Are Battlefield Lessons Useless to Business and Nonprofit Leaders?

Dear Business and Nonprofit Leaders,

Your instincts are right: many so-called battlefield lessons are useless for you and your team. Stories of hardship, heroism, and sacrifice might be inspiring, but their practical utility is often minimal. This is because those lessons haven’t been tailored to your organization’s needs.

Those of us offering insights from a military perspective must work harder to understand issues through your lens and present feasible, practical, and implementable ideas. Our failure to customize military leadership lessons to your needs has, understandably, resulted in waning enthusiasm. If the trend continues, the pendulum may complete its swing toward the view that military experience is interesting but irrelevant.

But battlefield lessons are useful to non-military contexts; the right framing just hasn’t been applied to them. Let’s take a few common examples and provide some simple ways to make them more relevant to you.

Staff Rides and Battlefield Tours.

Militaries have long used staff rides as part of leader education; I used them several times in my commands. A group of leaders or students studies a particular battle in advance and then takes a trip to the actual grounds to discuss what happened there, why it happened, and what lessons they can learn. Done correctly, staff rides can have a tremendous impact.

Battlefield tours for business leaders are less useful because they normally devolve into sightseeing. In most cases, the military tour guide explains in great detail what happened at each point in the battle and then challenges the audience to determine how to build agile leaders, good decision-makers, expert planners, and so forth. The absence of context and a clear connection to the audience’s contemporary challenges undermine the business utility of this leader development experience.

What to look for.

Find programs that focus on learning about you before offering advice. The best ones begin with an assessment that helps you and your leaders see your salient challenges and opportunities. Next, they should coordinate learning objectives and preparation work, such as readings and individual research. On the battlefield or historical site, the emphasis needs to be on linking key lessons to your business challenges.

Boot camps.

For the military, boot camps and other forms of initial entry training are essential parts of transforming civilians into soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. These intensive courses last several weeks and are often followed up by additional training before the service members arrive at their first organization. The development of military skills and values are essential for them to be able to function effectively in their first assignment. My initial training as an officer lasted nearly a year. Few businesses and nonprofits, of course, could devote even a fraction of that time for new employee education and training.

Leadership boot camps run by former service members may promise the same transformational results but in record time. Some leadership boot camps promise that a 3-day experience will result in a “quantum leap” in a leader’s performance. You know this is unlikely. Improvement is a long-term process that relies heavily on self-development: leaders sort through a wide array of concepts and ideas to determine what is most meaningful to them and then work on those attributes.

What to look for.

Assess what each workshop and boot camp is offering, and use common sense to determine its likely utility. These kinds of programs can be helpful, but anything that sounds too good to be true probably is. Workshops can play an important role in your team’s development. The best programs customize their workshops to your organization’s particular needs and objectives. Doing these as a team can have a much higher payoff than individual leader’s programs.

The boot camp analogy can be very useful in discussions about culture, too. Boot camps are part of the military’s onboarding process; how your organization onboards new employees is equally essential to sustaining your culture. Programs that help you define your culture, hire talented people who fit, onboard to set them up for success and continue their development on the job are likely to help you achieve high levels of employee engagement. [Did you know, according to Gallup, that nearly 2 of every 3 employees in America reports being unengaged at work?]

Strategic Planning.

“Plans are nothing, planning is everything” World War II Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower famously remarked. Good commanders drive their staff to identify possible contingencies, threats, and opportunities, and have branch plans or sequels to address each one of them. The planning process, in
military parlance, is never completed. Commanders often get detailed playbooks that aid decision-making for every permutation a creative staff (the strategic planners) can possibly think of in the time they are given to think. The results are often impressive.

The desire to bring the military-planning process to a business context is understandable. There’s one problem: very few businesses in the world can afford to have highly-skilled people spending all their time making detailed plans about things that will probably never happen. In fact, most businesses and nonprofits outsource their strategic planning. Here’s what you normally get: highly detailed plans that few employees have time to read. There is little to no sense of ownership. Even worse, your situation may be so dynamic that detailed plans soon become irrelevant. It is no wonder then that, according to one estimate, 90 percent of business plans are not executed. They gather dust. This might not be a big problem for the military, but it is for you.

What to look for.

Businesses and nonprofits that want to grow sustainably need both a strategy and a plan. A strategy helps you understand your situation, select a way forward to meet your goals, and manage a dynamic environment—to know when to stay on course and when to change. A plan helps you coordinate the activities of your team to implement your chosen way forward. With the right guidance, the best plans are ones written by your own team. If they have authorship over the plan, they are more likely to own and execute it.

Bottom line: the strategic plan can be counterproductive – a sort of reverse Goldilocks: not quite a strategy, not quite a plan, just plain ignored. Develop a sensible strategy and then put together an implementation plan that your team owns.

Is military experience useless for businesses and nonprofits?

Not at all. In fact, they can become an essential tool for organizations that feel stuck, want to implement change, or are trying to manage unexpected growth. Breakthrough insights, many leaders find, come from looking at your challenges from different points of view. Battlefield lessons can expand your perspective – your mental framework – and enable you to connect ideas from a different context that help your team grow sustainably.

Respect: It’s time to talk at work about bullying and assault

Respect

I am overwhelmed by the positive feedback to my story about being bullied by peers and sexually assaulted by priests as a teenager.

Several women shared their own harrowing and heartbreaking memories. A number of men came forward, too. Some shared their realities of being violated by people in positions of power or authority, others by peers and teammates.

My list is full of extraordinary leaders – veterans, diplomats, scholars, caregivers, advocates, reporters, humanitarians, nonprofit and business leaders, moms and dads, sons and daughters –  too many of whom had experiences like I did. If you would like to hear me talk in more depth about my personal experience, listen to episode 712 of Don Hutcheson’s Discover Your Talent podcast.

Those who responded with their own stories discussed the inner struggles they faced. They told of the triggers that brought forward the searing memories (the Penn State Sandusky scandal was one of mine) and the helpful and unhelpful ways they tried to deal with them. Each one of them found solace in writing things out.  

I was struck, particularly, by just how pervasive and underreported the abuse has been.

Leaders need to have the emotional courage to address bullying and sexual assault. This means doing something more meaningful and impactful than issuing policy letters and having people undergo sensitivity training. Addressing sexual harassment, according to one study, is the #1 workplace trend for 2017.

It means walking the talk. While this does not require sharing personal anguish, leaders need to convey clearly and personally their commitment to respect.

Here are some practical ways to do that:

• Start a professional reading program that includes articles or books that address these issues. First of all, employees and supervisors overwhelmingly note that such programs, if done authentically and consistently, are 1) valuable to their professional development; 2) make them more effective at work; and 3) show that the organization cares about them. Second, reading the experiences of others can give people safe ways of thinking about and discussing sensitive topics, and also help increase empathy.
• Hire people who will advance your culture of respect. It’s safe to assume that everyone is going to be nice during an interview. Few people are likely to list as references people they bullied. But did you notice how the candidate treated the janitor? Did the candidate pick up towels on the bathroom floor or leave them? How people treat others, especially those who the person believes can do nothing for them professionally, speaks volumes. How an individual demonstrates care (or lack thereof) for common areas is also telling.
• Zero-tolerance for bullies and bigots. We have zero tolerance policies for problems like corruption, lying, stealing, malpractice, and malfeasance. Expand that to include disrespect. Employers who look the other way often find that the price of tolerating a bully or bigot was too high.

Our short video on leadership principles Trustworthiness, Respect, and Stewardship provides a good gateway into the discussion.

Good character is developed over time through habituation—the traits that make us who we are come from habits we’ve acquired. The same is true for bad character. Leaders need to take a stand early on by calling out bad behavior and preventing that from becoming the norm.

Moreover, by shining a light on issues like bullying and assault, leaders can create a culture within which individuals feel empowered to report abuse and potential predators know the severe consequences they will face if they hurt others.

RADICAL COURAGE

“To be a better leader, never be the bearer of bad news” was the advice a senior executive in a large financial management firm had given to my colleague – who has been a dear friend for many years and a fellow veteran. My friend related the story to me in a WTF sort-of-manner. It grated against the most basic elements of leadership. He was counseled to forget about courage.

Unpacking what the senior executive said, we realized that his advice was perfectly sound for someone whose primary aim was climbing the corporate latter: make no waves, avoid being seen as a threat, have other people do the dirty work. Remove your spine. But as leadership advice, it was appalling.

Courage is the backbone of sound leadership. It is the virtue, according to the ancient Greeks and Romans, that allows all other virtues to exist.

How does this apply to business and nonprofit leaders? Courage enables leaders to set an example by:

• Sharing hardships with employees so they respect you as caring and in touch
• Doing what is morally and ethically right so you build trust in your employees and customers
• Facing situations of high anxiety and trepidation so you create faith and confidence that you will tackle tough challenges
• Demonstrating sound judgment in a dynamic marketplace so you can seize opportunities and manage unforeseen threats.

Leaders who set an example in these ways have what we call Radical Courage. Radical Courage is the integration of four types of courage: physical, moral, emotional, and intellectual. The descriptor “Radical” expresses an idea both basic and profound – leaders require multiple forms of courage.

We commonly think of courage in the physical sense: a soldier facing the enemy on the battlefield or a firefighter charging into a burning building to rescue a child. For most leaders, the need for physical courage takes on less dramatic but no less important aspects.

Imagine leaders who surround themselves with luxury and work in an environment far more comfortable than their employees. They are more likely to be seen as distant, detached, and out-of-touch. Leaders who require employees to work with shoddy materials in an unsafe or unhealthy work environment will probably find significant resentment.

Leaders who share hardships with their employees are more likely to be considered genuine and authentic. They are less likely to tolerate huge disparities or an unhealthy, unsafe work environment. Ray Lambert, a World War Two veteran and founder of Lambert Electric, told me that he insisted on being on-site when his employees were working late or with a new client or on a high-risk job. He wanted to make sure they had the materials, support, and conditions needed to do their jobs to the right standard and safely. He retained a highly loyal workforce and a group of clients. That veteran-owned business thrived for over 40 years until he sold it upon retirement.

Moral courage, on the other hand, is the willingness to uphold moral and ethical standards despite pressure to do otherwise. Business and nonprofit leaders can face these challenges in areas such as finance, accounting, and reporting. Leaders should also beware of creating an environment that places employees in a position that encourages moral or ethical compromise.

Volkswagen’s “no failure” culture, under which almost no employee mistakes were tolerated, reportedly led to practices that undermined honest communication and accountability. For instance, Volkswagen managers discovered that their diesel engines were producing emissions above standards. Rather than report and fix the problem (and face potential consequences), managers instead installed devices designed to fool emissions tests. Senior leaders allegedly covered up these actions in an effort to avoid public embarrassment and the cost of recalling and fixing the engines. The decision by Volkswagen managers to falsify emissions test results, and by the leadership to cover up the cheating, are failures of moral courage.

Two other forms of courage that are less well-known are emotional and intellectual. Emotional courage is the willingness to face high anxiety situations without being cold-hearted or carried away by anger, rage, elation, etc. In 2014, Mary Barra, the first female CEO of a major American automobile company, showed emotional courage in facing public outcry and congressional scrutiny over GM’s faulty ignition switches. Barra not only came forward to acknowledge the responsibility personally, but she also took proactive actions to turn the crisis into an opportunity for major organizational reform.

Intellectual courage is the foundation of good judgment. It is a balance between the strength of conviction and flexibility. Leaders who lean too far toward conviction can become obstinate, bull-headed, and impervious to feedback. So many warning signs about Uber’s toxic culture and questionable practices were ignored by former CEO Travis Kalanick and the Board of Directors, leading to a major crash for a company that had achieved the highest valuation of any start-up in history. Excessive flexibility, on the other hand, can create indecisiveness (losing the courage to act) or hyperactivity – over-reacting to every conflicting or contradictory data point.

Each element of courage is a balance between extremes and a willingness to face some form of danger or harm. Radical Courage is the integration of all four. Imagine a hashtag. Each line represents one of the four forms of courage. Radical courage is the space in the center.

How can leaders improve each element of courage? Let’s return to the ancient Greeks and Romans. They believe that virtue is a habit – the sum total of our daily choices of right and wrong. Therefore, leaders build radical courage through daily practice. Ask yourself these questions:

• Am I sharing the hardships and challenges of my employees?
• Do my decisions uphold our values and code of ethics?
• Do my expectations promote greater candor or incentives to hide the truth?
• Am I willing to be the bearer of, or face up to, bad news?
• How do I know when to change my mind or alter a plan?

Radical courage is a pivotal distinction between a leader and a corporate climber. Leading with Radical Courage increases your trustworthiness in the eyes of your employees and customers; it guides you when you have to face tough decisions or confront difficult truths; it helps you determine when to stick to your plan and when to change it. These qualities are essential for leaders who want their small businesses or nonprofits to grow sustainably in a competitive, dynamic market.