Servant

Forcing compliance is a form of servitude

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Sticking with last week’s topic of compliance, I came across an old memorandum I wrote and distributed to all my subordinate leaders when I was a company commander. As a reminder, at the top is a voiceover that will allow you to listen to this newsletter.

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1. A Leader is a servant to those he leads. A Leadership position is not a position of privilege, power, or superiority, it is purely a position of servitude. This mentality should permeate every decision a Leader makes.

2. In the Army, being a Servant Leader is an extraordinarily important and difficult task. Servant Leaders must force Soldiers to do things that they may not want to do in order to keep them safe and healthy. For example, when establishing a patrol base, a Leader is not serving his Soldiers by allowing them to skip steps in order to go to sleep. A Servant Leader forces his Soldiers to stay awake and pull security so they are safe from the enemy. He forces them to clean their weapons so they don’t jam when fighting the enemy. He forces them to eat and hydrate so they have the energy to fight the enemy.

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People don’t often link servant leadership with compliance, because the two don’t go together psychologically. Servants don’t apply force to those they serve, right? Well, does the Secret Service serve the President? Sometimes they force him to do stuff for his own good, right? If someone tries to attack the President, they don’t say, “Mr. President, please come this way.”

No!

They tackle him and drag him to safety even if he doesn’t know what’s going on. Sometimes that’s how it is with servant leadership. Sometimes the best way to serve someone is to make them do things that they don’t like. In the private sector, if a company is not profitable and undisciplined, the leader may need to crack down and start forcing people to comply. This is essentially what Elon Musk is doing at Twitter. A bunch of people left and he needed people at the office during work hours doing work. So he ended work from home and sent the message: be here and work hard. Even Alan Mullaly at Ford, in his soft-spoken Kansan way, forced compliance when he needed to.

In areas where compliance with regulations can be life-or-death, like working with pipelines or heavy machinery, leaders must be direct and forceful, maybe even harsh, when it makes sense to be.

In high-stress situations where time is short and there is no room for error, leaders must know how to get their organizations to comply with their demands. This means being clear and direct.

But gaining compliance does not happen overnight. Gaining compliance effectively means that you have previously earned the trust of your subordinates, and by shifting to compliance, you are cashing in on that trust. In rare instances, where you are new to an organization and you have to gain immediate compliance, you better have a plan to get some immediate wins.

When David Hackworth took over a failing battalion during the Vietnam War, he didn’t have time to build trust and lives were on the line. He forced immediate compliance with new regulations designed to keep the soldiers safe from the enemy. One of these new orders was to make the perimeter tighter by filling in the old fighting positions and digging new ones with camouflage and overhead cover to form a new perimeter. For those of you who have never dug a fighting position, I can tell you that it is extremely demanding. This move made him no friends. The soldiers immediately began chattering about “fragging” the new battalion commander.

As luck would have it, the night that the soldiers shifted into their new fighting positions, the North Vietnamese launched a massive attack on the old fighting positions. Hackworth had saved them, and they knew it.

A similar example is General Ridgway in Korea. Ridgway brought discipline and forced compliance with his way of warfighting because that was what was necessary to get the Army under control. He forced leaders to be close to the frontline, enforced aggressive patrolling, and had extremely high standards for his staff. Those who didn’t fall in line were relieved or punished.

The same is true of Patton in North Africa. Immediate discipline and forced compliance with regulations.

In each of these cases, the leader was given a failing organization that had to get turned around immediately. They had to serve their organizations by doing what was necessary to save them. They didn’t have 18 months to make change happen gradually. They had days or weeks, months at most. But in each case of heavily enforced compliance came very quick wins. Nothing builds morale like winning. And from generating those wins, leaders buy time for themselves and their organizations to continue operations and build a stronger team.

But, as I said, it’s much easier to build trust in the good times so that when you demand compliance in the bad times your team will stick with you.