I’m a military veteran. USAF. 13 years, 8 months, 13 days. If I was counting.
As such, I frequently read old military books, discourses, and papers to compare corporate leadership today with historical military leadership. The similarities are astounding. A 1941 book published by the Military Service Publishing Company is one such work.
Edited by the staff, it has no specific author, but is a compilation of thoughts, ideas, suggestions and directives from a stream of notable military leaders. Some–just as an example–include the likes of General J.G. Harbord, who began as a private in the Spanish-American war, achieved prominence as General Pershing’s Chief of Staff, and later commanding the USMC’s 2nd Division before assuming the Chairmanship of the RCA Corporation.
Just an example of the caliber of input for this book…
In this book, Chapter II discusses “Orientation.” Of course, it is meant to apply mostly to new officers at a new post or assignment.
Truth is, the advice given there — some 75-odd years ago to junior officers — is as appropriate today for first-time (and/or recently promoted) managers as it is senior-most leadership.
Sections and brief summaries include (apologies in advance for the dated, ubiquitous male gender references – these are quotes, not 2024 sound bites):
Your Brother Officers: “The commissioned officers of the U.S. military are a cross-section of the American Public… as a group, they are subject to the same ambitions, variations in viewpoint, and human frailties as the people they serve.”
This, of course, matches up with our corporate situations today. Managers and leaders have different backgrounds and experiences, bringing different thought processes and judgment. When harnessed for the common good, this is an excellent trait, one we should exploit, not suppress.
Different thinking means more choices. More choices usually mean better decisions. Or, as many would put it–embrace your weirdness.
Performance of Duty: “In the military, the performance of duty to the limit of one’s capacity is a fetish. Striving for perfection is more than a figure of speech… as you demonstrate your capacity for additional responsibility, it will come to you… be not impatient… there is much to learn.”
Wow, is this apropos or what!? The fetish analogy may be a bit much, but… Work hard, smart, and consistent. Do what you say you’ll do. Make well-thought decisions. Those of you who have achieved significant corporate rank: Did you get there through politics, trickery, and slight-of-hand, or was it hard work, diligence, and sacrifice??
This stuff really works.
Get Out or Get in Line (if you don’t read anything else, read this!): “Mind your business. If the concern where you are employed is all wrong, and the Old Man a curmudgeon (I love that word), it may be well for you to go tell the Old Man, confidentially, privately, and quietly, that he is a curmudgeon.
Explain to him that his policy is absurd and preposterous. Then show him how to reform his ways and offer to lead the effort to cleanse the faults.
Do this, or if for any reason you should prefer not, then take your choice of these: Get Out, Or Get In Line.
If you work for a man, in heaven’s name, work for him! Speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and the institution he represents.
If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth more than a pound of cleverness.
If you must vilify, condemn, and eternally disparage, why, resign your position and, when on the outside, damn to your heart’s content.”
This quotation is so appropriate in corporate management today that it needs no explanation, segue, or pithy remarks from me. Simply put–work for whomever you work for. Grammatical errors aside, you get my point. Don’t we all get tired of those who work “for” us part of the time, and “against” us the rest?
Bum Phillips, revered Houston Oilers coach, said it best: “Dance with who brung ya.”
Importance of the Word ‘NO’: “As an officer, many questions will come to you for decisions… the choice you make in the mere act of saying “yes,” or “no,” may constitute the measure of your success.
A weak man can say “yes” to troublesome situations, dissipating the efforts of the whole. An unwise man can say “no,” and by mere obstruction, cause the failure of the unit. It takes a happy combination of courage and wisdom to be able to say “no” at the right time and place.”
Simply put, our most significant, regular responsibility–day to day and strategic–is making decisions.
Anyone can make the easy ones… they seldom take forethought, intellect, or wisdom, since they are usually painfully obvious, and accolades are near. No, they pay us for the hard ones. The lonely decisions. The times when we make the “right” decision in the face of dissent and conflict, and where the easier decision is to abide with consensus.
That’s why they pay us the bucks and give us these fancy business cards.
Adaptability: “Adaptability is required. Leadership is a new and different life. He must be equally quick to detect and avoid those things which are abhorrent to military life… the road to recognition and fame may lie ahead. How well and how quickly the opportunities are embraced depends upon the promptness of adapting himself to the new horizons the career provides.”
You can’t always spell out the details of a leadership role in a nice, convenient job description. Our worlds are dynamic, fluctuating, and ever-changing.
We’ve got to know when to “stay the course,” and when to turn on a dime. All the while keeping those looking to us for leadership engaged in our path.
This is what sets us apart.
I only provided these today for two reasons. First, a reminder: Leadership — its theories, concepts, and approaches, really haven’t changed much in a couple thousand years.
Yes, some applications of principles have evolved over time, given our changing workforce, demographics, and societal norms.
The real concepts and basis of leadership, however, remain constant.
And lastly, we can learn a lot from simplicity. Sometimes we make this stuff too hard, when we could get to the same place — maybe even a better place — with approaches that embrace simplicity and ease of thought.
As the coach and consultant, I’m supposed to be the expert; offer advice, coaching, and counsel to my clients, and provide insights and thinking to get “unstuck” and make progress. To help them succeed. They pay me to bring concentrated expertise and specific judgment that likely doesn’t exist in their organization.
But there goes another year-end, and I have to say I learned a ton from my clients this past year.
Again.
Some of it completely useless and won’t be shared here (you know who you are); other morsels of wisdom have been found to be surprisingly valuable, and I thought I’d share those tidbits with you today.
Lessons I Learned from my Clients – just the Top 5
1. Don’t let anyone else tell you what’s normal. Normal is a subjective term, no matter how many supportive facts others may include as evidence. Facts may be facts, but using those facts to arrive at a conclusion is something entirely different.
What’s normal for one person or organization may be completely and utterly abnormal to another. And both can be correct in their assessment.
And since the apocalypse, the definition of normal keeps shifting for us all. It’s not a “new” normal as much as a “now” normal.
Take politics for example (watching everyone gasp sharply):
Candidate Bob did something. An objective, factual comment. Likely footage available.
Candidate Bob said something. Another objective, factual comment. Again, there’s probably a reel.
Therefore, Candidate Bob is an asshole. Hmmm… methinks there may have been a logic leap, a bit of subjectivity in arriving at the conclusion, even though facts were the starting point.
You get the picture.
You – personally or organizationally – determine what’s normal for you. No one else.
And anyway, normal is vastly overrated. Strive instead to get better. To change what needs to be changed, and reinforce what you should continue doing. That should be your “normal.”
2. Questions are learning moments. Teach. This one is something I’ve used in the past, when describing leadership traits and such. It’s included in my 5 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership article.
The whole “teach a person to fish” metaphor.
From the article: “If you always answer employee’s every question, you’ll forever be answering employees’ every question. Questions are teaching moments — don’t rob employees of the opportunity.”
True dat. Come to find out it applies to coach/client as well. Whouldathunkit??
Smart employees asking questions is a really good thing. And they want to learn, so let’s do the whole teaching moment thing, shall we?
3. Ask for help. When you need help, knowledge, casual assistance, or a full-blown life preserver… ask for it.
We (global leadership) are not good at this one. My friend and partner-in-crime Kevin Ross discusses this better than I can in his article, HELP!
We have somehow convinced ourselves that asking for help is akin to an admission of weakness of some sort.
Which is truly weird, if you consider that:
a. We are forever telling those we lead to do exactly that – ask for help when you need it. We know, intuitively, that it’s too much for a person to know all things, so we jump up and down when they don’t ask… like what the hell were you thinking?
Then we, sometimes sanctimoniously inside, do the exact same thing.
Weird, huh?
Asking for help, when you need it, is clearly seen by subordinates as an indicator of strength and confidence – the very opposite of a weakness.
b. When we ask others for help, we are both admitting that we do not/can not know it all, and that the appropriate thing to do in that situation is ask someone who knows more about that than I do.
Wins all around.
Ask for help when you need it. And trust me, the “when” is more frequent than you think. Really.
4. Offer assistance when you know you can. Here’s where it gets tricky, since it may butt heads a bit with the advice above about asking for help.
When you see clearly (or even not-so-clearly) that someone could use your help, offer it. In the moment. Right then when you see that you can add value.
Now the tricky part: I don’t mean to immediately offer a solution to something that they’re working diligently on, solving problems like a puzzle. They are making solid progress, leave them be.
Nor do I mean stepping in with the white-horse attitude of, “Here, let me fix that for you.”
I tell family, friends, and clients all the time, “It’s only help if the help you’re offering helps the person needing help.” Read it slowly, it’s not nearly as confusing as it looks initially.
Also, to be clear, I certainly don’t mean waiting until someone is near-drowning before stepping in with the offer. I do mean you need to read the room, and offer when it can actually help. Simple prompts, like:
Hey, can I give you a hand?
Can I offer a suggestion?
Don’t be that leader who, after failure, insists, “Well, if she needed help, she should’ve asked for it.”
5. Expand your reach. One-deep functional relationships are simply inadequate for anything useful. I’m talking here about functional relationships, not personal ones.
Personal relationships are, and forever will be, one-on-one. No one can sit in your stead, and no amount of peripheral or tertiary connections will make up for unsuccessful, one-on-one personal relationships.
Functional relationships, however, are different. And as a leader, you really need to consider broadening yours.
If you have a single go-to in Operations… that’s great, but insufficient. Not only are the inputs you may receive inadequate (or insufficient) to actually get a bead on what’s going on, but if you really need that go-to, and they aren’t there, then what?
Or your single contact in Accounting goes dark. Maybe they’ve taken a week off (called “vacation.” Google it). Maybe they quit, and left you in a lurch. Maybe they got whacked for using the corporate zoom account for some sketchy interactions.
Don’t care, doesn’t matter. It’s not their issue, it’s yours. And you’re in a bind because of a one-deep functional relationship.
Expand your reach. Meet, interact and connect with multiple folks in functional areas. You can combine those interactions if you simply must, meeting with all your Accounting peeps in one lunch, but expand your reach.
You can’t succeed as a leader without it.
Leadership is a journey, not a destination. You stop learning, you stop leading.
As I implied above, this list is far from all-inclusive.
This I merely a top-5 list of myriad lessons that I learned from clients this year. We are forever teaching each other – that’s a good thing, and exactly how it should be.
Look, nobody is saying you guys don’t talk to each other. Really.
I mean, think about it… with some of your direct reports, you speak multiple times each day. Hell, some of them all day. Like it or not. And no, that wasn’t a question, so stop nodding your head.
And anyway, that’s not the point.
The point is, we sometimes speak so much and so frequently that we never seem to get around to the conversations we should be having with those we lead.
The conversations that are about them. Not about what you want, but what they want. Not about your needs, but what they need to move forward. Not about your grandiose vision and plans for the future, but their ideas on what their career, life and future will look like.
Enter the 1:1 meeting.
Everyone likes to talk about themselves. You get to do it all the time – mainly because we like to believe that the rapt attention we receive when doing so means that those in front of us are pining away, wondering what future you have mapped out.
In reality, they’re listening to you discuss the future to help them determine how (or if) they fit into it. Or even if they want to fit into it.
What should be happening, if it isn’t already, is that you sit down with your folks, individually and regularly scheduled, and listen to them talk about themselves. Things like, what they want, how things are going (really), their expectations, and how you might fit into their future.
How you might fit into their future?
Crazy stuff, huh…?
1:1 meetings, solo gatherings between you and your direct reports on a regular (read: scheduled) basis are not just any meeting. For instance they are not:
Routine status checks,
Repeats of operational updates, or even
Personal performance assessments.
They are, however, about:
Their priorities,
Their targets,
The challenges they face, and
What actions they (or you) might take to better help them do their job and achieve their goals.
Totally centered on “they” and “their,” not “me and “my.”
We don’t do 1:1 meetings just for the hell of it. As a leadership tool, they foster engagement, improve relationships, give us early warnings, and create that sought-after discretionary effort.
No visible downsides.
Wins all around.
Added resource: A more in-depth, instructional look at 1:1 meetings can be seen here.
In today’s business climate, where rapid change, technological breakthroughs and improvements define the quest for high performance, middle-managers are making a comeback —a real renaissance of sorts.
But the more appropriate reaction requires a candid look at why we thought eliminating their roles was a brilliant idea in the first place. Mostly a courtesy of the cost-cutting wizards from McKinsey, Bain, Alavarez, et al., but that’s for another article.
Doing Less with Less
The unfortunate truth is, we’ve been actively squeezing middle management out of the workforce now for a couple of decades at least, and the toll has been ugly. In many cases, we were blindly thinking we were doing “more with less.”
It turned out, of course, that simply was not the case; we’re just doing less with less. In fact, more senior leaders today are simply doing what middle managers used to do. Some of them are doing it all the time.
No elimination of the role, just a headcount reduction and realignment of responsibilities.
But employees today are less developed than ever, less engaged than ever, and less satisfied than ever.
Doing less with less is not a strategy worth repeating and certainly not the most efficient or effective way to stay ahead of the curve. In short, it’s creating single points of failure in myriad organizations.
A Sign of The Times
Kicking along our memory lane… along came the financial meltdowns in 2008-2009, and the “all-hands-on-deck” mentality really worked to camouflage the mid-management shortfall. Everyone was micro-managing, so the lack of mid-management was mostly indiscernible.
Once some normalcy began returning, no one felt that adding now-deemed-superfluous headcount (see “wizards” above) was a good idea, so we kept those mid-managers from returning. Dumb idea. Short-sided and misguided.
Fast forward a decade or so, and along comes the apocalypse… the Covid-19 Pandemic. Again, it’s all-hands on deck. CEOs are having seemingly empathetic zoom calls with all employees; townhall meetings are rampant; everyone was committed to being as cooperative and collaborative as possible, since “we were all in it together.”
In such a collectively social environment, surely we don’t need a bunch of interlopers between individual contributors and the C-suite…!?
We’d continue along in our misguided bliss.
It’s today; we’ve come face-to-face with the now-normal – operational pressures, sketchy economy, political idiots on all sides… coupled with remote vs. office, quiet quitting, inflationary wages, and (my favorite) layoffs announced via social media (are you kidding me?)/
We’ve come to realize that no one is actually accountable for day-to-day leadership, management and watching the store.
Lots of people want to be responsible thousands of employees, $millions in capital, and 5-year strategic initiatives. No one, it seems, is around to make sure that next Wednesday goes without a hitch. That the parking lot lines get painted and the break room refrigerator is replaced.
To say nothing of people getting developed, being heard, and appropriately hired, onboarded, trained, and recognized.
Here’s the rub: we’ve discovered (like it was some big, freakin’ surprise), that senior leadership is incapable—from a bandwidth perspective—of managing day-to-day tactical efforts while dedicating brain-time to strategy and longer-term, organization-wide thinking.
The workload is simply too much, the machine is moving too fast, and the priorities are not working.
Supervision and Management-Still Key to Organizational Success
Leadership is essential for organizational success, of course, but so are supervision and management.
After all, someone has to deal with daily performance challenges, operational issues and changes in tactical direction. And the people. For Pete’s sake, don’t forget the people.
These are not always intuitive leadership roles, but those of experienced managers.
“Flattened organizations” sounded so good, so trendy. As did “leadership more in touch with the people.”
As the present day scenario teaches us, however, there’s a problem with using fads and cutesie catch-phrases to run a railroad. Reality slams you in the face.
All of that, and I’m not even going to address the incredible dearth of viable succession depth (again, another article).
And as we pick ourselves up off the ground and dust ourselves off, we are left with only one request— “Middle Managers, please come back, we need you.”
Bob’s a client, the chief executive of a fairly large company in the Northeast. His name is not really Bob, but he really is a client, and a recent experience prompted me
to share this (with Bob’s permission).
At the beginning of my coaching engagement with Bob, I
conducted a 360-degree survey so we could get an idea of how others see him in his day to day activities and interactions. If you haven’t had a 360 survey—a real one—done for you, you should. It’s almost always eye-opening. And sometimes a bit scary.
But no one dies in the process, so you’ve got that going for you…
Anyway, while doing the 360 survey on Bob, I was privileged to meet and speak with many of the direct reports on his leadership team. Without getting into details that would make Bob (if he’s reading this) squeamish, the results were insightful and indicated he’s clearly respected. Mostly good things, and nothing really out of the ordinary.
Until I spoke with Jim (again, not his real name). Jim offered that Bob was direct, decisive, and had a low tolerance for incompetence. No real shocker, given Bob’s role. Then, he gave the “pièce de résistance” (that’s a copy-paste, I had no idea how to write that).
“Bob fires assholes,” he said.
So, that had me putting my pen down. “Do tell,” I replied.
It seems that even more than incompetence, Bob has a crushingly low tolerance for anyone, particularly in any sort of leadership role, “being an asshole.” The culture of this organization doesn’t support that kind of behavior, and given their size, the ripple effect of a single jerkazoid in the mix causes all sorts of problems. Problems that can easily, and more effectively, be avoided by just firing “the asshole.”
Admit it – you’ve read this with a slight grin and a knowing nod of the head. You know the assholes in your world, the people causing problems, discomfort and stress for others, and you know the ones that should be whacked.
So whack ‘em.
Performance challenges we can deal with. We coach, mentor, advise, bring resources to bear to help someone well-intentioned up their performance game. That’s as it should be, so don’t stop that.
But behavior issues, particularly in leadership, should be dealt with sharply, definitively and immediately. The impact is just too big on the organization. You know that already, so suck it up and do what needs to be done.
