Organization

Give me a lever long enough...

Feb 22, 2022

If you are short on time, scroll down to “Managing Emergence” OR “Performer” and just read one of those. Please come back and read the rest later.

Brief apology:

At the end of the last essay, I told you to expect an essay about ethics training. That essay will come, just not this month.

One Person

The success of most large military organizations (or all military organizations) is dependent on the performance of an incredibly small number of people, probably about 5%-10% of the total number of soldiers. For a battalion of 700 soldiers, that means that the success of the battalion depends on the performance of about thirty-five people. This is counter-intuitive. In fact, most people I’ve talked with about this haven’t given it serious thought. Thirty-five sounds like such a small number of people relative to an entire battalion. How can the success of a 700 person battalion depend only on thirty-five people? Shouldn’t success depend on everyone working together and doing their job? Am I saying that most people in an organization just don’t matter? If success depends on so few people, then why are all those other people even in the organization? What is their purpose? These are valid questions that I will seek to answer throughout this essay.

To begin, let’s turn it around and look not at success, but at failure. How many people does it take to cause a military organization to fail or, at the very least, underperform by a wide margin?

One.

It takes one bad commander to completely destroy a unit. When you read this it seems impossible, but anyone who has been in a bad unit knows how deleterious a bad commander can be. By being overbearing, spiteful, resentful, toxic, or just downright incompetent, one commander can take a unit that would otherwise perform well and lead it straight into failure. Historical and contemporary examples abound.

In fact, many people have experienced the phenomenon of the collective exhale of relief when a bad boss leaves the office for a week, or even for a few days, for whatever reason. People whisper different versions of the same joke to each other in the hallways: “Thank god the boss is gone, we can finally get some work done around here,” or “the boss should leave more often, we’d be so much more effective.”

The same phenomenon occurs when a bad commander is removed or replaced. My friend Dan, an Army aviator, recently recounted a story to me about a toxic former commander of his who was suspended during an investigation. The day the commander left, the unit was finally able to operate effectively. People treated each other with more respect and communicated more openly; the unit became alive literally overnight. The tyranny of unspoken fear that had gripped the battalion as the result of the commander’s toxicity had been usurped by the collective will to focus on results and take care of each other.

This is not to say that all situations are so Pollyannish. It would be overstating the case to say that all organizations naturally exist in a high-performing state, thwarted only by the incompetence or toxicity of one leader at the top. Most, if not all, organizations need the leadership and guidance that comes from their commander and top lieutenants. But it is almost a certainty that a piss-poor leader who is intent on imposing his will on the organization can only cause harm and that simply removing this leader would cause an immediate improvement to the health of the organization.

So, if one person at the top can destroy an organization, is it really so crazy to think that a counter-intuitively small number of people can cause it to succeed?

In my essay Laziness Part 1, I talked about an asymmetry of leadership where it is much easier to do harm than make improvements, and that while one person can do enormous harm, it takes the efforts of multiple people to make improvements. Understanding this asymmetry is key to understanding why it only takes a small percentage of people at a particular echelon to make the organization successful.

“I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.” -Alexander the Great*

*supposedly—you can never tell with these types of quotes, right?

Two Fictional Battalions

Let’s conduct a thought experiment to see if we can build some intuition around why it only takes such a small number of people to make an organization perform at its best. Let’s look at two different battalions and make some inferences about their likely performance. Each Battalion has about 700 people.

BATTALION 1

This Battalion has top performers for each of the following 35 jobs:

Battalion Commander
Battalion Executive Officer
Command Sergeant Major
6 x Company Commanders
4 x Company Executive Officers
4 x First Sergeants
4 x Platoon Leaders
4 x Platoon Sergeants
Operations Officer (S3)
Operations Sergeant Major
Operations NCO
Personnel Officer (S1)
Personnel NCO
Intelligence Officer (S2)
Logistics Officer (S4)
Logistics NCO
Communications Officer
Communications NCO
That Random NCO who is magically everywhere and does everything (IYKYK)

These jobs represent about 5% of the total jobs in the battalion. These positions are suggestions. If you want to trade a platoon leader for another First Sergeant, go for it. If you’d rather have another platoon sergeant than a top-performing intelligence officer, be my guest. The bottom line is that you can have 35 top performers. These top-performers are good team players with strong track records. None of the people in these positions are toxic; they all received glowing reviews from previous subordinates, peers, and superiors. What’s more, if any one of these people isn’t cutting it, they can be replaced by another top-performer or with someone of the battalion commander’s own choosing.

Every other position in the battalion (that’s about 665 positions) is filled randomly with people whose track records are either average or below average. None of these people can be removed or replaced unless they commit serious violations.

BATTALION 2

This is the reverse of BATTALION 1.

The positions listed above are randomly filled with average to below-average performers, and they can’t be moved or replaced unless there is serious misconduct. Some will be incompetent, others will be toxic and incompetent, others might be competent but have a severe deficit of self-confidence and not stand up to the poor leaders around them. The other 665 positions will be filled with top performers with strong track records.

For each battalion, the people in the listed positions have to perform the duties assigned to them. For BATTALION 2, you can’t take a standout infantry lieutenant and have him perform the duties of the logistics officer. Only the assigned logistics officer can do logistic officer things.

Which Battalion do you think will do better over time?

At first, it can seem like Battalion 2 is very attractive. 665 top performers out of 700 people?! 95% of the battalion is top performers! That’s incredible! But let’s examine why Battalion 2 is not as good as it first looks.

Umm, Where Are We Going?

You have to think about your organization in dynamic terms, rather than static ones. It’s not about where your organization is, it matters which direction it’s moving. Battalion 2 will start with 665 top performers, but where will the battalion end up? How well will the top performers do in an environment where they are led by incompetent and or toxic leaders?

Let’s look at Sergeant First Class (SFC) Dorinda in Battalion 2. SFC Dorinda has been a standout performer her whole career, in fact, she got promoted to E7 in less than ten years, which is a remarkable achievement. But when she is assigned to Battalion 2, she consistently gets blamed for things that aren’t her fault, the personnel paperwork that she submits for processing always gets lost or significantly delayed, her creative ideas are ignored or rejected, she can’t resource her training because the operations department keeps forgetting to reserve training areas and ammunition, she can’t get her broken equipment fixed because the logistics department keeps dragging their feet on processing the paperwork, the awards she submits for her soldiers get returned for seemingly no reason, and to top it all off, she is forced to participate in weekly “Leader Development Classes,” led by people whose leadership skills she does not respect. When the unit deploys to a Combat Training Center to conduct a big wargame, she suffers from the battalion’s crappy planning, cowardly leadership, and endless logistical problems.

Hey, SFC Dorina, how are you doing?

The toxicity and incompetence of a very small number of people at the top of the battalion seep into everything the battalion does. Once a standout performer, SFC Dorinda becomes demoralized and demotivated. Despite her best efforts to do what is best, she spends large portions of her day commiserating with the other Senior NCOs about how screwed up everything is in the battalion, and about how her last battalion was WAY better than this one. Each story the senior NCOs tell each other highlights the battalion’s problems in new and seemingly unending ways. Now, even when a battalion leader does something good it gets criticized because the perception is that the battalion’s leadership can’t do anything good.

Battalion 2 might start with 665 top performers, but they will do a fine job of destroying the initiative and drive of every single one of them. That amazing number of 95% top performers will get driven down to 0% so fast it’ll make your head swim.

Now let’s look at Battalion 1.

Things might start out rough. The top 5% will periodically get frustrated with subordinates who are lazy and with subordinate leaders who are incompetent, but the Battalion Command team is able to keep the top 5% motivated and on track. The Battalion Staff Primaries are super user-friendly and very supportive. Over time, the top 5% are able to identify the strengths of their subordinates and focus on maximizing them. For subordinates who are difficult to deal with, they subtly reduce their negative impact over time. Through good leadership, the top 5% don’t turn any historically average or underperforming soldiers into superstars, but they are able to get adequate-ish performance out of most of their people.

Battalion 1 might not become the best battalion in the Army, but it will trend upward over time.

“Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”

-Archimedes

Managing Emergence

To understand the differences between these two battalions, we need to revisit the concept of emergence that I talked about in Development Part 1. Emergence1 is understanding how collective behaviors are created through the interactions of the parts of a system. Understanding emergence is understanding that a complex system (like a battalion) is not simply the sum of its parts. Joe Norman, a complexity researcher and theorist, uses the idea of a conversation to describe emergence. A conversation is not a group of people talking in isolation and then mashing their words together. A conversation is what emerges when two people interact with each other. One person says something, then someone says something else in response to what they just heard. The interaction is the conversation. A conversation can be good or bad depending on the nature of the interaction. Some people are really good conversationalists because they add value to the conversation. Other people destroy the value of a conversation by acting poorly.

The behavior of an organization is an emergent property, just like a conversation. The performance of a battalion isn’t determined by summing up the actions of all the individual people. The performance of the battalion is what emerges as individual people work together and interact. How people work together and interact is largely a product of how they are managed and led. Just like a good moderator can improve a conversation that could otherwise go haywire, a good leader can manage emergent properties to improve an organization by managing and influencing the nature of the interactions between people.

Strong Leaders are able to get people to work together in ways that create positive results. Leaders who put too much focus on the performance of individual people are missing the point completely. It matters less about the skills and abilities of individual people in an organization and more about how the leaders of that organization create positive results by focusing on how well those people work together to achieve things.

Herb Brooks makes this point very well in the movie Miracle:

“All-Star Teams fail because they rely solely on the individuals’ talent. The Soviets win because they take that talent and they use it inside a system that’s designed for the betterment of the team.”

“I’m not looking for the best players, Craig, I am looking for the right ones.”

Obviously, you have to have some raw materials to work with. The individuals in your organization have to have some existing skills and abilities related to what the organization is trying to accomplish. Herb Brooks probably couldn’t have beaten the Soviets at hockey by starting with the world’s greatest Kabaddi Team. But in any army battalion, the requisite screening and training have already been done. If they are there in the battalion, they have met the minimum requirements to be able to perform the key aspects of their job.

Battalion 1 is likely to succeed because its great leadership will produce results by getting the 95% of average and underperformers to work together in ways that leverage their existing skills and talents for the betterment of the battalion. If you think 5% is too small a number, that the top people will get overwhelmed, fine. Make it 10%, my point remains the same—a small number of people in the highest impact positions determine the success of the battalion.

If you can’t get a battalion to achieve positive results by hand-selecting 70 people and putting them in the positions that you think are the most impactful, I don’t know what to tell you, dude. No battalion commander in recent history has had the opportunity to hand-select anybody, and somehow most of them achieve great things.

“It is much easier to put existing resources to better use than to develop resources where they do not exist”

-George Soros

“Performer”

The idea of describing a “performer” as either “top,” “average,” or “under-” warrants a brief aside.

People do not objectively fit into these categories. Performance is, quite obviously, dependent on the domain in which someone is performing. People have different skills and motivations that affect their performance to varying degrees depending on the situation in which they are performing. A lieutenant who is a “top performer” as the leader of an infantry platoon might not be the top performer as the assistant to the assistant operations officer. And someone who is an underperformer as the officer in charge of the “S1 Shop” (aka personnel department), might be a top performer as 2nd in charge of the S1 shop.

This is why, as I wrote in the development essay, it is crucial to understand the strengths of the people in your organization so that you can use them in a way that maximizes those strengths. A person is not an “underperformer,” they might just be underperforming in the job they are in. Again, this sounds obvious— like stupidly, painfully obvious—but time and time again we watch leaders persist in trying to develop, improve, “fix,” or worse, just get rid of people who aren’t doing well. It would be much better to focus on the one or two things that that person can do well and just let them do those things until they learn how to do other stuff well, too.2

In one of my former battalions when I was a lieutenant (I was in four of them and I won’t say which one), the S1 officer was a brand new second lieutenant from the adjutant general corps. He knew a lot about how the Army personnel system worked, and how forms and memos needed to be formatted, and the relevant regulations regarding promotions and awards, but the poor guy didn't know diddly-squat about managing an S1 shop. He worked tirelessly, trying to keep his head above water, but he didn’t know how to handle the awkward situations that naturally arise when dealing with senior captains and senior NCOs when paperwork is being shuffled back and forth.

One time a company commander turned in an award to be processed, which was out of the normal because First Sergeants usually submit that kind of paperwork. The S1 awards clerk reviewed it, but sent the award back to the First Sergeant, rather than the commander, for some minor corrections, and then dutifully updated the awards tracker to reflect that the award had been returned to the company for corrections. The First Sergeant made the corrections but sent it directly to the Command Sergeant Major, skipping the S1 shop altogether. The Sergeant Major, who always got awards from the S1 shop rather than from 1SGs directly, missed the award in his overflowing inbox.

Prior to the next command and staff meeting, the S1 officer (the new 2nd LT) reviewed his awards tracker and saw that the award was returned to the company and hadn’t been resubmitted, and was now going to be late. This meant the company was going to need to write a memo explaining why the award was late. Of course, the S1 officer had no visibility of the award once his clerk dutifully returned it to the company and correctly updated the tracker.

The S1 officer called the company commander and politely asked about the award. During the conversation, the commander was pretty mean about the situation. The commander, who assumed that the S1 shop lost the award, derisively said, “I’m not writing a memo of lateness when your shop lost the damn award, lieutenant!”

An experienced staff officer would have been able to navigate this situation, but this new lieutenant got hosed.

Prior to the command and staff meeting3, the company commander raised the issue with the battalion commander, explaining his side of the story. Once they got in the meeting, the battalion commander absolutely ripped the new lieutenant for screwing up the awards process. The guilty parties quietly sat back as the S1 officer took the verbal beating. The new 2LT was too scared to try to stand up for himself in the meeting. He had seen the email his clerk had sent to the First Sergeant, and the First Sergeant’s reply email that read simply, “got it,” but he felt powerless in the situation.

According to everyone in the battalion, the S1 officer was an “underperformer,” and they weren’t wrong—he was underperforming. But why, then, did they keep him in that position?! His performance didn’t improve over time, despite attempts to “mentor,” “improve,” and “develop” him. He just got bitter and angry and left the Army when his time was up. What would have been a better solution?

Rather than let this new personnel lieutenant flounder as the head of the S1 shop, the Battalion Executive Officer could have moved in a confident and experienced captain into the S1 shop to formally but informally take charge. This captain would not be from the adjutant general corps. She might be from the infantry, or armor, or engineers, or transportation, and she might not know the first thing about the Army personnel system, but she’ll know how to make the trains run on time. On paper, the captain would get rated as an assistant S3, but in reality, she would be managing the S1 shop. The new lieutenant would have been the subject matter expert on the things in which he was an expert—memo formatting, automated personnel systems, etc. The captain’s role would be to make the S1 shop function efficiently and handle awkward situations like the one above with the misrouted award. Rather than constantly getting crushed by things for which he was completely unprepared, the new lieutenant would have focused on what he was good at while learning how to manage a shop by watching the experienced captain. Under this arrangement, the new lieutenant would learn a ton very quickly. He would probably be ready to take over the shop in about 4-6 months, if not sooner.

I often say that the S1 Officer is one of the most important yet overlooked people in the battalion. Remember, emergent behaviors are created by interactions between people in the organization. In a garrison environment, the S1 Shop is (almost certainly) the highest frequency source of interaction between the battalion staff and the rest of the battalion. If people are frequently interacting with the S1 shop, the nature of those interactions will have an extraordinary, yet almost invisible, impact on the battalion. Bad interactions between the S1 Shop and its customers place enormous direct strain on the shop and the customer, and an indirect strain on the organization as a whole.

After a bad interaction between SFC Smith and the S1 Shop, the people of the S1 staff commiserate with their peers in the other battalion shops about how SFC Smith from Bravo Company is a F***ing a-hole, and SFC Smith is quick to tell his buddies that the S1 staff is a bunch of F**ing idiots. This colors the future interactions of parties unrelated to the initial interaction, and over time, with a pattern of bad interactions, the staff and the companies begin to see each other as rivals. What’s worse, these types of interactions almost always go completely under the radar of the battalion commander, executive officer, and sergeant major. But a strong leader in the S1 shop who works hard to foster good relationships with the companies, ensure good customer service, and prevent or resolve negative interactions is invaluable to a battalion.

A Real Battalion

Any large organization is likely to be a solid mix of people with varying skills and talents. You’re unlikely to get a battalion that has a distribution of top performers all in top positions and people with only average to below-average performance in the lower ranks. It’s almost a guarantee that at every echelon, from the battalion command team to an infantry fire team, you will have people who succeed and people who struggle; people who will naturally add value to the organization, and people who will destroy value to varying degrees. This is why it’s important to understand that the 5%-10% heuristic applies across echelons. The battalion’s success relies on 5%-10% of the leaders in the battalion, but a company’s success also relies on 5%-10% of the people. But the people that make the company successful are not the same people that will make the battalion successful. A battalion can succeed without Alpha Company having a top-notch Training Room NCO4, but Alpha company might suffer without one. The company will be very adversely affected by not having a top-notch Training Room NCO, while the battalion will only be marginally affected. In the best organizations, leaders at every echelon place their focus on the 5%-10% of positions that have the highest impact.5

The point of the “two battalions thought experiment” is to demonstrate that there are a few positions in the organization that have an incredibly outsized impact on the organization’s performance. This is why leader development is so critical to organizational success. You, as the leader of the organization, need to focus your efforts on identifying the highest impact positions in the organization and making sure the people who fill those positions are doing an excellent job. If they are not doing an excellent job, then you need to DO something about it. Exactly what you need to do is based on the individual and the situation, but doing nothing or just talking to them will probably not cut it. If they need help, find someone to help them. If they need some kind of training, get them the training. If you think it’s unlikely that they will be able to succeed in that job, then find them another job where they can succeed and get someone else in there.

The 5%-10% heuristic is crucial for enabling yourself to be lazy. You don’t have to focus on the performance of everyone in the organization. You can probably influence the major emergent properties of the organization by focusing on the highest impact positions, or the highest impact people. In some organizations, the most important people aren’t near the top of the organizational hierarchy but have a lot of influence over the organization. Focus on playing with those points of leverage and you might be shocked at how you can change a large organization.

Next Month

In the last essay, I explored different ideas about how we think about leader development in the Army. I proposed that the best leader development happens within the context of a properly functioning organization and that an organization functions properly, in large part, by developing leaders.

This essay was a meditation on the consequences that flow from the fact that most of an organization’s success comes from a very small number of people. I’ve always known that the S1 Shop was incredibly important to a battalion, but until I sat down and typed out this essay, I never really understood why. Once I figured out that the high frequency of interactions makes it a hub of emergent properties for the battalion, I was finally able to make my intuition more concrete and explainable.

I have been working on an idea that I call the Objective Fredericksburg Problem for almost a year now. I haven’t written anything down yet; all the work has been done over hours of conversation, long runs, and long showers—the shower being my version of Winnie The Pooh’s Thinking Spot. Next month, I might make the first attempt at explaining this phenomenon. But I also might write a “part two” of this essay by illustrating it with some historical examples. Stay Tuned.

This is a term from complexity theory it is NOT my idea. I learned about it from “Making Things Work” by Yaneer Bar-Yam.” I’ve also heard Joe Norman talk about it.

There are some exceptions here. When David Hackworth took over 4-39IN Battalion in Vietnam he straight-up fired people and was like, “I don’t care where you go, but you can’t stay in this battalion. Scram.”

This is a weekly or sometimes bi-weekly meeting where most of the battalion’s administrative issues get worked out.

This Non-Commissioned officer handles a large portion of the company’s administrative tasks.

It’s important to add that most great leaders probably don’t think in these terms. They just do what feels natural to them. They can feel the power of the lever, they don’t think too much about the physics behind why the lever works so effectively.