Liaisons

Builders of empathy, designers of trust, architects of effectiveness.

Last week I left off talking about how distrust between adjacent units or units at different echelons can be a huge problem.

The problem of staff sections or certain people not working well together gets much worse when you are dealing at the highest echelons. How many problems were caused by the fact that Patton and Montgomery hated each other? And how much better would it have been if they had, instead of fighting over resources and glory, worked together? Distance causes mistrust to grow. It’s hard for two units to have empathy with for each other when they are, in some cases, hundreds of miles apart and facing very different enemy situations? The same is true of headquarters at different echelons.

Most people have been in the position of saying, “What the hell are those idiots at headquarters thinking!” Or they’ve been at headquarters thinking about the lower echelon unit, “Those idiots don’t know what they hell they are doing! This mentality can be extremely destructive to the overall mission, and building trust between units is absolutely crucial.

In the book Strange Defeat by Marc Bloch, which should be required reading for all staff officers, Bloch talks about how the poor teamwork between the British Expeditionary Force and French Army contributed to the poor performance of both during the German invasion of France in 1940. Bloch himself was assigned as a liaison for a short time before being quickly reassigned. In the book he writes about how a good liaison builds trust and mutual understanding, he isn’t just a conduit of information. He also talks about how overclassification of information was a huge problem in the French Army, and it prevented the two armies from working together effectively. Even today, anyone who has worked with international partners for any period of times knows that classification issues can cause a lot of friction.

It takes a good liaison to smooth over that friction, even if they are prevented from sharing specific information.

A good liaison who can facilitate trust, empathy, and shared understanding between units is worth her weight in gold. Units do themselves no favors when they send a mouth-breather to be a liaison instead of someone who actually has the skills and temperament to do the job. America’s partner forces seem to understand this well. Every time I have encountered liaison from the UK, Australia, Germany, Italy, or Turkey, or most other places, I have been extraordinarily impressed. American commanders, on average, seem reluctant to send their best people to be liaisons, though this is by no means universal…

When I was a young captain, I served as the liaison from the one-star headquarters in Train Advise Assist Command - South to the four-star headquarters at Resolute Support HQ in Kabul (which is attached to the embassy). You know the videos of those Taliban guys in the gym? Yeah, that’s where I got swole for nine months.¹

Anyway, that’s where I learned first-hand the impact that a good liaison can have.

I learned quickly that the TAAC-S staff and the HQRS staff were not very fond each other. There wasn’t any open hostility or anything, and other units had a much more adversarial relationship with HQRS, but I saw that if I didn’t help manage the relationship that things could go downhill fast.

I was in a tough position, like most liaisons are, because I was serving two masters. Every day I lived and worked with the people at the higher headquarters, but I was there to represent the interests of my parent unit (the lower echelon headquarters). Staff officers from the higher headquarters would come and yell at me about something that my unit was doing and try to tell me that I had to make them change their plans. Likewise, my parent unit would call and send emails asking me what the hell the higher headquarters was thinking.

There and elsewhere, I have seen liaisons get caught in one of three different kinds of traps. The first trap is a version of Stockholm Syndrome where they begin to only see things from the point of view of the headquarters where they are located. They begin to resent their parent unit, and they may even speak about them disparagingly in the open. The second trap is the exact opposite—liaisons get hyper-defensive about their parent unit. In this trap, liaisons will not bear even the slightest criticism of the unit they are there to represent. The third trap is when a liaison speaks out of both sides of her mouth. In this trap, the liaison will sh*t talk each side to the other side. This is the most destructive of the three traps because it will destroy a relationship, rather than build it.

As a liaison, both traps are easy to fall into unless you are very intentional about what you say and do. When I was a liaison, I made the conscious decision to be an honest broker between the two headquarters. When I spoke to my parent unit, I wrote and spoke in the most charitable way possible about what the higher headquarters was thinking. And the same was true while speaking to the higher headquarters about my parent unit. I tried to never show disloyalty to either side. In the short term this was a good way to get both sides to hate me, rather than hate each other, but eventually both sides saw that I was simply being an honest broker.

As a liaison, the first step is to realize that distance has a tendency to breed distrust. When two units are looking at the same thing from very different perspectives, it is very easy to think that the other unit is purposely distorting facts. The main job of liaison is to squash mistrust by clearly communicating to both sides the perspective of the other side, even if you think one side is clearly right or clearly wrong. Your job is less about representing one commander or one unit, and more about helping both sides work together to achieve the mission.

During our recent warfighter exercise, we had liaisons from two of our adjacent units. One unit sent a crack team of two experienced majors who both worked 18-hour shifts to ensure that the flow of communication between our units was flawless. There was once a big dispute between our unit and theirs about whether or not we could use a bridge that was technically in their area of operations. We both needed the same bridge to mass our forces against the enemy quickly.

Had we less experienced liaisons, that situation could have quickly devolved and hampered both of our offensive efforts. But the candor, professionalism, and sound judgement of the liaison team helped us smooth everything over, and we figured out a solution that enabled both units to achieve what they were trying to do. Ultimately, we worked together with that unit to attack the enemy simultaneously, and the mission was wildly successful.

Contrast that with the other adjacent unit. Rather than send an experienced officer team, they sent a junior officer. He was not a bad officer at all, but he was clearly out of his element. He had never been liaison and didn’t know how important his job was. Liaisons don’t just pass information back and forth; their primary purpose is to build a relationship between the units. Unfortunately, this young officer fell into the first trap—he developed a form of Stockholm Syndrome. When his unit began doing things that made no sense to us, and appeared to jeopardize the larger mission, he wasn’t able to help us see the battlefield from his unit’s perspective. He needed to persuade us that what his unit was doing made sense and that we needed to be supportive. But when we made snide comments about what his unit was doing, he just smiled and essentially agreed with us.

Now, should we have been making snide comments (and making hilarious memes roasting the ever-living sh*t out of his unit)? No, we shouldn’t have done that. We should have been more professional and tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. And, eventually, we started doing that. One of our deputy commanding generals stressed several times that we needed to respect what the other unit was doing, even if it seemed like they were making errors. Towards the end of the exercise, we got a lot better about trying to work with that unit. But the point remains that the liaison did not actively work to build the relationship.

As a quick aside, distrust between staffs is rarely, if ever, represented as distrust between commanders. Commanders usually will get along great, even if they don’t like each other, but their staffs can fight like cats and dogs. If this gets out of hand, it can easily end up with commanders of different units distrusting each other.

Liaisons, then, should encourage empathy in both sides. Only when two units can see things from each other’s perspectives can they build trust and work together.

1. I’m pretty sure it’s the same gym. I could be wrong.