The Frontline Leader I Miss: QMN027

Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Friday, 31 May

(Today’s report is a 6 minute read)

BLUF: The US military has a unique culture where frontline managers have an outsized role in the daily operation and direction of the organization. Empowered to carry out and lead based on a plan with an endstate, they’re imbued with a few traits I often find missing in the civilian workforce. Initiative, directness and professionalism are key to much of their effectiveness and sense of personal responsibility.

Brady here. “We can do the job without you.” The day I took command of my first platoon as an infantry platoon leader at the age of 22, just prior to deploying to Afghanistan in 2003, my new platoon sergeant and I had a discussion about what he and I each expected. He said he’d had a choice of two new lieutenants - one who didn't have a Ranger Tab and one who did - and he chose the more qualified one. He said he selected his platoon members carefully, challenged them accordingly and expected a lot from them. He said they deserved a good platoon leader and needed good direction, but that they were very capable and could operate without me. My first platoon sergeant represented what became a paradigm for me - the hard-learned, committed frontline manager who had figured out the game after 16 years of trial and error and would get the job done even if everything and everyone around him crumbled. There were probably eight other platoon sergeants in my battalion much like him - it was a strength of our battalion at the time. He’d learned leadership and management on the job from the leaders that came before him. And he demanded that I - his inexperienced rater - perform, or he would find someone else who would. Guys like him ran the battalion and we saw more than one platoon sergeant replace his platoon leader when he was found wanting in combat. 

Have you ever taken a job and on the first day had your seniormost direct report tell you he'd have you replaced if you weren’t up to the task? Given that demanding and plainspoken introduction, you might be surprised that what I miss most about military service is working with noncommissioned officers (NCOs) like my first platoon sergeant. The US military has a unique culture where frontline managers have an outsized role in the daily operation and direction of the organization. Empowered to carry out and lead based on a plan with an endstate, they’re imbued with a few traits I often find missing in the civilian workforce:

Initiative: From the start of their careers, noncommissioned officers are charged with taking personal responsibility for what's going on around them as leaders. Senior NCOs remind Junior NCOs about this often, and those Junior NCOs in turn begin to foster a sense of conscience and empowerment in the soldiers they lead. It starts with a sense of “what right looks like” and follows with an understanding that actions taken under personal initiative won't be punished if it's in service of the right goals. This can be extremely valuable for distributed, spread-out operations - as an officer I could rely on NCOs, simply by way of NCO leadership culture, on hand to make sure things were done right no matter the situation. 

Directness: The blunt talk I had immediately with my first platoon sergeant is a good example of the plain speaking common among NCOs. Charged with every facet of execution in military operations and training, the best NCOs I've worked with don't have much time to spare the feelings of their superiors or subordinates. Tact is still an important skill, but cutting to heart of an issue quickly and transparently leads to quicker decisions and outcomes. An officer can expect an explicit description of a problem that needs to get solved, which is critical for the integrity and effectiveness of many organizations. More than once I've seen general officers skip talking to colonels and captains and go directly to an NCO on the ground to find out what's really going on, and what needs to get fixed.

Professionalism: Given the freedom for directness and empowerment NCOs have, a sense of professionalism bounds what good NCOs will or will not do. NCO leadership training revolves around a charge of “Be, Know, Do” - where leaders must display specific leadership attributes, possess important general and task-specific knowledge relevant to their specialty and position, and routinely take action in ways that leaders must - which comes from an ethos of leadership by example. This “Be, Know, Do” approach guides how they learn their trade and approach new leadership roles across their careers- and requires a certain level of reflection and integrity to be effective for both individuals and the larger organization.

Given the capability for execution and sense of responsibility that you find with NCOs, you'd expect that more private sector businesses would adopt a similar method or developing and empowering frontline managers. But this hasn't really been the case. Pharmaceutical CEO Fred Hassan wrote an article for HBR in 2011 about how he engaged his frontline managers to turn around his company. And Ernest Fisher wrote the definitive book about the history of the United States Army's noncommissioned officer corps - explaining how it came to be such a prominent and forceful part of how the US Army fights its wars. But little has been done to connect civilian frontline leadership concepts with the NCO ethos that prizes initiative, directness and professionalism so much. Companies that find a way to build such a sense of responsibility to effective execution will see a return that far exceeds what they've put into it. (BJM)

KSA & CPP CALLED IT: Iron Man Must Die, So Iron Man Spinoffs Might Live (3 min) “The Special Operations Command had to kill its $80 million Iron Man suit in order to save its most battle-ready pieces, command leaders said here this week, confirming that some parts of the futuristic suit have already been shipped to troops in the field. The plan is to spend around $16 million in the coming months to continue testing and evaluating over a dozen promising technologies originally designed for the suit and incorporate them in to an ambitious new effort to modernize how special operations forces move, communicate, and fight.” (BJM)

BUT I LIKE QUOTES: Platitudes Are Contagious: ‘Company Culture,’ Management Maxims, And Other Bullshit (5 min) “They spread easily, sharing the same power of memes, viral stories, and fake news: they’re consumable, easily adaptable, require no analysis or critical thinking, and confirm one’s biases. Self-contained, they eschew context. This is the same reason why quotes from famous leaders do so well as preludes to tedious articles. Quotes are not bad per se. They often express ideas elegantly, flavor a text with wit, or signal a theme that is to be developed. Unfortunately, with bad writing — texts that become strings of platitudes masquerading as intelligence —writers utilize quotes as a kind of literary forced teaming to prime the reader into thinking that what they’re consuming is the intellectual peer of, say, Churchill, Einstein, or Sun Tzu. Quotes also provide an instant relatability: they’re signifiers of shared cultural iconography — Oprah, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi — that rely on shallow understandings to create a false sense of intellectual depth and social connectivity. As Winston Churchill wryly pointed out — and yes, I’m aware of the irony here, but bear with me — “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.” (KSA)

THE JUNIOR EXEC BY CPP: Span of Accountability

Span of control is what a manager can dictate based on their position. It might be managing a small team, a P&L, or an entire department. Middle managers fail when they have more accountability than control. They are held accountable for outcomes which go beyond the span of control - or they’re not held accountable for anything at all because the organization lacks governance. 

A better approach is to create ’span of accountability’ - an incentive system that encourages managers to go beyond their span of control, so that they may diagnose and work on problems that affect their team indirectly. This is referred to as the ‘entrepreneurial gap’ and the idea is to create stretch goals that extend beyond a manager’s ‘remit’. The key is to make that incentive more regular and more balanced than a yearly or biannual review - and to remember that you hired smart people for a reason.

Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.

KS Anthony (KSA), Chris Papasadero (CPP) & Brady Moore (BJM)