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.
