Management or Leadership - A Civilian-Military Gap: QMN063

Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Monday, 7 October

A CIVILIAN-MILITARY GAP: MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP (This week’s report is a 7 minute read)

BLUF: Management and leadership are two different things. Step one in developing leaders in your organization is understanding that the tasks of leaders and managers are different, and that it takes practice to get good results at both. Managers can be developed into leaders, but that takes training and experience at providing purpose, direction and motivation for the led.

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” - Peter F. Drucker

Brady here. Last week our post, about the three things a leader must provide, seemed to really resonate with veterans - specifically veterans who used to lead soldiers in combat and now work in the private sector. One sentence in particular got quoted back to me several times:

“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.”

If there’s anything that really seems to stand out to veterans I’ve met about the difference between civilian and military leaders is an understanding of what leaders do. In the civilian workplace, I’ve seen that nearly everyone in charge is brought up first as a manager, where the task is to ensure that things are coordinated, organized and executed in an appropriate manner, concerned more with efficiency and less with direction. It’s a career path that can progress incrementally - one starts by managing their own performance and can gradually take on responsibility for the performance of others. 

Where this often goes wrong is when a career manager is promoted and is expected to lead. Fittingly, the Greek soldier and poet Archilochus is attributed to have said that “We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” If someone’s only been trained to manage - to set schedules, measure timelines, divide up work, assess performance - and is then required to approach their work as a leader where the work is in assessing the environment, establishing and communicating purpose, determining the best way forward, identifying goals and motivating the group to reach them, without significant training and experience you’re not going to get great leadership results. This manager will approach leadership like a manager - by focusing more on doing things right than in doing the right things. 

A fire team leader from 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment positions his team during a live fire exercise. Photo by Staff Sgt. Jennifer Bunn

In the Army, I saw the opposite of this. In an infantry platoon, soldiers were brought up to manage themselves, of course, but the next role in a standard career path is that of a leader - a fire team leader. Working within the intent of a squad leader, a fire team leader is responsible for three other people and is expected to lead them - meaning that he’s responsible for providing purpose, direction and motivation. He’s focused not just on how well they’re doing the task, but if it’s the right task at the right time in the first place, and is expected to be, know and do the things that a leader does. That fire team leader’s next job is that of squad leader, who’s leading two fire team leaders and all their men. Not until that noncommissioned officer reaches the role of platoon sergeant does he really get into serious management again. Leadership abilities, skills and knowledge are foremost in the minds of nearly everyone in such a work environment - management is something that comes with it. The word “leadership” gets thrown around a lot in civilian settings, but its’ requisite knowledge, skills and abilities can often be an afterthought. 

Good managers are critical to success everywhere - the better managers your organization has, the more likely you’re going to have outstanding performance. But step one in developing leaders in your organization is understanding that the tasks of leaders and managers are different, and that it takes practice to get good results at both. Managers can be developed into leaders, but that takes training and experience at providing purpose, direction and motivation for the led. (BJM)

*****

BOOK REVIEW: Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

KSA here. In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris entitled "Citizenship in a Republic," the most famous portion of which is known as "the man in the arena" passage, which, not unsurprisingly, is one of the most over-quoted pieces of prose of the last century. It reads, in part:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming…"

Roosevelt articulates a certain truth that resonates with any person of conscience: that talk, in and of itself, is cheap and it is especially cheap when issued by people who have nothing to lose by talking. While we trust people who we know have "been there and done that," those who are there and doing that rightfully command greater respect: they are the boots on the ground, the front line, the ones who know what does (and doesn't) work in real life, in real time. These are the people who have what Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses in Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, the latest book in his Incerto series. For the author, there is an ethical side to this as well. "If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences," Taleb writes. "In case you are giving economic views: Don't tell me what you 'think,' just tell me what's in your portfolio (emphasis in text)." In short, Skin in the Game serves two functions, both of equal value: 1) to detect bullshit artists and 2) to keep one from becoming a bullshit artist.

Part of what I appreciate about Taleb is that he is unsparing when it comes to skewering those who make decisions that affect people - even entire countries - while having no skin in the game. More importantly, however, Taleb pulls aside the curtain to reveal the shortcomings of their thought processes. In analyzing the unintended consequences reaped by American (and other) foreign policy "interventionistas," Taleb cites three flaws:

1. They think in statics, not dynamics,

2. They think in low, not high, dimensions,

3. They think in terms of actions, never interactions

He further notes that "they can't get the idea that, empirically, complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system." If this sounds familiar, good: you've been paying attention. It is the reason why Green Berets are reminded to "Consider the Second- and Third-Order Effects!"

Taleb hammers this and other points home across multiple disciplines from science to religion, leaving little untouched. It's worth pointing out that Taleb is not a theoretician: he's a former professional risk-taker (he was a successful options trader and wrote an excellent, if highly technical, text on the subject) and, more importantly, a keen observer. His observations, collected throughout his work, are based on experience: his skin in the game. They are imminently useful and may provide some guidance when you find your face "marred by dust and sweat and blood." And indeed, if that's the case, hold fast: you're under the thumb of the best teacher of all: experience. As Taleb writes, "the knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us." (KSA)

*****

MIS-LED: After the Niger Ambush, I Trusted the Army to Find Answers. Instead, I Was Punished. (6 min) “It was tough at times, but I trusted the right decisions would be made to support and protect the people who volunteered to serve. In so many ways, in those months after the ambush, those expectations fell short. No longer trusting the organization to which I had devoted so much of my life, there was only one thing for me to do: leave. I am proud of my service, but even more so I am disappointed in what it cost and especially in some of the leaders I had aspired to emulate.” (BJM)

SKYNET IS NOT UPON US. NOT EVEN CLOSE: A RoboCop, a park and a fight: How expectations about robots are clashing with reality (8 min) “While people are beginning to more commonly encounter robots in everyday life, they can often fall short of expectations — much as HP RoboCop did. That gap can be exploited as a way to make a robot more effective than it actually is, but also runs the risk of creating situations in which people rely on robots in ways they’re unprepared for, as was the case for Guebara.The robot’s alert button is not yet connected to the police department, said Cosme Lozano, chief of police of Huntington Park, a city just southeast of downtown Los Angeles. The calls are instead directed to Knightscope, the company that creates and leases the robots.” (BJM)

GETTING IT RIGHT: From our foxhole: Empowering tactical leadership to achieve strategic AI goals (10 min) “Our AI experiments explored how to deal with the daily flood of data that is used to provide key decision-makers with predictive analysis and enhanced situational awareness. We chose this problem for our first round of experiments because the challenge is so common and is only getting worse, with 2.5 quintillion bytes of additional data each day. We termed this the “Imitation Game problem,” honoring the challenge that confronted British cryptographers cracking the Nazi enigma code, who began with more potential solutions each day then could be tried in multiple lifetimes.” (BJM)

Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.

KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)