Development Part 1
The key to strengthening your network is maximizing the effectiveness of your key nodes.
If you are short on time, just read the first section. Please come back and read the rest later.
You’re (probably) wasting your time
With the amount of ink that has been spilled by leadership and productivity gurus about why it’s more important to focus on strengths instead of weaknesses in personal and employee development, one might think that most leaders would be aware of this fact. But in my talks with many leaders, especially in the military, one would think that this was a closely guarded secret. If you just google “focus on your strengths” you’ll see dozens of articles and studies that talk about why trying to improve weaknesses is mostly a waste of time, and that improvements made on weaknesses quickly fade away.
Unfortunately, a lot of leader development efforts in the Army (and elsewhere) are focused squarely on developing weaknesses; sometimes by design, sometimes by habit. Throughout my career when I have suggested to fellow officers that they not waste their time trying to “fix” their subordinate leaders’ weaknesses, they scoff as though I was some kind of heretic. Why is this? Military leaders are trained almost from birth to identify the enemy, make a plan to kill him, and then execute the plan ruthlessly. If the enemy is a subordinate’s weakness, then it must be suppressed by overwhelming firepower, maneuvered upon, and bayoneted. So, the insinuation that you should let the “enemy” to escape your grasp by allowing a weakness to go unaddressed seems heretical.
Many rightly ask, “how can my subordinates improve if I don’t develop their weaknesses?” Well, it depends on what you mean by “improve.” In this essay, I am not talking about areas of personal performance like physical fitness or marksmanship. If you have a lieutenant who can’t pass the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT), then by all means provide them the resources and the time they need to train.
But when it comes to more complex tasks related to the proper functioning of the organization, don’t assign tasks to subordinates who aren’t good at those tasks. If you delegate something to someone, make sure they are actually good at the thing you want them to do (bonus points if they also enjoy it). Assigning a task to a subordinate for the sole purpose of “developing” one of their weaknesses frustrates them (and you), makes the organization less effective, and probably won’t improve that weakness as much as you think it will — if there is any lasting improvement at all.
Emergent Properties
In my last essay, “network,” I briefly touched on the concept of interdependence, a concept from complexity theory that focuses on identifying the degree to which parts of a system are reliant on other parts for proper functioning. Most of the things we do in the military have moderate to high levels of interdependence — on the battlefield, changes to something in one unit’s mission carry implications for many other ongoing missions. For example, if a brigade shifts the priority of artillery support from one unit to another, there can be huge shifts in the entire structure of the battle. Not only will there be changes in the friendly units, but the enemy will react to the change as well.
Even in a garrison environment, we are often unaware of the high degree of interdependence in our own organizations. If the unit armorer is late to work one day, it could create a causal chain of events that ends up with a platoon leader getting in trouble. The armorer being late means that the arms room is open late, and the soldiers get their weapons late. Now the platoon leader now has to decide between being late to the airfield and throwing off the aviation schedule or driving on roads during PT hours. Either of these choices can result in him getting in trouble. The fact that the platoon leader should have had a contingency plan in place does not change the fact that there is a high level of interdependence. This example is relatively easy to see and understand, but many of the interdependencies that exist in your organization are invisible, or only visible in hindsight. This is a crucial point.
Interdependence is about understanding how different parts of the system interact with each other. Emergence is about understanding how the interactions of different parts of a system create collective behaviors. Here is a brief extract from “Making Things Work” by Yaneer Bar-Yam.
Emergence refers to the relationship between the details of a system and the larger view. Emergence does not emphasize the primary importance of the details or of the larger view; it is concerned with the relationship between the two. Specifically emergence seeks to discover: Which details are important for the larger view, and which are not? How do collective properties arise from the properties of the parts? How does behavior at a larger scale of the system arise from the detailed structure, behavior and relationships on a finer scale?
In the book, Bar-Yam uses the example of a forest. You can zoom out and see the entire forest, or you can zoom in and see the individual trees and animals. Emergence is about changing perspective between the larger view and the detailed view. Of course, scientists like Bar-Yam use sophisticated models to study a wide range of issues, but understanding these concepts, and learning how to apply them can be of immense help to leaders in organizations.
So, how does this relate to leader development? Your leaders are crucial nodes in your network because their actions often have larger effects on the organization than the actions of individual soldiers. People are generally more dependent on the actions of leaders, and the interactions between the people under leaders create collective behaviors. If you want healthy collective behaviors, and if you want your organization to be as effective as it can be, then focusing on the behaviors of your leaders is critically important.
This is why it is usually counter-productive to the organization to assign tasks to subordinate leaders for the purpose of “developing” them. If you have a critical node in your organization, like a platoon leader, the last thing you want to do is weaken or reduce the effectiveness of that node. The platoon leader has a direct impact on all of the people in her platoon. If you frustrate that node by having it do things it isn’t good at, you are potentially harming the part of the network that relies on that node. The stress placed on that node will seep into that platoon and will have outcomes that are likely negative. It is much, much better for the organization for you, as a leader, to maximize the effectiveness of that node by using it to its full potential, not by trying to make it better at things it isn’t good at.
If you are having all the nodes in the network do what they are best at, the network will likely automatically compensate for the weaknesses of any individual node, and you will see very healthy and well-rounded collective behaviors from the organization. The emergent properties that arise from a network where the individual nodes are doing what they are most effective at are much better than the emergent properties of a network where the nodes are doing things that they suck at.
If you want the most out of your organization, you need to identify the strengths of your key nodes and focus on maximizing them, as we will see in the next section.
Range Day
Imagine you are a company commander and you have two platoon leaders. Chris is really good at planning and organizing, but gets flustered during execution, especially under stressful conditions. The other, Matt, is very good at inspiring others and making things run smoothly during execution, but is totally unorganized and hates administrative tasks like getting range binders together. The company has an advanced marksmanship range coming up which will require both detailed planning and very efficient execution. How would you divide the work?
Unfortunately, I have seen many officers who think that this is an excellent opportunity to develop the weaknesses of the two platoon leaders by having Chris in charge of the execution at the range, and Matt in charge of all the planning and organizing. Of course, this creates all kinds of problems. Matt is super stressed out by all of the planning details and seems to be allergic to all the things he has to get done. He rushes through everything and skips a bunch of steps that seem unimportant to him. When the unit gets to the range, the range safety inspectors come out to see Matt’s range binder to make sure he’s followed the proper steps. When they find out that Matt doesn’t have the right paperwork in the binder, they shut down the range until everything is corrected. Soldiers get frustrated, training time is lost.
Chris gets incredibly flustered and stressed because Matt did a bad job communicating his plan, and now the plan has completely changed because the safety inspector has closed the range, which stresses Chris even more. Instead of quickly coming up with some impromptu training for the soldiers and inspiring them in this frustrating situation, Chris destresses by screaming at Matt for screwing everything up.
You now have a closed range, soldiers sitting around not doing anything (or more likely looking for creative ways to get in trouble), and officers screaming at each other. When the battalion commander makes an unscheduled stop at the range to see how things are going, he is appalled to discover the state of affairs.
Of course, it doesn’t have to go this way. Instead of the range ending in disaster, it’s more likely that the training is simply not as good as it could have been had the platoon leaders played to their strengths. Matt’s plan ends up good enough to get through the training but has some minor holes that slow things down, and Chris goes through the motions as the head trainer, missing opportunities to adjust the plan to enhance training value. The soldiers get the training, but they feel like it was boring and robotic. The price that you paid for “development” for Chris and Matt isn’t ever visible, it’s mostly just opportunity cost. You might think that is an acceptable cost to improve the weaknesses of your platoon leaders. The problem is that, as I mentioned in the first section, the research suggests that neither platoon leader will see big improvements, and any small improvements will likely be temporary. You paid a cost for development and got almost nothing in return.
If you want to maximize training value at the range AND develop your platoon leaders, your best bet is to have them play to their strengths. Chris is super happy to put in the leg work of planning the range and organizing all the preparations, and Matt gets to be in his element out on the range training the soldiers, making adjustments on the fly, and getting it done. Soldiers get the training and enjoy it. Matt sees how good a range can run with proper preparation, and Chris learns a lot by watching Matt do his thing out on the range.
There are plenty of other creative ways to focus on leader development in this example while still having the platoon leaders play to their strengths.
Performance Counseling
The previous example assumes that you already know the strengths and weaknesses of your platoon leaders, but that won’t always be the case. It’s important that you, as a leader, start to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your subordinate leaders as soon as you take charge of a team. Of course, it’s rarely as simple as “Matt is good at X task in all cases and bad at Y in all cases, and Chris is the reverse.” Strengths and weaknesses often depend on context and can shift over time. This is why regular performance counseling is one of the most important development tools that a leader can use.
During initial counseling with my officers when I was a company commander, I had them do almost all of the talking (which isn’t usually the case during initial counseling). I asked them a bunch of questions that they probably thought were odd. I would ask them things like, "who is your favorite character in a war movie, and what do you like about them?” I’d ask them to describe what an ideal platoon leader looked like. I’d guide the conversation in different directions just trying to get a sense of them. I never really gave them a lot of my expectations, I let them set the expectations for themselves. What the hell did I know about what to expect from them? I’d been a company commander for like 2 hours!
I knew that what I said or didn’t say during initial counseling was largely irrelevant — it wouldn’t have a huge impact on the next 12-18 months of command. But I knew that consistent performance counseling would have a large impact.
Unfortunately, in the course of a year, some leaders never get counseled. Some get counseled a handful of times, some might even get counseled once a quarter. I counseled my platoon leaders, executive officer, and first sergeant formally, on paper, every single month. To many people, that frequency is shocking. I’ve never seen performance counseling happen that often in the Army, but it’s what I was comfortable with and it’s what I recommend to almost everyone. Sitting down every month to go over the indiviudal’s performance to discover what they liked and disliked, where they excelled and where they lagged, and to get their feedback about what I could do better, was invaluable to me.
Some people might think that the administrative burden of doing formal written counseling every month is prohibitive. It is not. I simply had a DA Form 4856 for each person every month and I would type some notes in there and keep the files organized on my computer.
If you want to develop your leaders, frequency matters a lot. You have to constantly assess and reassess them, and then provide them feedback. When you identify areas where someone is strong make sure to exploit that for the good of the organization.
Cope and Compensate
If you find an area where someone is weak, don’t try to “fix” them, just make sure they know it’s a weakness and try to work around it as much as possible. If you had asked me when I was a 21-year-old platoon leader what my strengths were I’d be like, “Oh yeah, I am super organized and disciplined, and I am really deliberate and I am really good at planning.” Anyone who knows me is laughing at reading these words because I am usually not those things. I am much more like Matt from the story above - I tend to be better at execution and I like to move quickly, skipping over details that don’t seem important. Fortunately, I figure this out before I took command.
When I was a commander, my constant refrain to my leaders was, “I am not a details guy.” I communicated what I wanted things to look like, what my vision was, and guided the company in the right direction, but I had no intention of getting wrapped up in details. Between you and me, I almost never looked at a weekly FRAGO - the First Sergeant and the XO handled that — and the company was better for it.
This dislike of details isn’t a weakness that I intend on trying to fix, and I would chafe if anyone tried to “develop” me to be more “detail-oriented.” The thought of this is somewhat nauseating and anxiety-inducing.
“But details are important!” you exclaim. Yes, details are important. I can do detailed planning and I can (if I try hard enough) impress people with my ability to think through the details of a task or situation. That doesn’t change the fact that I hate details and it’s not a strength. And it won’t be a strength no matter how hard I try to improve it.
Knowing that I am not good with details is important information — for me and for those around me. The best way for me to use my skills is to partner with someone who is good at details. When I was a company commander, this was my executive officer and my first sergeant. They both excelled at working through details and figuring things out.
Rather than try to “develop” or “improve” the weaknesses of your subordinate leaders, it is much more effective for you to figure out how to make them effective by working around their weaknesses. The first step is helping them to identify what their weaknesses are (see above section on the importance of frequent performance counseling). If you can, look for ways to test weaknesses to make sure they are actually weaknesses, not self-imposed limits. Once you’ve helped someone discover a weakness, talk with them about how they can work around it. More importantly, identify their strengths and have them maximize those.
Usually, the best way to compensate for someone’s weakness is to have them partner with someone who is strong in that area. In our example of Chris and Matt, this is putting the two together to run the range, playing to both of their strengths, rather than just giving the whole range to one officer as is the standard practice.
If you help people discover their strengths and weaknesses and simply encourage them to play to their strengths, they will find their own creative ways to compensate for the weaknesses. As I said in a previous section, if all the nodes in the network are being enabled to focus on what they are best at, the weaknesses of any individual node will usually be compensated for automatically, if the eco-system is functioning properly.
Division of Labor
When it comes to helping yourself and others become more self-aware, there are no shortages of assessment tools for personality and performance awareness. I had to take a bunch of these assessments in business school. Myer-Briggs (I am an ENFP), enneagram, Big-5, Strength Finders, Judgment Index, Kolb’s Learning Styles, working genius, on and on and on. I can confidently say that I’ve never gotten a result on one of these assessments where I thought, “this is BS!” Most of the assessments, I felt, described me pretty well. Maybe this is because they are super accurate, maybe it’s because they are more like a horoscope than we’d like to believe — I don’t know.
When I was a company commander, the battalion chaplain brought me an assessment called Real Life Management (the name of the program has changed to something else now). I put a lot of effort into making sure that every soldier in the company took the assessment and was trained to understand the results. It was difficult to get the junior leaders to buy into the program, but some did and I think it was a net positive, overall. The thing I liked about the program was that it helped me to understand who was likely to be a detail-oriented person, and who was likely to be a more big-picture person.
The reason I like to classify people as being more focused on details or more focused on the big-picture is because of an article I read in, of all places, The Official In-Flight Magazine of Southwest Airlines when I was 19 years old. The article was originally printed in Harvard Business Review with the title “What 17th-Century Pirates Can Teach Us About Job Design”.
The article argues that there are basically two types of jobs or tasks — Star Tasks and Guardian tasks.
If you had to design the job of a pirate ship captain in [the 17th century], how would you do it? When I ask MBA students and executives to design the job, they invariably lump together two areas of responsibility: star tasks—strategic work such as target identification, command during battle, and negotiating alliances to form fleets—and guardian tasks, which are operational work such as allocating arms, adjudicating conflict, punishing indiscipline, distributing loot, and organizing care for the sick and injured.
Some people are good at both, but those people are rare.
One of the problems with Army talent management is that we align officers to jobs based on a timeline rather than a skillset. This is a common critique. Officers who excel at star tasks only get to be directly leading units for about six years over a twenty-year career (two years each as a platoon leader, company commander, and battalion commander). Officers who prefer guardian tasks like staff work are periodically forced into command positions because that is the only way to get promoted.
This system is unlikely to change. And even if you could change it, I am not sure how exactly you would go about it fairly.
So, you have to work with it.
It is critical to identify who are the guardians and who are the stars on your team so you can maximize their skills. If you are a guardian and you are placed in a command position, you need to play to your strengths and find someone to compensate for your weaknesses. The organization needs vision and inspired leadership. If that’s not something you feel like you can provide, would you consider trying to coax that out of someone else? If your senior non-commissioned officer is a visionary with a charismatic personality, why not let her play to that strength for the good of the organization? I am not saying let her be the commander, I am saying let her be the inspirer.
I read a John Maxwell book (I don’t remember which one) where he told a story about Larry Bird and the Celtics in a championship game. The Celtics were down with less than a minute on the clock, and the coach called a timeout. When the team huddled around the coach but before he could speak Larry said, “here’s the plan, give me the ball and get out of the way!” The coach said, “Larry! I am the coach and I’ll make the decisions. Now, here’s the plan: pass the ball to Larry and get out of his way.”
The coach didn’t stop being the coach just because Larry aggressively asserted himself. In a healthy organization, the commander isn’t afraid to admit to her weaknesses and look for others to help fill certain roles.
One of the battalion commanders I had as a lieutenant was totally uninspiring, but he had other strengths. The problem was that he tried to be inspiring and motivating, and it had the opposite effect — people lost confidence in him because he came across awkward and stiff. At the same time, he felt like he couldn’t play to his guardian task strengths because he wanted to allow the staff to operate the way he thought it was supposed to operate. Not only did the battalion suffer from him trying to excel in an area of weakness, but it also lost his area of strength — deliberate and detailed planning and analysis.
I am going to expand on the dangers of job mismatch in my next essay.
Suck it up
Yes, sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to do, and sometimes you have to make your subordinates do things that they aren’t good at it. That’s just life.
As it turns out, if you simply acknowledge that the task you are giving someone is something you know that they dislike or will struggle with, they’ll feel a lot better about it and will probably do a lot better on the task. You simply can’t avoid weaknesses all the time, but you should avoid them when you can. And should rarely, if ever, put in a lot of effort to “fix” what you see as someone else’s weakness.
Next Month
In the last essay, “network,” I talked about the importance of understanding your organization as a complex network, and about how the power of the network comes from nodes adding value to each other.
In this essay, I argue that leader development efforts that are focused on improving weaknesses in individual leaders harm the organization and don’t help the people they are trying to help. It is much better for the organization if you, as the leader, identify the strengths and weaknesses of your subordinate leaders and focus almost exclusively on maximizing their strengths. Doing this will increase the effectiveness of your organization and do a better job of developing your leaders.
In the next essay, I am going to continue on the theme of leader development. I am going to present what I have seen as a common pattern of leader development in the Army and how I think you can improve it in your organization.