We know that senior people make decisions in different ways and these can affect business outcomes. Emotion, ego and even childhood trauma may be involved. In order to understand and explain the business and communication failings of modern managers and leaders, it may help to take a closer look at what constitutes leadership and the types of individuals who aspire to lead.
THE NATURE OF LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT
How do we define the terms “leader” and “leadership? A dictionary tells us the former is “a person or thing that leads...a person who is well fitted to lead”, while leadership is defined as “the state or position of being a leader...the qualities of a leader...the ability to lead”.
That seems straightforward at first glance but let’s look deeper at a business organization. It also uses the term “management”, defined by the dictionary as “control, handling, direction”. Yet a leader may also control, handle, and direct and a manager may be in a state or position of leading.
If we make a broad generalization, we can perhaps say that leaders are at the top of organizations and managers are one step lower in rank. The term “managing director” is used more in Britain than North America, but I know of at least one Canadian company in which the President reported to the Managing Director. The terminology begins to obscure simple distinctions such as giving and taking orders-or position on the organizational chart.
If leaders are above managers, then it might also be true that managers are more often in the trenches, dealing with issues, people, assets, and systems, while leaders concern themselves with more motivational and conceptual matters. This might be consistent with some schools of thought which hold that management is the implementation of known systems, whereas leadership involves breaking new ground. Standards can address known systems, but breaking new ground is an adaptive challenge needing new approaches. Once those new approaches are mastered, they become standards to be implemented with management and supervision. So, even a good working definition changes over time, with the people involved and with the task at hand.
I still find these distinctions unsatisfying because we know that a leader may regularly perform management functions and vice versa. So let’s broaden our search to look at leadership in history and in non-business settings.
As noted earlier it is not uncommon to hear the names of Winston Churchill, General George S. Patton or Charles de Gaulle in general discussions of leadership. These are just three well-known leaders from three different cultures, and others may come to mind, depending on context. Perhaps, ironically, it is also hard to imagine a detailed and analytical discussion about the leadership styles of these icons while they were in their prime. Perhaps it is the benefit of hindsight, but these leaders seemed to make decisions and act on them; their actions did not need validation by the word “leadership”. Their leadership was self-evident. Yet today, corporate executives discuss their leadership styles at length and the business literature examines how various senior executives fit into leadership categories.
Given the violent history of the world, it is no surprise that the imagery associated with leadership often concerns the military. Both de Gaulle and Patton were generals and Churchill began his career in the cavalry. Even today military terminology such “lock and load”, “take no prisoners”, “in the trenches”, “troops” and so on is heard regularly in the workplace.
It seems natural, then, to draw parallels between business management techniques and command and control practised by the military. The concept was borrowed from the military around the turn of the twentieth century and is still in vogue in many organizations. The irony is that my work with approximately 2,000 senior military officers as well as studies of the military literature show that this top-down decision-making concept has never been as universally useful as the doctrine implies.
THE MILITARY MODEL
The bayonet has been an instrument of war for hundreds of years of recorded history and was probably one for thousands of years before that. It may have had its beginnings as a sharp stone on the end of a stick. However, for the last three hundred years, the bayonet has been of limited use.
The plug bayonet, used around 1700, rendered a musket unusable, since the muzzle was literally plugged with the blunt end of the instrument. In the US Civil War, hospitals and field medics reported very few bayonet wounds. Yet fifty-five years later, the fixing of bayonets and marching toward enemy trenches was standard procedure in World War I. In that Great War, soldiers had difficulty wielding their long rifles within the narrow trenches. Elongating the weapons with bayonets may have actually lessened their utility. Yet decades after the bayonet had lost much of its utility, tens of thousands of men marched to their deaths, pointing them straight into machine gun fire. It is said that some machine gunners went mad at the slaughter.
Even more astounding, the bayonet was standard issue in World War II and can even be found on some modern rifles today. There was even a bayonet charge during the Falklands War. This illustrates the tenacity that many organizations display in clinging to useless or destructive policies, despite empirical evidence to stop.
Similarly, command and control was impossible and ineffective when World War I commanders, far behind trench lines, seemed unaware of the futility of infantry formations marching toward machine guns. Yet, these commanders repeatedly ordered troops to go “over the top”, condemning tens of thousands to their deaths. Command and control was as outdated as the bayonet.
Certainly, if a soldier with an empty rifle were facing an enemy two feet away, the bayonet would have been useful. Similarly, if a boom were coming overhead on a ship and the watch officer shouted “duck”, command and control would be very useful-even life-saving. But both the bayonet and command and control seem to require special circumstances to prove their worth.
In World War I, British troops not only subscribed to the command and control doctrine, but were also hampered by class-consciousness. There’s at least one story of how a lost British officer near Vimy Ridge would not take directions from a private soldier. The officer took his troops into harm’s way and probably died rather than break with tradition, rank and class.
Canadian troops took Vimy Ridge when French and British troops could not, in great part because of their egalitarian backgrounds, fostered in the rough-and-tumble Colony. Much of the work involved in trench warfare was exhausting manual labour. This was familiar to rural farm boys and woodsmen, but not to British troops, whose officers achieved their ranks largely as a result of class. The unorthodox Canadians once booed an officer off the parade ground for being late, destroyed a theatre because they did not appreciate the movie and generally showed limited decorum and deference. These were court-martial offences in other armies. But it was this individualism that made victory possible at Vimy.
Canadians developed the trench raid in which anywhere from dozens to thousands of soldiers tested German defences, captured enemies for interrogation, and killed or wounded thousands. Unorthodox Canadian officers recognized the importance of the machine gun. They used their own in an unorthodox manner for indirect fire, over ridges, as one would use artillery.
Fine calibration of artillery pieces made them more effective against the enemy, prevented many friendly-fire incidents and made creeping barrages more effective. Similarly, one officer with a scientific bent used the new field of acoustics to pinpoint enemy artillery and destroy it.
The most unorthodox tactic of all was the official flouting of the