Recently I was asked by a university leadership professor about training corporate leaders the way the military trains its leaders. Specifically, he wanted a review of books that might help him with how the military does it. As I was reviewing the books, I realized the extent to which I took my own training - particularly about delegation - for granted.
I’ve excerpted my note to him here, and am happy to hear comments.
**
Perhaps the most important thing I can say about leadership “training” in the military is that it is NOT what people in corporations think of when they think of leadership training. When a corporate or academic person thinks leadership training (at least in the U. S.), in my experience, they are thinking of a combination of classroom, reading, discussion, off-sites, 3-day facilitated sessions, and perhaps external/individual coaching.
When the military talks about leadership training, they just mean leadership.
What I mean by this is that the military has discovered that one thousand hours of leadership training are worth about 15 minutes of actual leading. Being given true responsibility for people, budgets, projects, missions, lives, and being asked to do one’s best and learn from success and failure is the best way to develop leaders. The military trains leaders by giving them real responsibility at the lowest levels (by pushing decision making down the chain of command as far as possible), and allowing junior leaders -soldiers, sergeants, young officers - to take action and learn as they do. The military does this not IN SPITE OF the chance that soldiers might die because of a mistake, but BECAUSE they might die, and they need their leaders to learn more quickly than in any other endeavor. A leadership professor might say this is “frequent, early feedback.” A corporal would say to that, “yeah, whatever. But I want my lieutenant to know what the hell he’s doing, and it doesn’t seem to me that they teach that in school.”
I spend a lot of time dealing with this when clients find out that I am a Military Academy graduate. Several have even said, “Make my folks into a bunch of West Pointers!” I invariably say “the way to start is to stop taking them places and ‘teaching’ them things, and start giving them real work that has consequences . Give them feedback and coaching until they are blue in the face . Make them work on hard things and big projects - things their bosses are working on now. Let the bosses pick their heads up off the day to day, and let that ripple up the chain so that senior leaders aren’t proofreading advertising copy.” This is how the military “trains” leaders.
I had four reminders of the important differences between the military way and the corporate way recently.
First, there have been a couple of articles recently touting Jack Welch’s new book, Winning. Some people like Jack, some don’t. I’m a fan. Many of his detractors have drawn erroneous conclusions from his A/B/C ranking of people, but that’s a whole separate discussion. In his latest book, he lays out a very simple, 3 step way to look at strategy: (1) Get a big ‘aha’ about your business - a way to get competitive advantage; (2) Put the right people in the right jobs; (3) Seek out best practices and implement them intelligently.
Another way he describes this is: Pick a general direction and implement like hell. Everything I know - my entire experience in the military and business - says this is true. I’m a consultant, and Jack’s comments about consultants are ALSO true: “the way these experts talk about strategy - as if it were some kind of high-brain scientific methodology - feels really off to me.”
Okay, keep Jack’s thoughts in your head as I go to the second reminder- a companion article in Fortune entitled, “Get me a CEO from GE!” The article suggests that many companies would love to tap the GE talent pool for senior leadership. And they do: 5 of the Dow 30 companies are run by ex-GEers. This particular article suggests that “the GE playbook may not travel well”, because of the 34 transplants running major companies, 17 out-performed the S&P 500, and 17 under-performed it. But while true - the GE playbook will NOT travel well to certain places - the companies still want GE TALENT.
And why? Crotonville is to be lauded, the article says (rightly in my opinion): “But at least as important was GE’s early decision to create dozens of autonomous units and rotate managers among them. If you were the old IBM or Ford or GM or Exxon, you didn’t run a true profit and loss until you were way up in your career. At GE you have all these farm leagues where you can test people.”
One final point: “if there is a GE playbook, it is this: ‘An absolute belief that great people build great companies,’ Welch says.”
So. Arguably the most successful (long term) company in America is an engine of leaders, and its most recent leader says it’s all about “picking” a direction, getting the RIGHT PEOPLE onboard, and implementing (which is a decidedly prosaic, people-driven activity).
Third reminder. In the same Fortune, Wal-Mart was profiled. The article talked about, of all things, the famous Saturday morning meeting. The largest company in the world, and recently the most admired, believes the single most important thing it does outside of serving customers millions of times a day is a 3 hour meeting held every Saturday morning in Bentonville. This is a meeting of regular people, talking about selling regular stuff to regular people. It is not training, it is not strategy, it is not HR, it is not “futuring”, or a focus group. It is a store operations meeting, because what Wal-Mart does is operate stores. It’s former STORE MANAGERS (promoted to run more stores) who are listened to intently at these meetings. It’s the stores - small autonomous units where leaders are leading, growing, trying, failing, succeeding and sharing - that Wal-Mart believes is the key to its success. These meetings are NOT training, though people do learn things. They are learning by doing.
And lastly, 60 Minutes recently did a segment on West Point, and how its young graduates are going to Iraq… and succeeding, and teaching the Army about how to win wars like the one in Iraq. (Ironically, one USMA grad described urban warfare in Iraq as ‘combat in a Wal-Mart’). Rest assured, these young men and women did NOT know what they were getting into, though West Point training is very good. Training is not doing. The piece made quite a fuss about how the young leaders were adapting, and sharing ideas, and learning what they needed to unlearn.
Those military leaders in Iraq are leading reservist soldiers who may come back to the states and go to work at Wal-Mart or GE. They are learning to lead the same way Wal-Mart and GE want their leaders to: by leading, by running a department, by running a project, by being responsible for men, materiel, ammunition, prisoners, results. NOT by going to class, not by reading, not by going off-site.
The biggest company in America, the most successful long-term company in the US, and the stunning winner of the early Iraq war all do leadership training the same way: by allowing their people to lead.
This is not a coincidence.
Members-Only 
Premium 
Interviewing Series
Stumble it!
