LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM THE MILITARY - Harvard Business Review (November 2010)

LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM THE MILITARY 

Harvard Business Review (November 2010)

Reviewed by Adil Ahmad (Editor, TCS CONNECT Corporate News Magazine)

Ever since the TCS Case Study started getting taught at the Harvard Business School, we at TCS have begun taking a closer look at the Harvard Business Review, much to our great good fortune!

Martial races are not uncommon in the land of the mighty Indus. The many different people who populate the territories that Pakistan now encompasses have in their lineage ancestors who lived the Spartan life of warriors, and spent their waking hours in the saddle, or trekking long distances in search of glory on the battlefield, and turning their swords into ploughshares during times of peace.

COMPLEXITIES OF STAYING COMPETITIVE

Given such an inheritance, and faced with the complexities of staying competitive in the modern day connected global village, I was delighted to find the Harvard Business Review (November 2010) carry as its cover story a series of related articles under the caption ‘Leadership Lessons from the Military’. Naturally enough, it wasn’t the fine traditions of the Pakistani people that prompted the article! The United States of America is the possessor of the most powerful and technologically advanced military machine in the world. Hence the cover story was not out of place. A host of experts contributed to the wisdom that it contained. Amongst them Jeff Weiss, Aram Donigan, Jonathan Hughes, Admiral Thad Allen, Boris  Groysberg, Andrew Hill, Toby Johnson, and Michael Useem.

RISKY, PRESSURED, FAST CHANGING

The pull-quote on the cover encapsulated well the linkage between the military and corporate environments. “Military work is risky, pressured, and fast changing. It calls for seemingly contradictory capabilities. An absolute clarity of the mission at a high level, coupled with an extraordinary adaptability on the ground, and a knack for managing complex, technically precise systems. These are the same skill sets that companies today need to prevail in a climate of intense economic uncertainty.”

ACT FAST, PROJECT CONTROL

The coauthors contend that business leaders today report feeling that they must constantly negotiate to extract complex agreements from people with power over industries or individual careers. Sensing that they are in continual danger makes them want to act fast, project control even when they don’t have any, rely on coercion, and diffuse tension at any cost. The end result may be a compromise that fails to address the real problem or opportunity, increases resistance from the other side that makes agreement impossible, creates resentment that sours future negotiations, fails to develop relationships based upon mutual respect and trust, or generates agreement that creates enormous exposure to future risk.

SYSTEMATICALLY BUILD TRUST AND COMMITMENT

To avoid these dangers say the coauthors, executives can apply the same strategies used by well trained military officers in hotspots like Afghanistan and Iraq. These negotiators solicit others points of view, propose multiple solutions, invite their counterparts to critique them, use facts and principles of fairness to persuade the other side, systematically build trust and commitments over time, and take steps to reshape the negotiation process as well as the outcome. Tall order by any yardstick! and not very successfully implemented by the results that have been brought forth before the world in Iraq and Afghanistan.

CREATE UNITY OF EFFORT

Retired Admiral Thad Allen was with the US Coast Guard, and the national incident commander for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He says that when faced with a complex, fast moving crisis, leaders must constantly adapt their mental models and create a unity of effort. “In the military you have total unity of command. In a civil emergency that chain of command doesn’t exist. You have to aggregate everybody’s capabilities to achieve a single purpose, taking into account the fact that they have distinct authorities and responsibilities. That’s creating unity of effort rather than unity of command, and it’s a much more complex management challenge.”

CREATE SHARED VALUES

“You have to understand at a very large macro level what the problem is that you’re dealing with, and what needs to be done to achieve the effects you want, and you have to be able to communicate that. You also have to create a set of shared values that everybody involved can subscribe to. With Hurricane Katrina it was clear to me after 24 hours in New Orleans that we weren’t dealing only with a natural disaster. Under the hurricane response model resources are provided to the local government which then applies them and runs the response. But we had lost continuity of government in New Orleans. There was no functional local government that could take the resources and apply them to the mission. So the mental model became more like the response to a weapon of mass destruction. When I realized that, things started happening. We focused on providing security and creating the capacity of local government to do its job like de-watering the city, doing house to house searches, and so forth.”

PUBLIC PARTICIPATION

Allen says that social media and the 24/7 news cycle are part of a fundamental change in our sociological structure, and there will never again be a major disaster that wont involve public participation. Public participation will happen whether it’s managed or not. Allen blogs and tweets regularly.

FLEXIBILITY, AGILITY AND CURIOSITY

On the subject of whether military trained personnel make for good business managers, Allen says that they do so long as they are not too doctrinaire about anything. “If you’re too caught up in military protocol then you won’t be flexible in dealing with folks who are not in the military. On the other hand, if you’re so captivated by the private sector and running everything against a balance sheet, you can become too much of an ideologue. Good leadership requires flexibility, agility and curiosity. If you have those then I think it’s possible to cross over both ways.”

OPTIMIZE WHAT YOU CAN DO

When asked whether he is a born leader or has learned something over the years, Allen says everybody can be a better leader. “You should focus on trying to optimize what you can do with the skills and talent that you’ve got. The more you’re a lifelong learner, and the more intellectually curious you are, the bigger the base of potential you’ll have to build on when the opportunity presents itself. It also makes you better at recognizing opportunity.”