The Only Three Things Leaders Must Do: QMN062

Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Monday, 30 September

(This week’s report is an 8 minute read)

BLUF: Leadership is influencing people by providing purpose, direction and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission. Each of these things requires focused effort on behalf of leaders, but the result is meaningful work and an effective organization. Leaders should align themselves to these tasks and let their people handle the rest. 

Brady here. In the late summer of 2002 I sat in the dark of a hot Georgia night and heard the most important words about leadership I've ever come across. I was a young second lieutenant training to lead infantrymen in combat in Afghanistan, and soon after, Iraq. My class of new infantry officers had spent several days and nights learning about how to fight in urban settings - we were taught how to approach a group of buildings and clear them of enemy fighters using simunitions to understand the difficulties of fighting in close quarters. Night and day we attacked buildings and were pelted by plastic 9mm bullets filled with gel paint. We learned that in urban combat, which was in most of our futures, casualty rates would be very high and that a fight in a city could be a seemingly impossible task. After taking turns trying and failing to lead successful seizures of buildings from entrenched defenders, and seeing everyone covered in paint spots where they'd been shot, I got the feeling that my future job in combat might be futile. At the end of our multi-day exercise my class was gathered in a dark field at night and a senior noncommissioned officer (NCO) just back from fighting in Afghanistan addressed us: “Your job as a platoon leader is to provide purpose, direction and motivation to your platoon. Let your platoon sergeant and squad leaders do their jobs and you do yours. The lives of your men depend on it.” 

1-50 Infantry at McKenna MOUT Site, Fort Benning, Georgia

This simple admonition has stuck with me ever since, and provided me guidance on what I should be doing as a leader and what I should expect from my leaders - and there are only three things. Indeed - the man who told this to me and all the other young leaders getting ready for Iraq & Afghanistan was pulling a key quote from the US Army’s leadership manual, Field Manual 6-22 entitled Leader Development. It defines leadership as “influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission and improving the organization.” It’s been my standard for leaders ever since - as well as when I’ve found myself in leadership situations. As leaders we often seem to fall into a falsehood - that we have to do everything for everyone under our control. The truth is that we really need to only do these three things really well. 

Purpose is key for military leadership for a number of reasons. First, military leaders don’t usually have the ability to incentivize with pay or material goods - at least not in the short term. Second, in military situations leaders often have to ask their people to do things well beyond the requirements of their day to day jobs - what award citations often call acting “above and beyond the call of duty.” Simon Sinek in his marketing (not leadership) book Start With Why lays out the requirement for purpose pretty well: “People don’t buy WHAT you do; they buy WHY you do it.” and “…when a company clearly communicates their WHY, what they believe, and we believe what they believe, then we will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to include those products or brands in our lives.” Third, purpose is key for the way that American combat leaders communicate their plans and ensuring they’re well executed - by establishing and following a Commander’s Intent. Subordinates need to know the reason why they’re accomplishing a task so that if the situation changes and they need to make a critical decision before they can talk to their leader, they can make a call in line with the larger aim. Knowing the purpose also allows subordinates to seize unexpected opportunities and adapt as they go about their jobs.

Direction is a set of tasks that’s easy to get wrong. Leaders can often err on the side of giving too much direction - in the end managing instead of leading. I think everyone’s experienced this - a leader hires you to do a job and prescribes your behavior so much that you start to wonder why they need you in the first place. Direction has to give subordinates what they need to know and prescribe as little else as possible. In his unrivaled book The Art of Action, Stephen Bungay examines the work of one of the greatest practitioners of direction in history, Field Marshal Helmut Graf von Moltke, whom he says “limited direction to defining and expressing the essential intent […] allowing each level to define what it would achieve to realize the intent; and [gave] individuals freedom to adjust their actions in line with intent.” Bungay also found a manual that von Moltke wrote, where the master explained:

“The higher the level of command, the shorter and more general the orders should be. The next level down should add whatever further specification it feels to be necessary, and the details of execution are left to verbal instructions or perhaps a word of command. This ensures that every- one retains freedom of movement and decision within the bounds of their authority.”

In practical terms, this means KEEP IT SIMPLE. Leaders need to let their people know how each of them fit in the larger plan, and what they must accomplish to fulfill their part of the plan, and not a whole lot else. How they accomplish their tasks is up to them, within reason and some boundaries. Having that purpose as described above is key to making good direction effective. 

Motivation is tricky. As a leader of light infantry NCOs, soldiers and Green Berets I found that motivation was either something that was built-in (as in the organization purposefully selected self-motivators), that it was continually generated as a part of the organization’s culture (what people might call being a group of “hard chargers”) or it had to be generated on a personal level - where I had to talk to individuals about what we were doing, why we were doing it, and why I needed their help specifically. But the truth is that in combat, most infantry soldiers, NCOs & Green Berets I worked with were motivated just to be in the fight - for just about everyone we were doing what we joined to do. The job was risky and dangerous and uncertain to a level that’s hard to find anywhere in western society today - and we were finally there. Where motivation was needed was when we were back home and having to accomplish an administrative or support task that was boring or seemingly unnecessary. In that case I had to connect our banal administrative tasks to our next deployment - showing for instance how language training was going to make us more effective at counterinsurgency in our next trip to Southern Afghanistan. I found this task to be difficult, because when you’re used to having a set of people who seem to be always motivated, finding them tired, dejected and lost is confusing. Knowing what drives a person on an individual level is key in this case - so that you can ensure that what’s going on maps to those drivers. 

Good leaders, by providing purpose, direction, and motivation, create meaning for their organizations - and this is extremely important. Gallup identified a few years ago in its State of the American Workplace survey that 7 in 10 American workers weren’t engaged in their work - meaning that they “are emotionally disconnected from their companies and may actually be working against their employers' interests; they are less productive, are more likely to steal from their companies, negatively influence their coworkers, miss workdays, and drive customers away.” Meaningful work has been identified as a key factor in workplace effectiveness, engagement and retention, and has been studied as such by Stanford University (comparing happiness with meaningfulness). Leaders who create meaning are creating more effective organizations by winning the hearts of their people and aligning them with the aims of the larger organization. It’s hard work, but it’s what good leaders do.

What that senior NCO, whose face or nametape I never saw, told us after a hard realization about future urban combat provided me not just a good set of precepts for my next job, but with meaning as a leader. I knew what I needed to do and why, and how my actions and effort would impact the larger goal - even if I wasn’t yet sure how it was all going to work out. (BJM)

*****

MORE ON MEANING & WORK: Why You Hate Work (10 min) “Employees are vastly more satisfied and productive, it turns out, when four of their core needs are met: physical, through opportunities to regularly renew and recharge at work; emotional, by feeling valued and appreciated for their contributions; mental, when they have the opportunity to focus in an absorbed way on their most important tasks and define when and where they get their work done; and spiritual, by doing more of what they do best and enjoy most, and by feeling connected to a higher purpose at work. The more effectively leaders and organizations support employees in meeting these core needs, the more likely the employees are to experience engagement, loyalty, job satisfaction and positive energy at work, and the lower their perceived levels of stress. When employees have one need met, compared with none, all of their performance variables improve. The more needs met, the more positive the impact.”(BJM)

PROVING WHAT WE’VE KNOWN: Research Shows Military Service Can Hurt Some Job Seekers’ Prospects (3 min) “The research comprises 10 studies and randomized experiments with almost 3,000 participants, including people with no hiring experience, as well as seasoned managers and recruiters. A manuscript describing the research is forthcoming in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process. “This bias was occurring among actual managers who are in the business of hiring people,” said Aaron Kay, Ph.D., a Fuqua management professor and senior author of the research. “In one of the studies, we tested this in a large American restaurant chain. As these managers were evaluating applicants’ resumes, their choices showed they thought veterans were more suited to the kitchen as opposed to jobs where they would be dealing with people. Importantly, veterans were not liked less – managers just thought the kitchen is where they would thrive.” (BJM)

CYBER WARFARE IN ACTION: How The U.S. Hacked ISIS (20 min) “We hear all about Russia's influence campaigns and Chinese intellectual property thefts and Iranian hackers trolling American infrastructure, but we rarely hear in any detailed way about the American response. Nakasone appears to be starting to address that. The irony is that offensive cyber's richest target is us. "The United States is the country most highly dependent on these technologies," Deibert said. "And arguably the most vulnerable to these sorts of attacks. I think there should be far more attention devoted to thinking about proper systems of security, to defense." That would mean trying to find a way to harden soft targets across the country, getting private companies to beef up their cybersecurity, getting the U.S. government to mandate standards. Offensive cyber, at this point anyway, may seem easier.” (BJM)

Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.

KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)