Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

by Stanley McChrystal

Walking down the hall to grab me might take only a few minutes, but in a fast-paced environment, that could be the difference between operational success and failure—between capturing AQI operatives or letting them slip through our fingers, or between life and death for our operators and for Iraqi civilians.

The requirement to consult me for strikes was symptomatic of a bureaucracy that, over the years, had grown slower and more convoluted as ...

the seemingly instantaneous communications available up and down the hierarchy had slowed rather than...

people at every level of the organization had the information and connectivity to determine what the right thing was, in real time.

But, held back by our internal processes, they lacked the ability to act on that determination.

We had gotten halfway to transcending Krasnovian soccer and then stopped: we had built an outstanding team bound together by the oneness of trust and purpose and capable of devising, in real time, brilliant, emergent solutions to complex problems, but we still required every...

advances in live communications have significantly curtailed the powers and responsibilities enjoyed by Navy commanders.

Taylor’s contemporary Henri Fayol enumerated the “five functions of management” as “planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling.” The last three become much easier to attend to when you have more information, creating a cycle of seeking ways to gather and centralize more information in order to push more and more efficient directives to the organization.

but it also created a nightmare of paperwork and approvals—time that could otherwise have been spent solving real problems.

Like other staples of managerial thinking, the Perry Principle made sense in a world that no longer exists, but offers little help when the velocity and volume of decisions needing to be made so exceed the capabilities of even the most gifted leaders that empowerment of those on lower rungs is simply a necessity.

I began to reconsider the nature of my role as a leader. The wait for my approval was not resulting in any better decisions, and our priority should be reaching the best possible decision that could be made in a time frame that allowed it to be relevant.

The practice of relaying decisions up and down the chain of command is premised on the assumption that the organization has the time to do so, or, more accurately, that the cost of the delay is less than the cost of the errors produced by removing a supervisor.

In 2004 this assumption no longer held. The risks of acting too slowly were higher than the risks of letting competent people make judgment calls.

empowerment improved employee satisfaction. Kenneth W. Thomas and Betty A. Velthouse identified the decentralization of authority as creating “intrinsic task motivation

The less people’s jobs can be automated, the more you need them to take initiative, innovate, and think creatively.

only 20 percent of workers feel empowered and act resourcefully; most feel disenfranchised or locked down.

“The degree to which the opportunity to use power effectively is granted to or withheld from individuals is one operative difference between those companies which stagnate and those which innovate.”

we accepted that divergences from plan were inevitable—we wanted to improve our ability to respond to them. We needed to empower our teams to take action on their own.

Empowerment did not always take the form of an overt delegation; more often, my more self-confident subordinates would make decisions, many far above their pay grade, and simply inform me.

piece of this is the psychology of decision making. An individual who makes a decision becomes more invested in its outcome.

the key reason for the success of empowered execution lay in what had come before it: the foundation of shared consciousness. This relationship—between contextual understanding and authority—is not new.

A general is expected to have general knowledge of the army—blue, red, green, and everything in between. It is because they have this general knowledge that leaders can be trusted to make major decisions.

We reversed it: we had our leaders provide information so that subordinates, armed with context, understanding, and connectivity, could take the initiative and make decisions. Shared consciousness meant that people at every level on our org chart now enjoyed access to the kind of perspective once limited to senior leaders.

I was most effective when I supervised processes—from intelligence operations to the prioritization of resources—ensuring that we avoided the silos or bureaucracy that doomed agility, rather than making individual operational decisions.