Leadership is different from management in the type of results it produces, and for this reason it's more important. Management controls performance in people because it impacts skill; it's a matter of monitoring, analyzing and directing. Leadership creates performance in people because it impacts willingness; it's a matter of modeling, inspiring and reinforcing. How can you control what you haven't yet created?
The relative quality of performance from your people has little to do with their skill. They already know how to do their jobs -- you hired them because they had that basic capability and, once they get an orientation to your products and procedures, they're competent. From that point on the quality and quantity of their performance depends on their willingness to use their skill to the utmost, regardless of whether you're hovering over them like some supervisory gargoyle.
Excerpting General Patton's speech to the Third Army seems appropriate at this point for contrasting the management of skills with the inspiration of leadership.But not from the much sanitized version of the events from the movie, so the language is quite colorful (2).
You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you right here today would die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all men.
Yes, every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he's not, he's a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are.
The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood. Remember that the enemy is just as frightened as you are, and probably more so. They are not supermen.
We have the finest food, the finest equipment, the best spirit, and the best men in the world
All of the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters, either. Every single man in this Army plays a vital role. Don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. Every man has a job to do and he must do it. Every man is a vital link in the great chain. What if every truck driver suddenly decided that he didn't like the whine of those shells overhead, turned yellow, and jumped headlong into a ditch? The cowardly bastard could say, "Hell, they won't miss me, just one man in thousands". But, what if every man thought that way? Where in the hell would we be now?
What would our country, our loved ones, our homes, even the world, be like? No, Goddamnit, Americans don't think like that. Every man does his job. Every man serves the whole. Every department, every unit, is important in the vast scheme of this war. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns and machinery of war to keep us rolling. The Quartermaster is needed to bring up food and clothes because where we are going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man on K.P. has a job to do, even the one who heats our water to keep us from getting the 'G.I. Shits'."
Each man must not think only of himself, but also of his buddy fighting beside him. We don't want yellow cowards in this Army. They should be killed off like rats. If not, they will go home after this war and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed more brave men. Kill off the Goddamned cowards and we will have a nation of brave men. One of the bravest men that I ever saw was a fellow on top of a telegraph pole in the midst of a furious fire fight in Tunisia. I stopped and asked what the hell he was doing up there at a time like that. He answered, "Fixing the wire, Sir". I asked, "Isn't that a little unhealthy right about now?" He answered, "Yes Sir, but the Goddamned wire has to be fixed". I asked, "Don't those planes strafing the road bother you?" And he answered, "No, Sir, but you sure as hell do!" Now, there was a real man. A real soldier.
There was a man who devoted all he had to his duty, no matter how seemingly insignificant his duty might appear at the time, no matter how great the odds. And you should have seen those trucks on the road to Tunisia. Those drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they rolled over those son-of-a-bitching roads, never stopping, never faltering from their course, with shells bursting all around them all of the time. We got through on good old American guts. Many of those men drove for over forty consecutive hours. These men weren't combat men, but they were soldiers with a job to do. They did it, and in one hell of a way they did it.
They were part of a team. Without team effort, without them, the fight would have been lost. All of the links in the chain pulled together and the chain became unbreakable.
The quicker we clean up this Goddamned mess, the quicker we can take a little jaunt against the purple pissing Japs and clean out their nest, too. Before the Goddamned Marines get all of the credit.
Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. And when we get to Berlin I am personally going to shoot that paper hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler!
The full speech, with annotations, may be found here.
You don't need to be a sissy to be empathetic -- Patton used it brilliantly to get the troops to buy-in and listen to the message. He took on their fears of death and letting their comrades down head on and acknowledged them; you're afraid and there is a way out of this, here's how.
Once they bought in he appealed to the higher reason of the human mind by laying out logically how each person is a link in a chain, how each thing they achieve -- always trying to overcome fear, always staying alert, that every man has an important job, to always move forward, to take Berlin, to take Tokyo -- all logically build, and finally logically build to the most important goals of getting back to our Country, your homes, your loved ones, your children's children, leaving a positive legacy for all time.
Modeled his vision? Absolutely.
Reinforcing? Positively -- he reminded the men they knew what they needed to know, and that success simply depended on them all giving it their very best effort.
Inspirational? Those troops, most facing combat for the first time, would have followed him through the gates of hell at the moment the speech ended.
Seven months later that Army accomplished, in poor winter weather, one of the most remarkable feats of military adventure ever -- disengaging from combat in one battle and moving one hundred miles in forty-eight hours to relieve besieged Bastogne.
That man knew how to lead -- leadership based on his ability to make good decisions based on understanding human behavior, mastery of military doctrine, and keen situational awareness; the listen, learn, and observe at the base of my diagram.
-----------
Footnotes:
(1) "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" is a book that, though written with far too much of the sense of White Man's Burden and the liberal guilt that pervades revisionist history, is named after the Massacre at Wounded Knee where 300 Indians, many women and children, and 25 soldiers were killed in the final major armed conflict of the Indian Wars.
It's hard for me to read Slap talking about connecting with your values and emotions when he makes a joke about such an event by the cute title of his book and program.
Slap's title makes even less sense if one argues it comes from the poem American Names by Stephen Benet that the phrase originally appeared -- it was about the poet's love of American place names; I know Slap's intention wasn't to express how much a manager loves his job that when he dies he would want to buried in a conference room.
I finally gave up on finishing reading it about 2/3rds through. Some content was good, but the format of the book just didn't hold my attention.
(2) When attention returns to the tactical side and developing skills, a good subject for a post will be Baron von Steuben who, when drilling the Continental Army at Valley Forge, would call over an assistant to translate his French and German swears into curses the Americans understood.
No comments:
Post a Comment