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For what the leaders are, that, as a rule, will the men below them be. —Xenophon (430?–355? B.C.)
In the late 1930s, U.S. Brigadier General George C. Marshall (1880–1958) preached the need for major military reform. The army had too few soldiers, they were badly trained, current doctrine was ill suited to modern technology—the list of problems went on. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to select his next army chief of staff. The appointment was critical: World War II had begun in Europe, and Roosevelt believed that the United States was sure to get involved. He understood the need for military reform, so he bypassed generals with more seniority and experience and chose Marshall
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Some ten years earlier, Marshall had served as the assistant commander of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he had trained many officers. Throughout his time there, he had kept a notebook in which he recorded the names of promising young men. Soon after becoming chief of staff, Marshall began to retire the older officers in the War Department and replace them with these younger men whom he had personally trained. These officers were ambitious, they shared his desire for reform, and he encouraged them to speak their minds and show initiative. They included men like Omar
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Marshall positioned his protégés throughout the War Department, where they quietly spread his way of doing things. To make the task easier, he cut the waste in the department with utter ruthlessness, reducing from sixty to six the number of deputies who reported to him. Marshall hated excess; his reports to Roosevelt made him famous for his ability to summarize a complex situation in a few pages.
“Do you think every Greek here can be a king? It’s no good having a carload of commanders. We need One commander, one king, the one to whom Zeus, Son of Cronus the crooked, has given the staff And the right to make decisions for his people.” And so Odysseus mastered the army. The men all Streamed back from their ships and huts and assembled With a roar. THE ILIAD, HOMER, CIRCA NINTH CENTURY B.C.
Marshall exuded authority but never yelled and never challenged men frontally. He had a knack for communicating his wishes indirectly—a skill that was all the more effective since it made his officers think about what he meant.
When Marshall became chief of staff, he knew that he would have to hold himself back. The temptation was to do combat with everyone in every problem area: the recalcitrance of the generals, the political feuds, the layers of waste. But Marshall was too smart to give in to that temptation.
The solution is to do as Marshall did: operate through a kind of remote control.
Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups. —Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Now more than ever, effective leadership requires a deft and subtle touch. The reason is simple: we have grown more distrustful of authority. At the same time, almost all of us imagine ourselves as authorities in our own right—officers, not foot soldiers. Feeling the need to assert themselves, people today put their own interests before the team. Group unity is fragile and can easily crack.
Divided leadership is dangerous because people in groups often think and act in ways that are illogical and ineffective—call it Groupthink. People in groups are political: they say and do things that they think will help their image within the group.
A critical step in creating an efficient chain of command is assembling a skilled team that shares your goals and values. That team gives you many advantages: spirited, motivated people who can think on their own; an image as a delegator, a fair and democratic leader; and a saving in your own valuable energy, which you can redirect toward the larger picture.
Be careful in assembling this team that you are not seduced by expertise and intelligence. Character, the ability to work under you and with the rest of the team, and the capacity to accept responsibility and think independently are equally key. That is why Marshall tested Eisenhower for so long. You may not have as much time to spare, but never choose a man merely by his glittering résumé. Look beyond his skills to his psychological makeup.
Marshall would sometimes drop in on an army base incognito to see with his own eyes how his reforms were taking effect; he would also read letters from soldiers. But in these days of increasing complexity, this can consume far too much of your time.
The single greatest risk to your chain of command comes from the political animals in the group. People like this are inescapable; they spring up like weeds in any organization. Not only are they out for themselves, but they build factions to further their own agendas and fracture the cohesion you have built. Interpreting your commands for their own purposes, finding loopholes in any ambiguity, they create invisible breaks in the chain. Try to weed them out before they arrive.
Another solution is to isolate the political moles—to give them no room to maneuver within the organization. Marshall accomplished this by infusing the group with his spirit of efficiency; disrupters of that spirit stood out and could quickly be isolated. In any event, do not be naïve.
The critical elements in war are speed and adaptability—the ability to move and make decisions faster than the enemy. But speed and adaptability are hard to achieve today. We have more information than ever before at our fingertips, making interpretation and decision making more difficult.
COMMAND IN WAR, MARTIN VAN CREVELD, 1985
We find our attention drawn repeatedly to what one might call “the organizational dimension of strategy.” Military organizations, and the states that develop them, periodically assess their own ability to handle military threats. When they do so they tend to look at that which can be quantified: the number of troops, the quantities of ammunition, the readiness rates of key equipment, the amount of transport, and so on. Rarely, however, do they look at the adequacy of their organization as such, and particularly high level organization, to handle these challenges. Yet as Pearl Harbor and other
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Patton’s philosophy of command was: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” PATTON: A GENIUS FOR WAR, CARLO D’ESTE, 1995
Understand: the future belongs to groups that are fluid, fast, and nonlinear. Your natural tendency as a leader may be to want to control the group, to coordinate its every movement, but that will just tie you to the past and to the slow-moving armies of history. It takes strength of character to allow for a margin of chaos and uncertainty—to let go a little—but by decentralizing your army and segmenting it into teams, you will gain in mobility what you lose in complete control. And mobility is the greatest force multiplier of them all. It allows you to both disperse and concentrate your army,
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success and power. They do not want to think on their own; they just want a recipe to follow. They are attracted to the idea of strategy for that very reason. In their minds strategy is a series of steps to be followed toward a goal. They want these steps spelled out for them by an expert or a guru. Believing in the power of imitation, they want to know exactly what some great person has done before. Their maneuvers in life are as mechanical as their thinking.
This meant that he should act without awaiting orders, if action seemed necessary. It also meant that he should act contrary to orders, if these did not seem to be consistent with the situation.
A GENIUS FOR WAR: THE GERMAN ARMY AND GENERAL STAFF, 1807–1945, COLONEL T.N. DUPUY, 1977
The Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan in the first half of the thirteenth century were perhaps the closest precursors to Napoleon’s corps. Genghis, who preached a philosophy of Mongol superiority, was a master of mobility in warfare. His segmented forces could disperse and concentrate in complicated patterns; the armies that faced them were shocked at how chaotic they seemed, so impossible to figure out, yet they maneuvered with amazing coordination. Mongol soldiers knew what to do, and when, without being told. For their victims the only explanation was that they were possessed by the devil.
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In a real sense, maximum disorder was our equilibrium. T. E. LAWRENCE, 1885–1935
Like Sherman, do not struggle with your soldiers’ idiosyncrasies, but rather turn them into a virtue, a way to increase your potential force. Be creative with the group’s structure, keeping your mind as fluid and adaptable as the army you lead.
Authority: Thus the army…moves for advantage, and changes through segmenting and reuniting. Thus its speed is like the wind, its slowness like the forest; its invasion and plundering like a fire…. It is as difficult to know as the darkness; in movement it is like thunder. —The Art of War, Sun-tzu, (fourth century B.C.)
We humans are selfish by nature. Our first thoughts in any situation revolve around our own interests: How will this affect me? How will it help me? At the same time, by necessity, we try to disguise our selfishness, making our motives look altruistic or disinterested. Our inveterate selfishness and our ability to disguise it are problems for you as a leader. You may think that the people working for you are genuinely enthusiastic and concerned—that is what they say, that is what their actions suggest. Then slowly you see signs that this person or that is using his or her position in the group
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You can do nothing with an army that is an amalgam of a hundred people here, a hundred people there, and so on. What can be achieved with four thousand men, united and standing shoulder to shoulder, you cannot do with forty or even four hundred thousand men who are divided and pulled this way and that by internal conflicts…. RULES OF WAR AND BRAVERY, MUBARAKSHAH, PERSIA, THIRTEENTH CENTURY
Morale is contagious: put people in a cohesive, animated group and they naturally catch that spirit. If they rebel or revert to selfish behavior, they are easily isolated. You must establish this dynamic the minute you become the group’s leader; it can only come from the top—that is, from you.
Step 1: Unite your troops around a cause. Make them fight for an idea.
There are always moments when the commander’s place is not back with his staff but up with the troops. It is sheer nonsense to say that maintenance of the men’s morale is the job of the battalion commander alone. The higher the rank, the greater the effect of the example. The men tend to feel no kind of contact with a commander who, they know, is sitting somewhere in headquarters. What they want is what might be termed a physical contact with him. In moments of panic, fatigue, or disorganization, or when something out of the ordinary has to be demanded from them, the personal example of the
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Step 2: Keep their bellies full. People cannot stay motivated if their material needs go unmet.
Step 3: Lead from the front. The enthusiasm with which people join a cause inevitably wanes. One thing that speeds up its loss, and that produces discontent, is the feeling that the leaders do not practice what they preach.
Step 4: Concentrate their ch’i. There is a Chinese belief in an energy called ch’i, which dwells in all living things. All groups have their own level of ch’i, physical and psychological. A leader must understand this energy and know how to manipulate it. Idleness has a terrible effect on ch’i. When soldiers are not working, their spirits lower.
Step 5: Play to their emotions. The best way to motivate people is not through reason but through emotion. Humans, however, are naturally defensive, and if you begin with an appeal to their emotions—some histrionic harangue—they will see you as manipulative and will recoil.
Step 6: Mix harshness and kindness. The key to man management is a balance of punishment and reward.
Step 7: Build the group myth. The armies with the highest morale are armies that have been tested in battle. Soldiers who have fought alongside one another through many campaigns forge a kind of group myth based on their past victories. Living up to the tradition and reputation of the group becomes a matter of pride; anyone who lets it down feels ashamed.
Step 8: Be ruthless with grumblers. Allow grumblers and the chronically disaffected any leeway at all and they will spread disquiet and even panic throughout the group. As fast as you can, you must isolate them and get rid of them.
You know, I am sure, that not numbers or strength brings victory in war; but whichever army goes into battle stronger in soul, their enemies generally cannot withstand them. —Xenophon (430?–355? B.C.)
1. In the early 1630s, Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), a provincial gentleman farmer in Cambridgeshire, England, fell victim to a depression and to constant thoughts of death.
Although Cromwell had no military background, he hurriedly formed a troop of sixty horsemen from his native Cambridgeshire. His aim was to incorporate them in a larger regiment, gain military experience by fighting under another commander, and slowly prove his worth.
Despite his lack of experience, Cromwell was something of a military visionary: he imagined a new kind of warfare spearheaded by a faster, more mobile cavalry, and in the war’s first few months he proved a brave and effective leader. He was given more troops to command but soon realized that he had grossly overestimated the fighting spirit of those on his side: time and again he led cavalry charges that pierced enemy lines, only to watch in disgust as his soldiers broke order to plunder the enemy camp.
That Cromwell is generally considered one of history’s great military leaders is all the more remarkable given that he learned soldiery on the job. During the second stage of the Civil War, he became head of the Roundhead armies, and later, after defeating King Charles and having him executed, he became Lord Protector of England.
2. In 1931 the twenty-three-year-old Lyndon Baines Johnson was offered the kind of job he had been dreaming of: secretary to Richard Kleberg, newly elected congressman from Texas’s Fourteenth Congressional District. Johnson was a high-school debating teacher at the time, but he had worked on several political campaigns and was clearly a young man of ambition.
Lyndon Johnson was an intensely ambitious young man. He had neither money nor connections but had something more valuable: an understanding of human psychology. To command influence in the world, you need a power base, and here human beings—a devoted army of followers—are more valuable than money. They will do things for you that money cannot buy.
Hannibal was the greatest general of antiquity by reason of his admirable comprehension of the morale of combat, of the morale of the soldier, whether his own or the enemy’s. He shows his greatness in this respect in all the different incidents of war, of campaign, of action. His men were not better than the Roman soldiers. They were not as well-armed, one-half less in number. Yet he was always the conqueror. He understood the value of morale. He had the absolute confidence of his people. In addition, he had the art, in commanding an army, of always securing the advantage of morale. COLONEL
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Understand: morale is contagious, and you, as leader, set the tone. Ask for sacrifices you won’t make yourself (doing everything through assistants) and your troops grow lethargic and resentful; act too nice, show too much concern for their well-being, and you drain the tension from their souls and create spoiled children who whine at the slightest pressure or request for more work. Personal example is the best way to set the proper tone and build morale.
3. In May of 218 B.C., the great general Hannibal, of Carthage in modern Tunisia, embarked on a bold plan: he would lead an army through Spain, Gaul, and across the Alps into northern Italy. His goal was to defeat Rome’s legions on their own soil, finally putting an end to Rome’s expansionist policies.
