. Provide your people a faith that what they see is what they get, not a caricature of something acting in a way that does not ring true. Third, reliability is key. people need to believe that others genuinely care about them, and that that care is returned in a manner that they can recognize. Without that feedback mechanism, there is no way for either side to know, without a doubt, that the other is acting on their best behalf. If, a person half-steps in his or her personal commitment to someone then the entire trust system breaks down. Finally, Integrity - Hand in hand with reliability, integrity is people's spoken and unspoken commitment to others and the organization. If every level of the Army can actively demonstrate those 4 qualities, I believe that the entire organization will certainly be able to live up to General Dempsey's mandate that we become an institution of trust.
The missing key here though is the element of risk. A leader must have a vision for the Soldier and the organization. That vision may be markedly different from the Soldier's understanding of their present circumstance. So the two are very far apart in the beginning. The job of the leader is to close that understanding gap. The risk for the Soldier is believing in something outside of their understanding of the current environment. Things have to be done by the leader to demonstrate that their vision (narrative) is more accurate or correct for the Soldier than the Soldier's is. That Soldier is risking his/her narrative against a new one. I think it is imperative that leaders understand and respect that.
There is risk for the leader as well. If they offer a narrative that is too widely divergent from the Soldier's narrative, they risk that the Soldier cannot accept it at all and rejects it summarily. If the leader does not have a method of bridging that gap, then it won't matter if their narrative is correct. The Soldier has no way of hearing it, or seeing how to achieve it. It is incumbent upon the leader to recognize when that happens. The possibility is that the two groups remain apart and actually start to drift further than they started. This is the worst possible scenario and often leads to the toxic environments that plague a lot of units today.
So small steps are taken by both sides. The leader says, "Follow me." The led says, "OK." This is risk 1 for both. But both sides are holding out something. The leader may want to run down a particular road because they know it is best. However, they may need to let the led go down another road first for no other reason than to learn that it is not the right one. This is trust 1 from the leader. That the led will reach the end of that road and be able to recognize that they went the wrong way. The leader has to take small steps to demonstrate Bennis's four ingredients in ways that resonate with the led. This is risk 2. This has to happen because, in the beginning, it is the led's determination of whether or not the leader's vision will work, or had value that will advance the trust or stop it cold. This step is taken without knowing the outcome in advance. This is the risk/trust nexus. Where the two come together. The leader will not advance the narrative without the led buying in, and the led will not buy in unless the leader possesses something that provides them a belief that their 'buy-in' is in their best interest. This is a true test of leadership versus management. Managers - and a lot of Army 'leaders' are actually managers - impose systems to implement vision. Leaders gain the willful acceptance of their vision from subordinates. One is system driven, one is human driven. Both have a place in the Army, but they are not the same and we do a disservice to the entire organization when we mix them together.
The nexus of risk and trust is the center of the leader universe. You cannot have one without the other. And risk, how much, when and where, is the real starting point for any discussion involving trust.
So who sets this tone? Who sets the wheels of risk and trust in motion to advance a vision or narrative? Honestly, I think there is equal opportunity on both sides of the equation. I think the Army and most large institutions believe that they often control both of these in moving the narrative forward, but in reality, both the leader and the led have responsibilities in the dialogue that will not work if one side or the other owns the entire process. The leader has to have a vision to share. The led have to be willing to look for opportunity in it. The leader determines how the narrative will play out. The led have to provide feedback when they cannot see the steps. The led have to have faith in the leader's narrative. The leader has to gain that faith. The led had to be willing to risk the status quo. The leader has to value their risk.
Ultimately, the risk/trust nexus is a dance between two equal partners. Trust cannot dance by itself. Nor can risk. As the Army drives forward under General Dempsey's hand, it will be interesting to see how this dance of risk and trust plays out. Right now, the leader has set a new narrative in place. It is up to us the led, the take the leap of faith required, to take some risk that our narrative might need to be updated. With mutual respect for the leader, the led and the institution, this is possible. Without it, the Army will stagnate in it's current methods of thinking.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
http://www.army.mil/-images/2011/04/11/104815/index.html
What struck me about the paper was the last paragraph.
"One other thing you need to know about me. In my 37 years, I've been deployed several times, to several different kinds of conflict. In each case, upon notification to deploy, I was able to requisition nearly everything my unit needed. What I couldn't requisition was Trust, Discipline and Fitness. These qualities have to exist in every unit, and in every Soldier of our Army all of the time. When I come to visit your organization - whether a tactical unit or part of our institutional Army - I'll want to know what you're doing to develop a climate of trust, to ensure the discipline of your Soldiers, and to increase the fitness of the Force."
What are you doing to develop a climate of trust? Interesting question. I think it will be instructive, and somewhat amusing, to watch different levels of command from the individual Soldier all the way through Divisions and Corps try to answer his question. I've got a suspicion that there will be a lot of dancing around at the podium if that one comes up during a briefing....
What does it take to develop a environment of trust? To arrive at a mutual understanding such that the leader and the led both enjoy the same feeling that they have the tools and support to carry out their assigned missions, or to address an emerging challenge? And, important to the discussion, who determines whether or not that climate truly exists?
In his book, "On Becoming a Leader", Warren Bennis had this to say about the role of a leader in developing a trusting organization:
"There are 4 ingredients that leaders have that generate and sustain trust:
1. Constancy - Whatever surprises leaders themselves may face, they don't generate any for the group. Leaders are all of a piece. They stay the course.
2. Congruity - Leaders walk their talk. In true leaders their is no gap between the theories they espouse and the life they practice.
3. Reliability - Leaders are there when it counts; they are ready to support their co-workers in the moments that matter.
4. Integrity - Leaders honor their commitments and promises."
I think these 4 simple ideas are key to developing trusting organizations across the Army. These belong to both the leader and the led equally. First, be constant. Be there. Be engaged and be proactive. See the problems, and provide a rock for your people to lean on when they lose their way. Expect the crisis to arise and prepare yourself mentally and physically for it. Learn to listen to the discordant sounds in your head that alert you to an impending change of course and then prepare your people for it. Second, congruity. Be who and what you say you are. Provide your people a faith that what they see is what they get, not a caricature of something acting in a way that does not ring true. Third, reliability is key. people need to believe that others genuinely care about them, and that that care is returned in a manner that they can recognize. Without that feedback mechanism, there is no way for either side to know, without a doubt, that the other is acting on their best behalf. If, a person half-steps in his or her personal commitment to someone then the entire trust system breaks down. Finally, Integrity - Hand in hand with reliability, integrity is people's spoken and unspoken commitment to others and the organization. If every level of the Army can actively demonstrate those 4 qualities, I believe that the entire organization will certainly be able to live up to General Dempsey's mandate that we become an institution of trust.
The missing key here though is the element of risk. A leader must have a vision for the Soldier and the organization. That vision may be markedly different from the Soldier's understanding of their present circumstance. So the two are very far apart in the beginning. The job of the leader is to close that understanding gap. The risk for the Soldier is believing in something outside of their understanding of the current environment. Things have to be done by the leader to demonstrate that their vision (narrative) is more accurate or correct for the Soldier than the Soldier's is. That Soldier is risking his/her narrative against a new one. I think it is imperative that leaders understand and respect that.
There is risk for the leader as well. If they offer a narrative that is too widely divergent from the Soldier's narrative, they risk that the Soldier cannot accept it at all and rejects it summarily. If the leader does not have a method of bridging that gap, then it won't matter if their narrative is correct. The Soldier has no way of hearing it, or seeing how to achieve it. It is incumbent upon the leader to recognize when that happens. The possibility is that the two groups remain apart and actually start to drift further than they started. This is the worst possible scenario and often leads to the toxic environments that plague a lot of units today.
So small steps are taken by both sides. The leader says, "Follow me." The led says, "OK." This is risk 1 for both. But both sides are holding out something. The leader may want to run down a particular road because they know it is best. However, they may need to let the led go down another road first for no other reason than to learn that it is not the right one. This is trust 1 from the leader. That the led will reach the end of that road and be able to recognize that they went the wrong way. The leader has to take small steps to demonstrate Bennis's four ingredients in ways that resonate with the led. This is risk 2. This has to happen because, in the beginning, it is the led's determination of whether or not the leader's vision will work, or had value that will advance the trust or stop it cold. This step is taken without knowing the outcome in advance. This is the risk/trust nexus. Where the two come together. The leader will not advance the narrative without the led buying in, and the led will not buy in unless the leader possesses something that provides them a belief that their 'buy-in' is in their best interest. This is a true test of leadership versus management. Managers - and a lot of Army 'leaders' are actually managers - impose systems to implement vision. Leaders gain the willful acceptance of their vision from subordinates. One is system driven, one is human driven. Both have a place in the Army, but they are not the same and we do a disservice to the entire organization when we mix them together.
The nexus of risk and trust is the center of the leader universe. You cannot have one without the other. And risk, how much, when and where, is the real starting point for any discussion involving trust.
So who sets this tone? Who sets the wheels of risk and trust in motion to advance a vision or narrative? Honestly, I think there is equal opportunity on both sides of the equation. I think the Army and most large institutions believe that they often control both of these in moving the narrative forward, but in reality, both the leader and the led have responsibilities in the dialogue that will not work if one side or the other owns the entire process. The leader has to have a vision to share. The led have to be willing to look for opportunity in it. The leader determines how the narrative will play out. The led have to provide feedback when they cannot see the steps. The led have to have faith in the leader's narrative. The leader has to gain that faith. The led had to be willing to risk the status quo. The leader has to value their risk.
Ultimately, the risk/trust nexus is a dance between two equal partners. Trust cannot dance by itself. Nor can risk. As the Army drives forward under General Dempsey's hand, it will be interesting to see how this dance of risk and trust plays out. Right now, the leader has set a new narrative in place. It is up to us the led, the take the leap of faith required, to take some risk that our narrative might need to be updated. With mutual respect for the leader, the led and the institution, this is possible. Without it, the Army will stagnate in it's current methods of thinking.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
#114 Learning From Hamlet
"There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so."
- William Shakespeare
At various times throughout throughout my writing, I have talked about Boyd's second O in the OODA Cycle, Orientation. I have made the claim over and over that Orientation is the critical step to gaining insight into how people view their world, and that how they view their world has a direct effect on how they lead others. I have talked about it in terms of filters. We all have filters that we use to navigate our environment and those filters are particular to every one of us. Therefore, no two people can have the exact same understanding of something even if they were standing side-by-side staring at it. There are a lot of things that can happen in that filtering/orienting gap.
This has always seemed to me to be a key understanding in leadership - and one that we totally overlook in training. A leader needs to have an awareness about why they see their world the way they do, and they need to understand that others - subordinates or superiors - cannot and likely will not view it the same way. Not in the beginning at least. The job of the leader is to bring those disparate understandings together in order to accomplish the assigned mission.
The past week has been a personally challenging one for me and I have learned a lot about myself in an extremely short period of time. I am starting to become very aware of the power of the filters in my own life. And while some of this discovery is difficult, ultimately it will enhance me both personally and professionally. Some of my journey is intensely private and will not appear here because it does not belong here. There are parts however that do belong - especially with regard to how we train leaders in the Army.
A friend of mine, reacting to last weeks post, introduced me to two behavioral concepts that have direct bearing on this discussion both personally and professionally. The first is called Irrational Thinking - a set of defense mechanism filters that affect future decisions, and the second is a school of thought and therapeutic technique called Rational Emotional Behavior Therapy (REBT). Together they form a powerful set of self-awareness and leader awareness tools.
Irrational Thinking is something we all do to one degree or another and generally has it's origins in some form of fatalistic, permanent, and stationary idea about people, events, or things that affect our lives. It is a natural occurrence. Something negative happens and we form a defense against it. If this, then that. If something bad happens to me, and it is painful, then I start dropping filters in place to protect myself from its pain if/when it shows up again. Another option is found in the fear that if I do not accomplish this task to perfection then XYZ will be the outcome. And that outcome is bad, is permanent and will define me forever. There are multiple sub-categories of Irrational Thinking which I highlighted below. Personally, all that matters for this conversation is that once armed with the knowledge of Irrational Thinking's existence and beginning to see how it acts to filter my world, things started to become a lot more clear. My long struggle to come to grips with Black Hearts is largely a text book case study in Irrational Thinking.
The second concept is Rational Emotional Behavior Therapy (REBT). Leaving the therapy part alone for a minute and concentrating only on the school of thought portion consider the following from Wikipedia:
"One of the fundamental premises of REBT is that humans, in most cases, do not merely get upset by unfortunate adversities, but also by how they construct their views of reality through their language, evaluative beliefs, meanings and philosophies about the world, themselves and others. In REBT, clients usually learn and begin to apply this premise by learning the A-B-C-model of psychological disturbance and change. The A-B-C model states that it normally is not merely an A, adversity (or activating event) that contributes to disturbed and dysfunctional emotional and behavioral Cs, consequences, but also what people B, believe about the A, adversity. A, adversity can be either an external situation or a thought or other kind of internal event, and it can refer to an event in the past, present, or future."
To put it plainly, REBT accepts that every time something happens (a triggering event) it is not only the act that matters. In fact, the act is neutral until assigned a value by the individual (Hamlet's quotation above). The resulting Orientation is the outcome of the Act as effected by the Value assigned.
REBT also accepts that emotion, reason, and action are not separate boxes within us, but all are mixed together in varying degrees and that they constantly interact with each other to create new understandings of our reality and environment.
While this all might sound really complicated so far, bear with it for a moment....
I am deployed and attacked by a civilian. They might be an insurgent. But I cannot know that for sure. All I know is that they do not wear a uniform. The attack produces fear and anger. The fear and anger lead to hatred. Hatred leads to the over-generalization that all civilians are evil. The over-generalization leads to there only being one train of thought that I allow myself when viewing civilians on the battlefield (i.e.that all civilians want to do me harm). If the attack itself is the trigger, how does it directly lead to an absolute Orientation that all civilians are evil? The reality is that is doesn't. What does allow that to happen are the intermediate emotions of fear and anger that get between the act and the outcome. If we taught leaders to recognize that pattern in themselves and others, then the Orientation (how they filter the problem) changes.
Why does all this matter? Consider for a second what could happen if we taught REBT in leader development schools, not as a post deployment therapy technique (although there would are benefits to that as well), but rather as a 'how' to think method for leader development. If we could show people that the emotions that drive many of their actions are helping to predetermine and influence some outcomes, then we might be able to mitigate both negative Soldier actions, and emotional trauma that many Soldiers are face upon returning home. Conversely, their positively based emotions can be used to increase Soldier resiliency both predeployment and during it when they are confronted with the vagaries of war.
An example: Was it rational to believe in 2001 that all Iraqis would automatically greet us as liberators and harbingers of freedom? That they would patiently wait for the new life that everybody said would follow with the removal of Saddam Hussein? No. It wasn't. However, since we did not approach the situation rationally, and then placed our behavioral filters in between the action and the outcome, what happened? When the outcome was incongruent with the action, we had no way to reorient ourselves and that led to other behaviors that influenced the war significantly from 2003 - 2007.
Personally, while my introduction to REBT is new, and I don't yet have a full understanding of it in practice, it seems instinctual to me that it helps inform and flesh out the Orientation portion of the OODA cycle. As Boyd pointed out, one's Orientation to a situation is critical to success or failure. It has to be gotten right and whoever can do that fastest will get to the Act portion more quickly and begin to effect the enemy before they can react. What slows people down in OODA is having to sort through all the filters, and find a common language to work from. REBT is a method of doing that.
The largest single thought process that works against REBT however, is probably Irrational Thought. In a document I was sent, some of the ways that Irrational Thought works are as follows:
Catastrophic Thinking - Blowing negative events or feelings way out of proportion.
Black and White Thinking - Viewing everything in terms of absolutes.
Magnifying the Negative - Dwelling on the negative impacts of something and making it seem much larger than the positive.
Overgeneralizing - Assuming that something that happened at one time or in one situation will continue to happen in all places and all situations.
Personalizing - Assuming the blame for something you might have influenced but was not totally under your control.
If you take the Irrational Thoughts statements above and let them go unabated, you will eventually run into almost every Soldier and leader issue we have faced for the last decade. However, if we as an institution were to teach and apply REBT principles in the school house and in the operational force, we would then have a method of counter-acting the negative influence of Irrational Thought and focus people more completely on the common language of the mission and commander's intent.
My recognition of how Irrational Thought has effected me for the last 5 years has been profound. The introduction to REBT as a thought generating process has left me with hope that I now have a method of orienting myself correctly to any situation that might arise. While the personal process is slow and painful right now, it holds promise as both a way to recover in a post-deployment setting and as a thought mechanism we can introduce to the schoolhouses to increase leader and Soldier self-awareness.
In the decentralized world of Army operations and instant communications that we live in, the actions of one individual can often have large consequences very quickly. If we had a method of helping leaders and Soldiers to stay more correctly, more rationally, oriented I wonder if some of the more negative actions might possibly have been avoided?
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
- William Shakespeare
At various times throughout throughout my writing, I have talked about Boyd's second O in the OODA Cycle, Orientation. I have made the claim over and over that Orientation is the critical step to gaining insight into how people view their world, and that how they view their world has a direct effect on how they lead others. I have talked about it in terms of filters. We all have filters that we use to navigate our environment and those filters are particular to every one of us. Therefore, no two people can have the exact same understanding of something even if they were standing side-by-side staring at it. There are a lot of things that can happen in that filtering/orienting gap.
This has always seemed to me to be a key understanding in leadership - and one that we totally overlook in training. A leader needs to have an awareness about why they see their world the way they do, and they need to understand that others - subordinates or superiors - cannot and likely will not view it the same way. Not in the beginning at least. The job of the leader is to bring those disparate understandings together in order to accomplish the assigned mission.
The past week has been a personally challenging one for me and I have learned a lot about myself in an extremely short period of time. I am starting to become very aware of the power of the filters in my own life. And while some of this discovery is difficult, ultimately it will enhance me both personally and professionally. Some of my journey is intensely private and will not appear here because it does not belong here. There are parts however that do belong - especially with regard to how we train leaders in the Army.
A friend of mine, reacting to last weeks post, introduced me to two behavioral concepts that have direct bearing on this discussion both personally and professionally. The first is called Irrational Thinking - a set of defense mechanism filters that affect future decisions, and the second is a school of thought and therapeutic technique called Rational Emotional Behavior Therapy (REBT). Together they form a powerful set of self-awareness and leader awareness tools.
Irrational Thinking is something we all do to one degree or another and generally has it's origins in some form of fatalistic, permanent, and stationary idea about people, events, or things that affect our lives. It is a natural occurrence. Something negative happens and we form a defense against it. If this, then that. If something bad happens to me, and it is painful, then I start dropping filters in place to protect myself from its pain if/when it shows up again. Another option is found in the fear that if I do not accomplish this task to perfection then XYZ will be the outcome. And that outcome is bad, is permanent and will define me forever. There are multiple sub-categories of Irrational Thinking which I highlighted below. Personally, all that matters for this conversation is that once armed with the knowledge of Irrational Thinking's existence and beginning to see how it acts to filter my world, things started to become a lot more clear. My long struggle to come to grips with Black Hearts is largely a text book case study in Irrational Thinking.
The second concept is Rational Emotional Behavior Therapy (REBT). Leaving the therapy part alone for a minute and concentrating only on the school of thought portion consider the following from Wikipedia:
"One of the fundamental premises of REBT is that humans, in most cases, do not merely get upset by unfortunate adversities, but also by how they construct their views of reality through their language, evaluative beliefs, meanings and philosophies about the world, themselves and others. In REBT, clients usually learn and begin to apply this premise by learning the A-B-C-model of psychological disturbance and change. The A-B-C model states that it normally is not merely an A, adversity (or activating event) that contributes to disturbed and dysfunctional emotional and behavioral Cs, consequences, but also what people B, believe about the A, adversity. A, adversity can be either an external situation or a thought or other kind of internal event, and it can refer to an event in the past, present, or future."
To put it plainly, REBT accepts that every time something happens (a triggering event) it is not only the act that matters. In fact, the act is neutral until assigned a value by the individual (Hamlet's quotation above). The resulting Orientation is the outcome of the Act as effected by the Value assigned.
REBT also accepts that emotion, reason, and action are not separate boxes within us, but all are mixed together in varying degrees and that they constantly interact with each other to create new understandings of our reality and environment.
While this all might sound really complicated so far, bear with it for a moment....
I am deployed and attacked by a civilian. They might be an insurgent. But I cannot know that for sure. All I know is that they do not wear a uniform. The attack produces fear and anger. The fear and anger lead to hatred. Hatred leads to the over-generalization that all civilians are evil. The over-generalization leads to there only being one train of thought that I allow myself when viewing civilians on the battlefield (i.e.that all civilians want to do me harm). If the attack itself is the trigger, how does it directly lead to an absolute Orientation that all civilians are evil? The reality is that is doesn't. What does allow that to happen are the intermediate emotions of fear and anger that get between the act and the outcome. If we taught leaders to recognize that pattern in themselves and others, then the Orientation (how they filter the problem) changes.
Why does all this matter? Consider for a second what could happen if we taught REBT in leader development schools, not as a post deployment therapy technique (although there would are benefits to that as well), but rather as a 'how' to think method for leader development. If we could show people that the emotions that drive many of their actions are helping to predetermine and influence some outcomes, then we might be able to mitigate both negative Soldier actions, and emotional trauma that many Soldiers are face upon returning home. Conversely, their positively based emotions can be used to increase Soldier resiliency both predeployment and during it when they are confronted with the vagaries of war.
An example: Was it rational to believe in 2001 that all Iraqis would automatically greet us as liberators and harbingers of freedom? That they would patiently wait for the new life that everybody said would follow with the removal of Saddam Hussein? No. It wasn't. However, since we did not approach the situation rationally, and then placed our behavioral filters in between the action and the outcome, what happened? When the outcome was incongruent with the action, we had no way to reorient ourselves and that led to other behaviors that influenced the war significantly from 2003 - 2007.
Personally, while my introduction to REBT is new, and I don't yet have a full understanding of it in practice, it seems instinctual to me that it helps inform and flesh out the Orientation portion of the OODA cycle. As Boyd pointed out, one's Orientation to a situation is critical to success or failure. It has to be gotten right and whoever can do that fastest will get to the Act portion more quickly and begin to effect the enemy before they can react. What slows people down in OODA is having to sort through all the filters, and find a common language to work from. REBT is a method of doing that.
The largest single thought process that works against REBT however, is probably Irrational Thought. In a document I was sent, some of the ways that Irrational Thought works are as follows:
Catastrophic Thinking - Blowing negative events or feelings way out of proportion.
Black and White Thinking - Viewing everything in terms of absolutes.
Magnifying the Negative - Dwelling on the negative impacts of something and making it seem much larger than the positive.
Overgeneralizing - Assuming that something that happened at one time or in one situation will continue to happen in all places and all situations.
Personalizing - Assuming the blame for something you might have influenced but was not totally under your control.
If you take the Irrational Thoughts statements above and let them go unabated, you will eventually run into almost every Soldier and leader issue we have faced for the last decade. However, if we as an institution were to teach and apply REBT principles in the school house and in the operational force, we would then have a method of counter-acting the negative influence of Irrational Thought and focus people more completely on the common language of the mission and commander's intent.
My recognition of how Irrational Thought has effected me for the last 5 years has been profound. The introduction to REBT as a thought generating process has left me with hope that I now have a method of orienting myself correctly to any situation that might arise. While the personal process is slow and painful right now, it holds promise as both a way to recover in a post-deployment setting and as a thought mechanism we can introduce to the schoolhouses to increase leader and Soldier self-awareness.
In the decentralized world of Army operations and instant communications that we live in, the actions of one individual can often have large consequences very quickly. If we had a method of helping leaders and Soldiers to stay more correctly, more rationally, oriented I wonder if some of the more negative actions might possibly have been avoided?
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
#113 The Invincibility Myth
I was talking to a friend of mine this week and she asked me what I felt had fundamentally changed about me over the last five years since the Black Hearts events took place. She asked me to identify those things that I was absolutely sure of and those things I was not. Had my core values or beliefs changed? Had my sense of self identification changed or am I still the same person I was - in terms of values and orientation - that I was earlier in my career?
On the surface, the answer to these seems pretty simple. Of course I'm different than I was 5 years ago. Everyone is. Nobody can retain exactly the same orientation that they possessed at a different period in their life. Especially in extremely difficult circumstances such as those were. But it's really not quite that easy. If your baseline values haven't changed, and your belief in who and what you are haven't changed, and your sense of right and wrong haven't changed, then fundamentally are you different today than you were 5, 10 or 15 years ago? And if so, why? The following is part of a chat exchange we shared. I think it's very relevant to the theme of today's post.
Her: "When there is a leadership failure, it is either a failure of competence or character."
Me: "For me, one could make the argument that it could be a competence failure, but not character. I guarantee that. I'm not perfect and have done things I regret, but my character is pretty much the only thing that has survived a lot of these last years."
Her: "Complete pride, impeccable character, questionable competence?"
Me: "Fair enough."
Her: "So that's where the doubt actually is. Not swept away by the pandemonium of the crowd, but that there were some actual missteps.."
Me: "No. There was no doubt then. The doubt now is unjustified (I am aware of that, just can't stop it) because I could not have known then what I know now."
Her: "Ok. So the failure of competence can only be seen through reflection?"
Me: "Yes. You can only know what you got right or wrong once the result is known. You go into something believing that you are doing X to achieve Y. Only after you do it can you see your actions clearly."
Her: "Should you have known those things at the time? Would a group of your peers with comparable training and experience have made similar decisions?"
Me: "Probably. But the circumstances were almost so unique that there is really nothing to compare it to. That probably applies to part two of your question."
Her: "I'm just going after what parts you're absolutely sure about, and what parts feel not as solid."
Me: "I'm sure that I made right and sound tactical decisions. I'm sure that had the rape/murder not happened the rehabilitation of that platoon would have happened on my watch. I'm sure that the enemy got a vote on one occasion prompted by the actions of a few people that never allowed that chance to happen."
To me, the key part of that exchange is the statement, "There was no doubt then."
In early 2005 I was invincible. I had absolute faith in myself and my ability to be successful in the Army. I truly believed that I knew how to lead Soldiers and that my entire decision making process was correct every time, all the time. That may be arrogant, but that arrogance was honestly come by. The Army created it. It planted a seed through promotion, opportunity and schooling, nursed it through its' infancy and watched it grow into adulthood. And it kept validating it every step of the way. Graducation from this school means you are in the top 10% of all infantrymen. Getting inducted into that club places you in the top 5% of all Noncommissioned Officers. Being selected for promotion earlier than your peers means that you are more competent than they are based upon the Army's criteria for excellence. It is a reaffirming system. It is a concrete reality reflected by awards, certificates, and tangible things to hang on a wall that reflect back to you your sense of complete understanding of your world. It's what allows you to believe your own bullshit and it is very difficult to get anyone - especially yourself - to look beyond it and see if there is something more.
This invincibility myth pervades the entire Army culture and has an amazing power to shape how we think, act and behave. It helps write our doctrine, inform the way we communicate and even molds our response mechanisms. In many ways, we have become a prisoner of our own invention. We have an ethic of service characterized by complete devotion to the Army's needs (which we sell as the Nation's needs - just wondering if the Nation knows how many Power Point slides it creates each day!). Those we serve are led to believe that we have an answer for every question, a solution to every problem, and our solutions and answers will be correct every single time. We are the Army and we do not make mistakes, and we do not fail. Why? Because we have systems in place to prevent failure, we have the best leader development system the world can produce, and we are so dedicated to getting it right that we can continually work on a problem until it is solved. We will never quit. We endure. We redouble our efforts. We are Supermen. We are invincible. And you, the early promoted, well decorated, oft-awarded young man or woman, you are the best of the best. Stick with us kid and you'll go far.
It's a myth. And when the world you thought to be made of concrete turns out to be only so much smoke and mirrors, the results can be devastating. For the past 5 years, I have been slowly trying to make my way back to finding those things that I am sure of. Slowly trying to stake down what I know to be absolutely true about me, versus those things that were falsely created by my inability to properly orient to my surroundings. The price to be paid for me believing my own bullshit.
After 2006, once all labels were in place -that I was a leadership failure, responsible for getting people needlessly killed etc, a new reality started to get formed. And just like the previous one based on invincibility, this new one, built on indecision, fear, and paranoia took hold and gained its' own momentum and became a new self-definition. In fact, it is no more real than the previous model, but it's root system runs just as deep and - in many ways - is much more difficult to break hold of precisely because the invincibility model is so pervasive throughout our culture.
The Army speaks a lot about self-awareness. Everywhere you turn, you'll find people saying that good, successful leaders are self-aware. That they understand who they are. That they possess a solid moral/ethical/behavioral ethic that is unshakeable. This is the message that gets sent over and over:
You came to us with a set of values. We (the Army) molded you, trained you, rewarded you, and developed you. We have co-opted your values (mostly without you knowing it happened) and slowly replaced them with our own until you are a walking, talking example of invincibility in action. But please don't look too far beneath that paper thin veneer of invincibility we have so carefully constructed. Don't ask yourself the really hard questions about your character, your true strengths and weaknesses, your true, personally immutable, value system. Don't pay any attention to your own doubts. And please don't listen to them as warning signs. Please don't do that. Because if you do, you might find out that our carefully crafted system is a house of cards and that we need it to be that way in order to ensure that when you screw up we can easily re-label you and protect ourselves at the same time.
If we truly want to inform and influence the leader development discussion, a lot more focus will have to go into getting people to know who they are - those baseline things that cannot be surrendered at any point, for anyone, under any circumstances. While the answers to those questions will be different for each of us (another thing the institution doesn't like) ultimately, they will provide the Army with stronger leaders. People who's character and leadership style is formed not by the fake concrete of the current system, but by an unshakeable faith in their understanding of who they are. The only problem with this is that we often cannot find our true selves until a crisis unfolds. And in the middle of a crisis is not the time to discover weaknesses and cracks in the invincibility armor.
People lead and follow other people. For better or for worse. From Mother Theresa to Adolf Hitler, people follow others all along the spectrum. And what often attracts them to that person is the unshakeable sense they possess in the rightness of the cause and their ability to provide a purpose and a method to achieve it.
When we started talking, my friend said that it seemed as if I had shackled myself to the events of 2005-2006 and that I needed to put down that weight. She is correct. Although I cannot always see it clearly - nor do I possess the ability to completely disentangle myself from it right now, the failure myth is as equally powerful as the success myth. We all should be careful to become trapped by one or the other. That is exactly what happened to me. I share it with you in the sincere hope that you never have to suffer to learn that lesson. I'm not sure if that is possible since it is only in the crucible of a difficult challenge that some revelations are made clear, but I do want to try. If not to protect you from harm or tough times, then only to ensure that you have thought enough about who and what you are, that you can face them with a calm assurance that you have the tools you need to withstand them.
Slowly, I am putting the Black Hearts saga down. I can no longer only define myself by that one period. My life is a totality of many events, of which that is only one. An important one to be sure, but only one. And while that may be obvious to you, let me tell you that it came as somewhat of a surprise to me. Because of the success of my early career and the events and aftermath of that time, I have let the Army define me twice. Maybe the time has come to figure out how I define me. I'll probably need some help because the root systems are so strong, but neither the invincibility self-definition nor the failure self-definition are correct. The are both myths. I'm beginning to see that clearly now and the road ahead suddenly seems a lot more bright.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
On the surface, the answer to these seems pretty simple. Of course I'm different than I was 5 years ago. Everyone is. Nobody can retain exactly the same orientation that they possessed at a different period in their life. Especially in extremely difficult circumstances such as those were. But it's really not quite that easy. If your baseline values haven't changed, and your belief in who and what you are haven't changed, and your sense of right and wrong haven't changed, then fundamentally are you different today than you were 5, 10 or 15 years ago? And if so, why? The following is part of a chat exchange we shared. I think it's very relevant to the theme of today's post.
Her: "When there is a leadership failure, it is either a failure of competence or character."
Me: "For me, one could make the argument that it could be a competence failure, but not character. I guarantee that. I'm not perfect and have done things I regret, but my character is pretty much the only thing that has survived a lot of these last years."
Her: "Complete pride, impeccable character, questionable competence?"
Me: "Fair enough."
Her: "So that's where the doubt actually is. Not swept away by the pandemonium of the crowd, but that there were some actual missteps.."
Me: "No. There was no doubt then. The doubt now is unjustified (I am aware of that, just can't stop it) because I could not have known then what I know now."
Her: "Ok. So the failure of competence can only be seen through reflection?"
Me: "Yes. You can only know what you got right or wrong once the result is known. You go into something believing that you are doing X to achieve Y. Only after you do it can you see your actions clearly."
Her: "Should you have known those things at the time? Would a group of your peers with comparable training and experience have made similar decisions?"
Me: "Probably. But the circumstances were almost so unique that there is really nothing to compare it to. That probably applies to part two of your question."
Her: "I'm just going after what parts you're absolutely sure about, and what parts feel not as solid."
Me: "I'm sure that I made right and sound tactical decisions. I'm sure that had the rape/murder not happened the rehabilitation of that platoon would have happened on my watch. I'm sure that the enemy got a vote on one occasion prompted by the actions of a few people that never allowed that chance to happen."
To me, the key part of that exchange is the statement, "There was no doubt then."
In early 2005 I was invincible. I had absolute faith in myself and my ability to be successful in the Army. I truly believed that I knew how to lead Soldiers and that my entire decision making process was correct every time, all the time. That may be arrogant, but that arrogance was honestly come by. The Army created it. It planted a seed through promotion, opportunity and schooling, nursed it through its' infancy and watched it grow into adulthood. And it kept validating it every step of the way. Graducation from this school means you are in the top 10% of all infantrymen. Getting inducted into that club places you in the top 5% of all Noncommissioned Officers. Being selected for promotion earlier than your peers means that you are more competent than they are based upon the Army's criteria for excellence. It is a reaffirming system. It is a concrete reality reflected by awards, certificates, and tangible things to hang on a wall that reflect back to you your sense of complete understanding of your world. It's what allows you to believe your own bullshit and it is very difficult to get anyone - especially yourself - to look beyond it and see if there is something more.
This invincibility myth pervades the entire Army culture and has an amazing power to shape how we think, act and behave. It helps write our doctrine, inform the way we communicate and even molds our response mechanisms. In many ways, we have become a prisoner of our own invention. We have an ethic of service characterized by complete devotion to the Army's needs (which we sell as the Nation's needs - just wondering if the Nation knows how many Power Point slides it creates each day!). Those we serve are led to believe that we have an answer for every question, a solution to every problem, and our solutions and answers will be correct every single time. We are the Army and we do not make mistakes, and we do not fail. Why? Because we have systems in place to prevent failure, we have the best leader development system the world can produce, and we are so dedicated to getting it right that we can continually work on a problem until it is solved. We will never quit. We endure. We redouble our efforts. We are Supermen. We are invincible. And you, the early promoted, well decorated, oft-awarded young man or woman, you are the best of the best. Stick with us kid and you'll go far.
It's a myth. And when the world you thought to be made of concrete turns out to be only so much smoke and mirrors, the results can be devastating. For the past 5 years, I have been slowly trying to make my way back to finding those things that I am sure of. Slowly trying to stake down what I know to be absolutely true about me, versus those things that were falsely created by my inability to properly orient to my surroundings. The price to be paid for me believing my own bullshit.
After 2006, once all labels were in place -that I was a leadership failure, responsible for getting people needlessly killed etc, a new reality started to get formed. And just like the previous one based on invincibility, this new one, built on indecision, fear, and paranoia took hold and gained its' own momentum and became a new self-definition. In fact, it is no more real than the previous model, but it's root system runs just as deep and - in many ways - is much more difficult to break hold of precisely because the invincibility model is so pervasive throughout our culture.
The Army speaks a lot about self-awareness. Everywhere you turn, you'll find people saying that good, successful leaders are self-aware. That they understand who they are. That they possess a solid moral/ethical/behavioral ethic that is unshakeable. This is the message that gets sent over and over:
You came to us with a set of values. We (the Army) molded you, trained you, rewarded you, and developed you. We have co-opted your values (mostly without you knowing it happened) and slowly replaced them with our own until you are a walking, talking example of invincibility in action. But please don't look too far beneath that paper thin veneer of invincibility we have so carefully constructed. Don't ask yourself the really hard questions about your character, your true strengths and weaknesses, your true, personally immutable, value system. Don't pay any attention to your own doubts. And please don't listen to them as warning signs. Please don't do that. Because if you do, you might find out that our carefully crafted system is a house of cards and that we need it to be that way in order to ensure that when you screw up we can easily re-label you and protect ourselves at the same time.
If we truly want to inform and influence the leader development discussion, a lot more focus will have to go into getting people to know who they are - those baseline things that cannot be surrendered at any point, for anyone, under any circumstances. While the answers to those questions will be different for each of us (another thing the institution doesn't like) ultimately, they will provide the Army with stronger leaders. People who's character and leadership style is formed not by the fake concrete of the current system, but by an unshakeable faith in their understanding of who they are. The only problem with this is that we often cannot find our true selves until a crisis unfolds. And in the middle of a crisis is not the time to discover weaknesses and cracks in the invincibility armor.
People lead and follow other people. For better or for worse. From Mother Theresa to Adolf Hitler, people follow others all along the spectrum. And what often attracts them to that person is the unshakeable sense they possess in the rightness of the cause and their ability to provide a purpose and a method to achieve it.
When we started talking, my friend said that it seemed as if I had shackled myself to the events of 2005-2006 and that I needed to put down that weight. She is correct. Although I cannot always see it clearly - nor do I possess the ability to completely disentangle myself from it right now, the failure myth is as equally powerful as the success myth. We all should be careful to become trapped by one or the other. That is exactly what happened to me. I share it with you in the sincere hope that you never have to suffer to learn that lesson. I'm not sure if that is possible since it is only in the crucible of a difficult challenge that some revelations are made clear, but I do want to try. If not to protect you from harm or tough times, then only to ensure that you have thought enough about who and what you are, that you can face them with a calm assurance that you have the tools you need to withstand them.
Slowly, I am putting the Black Hearts saga down. I can no longer only define myself by that one period. My life is a totality of many events, of which that is only one. An important one to be sure, but only one. And while that may be obvious to you, let me tell you that it came as somewhat of a surprise to me. Because of the success of my early career and the events and aftermath of that time, I have let the Army define me twice. Maybe the time has come to figure out how I define me. I'll probably need some help because the root systems are so strong, but neither the invincibility self-definition nor the failure self-definition are correct. The are both myths. I'm beginning to see that clearly now and the road ahead suddenly seems a lot more bright.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
#112 The Need for Jacks
A few weeks back there was an article in The Army Times highlighting comments made by the in-coming Army Chief of Staff, General Martin Dempsey. The headline read "Dempsey: Jacks of All Trades Aren't Leaders". You can find the link here:
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2011/02/army-dempsey-on-leadership-022811w/
In the article, General Dempsey is quoted as saying the following:
"The Army does not want soldiers who are jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none", he said.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2011/02/army-dempsey-on-leadership-022811w/
In the article, General Dempsey is quoted as saying the following:
"The Army does not want soldiers who are jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none", he said.
“If we make leaders skilled in a few areas, they’ll have the confidence to adapt when we inevitably get the future wrong,” Dempsey said. “But if you’re not a master of anything, you have no confidence in anything. I’m a passionate believer in that.”
Earlier in the article was the statement that:
"The Army needs to decide which 5 things - not 55 things - it's Soldiers are going to master, the 4-star told the audience at Unified Quest, an annual exercise held at the Booze Hamilton facility in McLean, VA."
Depending upon his actual intent and the scope of those 5 things, I found these statements a little unnerving and extremely threatening to the environment of adaptability and agility that has been painstakingly built over the past 10 years. I can only imagine whole communities throughout the Army jumping up and down with joy as they feel that his remarks validate their particular interpretation of what the purpose of the Army is.
In the bottom portion of the article there is a quote that says the following:
"Over the past nine years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has been mostly focused on one end of the spectrum: lower-intensity, counterinsurgency-type operations. Now with more time at home between deployments, the service wants to improve its other skills. The Army is beginning to conduct “full-spectrum” training exercises that encompass everything from humanitarian assistance to major combat operations. What’s happened, though, is some people have begun to equate this return to full-spectrum operations as a return to preparing for major combat, rather than re-integrating major combat into the Army’s set of skills. It’s clear this frustrates Dempsey. He said doctrine in this area will inform leader development, but it will also shape the kinds of technology and the equipment the Army decides to buy."
After all of that, it's the headline that bothers me the most. "Jacks-of-all-trades aren't Leaders". I looked, and nowhere in the piece is General Dempsey quoted as saying those words. At best they are a liberal interpretation of his intent, and at worst they will send a ripple through the force implying that all of the focus on agility, adaptability and 'how to think' and working outside of one's comfort zone of previous training is only necessary for the counterinsurgency fight we are currently in.
What the Army needs right now more than anything are Jacks-of-all-trades, and I'm struggling to make sense of the quote that mastering 5 things gives one the confidence to adapt when required. If I master a skill - no matter what it is - I will have an overwhelming tendency to see everything else in light of that one skill. If I can shoot better than I can call for fire, then I'll be more apt to shoot than call for fire. Skilled sports players don't spend much time trying to excel at anything other than their sport. And this expertise provides only one frame of reference regarding how people interact with their environment. An armored guy will view terrain one way, and a light guy another. And both are uncomfortable trying to see it from any other perspective. There is a reason that armor guys don't want to be light guys, and light guys don't want to be armor guys. Armor guys are comfortable with tanks and the motorpool and big firepower. Light guys are comfortable with the austere conditions required when you carry everything on your back. Neither side really wants to be like the other. And so each became a master of their little piece of the pie. The job of the senior leader was to bring the 'masters' beneath them together in a coherent manner to address a threat. Over the last decade however, those requirements have changed significantly, everyone became a light infantryman - Armor units, Field Artillery units, everyone. And a politician, and a supply person, and an ambassador. This war has called on every soldier to become all things, all the time. And that has done more good for the Army than many folks want to consider. Everyone has had to learn on the fly and everyone has had to adapt to ever-changing circumstances, and the entire Army has been thrown out of it's comfort zone. All of which has provided the Nation with a military that is certainly more capable today than it was a decade ago. The ability of leaders to think three dimensionally, to see the environment more clearly, and to learn how to make use of all of the tools at their disposal is an absolutely critical skill-set that needs to be maintained and further developed in the years ahead. The ability to think dynamically versus dogmatically is the key ingredient to leadership.
The model of bands of experts with limited knowledge of anything outside their realm is exactly the one that needs to be broken. We need more 'jacks', not less. We need people who can view their conditions from more than one vantage point and bring to bear the right solution, in the right measure, at the right time. That is the type of adaptability and agility that we need to develop throughout the force. We need to open up the Army so that people can experience a wider variety of inputs and stimuli that ultimately enhance their understandings and provide a wider frame of reference to use when confronted by an unanticipated set of circumstances. The confidence General Dempsey spoke of above would be developed by the self-awareness that one possesses the ability to accurately assess and address any situation, not from only one limited viewpoint. Instead of saying, "I am an expert at X or Y", the leader can now say, "I am an expert at viewing the problem and it's potential solutions, quickly making use of whatever is at my disposal to solve it."
Almost by definition, a leader must be a jack-of-all-trades. He or she must possess the technical skills required by their particular craft to be sure, but also must be enough of a generalist to be able to see the forest through the trees. In fact, while it is simple enough to learn the skills associated with most trades (and infantry, armor, or field artillery - basically any branch of the Army could all be considered trades) it is much more complex to learn the human aspects of leadership. How to motivate, how to empathize, how to understand the human conditions affecting those above and below you, how to see yourself clearly enough to understand the effect the environment has on you and how that effects those you interact with. These are the critical understandings we need to develop, and the adaptability and agility that surround them are much more important than most people want to recognize.
For example, two weeks ago, in post #110 I mentioned the loss of one of my former Soldiers who happened to be a woman. It was only one third of the 'inputs' that helped form that weeks post, but it has garnered more than it's share of attention since then. First, one reader suggested that while my support for women in the combat arms trades might be politically laudable or supportable, it might also be extremely naive since we truly do not understand some of the basic human being interactions between men and women and why they act the way they do towards each other. And then yesterday, another person replied to that post with a very powerful story of her experience embedded with an infantry platoon. How she had served among the men, been beaten by the men, been degraded by the men and ultimately how she came to be seen as a peer among the men. How she was aware that if she had reported her attack that she might have reinforced a commonly held belief that women do not belong in the infantry. In the crucible of contact however, her actions garnered her their respect for her gender ceased to matter. A painful and hard fought price to pay.
Let me see if I can bring this together coherently...
I am a light infantryman and have been my whole career. I am comfortable in that world and do not wish to serve in any other part of the Army. I am a master of my craft. Ten years ago however, I was selected to be a Drill Sergeant and chose to serve at Ft. Jackson, SC., the home of the nation's largest Army training post where almost all Soldiers - male and female - complete Basic Combat Training. This was my first interaction on a large scale with female Soldiers. It was a very limited and controlled environment, but it did provide me the opportunity to train, observe, and watch them as they progressed through the 9 week program. What I saw was that women generally went through a much larger growth in BCT than their male counterparts. While men generally improved most significantly in physical ability, women tended to make large strides in both physical and behavioral ways. They often gained much more self-assurance as they found that not only could they push their bodies harder than they believed possible, but they could push their minds harder as well. More often than not, my platoon would end up having a female platoon guide because they would stand out and demonstrate to a higher degree the qualities of leadership we are looking for in our young Soldiers. Opening myself up to that experience was eye-opening for me and I learned a lot from my 2 years there. Three or four years later I was asked to start a Forward Support Company comprised mostly of truck drivers, mechanics, and cooks, another foray into the world outside of the infantryman. It is also a mixed-gender world and my having worked with female Soldiers previously made integrating them into the company a much easier task. That is where I met Crystal Thompson. She was one of my Soldiers from that period.
But where would I be without having had these experiences? What if I had only stayed in my own little male-only world of the infantry? How would I know how capable women are? How would I know how vital all those cooks, mechanics, and truck drivers are? How could I gain a measure of respect for the Soldier separate from the job title if I never spent any time getting to know their world. While I have no doubt that my lack of mastery of how a motorpool operates probably allowed things to happen that shouldn't have, or corners to be cut that I wasn't aware of, I will be forever grateful for the chance to experience a world different from the one I had known for the previous 12 years - that of the infantryman who believed that everyone else was beneath them because they are the tip of the spear. You may be good at what you do, but you are not an infantryman, so it doesn't really matter how good you are at your job. You are not one of us.
And so I became a supporter of woman in combat arms roles because I saw what they were capable of. I saw the same grit and determination, the same wanting to contribute to the team, the same desire to serve that I saw among men. But then yesterday's post showed up and caused me to stop for a second and re-evaluate the situation. Political stances don't get your ass kicked. Supporting a minority shouldn't get you attacked in the dark. I have been forced to broaden my perspective even further. Now, it might not be whether or not women are capable of serving in the combat arms, it might be whether some baseline male behaviors will make that too dangerous a course to consider. No Soldier should have their service beaten out of them by another Soldier. And so, the reader who contended that maybe I was being a little too naive in my glib suggestion that we remove the restrictions on women in combat, may be correct. Or maybe not. Maybe all she provided was another piece of the puzzle that will have to be addressed. Another viewpoint to be considered.
We need Jacks-of-all-trades who can make sense of all of the varied inputs we face. The gaining of leadership awareness has to come from a variety of sources and previous assumptions need to be challenged on a routine basis. We do not live in a homogenous world anymore and this is certainly no time to return to a homogenous Army. The Times article above does a great disservice to General Dempsey by using that headline. The truth is that we need people skilled, comfortable and confident that they can work anywhere along the operational spectrum from nation building to major offensive operations. They are comfortable with ambiguity and change. And we need to expose more people to Soldiers like Crystal and the woman who replied yesterday so that we move the discussion from merely a political one to one focused on real challenges and real solutions. Only by widening our awareness of the environment can we do this. Becoming a master of only one small piece will not enhance that one bit.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
#111 The Phone Call
"Leaders throughout our future force must have both the authority as well as the judgment to make decisions and develop the situation through action. Critical thinking by Soldiers and their leaders will be essential to achieve the trust and wisdom implicit in such authority. The training and education of our entire force must aim to develop the mindset and requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities required to operate effectively under conditions of uncertainty and complexity."
TRADOC Pam 525-3-0 The Army's Future Force Capstone Concept - Dec 2009
"Lifelong learning and cognitive skills. Future Army forces require lifelong learners who are creative and critical thinkers with highly refined problem solving skills and the ability to process and transform data and information rapidly and accurately into usable knowledge, across a wide range of subjects, to develop strategic thinkers capable of applying operational art to the strategic requirements of national policy."
TRADOC Pam 525-3-1-2 The United States Army Operating Concept - August 2010
"While these experts note senior leaders are more prone to empower subordinate commanders than ever before in combat, these same senior leaders tended to micromanage subordinates in garrison. Senior leaders emphasized that mutual trust and confidence originates and is reinforced in garrison through day-to-day activities and procedures (figure 2-7). This evolved concept of mission command demands subordinates are entrusted with decisionmaking authority and placed in demanding and complex situations in garrison to forge the trust relationship and develop their competency for armed conflict. This is a profound cultural issue that calls upon leaders at every echelon to exercise nerve, restraint, and calculated risk."
TRADOC Pam 525-3-3 "The United States Army Functional Concept for Mission Command" - October 2010
Last night I went over to some friends of mine for dinner. They have both recently returned from a year long deployment and are now slowly easing their way back into life in the States. I am glad they are home and was really happy to have chance to get caught up. He is a Company commander and she works in an operations shop. They are both young, aware, self-confident people who have a great desire to serve and succeed in the Army. They are the next generation of Army leaders and I am proud to call them my friends and honored that they would consider me one of theirs. I always enjoy getting a chance to see them and share ideas and thoughts with them and get their input and ideas in return.
At one point in the evening, his phone rang and he suddenly got a look in his eye and his shoulders tensed up as he answered. Apparently it was a wrong number and as he hung up the phone there was a visible wave of relief and relaxation that passed over him. He had gone through an entire cycle of emotion from enjoying a quiet evening, to 'switched-on' and putting his professional brain back into gear, to relaxed again all in about 30 seconds. Kind of interesting to watch. When he hung up, I asked him about it and it started a discussion about things that had come up since the unit had returned. Soldiers in jail and other issues that happen upon redeployment and reintegration back into the much wider and much more free life back at home. He made the comment, "It's easier to command downrange because there are walls. Soldiers can only go so far." Since he has been home, he is finding out one of the limits of his authority as a commander. Whereas when the unit is deployed, he can track and control his subordinates activities due to the physical limitations of the environment, when he comes home many of those restraints are removed and his Soldiers have a much greater degree of individual decision-making autonomy. And while the vast majority will make proper and well thought out choices, there will certainly be those who do not.
As we were talking about the phone call and another incident he has been dealing with it came up that he really has no idea how to command his unit under his present circumstances (at home station) and that lack of familiarity and experience is unsettling. In many ways, because he has spent all of his command time so far in a deployed environment, his experience and knowledge, and expertise about command and leadership is almost completely formed by life downrange. He is now beginning a 2nd deployment cycle as a commander - only this time it is in the United States. He is finding out very quickly that it is a far more treacherous battlefield to navigate back home than it is downrange. I brought up an idea I have mentioned many times before that if we would treat the return back home as a deployment with all of the same preparations we give to understanding the downrange environment we would be much better off than we currently are. Is it really that much different to understand the social, structural, behavioral and cultural norms of an American Soldier than it is for the people in a province in Iraq or Afghanistan? Not really. We can do the same analysis of our Soldiers and their wants and needs and understandings as we do for indigenous populations downrange. We already have the tools to gain this insight, but we don't often use it to look at ourselves. Why not? Why not take all the tools for counterinsurgency operations we have been painstakingly learning over the past decade and put them to use in order to assist Soldiers in making the necessary behavioral changes that life in the States requires?
Look again at the opening quotations from the TRADOC publications above:
"While these experts note senior leaders are more prone to empower subordinate commanders than ever before in combat, these same senior leaders tended to micromanage subordinates in garrison."
"Leaders throughout our future force must have both the authority as well as the judgment to make decisions and develop the situation through action. Critical thinking by Soldiers and their leaders will be essential to achieve the trust and wisdom implicit in such authority."
"Future Army forces require lifelong learners who are creative and critical thinkers with highly refined problem solving skills....."
What do these things really mean? On their face, the fact that they are stated in the documents as a need, implies a recognition that we are not doing them now. That alone should give us all pause....
If we truly want to imbue these abilities in our junior leaders then here is what that phone call really means:
Instead of the relief- alert-action-tension-relief cycle there could be a calm understanding that the commander is trusted by his superiors that he can make the proper assessments and judgments regarding incidents with his Soldiers. He doesn't get tense answering the phone because it is not a challenge of his abilities or his judgment. Instead of nervousness he could concentrate on the problem itself. And as part of that he could recognize those times when he needs to ask others above him for advice and counsel, as confident in his knowledge of those things unfamiliar as he is with those things familiar. He would not spend time gaining approval before making a decision. He would make the best one possible using his experience and rest easy in that. After all, isn't that why he was selected to command the unit in the first place? And part of this confidence would come from a recognition throughout the command from top to bottom that after a year-long deployment there are going to be a myriad of issues, problems, and incidents - both major and minor -that will inevitably arise. Instead of trying to set the conditions for 'zero defect', all levels of leadership from the lowest to highest, should be working to create environments where there is an unwillingness on the part of the members to put themselves in those tenuous situations in the first place. Instead of, "If you do this, then I will punish you by doing that", everyone would be working to create units where we have increased Soldier judgment and esprit de corps so much that the individual does not want to let the unit down by doing something to discredit it.
There would also be the implicit understanding that when issues do arise, they are not always an indictment of the commander personally. Since there would be an acceptance that leaders cannot control every action or decision made then we would be forced to remove the personality and solve the problem. There really is no difference between solving a logistical problem regarding how to get water, food, fuel etc to Soldiers on the battlefield, and how to get a Soldier who has been arrested, arraigned, and back to post and through the remaining legal processes. The steps of the process are similar, only the conditions are different. That recognition seems to me to be the critical 'agility' and 'adaptability' steps that have become the buzzwords that describe the type of Army leader we are all looking for but don't seem to know how to develop. It is an implicit understanding of the operating environment. It's not a judgment of an individual person (Jane or Joe is a lousy commander because they lead the unit in XYZ incidents), but rather an acceptance that Jane or Joe is leading a unit in a new environment that neither they nor their Soldiers are familiar with and this spike in incidents will have to be reduced over time by the application of leadership.
Finally: "The training and education of our entire force must aim to develop the mindset and requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities required to operate effectively under conditions of uncertainty and complexity."
Yup. My friend got failed by the Army because it has done none of the above for his current environment. His command experience just became a lot more uncertain and a damn sight more complex! The Army has not provided him the knowledge he needs to have when a Soldier arrives home to a spouse who has decided to leave and take their children. It has not provided him the knowledge of why and how so many Soldiers engage in risky behaviors that can have horrible effects. It has not given him the skills necessary to navigate the many personal, human being challenges that will arise over the weeks and months ahead. We have the ability to do these things, but we have not because no one seems to realize that the critical understanding of the environment is equally as important back home as it is deployed. The problem is the same, it just needs to be Oriented to differently. Soldiers who were 'switched-on' for the better part of the last year will now have the ability to flip that switch on and off as they see fit. What have we done to prepare them for that personal responsibility?
Because we haven't done those things, the need for micromanagement will make a nasty and very swift return. And here's how it will happen. A senior leader will want to start tracking the number of incidents that occur in his or her unit. As the chart is built, inevitably it will be broken down by subordinate unit. This company or that platoon etc and then the number of DUI's or domestic violence, or speeding tickets all neatly charted in rows and columns. As soon as that happens, then the competition has begun and micromanagement has returned. As the senior leaders work to out-do each other to have the smallest number of incidents, it will require them to emplace further and further restrictions on their Soldiers actions. What gets lost in this contest however is that no one is actually doing the one thing that will, in the long run, make the most difference. No one is developing the critical judgment ability of the individual Soldier. They have not become any more self-aware or able to make sound judgments. I'm not kidding here. The thing that scares me the most for the Army as the rotation and deployment schedule slows down is the return of 'zero defect' mentalities and the frontal attack that is coming from micromanagement. It will take an amazingly strongly command climate to hold these things at bay and ensure that we concentrate our efforts of the development of trust, agility, critical thinking, and esprit de corps.
Thankfully, last night's phone call turned out to be wrong number. Imagine what might have happened had it been something serious.....
Why are we putting our young leaders in positions where they cannot wait to accept the challenge of command and then in very short order cannot wait until the mantel is passed? Could it be because we are not providing them the critical abilities they need, the trust they deserve, and the climates that truly care for them? Maybe. We'll have to wait and see if the next generation of leaders can fight back hard enough against micromanagement and competition to actually focus on what matters - developing Soldiers at all levels from Private to General capable of making sound decisions, under challenging circumstances with a wide understanding of the environment and their place in it.
Over 40 years ago, General Melvin Zais said the following:
"It is an interesting phenomenon and paradox that go to school after school and we spend 80% of our time on tactics, weapons, logistics and planning and 20% of our time on people matters and then we go to our units and what do we do? We spend 80% of our time on people matters and 20% on tactics, weapons, logistics etc."
Welcome to your second deployment as a commander. Too bad we didn't prepare you for it the way we should have.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
TRADOC Pam 525-3-0 The Army's Future Force Capstone Concept - Dec 2009
"Lifelong learning and cognitive skills. Future Army forces require lifelong learners who are creative and critical thinkers with highly refined problem solving skills and the ability to process and transform data and information rapidly and accurately into usable knowledge, across a wide range of subjects, to develop strategic thinkers capable of applying operational art to the strategic requirements of national policy."
TRADOC Pam 525-3-1-2 The United States Army Operating Concept - August 2010
"While these experts note senior leaders are more prone to empower subordinate commanders than ever before in combat, these same senior leaders tended to micromanage subordinates in garrison. Senior leaders emphasized that mutual trust and confidence originates and is reinforced in garrison through day-to-day activities and procedures (figure 2-7). This evolved concept of mission command demands subordinates are entrusted with decisionmaking authority and placed in demanding and complex situations in garrison to forge the trust relationship and develop their competency for armed conflict. This is a profound cultural issue that calls upon leaders at every echelon to exercise nerve, restraint, and calculated risk."
TRADOC Pam 525-3-3 "The United States Army Functional Concept for Mission Command" - October 2010
Last night I went over to some friends of mine for dinner. They have both recently returned from a year long deployment and are now slowly easing their way back into life in the States. I am glad they are home and was really happy to have chance to get caught up. He is a Company commander and she works in an operations shop. They are both young, aware, self-confident people who have a great desire to serve and succeed in the Army. They are the next generation of Army leaders and I am proud to call them my friends and honored that they would consider me one of theirs. I always enjoy getting a chance to see them and share ideas and thoughts with them and get their input and ideas in return.
At one point in the evening, his phone rang and he suddenly got a look in his eye and his shoulders tensed up as he answered. Apparently it was a wrong number and as he hung up the phone there was a visible wave of relief and relaxation that passed over him. He had gone through an entire cycle of emotion from enjoying a quiet evening, to 'switched-on' and putting his professional brain back into gear, to relaxed again all in about 30 seconds. Kind of interesting to watch. When he hung up, I asked him about it and it started a discussion about things that had come up since the unit had returned. Soldiers in jail and other issues that happen upon redeployment and reintegration back into the much wider and much more free life back at home. He made the comment, "It's easier to command downrange because there are walls. Soldiers can only go so far." Since he has been home, he is finding out one of the limits of his authority as a commander. Whereas when the unit is deployed, he can track and control his subordinates activities due to the physical limitations of the environment, when he comes home many of those restraints are removed and his Soldiers have a much greater degree of individual decision-making autonomy. And while the vast majority will make proper and well thought out choices, there will certainly be those who do not.
As we were talking about the phone call and another incident he has been dealing with it came up that he really has no idea how to command his unit under his present circumstances (at home station) and that lack of familiarity and experience is unsettling. In many ways, because he has spent all of his command time so far in a deployed environment, his experience and knowledge, and expertise about command and leadership is almost completely formed by life downrange. He is now beginning a 2nd deployment cycle as a commander - only this time it is in the United States. He is finding out very quickly that it is a far more treacherous battlefield to navigate back home than it is downrange. I brought up an idea I have mentioned many times before that if we would treat the return back home as a deployment with all of the same preparations we give to understanding the downrange environment we would be much better off than we currently are. Is it really that much different to understand the social, structural, behavioral and cultural norms of an American Soldier than it is for the people in a province in Iraq or Afghanistan? Not really. We can do the same analysis of our Soldiers and their wants and needs and understandings as we do for indigenous populations downrange. We already have the tools to gain this insight, but we don't often use it to look at ourselves. Why not? Why not take all the tools for counterinsurgency operations we have been painstakingly learning over the past decade and put them to use in order to assist Soldiers in making the necessary behavioral changes that life in the States requires?
Look again at the opening quotations from the TRADOC publications above:
"While these experts note senior leaders are more prone to empower subordinate commanders than ever before in combat, these same senior leaders tended to micromanage subordinates in garrison."
"Leaders throughout our future force must have both the authority as well as the judgment to make decisions and develop the situation through action. Critical thinking by Soldiers and their leaders will be essential to achieve the trust and wisdom implicit in such authority."
"Future Army forces require lifelong learners who are creative and critical thinkers with highly refined problem solving skills....."
What do these things really mean? On their face, the fact that they are stated in the documents as a need, implies a recognition that we are not doing them now. That alone should give us all pause....
If we truly want to imbue these abilities in our junior leaders then here is what that phone call really means:
Instead of the relief- alert-action-tension-relief cycle there could be a calm understanding that the commander is trusted by his superiors that he can make the proper assessments and judgments regarding incidents with his Soldiers. He doesn't get tense answering the phone because it is not a challenge of his abilities or his judgment. Instead of nervousness he could concentrate on the problem itself. And as part of that he could recognize those times when he needs to ask others above him for advice and counsel, as confident in his knowledge of those things unfamiliar as he is with those things familiar. He would not spend time gaining approval before making a decision. He would make the best one possible using his experience and rest easy in that. After all, isn't that why he was selected to command the unit in the first place? And part of this confidence would come from a recognition throughout the command from top to bottom that after a year-long deployment there are going to be a myriad of issues, problems, and incidents - both major and minor -that will inevitably arise. Instead of trying to set the conditions for 'zero defect', all levels of leadership from the lowest to highest, should be working to create environments where there is an unwillingness on the part of the members to put themselves in those tenuous situations in the first place. Instead of, "If you do this, then I will punish you by doing that", everyone would be working to create units where we have increased Soldier judgment and esprit de corps so much that the individual does not want to let the unit down by doing something to discredit it.
There would also be the implicit understanding that when issues do arise, they are not always an indictment of the commander personally. Since there would be an acceptance that leaders cannot control every action or decision made then we would be forced to remove the personality and solve the problem. There really is no difference between solving a logistical problem regarding how to get water, food, fuel etc to Soldiers on the battlefield, and how to get a Soldier who has been arrested, arraigned, and back to post and through the remaining legal processes. The steps of the process are similar, only the conditions are different. That recognition seems to me to be the critical 'agility' and 'adaptability' steps that have become the buzzwords that describe the type of Army leader we are all looking for but don't seem to know how to develop. It is an implicit understanding of the operating environment. It's not a judgment of an individual person (Jane or Joe is a lousy commander because they lead the unit in XYZ incidents), but rather an acceptance that Jane or Joe is leading a unit in a new environment that neither they nor their Soldiers are familiar with and this spike in incidents will have to be reduced over time by the application of leadership.
Finally: "The training and education of our entire force must aim to develop the mindset and requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities required to operate effectively under conditions of uncertainty and complexity."
Yup. My friend got failed by the Army because it has done none of the above for his current environment. His command experience just became a lot more uncertain and a damn sight more complex! The Army has not provided him the knowledge he needs to have when a Soldier arrives home to a spouse who has decided to leave and take their children. It has not provided him the knowledge of why and how so many Soldiers engage in risky behaviors that can have horrible effects. It has not given him the skills necessary to navigate the many personal, human being challenges that will arise over the weeks and months ahead. We have the ability to do these things, but we have not because no one seems to realize that the critical understanding of the environment is equally as important back home as it is deployed. The problem is the same, it just needs to be Oriented to differently. Soldiers who were 'switched-on' for the better part of the last year will now have the ability to flip that switch on and off as they see fit. What have we done to prepare them for that personal responsibility?
Because we haven't done those things, the need for micromanagement will make a nasty and very swift return. And here's how it will happen. A senior leader will want to start tracking the number of incidents that occur in his or her unit. As the chart is built, inevitably it will be broken down by subordinate unit. This company or that platoon etc and then the number of DUI's or domestic violence, or speeding tickets all neatly charted in rows and columns. As soon as that happens, then the competition has begun and micromanagement has returned. As the senior leaders work to out-do each other to have the smallest number of incidents, it will require them to emplace further and further restrictions on their Soldiers actions. What gets lost in this contest however is that no one is actually doing the one thing that will, in the long run, make the most difference. No one is developing the critical judgment ability of the individual Soldier. They have not become any more self-aware or able to make sound judgments. I'm not kidding here. The thing that scares me the most for the Army as the rotation and deployment schedule slows down is the return of 'zero defect' mentalities and the frontal attack that is coming from micromanagement. It will take an amazingly strongly command climate to hold these things at bay and ensure that we concentrate our efforts of the development of trust, agility, critical thinking, and esprit de corps.
Thankfully, last night's phone call turned out to be wrong number. Imagine what might have happened had it been something serious.....
Why are we putting our young leaders in positions where they cannot wait to accept the challenge of command and then in very short order cannot wait until the mantel is passed? Could it be because we are not providing them the critical abilities they need, the trust they deserve, and the climates that truly care for them? Maybe. We'll have to wait and see if the next generation of leaders can fight back hard enough against micromanagement and competition to actually focus on what matters - developing Soldiers at all levels from Private to General capable of making sound decisions, under challenging circumstances with a wide understanding of the environment and their place in it.
Over 40 years ago, General Melvin Zais said the following:
"It is an interesting phenomenon and paradox that go to school after school and we spend 80% of our time on tactics, weapons, logistics and planning and 20% of our time on people matters and then we go to our units and what do we do? We spend 80% of our time on people matters and 20% on tactics, weapons, logistics etc."
Welcome to your second deployment as a commander. Too bad we didn't prepare you for it the way we should have.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
#110 The Edge of an Understanding
I have no idea where this post is going to end up. Normally, I do. It will start with an idea formed by something I've seen or read, and then progress down a pretty clear path to a picture in my mind of the point I hope to make. The difficulty is only in getting the 3-D picture in my mind onto the page and trying to do justice with words that accurately describe the image. Today though, the picture itself isn't very clear, so I cannot see a way to describe it for you. I think the reasons for my confusion are actually pretty simple however. Too many fragmented inputs, too many questions, and not enough time to consider each of them in depth. I feel as if I'm on the edge of an understanding, but do not see the whole picture yet. Let's see where it ends up...
Inputs:
First, yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the crimes committed by my Soldiers. Regardless of what else happens in my life, March 12, 2006 will forever remain a definitive moment for me. In some ways, it is the defining moment. There was life - and all I understood it to be - before that day, and there is life after that day. The earth quake that hit Japan this week moved its' coastline 8 feet and changed the earth's axis. Whole systems within the universe will be changed ever so slightly because of that. March 12th did that for me. Through the looking glass we go...
Second, a former Soldier of mine died this week. She was a young woman, twenty-something years old. When I knew her she was a happy, smiling, vibrant young girl who was determined to have fun and she made your day brighter just being around her. She was also one hell of a Soldier. But she got lost somewhere along the way and ended up out of the Army and was trying so very hard to redefine and find her way in the world. She will be buried sometime next week, and the world has lost another pure soul much too soon. It just left me feeling sort of fragile. Hopefully, she is not searching anymore. The rest of us will be left asking why?
Third, a portion of an article sent to me by a friend entitled, "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education", written by Professor William Deresiwicz that speaks to recognizing how elite systems work, and how they create cultures of entitlement and conformity, rather than challenge and thoughtful consideration. How the intellectual elite end up separating themselves from the world they live in and insulate themselves from humanity.
And finally, from a mentor who sent me a very simple - yet very powerful thought. He reminded me that good leaders, "Don't personalize the profession, but rather professionalize the person".
Questions:
How do you lead other people? On slide #95 of "Patterns of Conflict", COL John Boyd made the following observation with regard to guerrilla warfare:
- "Guerrillas must develop implicit connections with the people or countryside."
- "Guerrillas must be able to blend into the emotional - cultural - intellectual environment of the people until they become one with the people."
- "The people's feelings and thoughts must become the guerrilla's feelings and thoughts and the guerrilla's feelings and thoughts must become the people's feelings and thoughts."
Result: "Guerrillas become indistinguishable from the people while government becomes isolated from the people."
Now remove the word guerrilla and replace it with the word leader. Seems awfully close to me to be the ideal of leadership. To become one with those we lead. To immerse ourselves in their experience to the point that who is in charge becomes less important than the mission we are collectively conducting. To become indistinguishable by any formal system from those we lead. The mission is the only thing. Who accomplishes it, who directs it, and who leads it become secondary concerns to getting it done.
With regard to yesterday's anniversary of the crimes committed by members of my platoon, the aftermath of that tragic event has sent me down a path that has fundamentally changed the way I view leadership both practically and theoretically. My concept of what leadership is has changed and as a result of that how I exercise leadership has changed as well. I have become less directive and less sure of the outcome. I have gained a much greater respect and awareness for unfolding circumstances that can affect the mission. I spend a lot more time painting the picture and a lot less proscribing the steps. In many ways, I feel as if I have become much more adaptable and much more attuned - especially to those non-quantifiable things like perspective, and emotion. I no longer ascribe to the notion that everyone can be treated the same. Each individual must be treated as a unique set of understandings and interpretations. The key to successful leadership is find out how and why others view their world the way they do and then working with that understanding to accomplish a common mission.
Which leads me to the second input - the loss of Crystal Thompson. While I do not understand why she has passed, the fact that she has means that we will never understand completely who she was, or who she had the potential to become. Because she was no longer in the Army, her loss will not be viewed by many as combat related, or as a result of the war, but in the back of my mind I cannot escape the idea that had she had senior leaders around her who accepted her, who saw her as more than an interchangeable widget, who had helped her to see herself more clearly, she might not have gotten quite so far off track. She, at one time, was a Soldier - and a damn good one. I just feel like we owed her more than that. We owed her leadership in the sense that we viewed her as one of our children. We owed her the respect of her humanity. Throughout the week many of her former Soldiers and friends have expressed their grief and their love for her on her Facebook page. Maybe had she known that earlier, we wouldn't be where we are right now.
In Professor D's paper, I came across the following paragraph that reminded me of so many Army leaders I know:
"Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world."
Leading people inherently means valuing them. Not simply as a means to an end, or from one limited understanding, but from a totality of their existence. Who they really are. The various roles they play. Why they think and act and color their world the way they do. You cannot lead others without this understanding. And yet, the Army creates many leaders who are colored a lot like Professor D's elite students above. They possess an absolute sense of their own surety and greatness. That they are the chosen few. That they are entitled to their world, their way. They cannot conceptualize or comprehend failure. A lot of last week's post outlined behaviors that fit this mold. Are we really raising our young officer corp to understand at the behavioral level those they lead, or are we continually perpetuating a class system of elites who see their subordinates as their minions? And to be completely fair, the idea of elitism is by no means limited to the officer corps alone. The NCO corps has become loaded with 'special' people who wrap themselves in titles and carry the accoutrements of position like a badge of honor. When we become disconnected like that, and begin to think we are entitled to something more, than we have already begun to fail. There is no entitlement in leadership. In its' perfect sense it happens regardless of rank, station, position, or education. And the only way to get to that place is through respect.
Finally, the quote from a friend and mentor. "Don't personalize the profession. Professionalize the person." Awesome, powerful statement because it requires the respect of the person first and the molding of them into the profession second. I have to value them individually first, recognizing their particular strengths, weaknesses, viewpoints, and filters, and then bring those attributes together inside of the profession that we share. There cannot be any nameless widgets in that phrase. It's not about the leader, it's truly about the led. As my friend does for me, the role of the leader is to help the subordinate see their environment more clearly, and to set the conditions for the subordinate to succeed in the professional arena.
March 12th will always remind me of how far I have come on my journey of understanding, and humble me when I realize how far I have to go. Crystal Thompson is a person who will remind me how quickly and permanently things can change. We must remain ever vigilant to guard against elitism in an Army system where the top could certainly be termed an 'educational elite', but the bottom can be very under-educated. We must guard against that gap becoming too large. John Boyd reminds me that to value them we must remain in tune with them. There can be no other way.
And we must ultimately respect those we work for. Not above us on the ladder, but those below us. They are the ones who matter. They are the ones who accomplish our missions, and they are the ones who look to us to provide them the opportunity to one day serve others. In order to do that, we may have to steal a page from COL Boyd and become a guerrilla....
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
Inputs:
First, yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the crimes committed by my Soldiers. Regardless of what else happens in my life, March 12, 2006 will forever remain a definitive moment for me. In some ways, it is the defining moment. There was life - and all I understood it to be - before that day, and there is life after that day. The earth quake that hit Japan this week moved its' coastline 8 feet and changed the earth's axis. Whole systems within the universe will be changed ever so slightly because of that. March 12th did that for me. Through the looking glass we go...
Second, a former Soldier of mine died this week. She was a young woman, twenty-something years old. When I knew her she was a happy, smiling, vibrant young girl who was determined to have fun and she made your day brighter just being around her. She was also one hell of a Soldier. But she got lost somewhere along the way and ended up out of the Army and was trying so very hard to redefine and find her way in the world. She will be buried sometime next week, and the world has lost another pure soul much too soon. It just left me feeling sort of fragile. Hopefully, she is not searching anymore. The rest of us will be left asking why?
Third, a portion of an article sent to me by a friend entitled, "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education", written by Professor William Deresiwicz that speaks to recognizing how elite systems work, and how they create cultures of entitlement and conformity, rather than challenge and thoughtful consideration. How the intellectual elite end up separating themselves from the world they live in and insulate themselves from humanity.
And finally, from a mentor who sent me a very simple - yet very powerful thought. He reminded me that good leaders, "Don't personalize the profession, but rather professionalize the person".
Questions:
How do you lead other people? On slide #95 of "Patterns of Conflict", COL John Boyd made the following observation with regard to guerrilla warfare:
- "Guerrillas must develop implicit connections with the people or countryside."
- "Guerrillas must be able to blend into the emotional - cultural - intellectual environment of the people until they become one with the people."
- "The people's feelings and thoughts must become the guerrilla's feelings and thoughts and the guerrilla's feelings and thoughts must become the people's feelings and thoughts."
Result: "Guerrillas become indistinguishable from the people while government becomes isolated from the people."
Now remove the word guerrilla and replace it with the word leader. Seems awfully close to me to be the ideal of leadership. To become one with those we lead. To immerse ourselves in their experience to the point that who is in charge becomes less important than the mission we are collectively conducting. To become indistinguishable by any formal system from those we lead. The mission is the only thing. Who accomplishes it, who directs it, and who leads it become secondary concerns to getting it done.
With regard to yesterday's anniversary of the crimes committed by members of my platoon, the aftermath of that tragic event has sent me down a path that has fundamentally changed the way I view leadership both practically and theoretically. My concept of what leadership is has changed and as a result of that how I exercise leadership has changed as well. I have become less directive and less sure of the outcome. I have gained a much greater respect and awareness for unfolding circumstances that can affect the mission. I spend a lot more time painting the picture and a lot less proscribing the steps. In many ways, I feel as if I have become much more adaptable and much more attuned - especially to those non-quantifiable things like perspective, and emotion. I no longer ascribe to the notion that everyone can be treated the same. Each individual must be treated as a unique set of understandings and interpretations. The key to successful leadership is find out how and why others view their world the way they do and then working with that understanding to accomplish a common mission.
Which leads me to the second input - the loss of Crystal Thompson. While I do not understand why she has passed, the fact that she has means that we will never understand completely who she was, or who she had the potential to become. Because she was no longer in the Army, her loss will not be viewed by many as combat related, or as a result of the war, but in the back of my mind I cannot escape the idea that had she had senior leaders around her who accepted her, who saw her as more than an interchangeable widget, who had helped her to see herself more clearly, she might not have gotten quite so far off track. She, at one time, was a Soldier - and a damn good one. I just feel like we owed her more than that. We owed her leadership in the sense that we viewed her as one of our children. We owed her the respect of her humanity. Throughout the week many of her former Soldiers and friends have expressed their grief and their love for her on her Facebook page. Maybe had she known that earlier, we wouldn't be where we are right now.
In Professor D's paper, I came across the following paragraph that reminded me of so many Army leaders I know:
"Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world."
Leading people inherently means valuing them. Not simply as a means to an end, or from one limited understanding, but from a totality of their existence. Who they really are. The various roles they play. Why they think and act and color their world the way they do. You cannot lead others without this understanding. And yet, the Army creates many leaders who are colored a lot like Professor D's elite students above. They possess an absolute sense of their own surety and greatness. That they are the chosen few. That they are entitled to their world, their way. They cannot conceptualize or comprehend failure. A lot of last week's post outlined behaviors that fit this mold. Are we really raising our young officer corp to understand at the behavioral level those they lead, or are we continually perpetuating a class system of elites who see their subordinates as their minions? And to be completely fair, the idea of elitism is by no means limited to the officer corps alone. The NCO corps has become loaded with 'special' people who wrap themselves in titles and carry the accoutrements of position like a badge of honor. When we become disconnected like that, and begin to think we are entitled to something more, than we have already begun to fail. There is no entitlement in leadership. In its' perfect sense it happens regardless of rank, station, position, or education. And the only way to get to that place is through respect.
Finally, the quote from a friend and mentor. "Don't personalize the profession. Professionalize the person." Awesome, powerful statement because it requires the respect of the person first and the molding of them into the profession second. I have to value them individually first, recognizing their particular strengths, weaknesses, viewpoints, and filters, and then bring those attributes together inside of the profession that we share. There cannot be any nameless widgets in that phrase. It's not about the leader, it's truly about the led. As my friend does for me, the role of the leader is to help the subordinate see their environment more clearly, and to set the conditions for the subordinate to succeed in the professional arena.
March 12th will always remind me of how far I have come on my journey of understanding, and humble me when I realize how far I have to go. Crystal Thompson is a person who will remind me how quickly and permanently things can change. We must remain ever vigilant to guard against elitism in an Army system where the top could certainly be termed an 'educational elite', but the bottom can be very under-educated. We must guard against that gap becoming too large. John Boyd reminds me that to value them we must remain in tune with them. There can be no other way.
And we must ultimately respect those we work for. Not above us on the ladder, but those below us. They are the ones who matter. They are the ones who accomplish our missions, and they are the ones who look to us to provide them the opportunity to one day serve others. In order to do that, we may have to steal a page from COL Boyd and become a guerrilla....
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
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