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Directive Control

For the past 20 years or so, the focus of most modern leadership theorists has been on the need for leaders to create an environment where followers feel safe to contribute fully without fear of ridicule or reprisal. Thus, the transition to the 21st century has also been a time to transition our approach to leadership and to introduce the concept of Psychological Safety.

Psychological Safety was popularised by organisational behavioural scientist, Amy Edmondson in the early 2000s but its origins extend back to Schein and Bennis in the 1960s. The concept of Psychological Safety has, in-kind, been incorporated into systems such as “Safety Culture” and the Toyota Total Production System (TPS) and is represented in the “Andon Cord” system.

What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological Safety is the ability to “show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career” (Kahn 1990, p. 708). It fosters a sense of value in what individuals and teams have to contribute, endows them with a sense of belonging, and empowers them to speak up, collaborate, and experiment.

But this post isn’t about Psychological Safety. Rather it’s concerned with the notion that Directive Control no longer has a place in the leader’s tool kit, and that’s wrong.

The wide adoption of Psychological Safety and the desire of leaders to demonstrate inclusivity may have caused them to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. At the same time as Psychological Safety was experiencing rapid take up throughout the corporate world, society was experiencing a significant shift in behavioural expectations. This shift was seeing diversity and inclusion experience an elevated sense of value and bullying and harassment being called out as inappropriate behaviour and rightly, worthy of punishment.

However, the problem is that the negative bullying and harassment behaviour prevalent at the time has been conflated with the leadership technique known as Directive Control.

The term Directive Control comes from the German ‘Auftragstaktik’ (literally, “mission tactics”) and was the precursor to Mission Command. It is a form of ‘command and control’ developed initially for use by the military and is predicated on the commander giving directions to their subordinates based on their intent. That is, the orders given describe the objective or outcome required, but does not prescribe how to achieve the outcome.

Directive Control tends to conjure images of military commanders yelling orders and punishing subordinates who fail to comply or achieve the objective. But this is a mischaracterisation which has been propagated by ill-informed, self-professed gurus in the leadership consulting circuit, pedalling their own leadership systems and ideologies.

The problem is, Directive Control has become synonymous with poor leadership due to the barrage of articles written that denounce and demonise it and those who employ it.

Directive Control, Mission Command and Command and Control are generally misunderstood terms. This is likely due to the terminology used to label the techniques which seems to imply autocratic, exclusive, and micro-managing forms of dictatorial rule. But this is an incorrect interpretation of these valuable leadership and management techniques.

To properly understand why these techniques are not evil and the value they offer, we need to understand the role of a leader.

 
While there is no universally accepted definition of leadership it is generally agreed that a leader is someone who creates a vision and influences followers to achieve the objectives required to realise that vision.

 

Commander’s Intent

Once a leader has formed a vision, which is a view of some desired future state, they will generally express their intent for achieving the vision. This is not detailed planning. Rather this is the ‘what’ to achieve not the ‘how’ to achieve it. The role of subordinate leaders is to take the leader’s intent and create detailed plans.

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.

When the military develops plans, they seek out the widest available input from all relevant, credible sources. This is a very inclusive process but deliberately restricts input from those who are not properly informed, positioned or experienced to contribute. At all levels of planning, commanders encourage what the military calls ‘contributary descent’. This is a technique where anyone and everyone involved in the planning is required to raise any concerns or issues they have with the plan. A kind of continuous Debono ‘Black Hat’ review.  Once the plan has been agreed and finalised, however, everyone is expected to adhere to it.

Directive Control

Directive Control is a system of leadership where the leader expresses their intent and provides direction to followers on the objectives to be achieved and then empowers them to achieve the necessary outcome within the parameters of a set of ‘freedoms and constraints’[1]. To be truly effective, the leader must educate and mentor their followers for sufficient time to develop trust in their ability to make decisions and the leader must vary their leadership style according to the evolution of the situation.

Decentralised Execution

Decentralised execution is the delegation of decision-making authority to followers, so they may make and implement decisions and adjust their assigned tasks in fluid and rapidly changing situations.

Follower decisions should be ethically based and within the framework of their higher leader’s intent. Decentralised execution is essential to seizing, retaining, and exploiting the operational initiative during operations in environments where conditions rapidly change, and uncertainty is the norm as has become the case in today’s VUCA[2] business world.

Rapidly changing situations and uncertainty are inherent in business where leaders seek to establish a tempo and intensity that their competitors, cannot match.

Decentralised execution requires disseminating information to the lowest possible level so followers can make informed decisions based on a shared understanding of both the situation and their leader’s intent. This empowers followers operating in rapidly changing conditions to exercise disciplined initiative within their leader’s intent.

Generally, the more dynamic the circumstances, the greater the need for initiative to make decisions at lower levels. It is the duty of followers to exercise initiative to achieve their leader’s intent. It is the leader’s responsibility to issue appropriate intent and ensure followers are prepared in terms of education, training, and experience to exercise initiative.

The leader’s intent provides a unifying idea that allows decentralised execution within an overarching framework. It provides guidance within which individuals may exercise initiative to accomplish the desired end-state. Understanding the leader’s intent two levels up further enhances unity of effort while providing the basis for decentralised decision making and execution throughout the depth of the organisation. Followers who understand the leader’s intent are far more likely to exercise initiative effectively in unexpected situations. Under the Mission Command approach to command and control, followers have both responsibility and authority to fulfil the leader’s intent.

Now that we have a shared understanding of the term Directive Control and how it is employed through decentralised execution, you can see how the philosophy of Directive Control is fully congruent with that of Psychological Safety. Hopefully, this has inspired you to consider researching more about Directive Control and Mission Command with the intent of incorporating their philosophies into your leadership style rather than excluding them due to the stigma created by ill-informed leadership gurus.

[1] Freedoms and constraints set out the rules, regulations, and limits of the mission or activity.
[2] Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous (VUCA).

Building Rapid Trust

Credit to The Cove and the Centre for Australian Army Leadership

The ability to build trust quickly is a skill leaders often need, but more often struggle to know how to achieve. In this Pod Cast, Dr Jemma King speak with the Centre for Australian Army Leadership about how to achieve rapid trust and explains her top 5 factors to increase inter-team effectiveness. There’s a lot that Dr King unpacks in this show so you may want to listen to it more than once.

Key take-aways

Dr King speaks about the need for leaders to demonstrate their ability and benevolence and to act in a consistent manner in order to rapidly gain trust and to sustain that trust over the long term. To aid in remembering these three critical components of trust she refers to these characteristics as the A-B-Cs of trust.

Dr King also explains that before followers will care about how much you know, they first want to know how much you care. Hence the sequence of the A-B-Cs is important and starts with benevolence, then ability and consistency.

The diagram below shows the relationship between a leader’s ability and benevolence or warmth.

Ability vs Trust

Ethics and Integrity

Ethics

Ethics and Integrity are undoubtedly the foundations of great leadership. Over the years, the media has been littered with examples of leaders and individuals who put profit and self-interest ahead of what was right. There are far too many modern examples where leaders compromised their integrity and breached their ethical obligations.

Related to follower willingness or conviction is the concept that leadership has a moral or ethical component. Followers see the difference between striving for a goal that they believe to be ethically sound and one that is ethically or morally wrong. This distinction is made to differentiate between those leaders that are influential and visionary but morally or ethically corrupt and those that are equally influential and visionary but morally and ethically sound.

Leader Responsibilities

It is necessary for leaders to have more than just an academic appreciation of ethics. Leaders require an understanding of how ethics influence their decision-making and actions. Leaders have specific responsibilities that relate to the individuals and the teams they lead. There are three fundamental ethical responsibilities that leaders are required to discharge. These are:

  • Serve as role models worthy of emulation.
  • Promote ethical development for followers.
  • Develop and sustain an ethical climate within the group that they lead.

Case Studies

Enron. One of the best-known examples of unethical behaviour is the 2001 Enron scandal where senior executives deceived clients and shareholders by hiding billions of dollars of losses and debt and coerced their auditors Arthur Andersen into ignoring and hiding the issues. Enron was ultimately caught and forced to file for bankruptcy and Arthur Andersen, then one of the largest and most respected auditing companies in the world, folded. Several Enron senior executives received jail sentences but despite Enron’s billions of dollars of assets, many investors’ pensions and livelihoods were lost by the actions of greedy, unethical, and morally bankrupt executives.

Wells Fargo. In 2016, Wells Fargo, one of the US’s largest and most trusted financial institutions was found to have created millions of fraudulent savings and checking accounts on behalf of their clients without their consent. Initially, senior leaders tried to distance themselves from any wrongdoing, blaming individual employees and managers; however, regulators found the fraud was due to senior leadership pressure to open as many accounts as possible and through cross-selling. The bank has been issued nearly $3Bn USD in fines and suffers ongoing reputational damage despite a pledge to reform its practices.

Despite most organisations and institutions now having strict policies on ethical behaviour and providing training at all levels, unethical behaviour continues to be an insidious problem that causes all manner of leadership challenges. But it’s not just commercial businesses that push the boundary to gain a competitive advantage. Ethical failures can occur in any organisation and at any level within the leadership and management ranks. In 2015, the then Chief of Army, LTGEN David Morrison AO, addressed the Australian Army to state his position on inclusion and his expectations of the officers and soldiers under his command. He did this because of allegations made against Officers and NCOs of misconduct and behaviour deemed inappropriate and demeaning to female ADF personnel.

“The standard you walk past is the standard you accept”

In making his stand, LTGEN Morrison may have himself crossed an ethical boundary through his treatment of some of the accused, effectively ruining their careers despite no charges being laid. It is important to apply ethics and integrity at all times and to all parties.

So how do leaders ensure they do not succumb to the allure of the quick win or belief that they can get away with unethical behaviour? What stops individuals from straying when no one is watching? Here are a few things you can do to stay the course set by your moral compass.

Know your values and live them

Nowadays, most organisations have a set of defined values. The unfortunate reality is that many organisations set these values as a means of marketing to their customers that their business is about more than just gross margins. There is little point to businesses setting corporate values if these values do not perfectly align with those of every individual member of the organisation. Besides, every client automatically expects every organisation to value honesty, integrity, trust, loyalty, and the array of other trendy values pinned to company websites everywhere. Values are nothing unless they are demonstrated through consistent behaviour. Leaders need to lead by example and exemplify the behaviour they expect of those they lead. There is real power in knowing this as you may attain compliance by mandating values but you will inspire behavioural change through inspiring junior staff to want to emulate their leaders.

Do what’s right, not what’s quick or easy

Time and cost pressure are powerful drivers and are significant influencers of behaviour. The need to be profitable and survive when times are tough will test even the most disciplined leader. This is when only the very best leaders know that crossing the ethics line is far worse than any short-term gain that may be realised by acting in an unethical manner. It is far better, to be honest, and deal with issues and problems at the time, rather than delaying them or acting inappropriately. Elron and Wells Fargo have shown the impact of crossing the line for short-term gain.

If it doesn’t feel right; do, or say something

Many times, in our lives we will encounter situations where our ethics, morals and integrity are challenged. This can be anything from schoolyard antics and trying to gain or retain your popularity amongst the “cool kids”, to peer pressure to shoplift or turn a blind eye to discrimination in the workplace. Speaking up and acting according to your values is hard and it gets harder the further you walk past the bad behaviour. There’s an old saying, “bad news doesn’t get better with age” and this is certainly true when it comes to needing to speak up. It is far easier to stop unethical behaviour at its early stages before it takes root. This is also the time when you are least implicated in the issue and therefore are less likely to suffer from being complicit. Often, the difficulty is noticing the subtle signs that something is not quite right. Hence, it’s crucial that you act as soon as you sense something seems off. At this early stage, be cautious not to be too accusatorial. A good technique is to ask lots of questions. Eventually, any corruption or unethical behaviour will surface, and you can then take action.

Choose good role models

Identifying three or four role models of unimpeachable ethics and striving to emulate their character and ethics is a great way to help keep you from straying due to pressure and local influences. Research them, think about them often, think about what they would do when faced with your challenge or ethical dilemma, and speak their names during conversations to reinforce them as important to you. Also, choose a couple of trusted mentors with who you can speak honestly and confidentially and use them as sounding boards when you have difficult circumstances to navigate or decisions to make. Generally, if you feel the need to discuss an issue with your mentors this should be a red flag that something is not ok, and your mentor should help confirm this and hopefully help you choose what to do.

Making ethical decisions

Facts and logic underpin all good decisions and decision-making processes, but it’s our moral compass and our values that guide and temper those decisions. Facts and logic alone only tell us what is; they don’t tell us what ought to be. If ethical decision making was as simple as understanding the facts and applying logic, all decisions would be black and white and solved by using the right mathematical equations. Many of the ethical dilemmas we face are multivariable problems that undermined our values, our cultural norms, and our religious beliefs and are often tainted by our biases and steered by our heuristics. There is no simple answer to the question of how to consistently make good ethical decisions. I believe all we can do is try our best to make them according to our values and, to quote Stephen Covey, “start with the end in mind”. Understand the outcome that must be achieved and anticipate any unintended consequences. It is often impossible to make a completely ethical decision, or at least from the perspective of some individuals or factions. In these cases, you should take a utilitarian approach.

Other approaches to ethical decision making include Kantian ethics, the Fairness or Justice approach, the Common-Good approach, and the Virtue or Aretaic approach.

Being of good moral character and always demonstrating good ethical behaviour and making ethical decisions are core to being a good leader. These traits will build internal and external trust and will be the pillars of your reputation. These things are precious and take much time to mature. Failing to act ethically and with integrity will destroy your reputation before your eyes and render you unable to lead; so, be warned, any momentary lapse of ethics could, and well ought to result in your downfall.

What Makes Teams Work?

Teams win because they are a stable, bounded group of individuals who are interdependent in achieving a shared outcome and work or practice together over a long period of time. In today’s fast-paced world where change is constant and disruption is an aim of business, diverse teams are brought together quickly and expected to achieve great things, often under immense time pressure, with complex and ambiguous requirements and no real certainty of the outcome. Amy Edmondson’s TED Talk on teaming sheds light on why some teams can come together to accomplish great things by bonding, finding a common purpose, and being prepared to try new things and fail. Leaders who practice situational humility and remain curious, create an environment of Psychological Safety that allows team members to speak up without fear of criticism or ridicule.

Meeting Expectations

Meetings are a useful means for brainstorming, planning, communicating, and coordinating activities. Pre COVID19 most meetings were conducted face-to-face in meeting rooms and were a means of bringing a team together to discuss important operational or project matters, often setting post-meeting tasks or follow-up. Holding meetings necessarily came with the requirement to schedule the meeting and book a room, plan the meeting and set a formal agenda, corral the participants, conduct the meeting, decide on and assign actions, set deadlines, take minutes, and socialise the outcomes. Meetings were used for discussions and decisions, and for planning and executing activities. After a meeting, teams would interact and discuss joint and individual activities creating an unseen extension of the meeting. Teams would, in effect, operate in ‘group silos’ performing both individual tasks and group activities requiring periods of isolated effort and team interaction. Tasks would be performed and would last until the activities were completed or the next meeting provided new or updated directions. Meetings took time and effort to set up and run and had a defined purpose.

Fast-forward to the 2020s where COVID19 has created a world where lockdowns and working from home are commonplace and meetings are conducted over the internet via videoconference. The ability for teams to socially interact during their workday has been eroded and the ability of team members to bond and create a unified team identity, a ‘tribe’ has been lost. This has negative implications for the team’s ability to complete their assigned duties in the effective and coordinated way they would if working together in a physical group environment. This social interaction is not only important from a humanistic and mental health perspective, it’s the way informal mentoring, problem solving, and innovation occurs. When individual members of a team work in isolation they are less likely to draw upon the diverse thinking that happens when a group of individuals interacts as a team. Under the constraints that COVID19 forces upon us, it’s important that teams take the time to connect in informal online meetings where formal agendas and meeting outcomes are not important and group discussion is the foremost purpose of the meeting.

As the leader or manager of the team, it’s important that you understand that your role in these meetings might be, to not be in these meetings. That’s right, your presence in these meetings may inhibit the natural flow of the meeting and morph its purpose from team interaction to planning, coordinating, deciding, and executing new activities. The purpose of these team interactive meetings is to allow your team to interact and discuss the activities already set, not to leave the meeting with a new set of activities, tasks, and deadlines. In the current paradigm, leaders and managers need to view online meetings in the same way as face-to-face meetings but must also realise that not every meeting is a formal meeting. Leaders and managers need to be clear with themselves about which meetings are for planning and assigning tasks and which meetings are just team interactions. Leaders and managers must ensure they do not dominate these meetings or assign new tasks. If you think about normal face-to-face meetings where the leader or manager needs to plan and set up the meeting and manage the outcomes, and then compare this to sending a meeting invitation to the team, ‘winging it’ and leaving the meeting with staff now having 15 or 20 new tasks, you run the risk of overloading staff with too much work.

Leaders and managers need to realise that their staff may not be comfortable taking the initiative and set up their own meetings or even understand the need or value in doing so. It’s important that you have a discussion with your team about the value of working together whilst in isolation.

Here are 10 ways you can hold better online meetings that help you lead or manage your team without overloading them and allow your team to interact, problem solve, be mentored, and be innovative.

  1. Distinguish between formal meetings and team interactions
  2. Conduct formal meetings as if they are face-to-face meetings
  3. Restrict formal meetings and task allocation to only when they are needed
  4. Develop a task register to track task allocation and progress and to allow task cross-leveling
  5. Start each week with a weekly planning meeting to understand and coordinate the weekly workload
  6. Make most meetings ‘catch ups’, progress updates, or information sessions
  7. Control your urge to end each meeting by assigning new tasks to staff
  8. Have a discussion with your staff about the importance of their own online interactions, mentoring, and group discussions
  9. Set up a reoccurring end of week meeting to wrap up the week and socialise before the weekend
  10. Don’t forget to have regular one-on-one ‘meetings’ with your staff to discuss their challenges and check on their welfare

COVID19 has been disrupting the way we live and work for over a year and a half now and will continue to challenge us for a long time to come. Ensuring the way we interact online is positive and effective and does not compound the stress staff already endure is critical in maintaining effective teams and reducing mental health issues. Holding effective, purposeful meetings is not only a critical leadership and management function, it’s now often the only interaction we have with our staff so its worthwhile making them as beneficial as possible.

Long-term Planning

Planning is the process of developing courses of action to move from your current state to a desired future state and involves change, and everyone knows, people don’t like change. We hear it all the time and it’s true, people don’t like change! But have you ever stopped to wonder why people don’t like change? In his book Your Brain at Work, Dr. David Rock takes this notion further and proposes that it’s uncertainty that actually makes us uncomfortable. If we can reduce the uncertainty associated with the change, we can significantly reduce its negative impact and increase engagement and uptake. The way we try to reduce uncertainty and gain control of the future is through planning.

We all like to be in control, but our inability to predict what’s going to happen in the future limits our feeling of control, and the further we look into the future the greater the uncertainty and lesser the control. Hence, our natural inclination is to try to predict the future and develop plans that allow us to prepare for whatever it’s going to throw at us.

We do this through planning and forecasting, but how many times have you been involved in planning and forecasting activities where the degree of uncertainty was so great that you knew in your heart that your plans were little more than an optimistic guess? This is especially true when the plans or forecasts being developed are very long term such as three, five, and ten year plans.

So why do we placed so much importance, emphasis, and time on long-term plans and forecasts when we know that it’s unlikely they’ll hit their targets? Well, the answer may be embedded in our brains and the way we think.

Every time we reduce uncertainty we receive a hit of dopamine. Dopamine is the chemical used by our brains to derive pleasure and just like ticking off a checklist is rewarding and pleasurable. So is fooling ourselves in the belief that our planning and forecasting will somehow create certainty in the future.

There is no real ability to plan long-term or truly forecast based on any single view of the future. But business continues to try and reduce uncertainty and give confidence to senior executives, boards, and shareholders by investing significant time and money in this type of planning.

The perception that planning and forecasting have been performed effectively provides a degree of comfort and is in a way a placebo that lasts a whole financial year or for the period covered by the plan. So, if planning and forecasting are little more than adding 5 or 10% to last year’s results and are not truly representative of the future, why should we bother trying to plan at all?

Well, it’s not all bad news. Whilst the future is uncertain and your plans and forecasts are based on your perception of what the future holds, there are ways that you can plan for an uncertain future and reduce the anxiety associated with uncertainty and your lack of control.

Planning and forecasting should be done for the shortest period possible. Longer-term planning must be broad and allocate low confidence levels and large margins for error and must factor uncertainty into the planning process.

These plans need numerous decision points that take a “what if” and “if then” approach. The best way to do this is to take a multi-varied view of the future. The further into the future that you try to plan, the greater the uncertainty and variability.

Understanding this means that you cannot simply plan for one future, but rather you need to plan for the various possible futures likely to eventuate.

For this reason, scenario planning offers the best approach and uses uncertainty to influence thinking and the planning process. Scenario planning unlike traditional business planning requires the planners to consider different views of the future and develop appropriate courses of action for each view.

As we move along the timeline and the future becomes clearer, we can adjust our courses of action as required or even change to a planned alternate course of action without feeling like a rudderless ship that is out of control and at the mercy of the sea.

For more information on how to develop effective plans, check out our post titled Planning Process. 

The 6 Components of Leadership

Universally, there seems to be a number of key components that are common to most leaders. Six of these components appear to be the essence of leadership. Each of these components are required before an individual can be deemed to be exercising a clear leadership function. The six essential components are:

1. Influence

Leadership is about someone influencing, motivating, or inspiring others. Most theorists believe that influence in the leadership relationship is multi-directional and is not restrained by position. It is widely believed that these influence behaviours must be non-coercive although the reality is that this is more likely a perception rather than a reality.

2. Followers

Other people aside from the leader are a necessary component of leadership. Some theorists also stress that followers have responsibilities and obligations to leaders. The belief is that responsible followers must exercise choice and be allowed to do so. A responsible follower will choose dissent when faced with leadership influence that the follower believes is unlawful or unethical.

3. Goal

Leadership is greatly enhanced when there is a mutual or shared goal, mission or vision. If there is no mutual goal, mission, or vision then it is unlikely that a group will form or stay together. Nevertheless, the goal or mission may not be grand or visionary but may be as simple as to survive in the current environment, to co-exist as a group or to win a game of football. The goal here is to develop a mutual goal that brings the team together and provides focus and purpose.

4. Purposeful Action

Leadership involves doing something or taking action towards the successful achievement of the group’s goal. Although achievement is seen by some as the hallmark of leadership, other theorists believe it is the striving for achievement that is characteristic of leadership.

5. Consent

Effective leadership requires the consent of those being led; the followers. Consent suggests that there is a direct relationship between the leader and the followers, and as a consequence, there are responsibilities on both within an effective leadership relationship. In some circumstances, the leader is expected to ‘pressure’ followers to achieve the goal. In other contexts, followers will resist force and coercion.

6. Ethics

Related to follower willingness or conviction is the concept that leadership has a moral or ethical component. Followers see the difference between striving for a goal that they believe to be ethically sound and one that is ethically or morally wrong. This distinction is made to differentiate between those leaders that are influential and visionary but morally or ethically corrupt and those that are equally influential and visionary but morally and ethically sound.

Leader Responsibilities

It is necessary for leaders to have more than just an academic appreciation of ethics. Leaders require an understanding of how ethics influences their decision-making and actions. Leaders have specific responsibilities that relate to the individuals and the teams they lead. There are three fundamental ethical responsibilities that leaders are required to discharge. These are:

      • Serve as role models worthy of emulation.
      • Promote ethical development for followers.
      • Develop and sustain an ethical climate within the group that they lead.

Principles of War

Karl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831) was a Prussian who fought in the Russian Army in the early 19th century and rose to the rank of General. He started his military training at the age of 12 as a member of the officers’ corps of the Prussian Army and witness some of the most decisive European battles of the times.  He was a renowned German military leader and strategist and documented his theories and observations from the battlefields into what is now referred to as the 9 Principles of War.

These 9 principles, or variations thereof, have become standard doctrine for most military forces and are taught to military leaders at all levels. They have endured significant changes in the way war is waged and are as relevant today as on the battlefield at the advent of firearms and artillery.

It’s not too difficult to draw a comparison between Clausewitz and the modern business theorist, Peter Drucker who established many of the guiding principles of modern business management and leadership. Whilst comparing business to battle is a long bow to draw, there are some very similar challenges faced by leaders in the board room as on the battlefield.

Here are the 9 Principles of War as composed by Clausewitz and modified to provide some context for business. See if you can draw a comparison between your workplace and leadership challenges and how they may be used to help you lead your troops to success.

Objective. In battle, the objective is the feature that must be seized, captured, or destroyed. It is the purpose of the mission and the reason for the battle. It is vital that the commander has a clear understanding of the objective and communicates it effectively to every officer and soldier in his command in order to take the objective. The development of clear objectives is equally important in business as is the need to communicate them to all staff in a clear and concise manner. In the business context, the objective is often written as a mission or purpose statement. It’s important that the objective is achievable and than everyone in the organisation is clear about their part to play in capturing the objective.

Offensive. The offensive is the strategy executed to achieve the objective. It should be the most decisive way to seize, capture or destroy the objective. There are often many simultaneous battles waged within the ‘theatre of war’, so it is critical that all troops understand their freedoms and constraints and the limits of exploitation to prevent blue-on-blue clashes or interference with other missions. In business, you must also develop an effective strategy and execute that strategy decisively without overreaching.

Mass. Mass refers to the employment of your full combat power on to the objective rather than just the concentration of forces at a set time and place. This is referred to as synchronisation and is a more holistic approach to the use of force than to converge troops onto the objective. This reduces the exposure of your troops to enemy fire and allows you to achieve more decisive results. In business be careful not to concentrate all your effort on one sector of the market. Where you do focus your efforts, use the breath of your entire organisational capability to secure the victory rather than concentrating the effort of one branch.

Economy of Force. In contrast to the use of mass, economy of force is the offset needed to conserve combat capability. These two principles must be employed in balance to prevent the premature reduction or loss of combat power. Ensure you know how much of your business resources you can afford to dedicate to taking your objective and what your limit of exploitation is. In other words, know when to hold back, stop or even redeploy your efforts.

Manoeuvre. Manoeuvre is the shaping of the battlefield by the deployment and redeployment of troops and military equipment in relation to the enemy, for the purpose of gaining advantage over the objective. Manoeuvre is used to exploit enemy weaknesses, preserve own troops’ freedom of action, and direct firepower for best effect. Being flexible and able to pivot is critical to business in the modern world. Ensure your business is prepared to embrace change and that manoeuvre is core to your long-term business strategy.

Unity of Command. The decisive action necessary for the achievement of the objective requires all troops to fight under the direction of a single commander. This is not to say that there is only one leader responsible for directing forces, but rather there is one commander who is the ultimate decision-maker and executor of the mission. All other leaders and followers must support the commander’s intent if the objective is to be taken. This can be very challenging in the current business climate. The adoption of Servant Leadership as the dominant approach to leading and juggling decentralised command or “employee empowerment”, doesn’t remove the responsibility of the leader to issue clear directions or subordinate leaders and employees from following them.

Security. The best defence is a good offence, but never forget to maintain security as it enhances your freedom of action. You must identify your vulnerabilities and mitigate enemy attacks before they can disrupt your operations. Security is developed from the market intelligence you gather, and the surveillance of your competition. It allows you to anticipate their actions and manoeuvre to counter their disruption of the market or impact on your business.

Surprise. You should always attack your enemy at a time and place of your choosing when he is least prepared or able to defend or counter-attack. Surprise and the swift application of mass can upset the enemy’s momentum and shift the balance of power in your favour. Innovation and speed to market are two effective ways to use the principle of surprise in a business context.

Simplicity. Your battle plans must be clear, concise, and complete, leaving no doubt in the minds of your troops as to what needs to be done to take the objective. The development of simple plans is not easy and requires the removal of uncertainty and complexity through wargaming and other similar techniques. In the same way, your business plan must be clear and easily understood by everyone in your organisation. Developing simple plans helps to overcome the inertia that prevents the effective execution of so many business plans.

True Resilience

A lot has been written about the need for leaders to be resilient, and for good reason. Leadership is hard and the business world and life, in general, can be brutal and unforgiving, but what does it really mean to be resilient? Websters’ dictionary defines resilience as: 

  • the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress; and

  • an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.

Both of these definitions are predicated on reacting to some force, misfortune, or change that has impacted the object, in this case the leader, and the object’s ability to recover and adapt to the force or change. 

Despite not having a thick hide or razor-sharp claws and teeth, humans have adapted to natural forces and changes for thousands of years and survived to become the dominant species on the planet. 

This has been due, in part, to our large brains, our endurance, and our reliance on our social networks, our tribes. It was also because we were able to evolve and adapt to the harsh climate and environment. Since the origins of mankind, our evolution has aligned perfectly with Darwin’s theory of evolution which states that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. 

 It’s our ability to endure physical and emotional stress and to incrementally adapt to it, that has allowed us to evolve and succeed as a species. In essence, our evolution and survival has really been a case of “what didn’t kill us, truly did make us stronger”.  

 Resilience is a critical ability needed by all leaders in order to deal with the myriad of forces that impact them on a daily basis. 

 So why is it some leaders seem to be more resilient than others? What’s their secret? 

Well, it might just be that the need to be resilient has been over-stated, as it is far better to build your capacity and strength to deal with these forces and changes at the time and not be impacted in a way that takes you down resulting in needing to get back up. Leaders need to be mentally, physically, and spiritually tough. They need to be able to take a punch and keep punching back. Applying the current guidance, resilience would be the equivalent of being a boxer who gets knocked down and gets back up and continues this cycle until he can’t get back up anymore. 

 It’s far better to spend time learning how to anticipate the punches, and training to develop your physical strength and mental toughness so you don’t get knocked down at all. 

How we respond to modern forces and changes and the stresses they thrust upon us, impact how our bodies cope with the release of stress hormones. The primary hormonal mediators of the stress response, glucocorticoids and catecholamines, have both protective and damaging effects on the body. In the short term, glucocorticoids promote the conversion of protein and lipids to usable carbohydrates. Glucocorticoids also act on the brain to increase appetite for food and to increase locomotor activity and food seeking behaviour (Leibowitz and Hoebel 1997). This can adversely affect regulating behaviours that control energy input and expenditure. 

Glucocorticoids can be an essential source of energy if you need to run a kilometre to evade a predator but will likely have negative health effects if the stress is caused by a business deadline that has you stuck behind your keyboard eating junk food and drinking soft drink or coffee, for hours on end. 

Being inactive whilst having chronically elevated levels of glucocorticoids can interfere with the action of insulin and reduce glucose uptake causing insulin levels to increase. The combination of elevated levels of insulin and glucocorticoids cause an increase in body fat deposits and can cause the formation of atherosclerotic plaques in the coronary arteries (Brindley and Rolland 1989). 

So how do we train ourselves to be better able to deal with stress and be more resilient?

Sports science has embraced and used incremental physical stress (exertion) as a means of adapting the body to ever increasing loads or effort. This exertion has a neurological impact on the body through the nervous system but does not result in the sort of anxiety disorders, depressive illness, hostile and aggressive states, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), cardiovascular disease (CVD) and other systemic disorders related to mental stress. This is an important distinction as stress is stress, regardless of whether it is physical or mental. 

So why doesn’t physical stress cause illness? Well it can and it does; however, the brain will generally not allow the body to accept more physical stress than it’s comfortable dealing with, as a safeguard to prevent injury. 

Elite military units and Special Forces know this, and invest heavily in the development of their troop’s mental toughness. They know that the mind will give in well before the body. The Navy Seals have called this the 40% Rule. This is where most ‘normal’ people will give up when physical activity seems too hard, even though they have only used 40% of their energy reserves.  It is possible to train your mind to override your natural instinct to quit and keep ‘pushing through the pain’ if you have the determination and grit to do so. This can be very dangerous and it’s critical that you honestly know your limits otherwise, you can suffer from Rhabdo-my-olysis, the breakdown of skeletal muscle commonly known as muscle-meltdown. Muscle breakdown causes the release of myoglobin into the bloodstream. Myoglobin is the protein that stores oxygen in your muscles. If you have too much myoglobin in your blood, it can cause renal failure, kidney damage, and death. This is just one example of how overstressing the body can result in very dire consequences. 

But humans often and very deliberately subject themselves to high levels of physical stress we call exercise and the result, very more often than not, is an increase in physical strength, speed, endurance, or whatever physical attribute is enhanced by the specific activity undertaken. The body adapts to the activity. This is known as the SAID principle (Specific Adaption to Imposed Demands). In other words, the body adapts to whatever stress it is subjected to. The more the body is exposed to the activity, the less it is negatively impacted. 

It is of course possible to overtrain and become injured. The incremental improvements to the body occur over long periods and require not only the stimulus of exercise but also the recovery provided by adequate rest and nutrition. 

The mental stress endured by people working long hours under poor conditions with no ability to take a break from the stress is what causes negative health effects. Unlike exercise where you undertake a high degree of physical stress for a relatively short period, followed by rest and nutrition, people often work under very high stress loads for long periods of time and this is not good. 

There are only really three things that can be done to change this. You can quit your job and find something to do that doesn’t cause you a high level of mental stress, but this is not particularly desirable or even possible for most people especially if you have invested a lot of time and effort in advancing your chosen career. The second way is to create a work environment where there is an understanding of the negative effects of stress on workers. In this scenario, the leaders in the organisation must understand the impact they have on the employee’s levels of stress and take real and positive steps to monitor and manage stress levels. The third way is to develop the mental toughness needed to be able to cope with elevated levels of stress so that over time these stress levels become normalised in the same way as incremental increases in exercise effort develops muscle. 

In my experience, the best way to deal with stress in the workplace is a combination of good leadership and the development of mental toughness. 

Being mentally tough and resilient is critically important so you can weather incremental forces and changes, and adapt to them over time. The way to develop your mental toughness is through exposure to periods of adversity over long spans of time. It’s also worth noting that practicing techniques for reducing stress such as meditation and mindfulness provide rest and recovery for the mind. Keeping fit through regular exercise and eating a healthy diet where you limit or abstain from coffee, soft-drink and alcohol, and definitely from smoking, will contribute to your overall health, well-being, and resilience. 

I hope this has given you a different perspective on what it means to be resilient and a couple of ideas for how you can increase your personal resilience. But remember, as leaders it’s our responsibility to ensure that those we lead are kept safe from unnecessary stress and are given the opportunity to develop the mental toughness they need to cope when the conditions that cause stress are unavoidable.  

Accountability

Whenever staff hear executives and leaders use the “A word”, that’s ‘accountability, they collectively become defensive and feel targeted for blame. Their shoulders drop, they look down and feel the burden of responsibility for all past, present or future business failures.

In business, the term accountability has taken on a very negative connotation because of the way it’s being used. The Oxford Dictionary defines being accountable as being:

“responsible for your decisions or actions and expected to explain them when you are asked”

The words used in this definition are very important and deliberately do not mention results or outcomes. That’s not to say that we should never be held responsible for the result of our actions and there are many examples where we should. Acting inappropriately, unethically, negligently or illegally are examples where individuals or groups must be held to account, not only for their actions but also their outcomes.

However, in business we need our people to feel comfortable and empowered to extend themselves, try new approaches, be innovative, and take appropriate risks. No one is going to do this if their leaders hold them accountable for the outcome when things go wrong. There are many factors that affect results and outcomes that are completely outside the control of the individual; thus, leaders should only hold their staff accountable for those things that are in their control. To coin a military phrase, this is because “the enemy has a say in your plan”. If outcomes were guaranteed and forgone conclusions, every business would be equally successful. What we want from our staff is that they perform their duties in a manner that maximizes the likelihood of success and reduces the risk of failure.

Leaders need to be very clear with their staff about exactly what they mean when they tell them that they are accountable. Doing this correctly sets clear expectations and builds trust.

“People perform at their best when they feel at their best” 

Daniel Goleman

Being accountable means doing what’s right to the best of your ability. It means treating others with respect, being of good character, being loyal to your organization, your leadership and your colleagues, and living according to your values and those of the organization. It means making well informed decisions and preforming actions based on those decisions. These are the non-negotiable accountable items. If you do these well, the chance of the outcome being positive is greatly improved, but if not successful, it is clear that you did everything you could and that’s all you could be expected to do.

The message leaders should tell their staff is that being accountable is about being of good character, being loyal, and doing what’s right. It’s about making informed decisions and acting accordingly and it’s about living your values. These are the things you are accountable for.

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