In the corporate world, potential leaders are identified because they excel in a technical area and are then taught leadership skills. Sometimes it is assumed functional excellence implies leadership effectiveness so new leaders are left to sink or swim.
The military provides a contrast. For example, if you join the RAF you probably want to fly a plane. But you have to wait six months to get to that point: for the first six months you are immersed in issues of brand, leadership and followership.
People see the military as inflexible: as having a set hierarchy, a way of doing things. Of course you learn certain things ‘by the book’ so you can free up your brain to make crucial judgements. But if you are flying a night mission over Kosovo, there is no time for a request to go up the chain of command and the decision to come back down. Everyone is involved in leadership. Mission decision-making is fluid and flexible.
In military operations, leadership has little to do with seniority. Operational teams are complex matrix structures. Once goals are set you decide who is best placed to fulfil each role. Since everyone has a grounding in leadership, anyone can take up that role. The key is to decide who is best to lead the project, to push decision making as far down the chain as it will go and then to support the people you’ve delegated to. If you do that right it solves the disengagement problem.
A mission without debriefing is unfinished. Debriefing is a constantly iterated cycle of 360° feedback and performance appraisal. Just as in execution, debriefing sidelines seniority. Leaders’ performance is critiqued and praised so they in turn learn. How leaders react to this – defensively or openly – is critical to the loyalty and motivation of their team. So debriefing, carried out in this way, sites leaders within the team: not as someone who ‘has all the answers’ but as someone learning, improving and responding to upward insights. It pulls together everything: leadership; motivation; engagement and an upward performance trajectory.
A lot of business thinkers and business schools have taken the passion out of leadership by overcomplicating it. Leadership is underpinned by process but, in the end, it's about behaviour.
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