Zamboni
Leadership is an activity, like driving a Zamboni
Prologue
When I arrived at Fort Bliss, Texas as a Second Lieutenant in 2012, I was handed a 40-man Infantry Platoon, 4 x Stryker vehicles which cost about 5 million dollars apiece, and various other equipment worth an additional 10-20 million dollars. We were deploying to Afghanistan in six months, and I was overall responsible for everything that the platoon did or failed to do.
I was 21 years old.
To say that I struggled would be an understatement. I was younger than my E-5 sergeants, and my platoon sergeant joined the Army when I was in diapers. They resented having an officer so young, and I resented the fact that they resented me. This was not a great start in my leadership journey.
On day 1 of being an infantry platoon leader, two of my squad leaders got into a fist fight in the office, and when I tried to break it up, I was shoved aside. I told the platoon sergeant what happened and said that we needed to resolve the situation, but he just took the side of one of the squad leaders with whom, I found out later, he was close friends.
Anything I tried to do was met with resistance. Any correction I tried to make was met with excuses. I grew increasingly frustrated.
Things improved marginally after we deployed to Afghanistan — bullets and IEDs have a way of bringing people closer together. But I still dealt with many of the same problems. Just as I thought that we might be starting to gel as a platoon, it was my turn to leave and another officer’s turn to get his ticket punched as a platoon leader.
I begged for another platoon, and as I waited, I embarked on an intense journey of self-reflection. I journaled for hours about the things I had done and thought about while leading my first platoon. I spent 3-4 hours in the gym everyday punishing myself for my mistakes. Why had I struggled? Why was it so hard for me to earn respect? What the hell was wrong with me!? Every day was like a battle. I worked myself so hard in the gym that I could barely walk. I was so emotionally spent at the end of every day that I felt numb. The only thing I wanted to do my whole life was to lead an infantry platoon in combat, but I felt like I had done it poorly.
I wanted another chance.
As luck would have it, a platoon opened up in the cavalry squadron, and my battalion commander allowed me to transfer. I knew this was a gift from God, and I was determined not to squander my chance for redemption.
No matter who my NCOs were, I was determined to be confident, to earn their respect, and to be the platoon leader that I knew I could be.
Struggle
No leader wants to do a bad job, but leading is hard and many struggle to figure out the basics. A person in a leadership position who is struggling will often start reading about leadership. Maybe they pick up a few books by John Maxwell, or The Servant by James Hunter, or a book by Pat Lencioni like Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
Different books will resonate with people to different degrees depending on their specific situation and past leadership experience. I can’t really say that there is anything wrong with these books, in fact a lot of them are quite good. But what I have found is that leadership books tend to be a lot like self-help books — for some reason you feel like you have to keep buying and reading different ones. And, for some reason, a lot of leadership books are very interested in the concept of “mindset.”
Mindset based approaches never resonated with me, and I don’t know too many strong leaders who preach about mindset. The highest performing leaders that I know are focused on things like risk, cost-benefit, strategic communication, process improvement, leader development, and morale. These high performing leaders also have a tendency to get people to do what they say, and, more importantly, they get people to want to do what they say. In other words, they are very good at getting people to comply with orders and getting people to be committed to the organization and the mission.
So, when I set out to teach my junior officers about leadership as a company commander, and when I get to talk to others about the basics of leadership, I focus on few basic concepts which are focused on behavior not on mindset.
What is Leadership?
I like to focus on behavior because leadership is an activity. It isn’t a skill or a genetic, but an activity. Don’t take my word for it, take the Army’s word for it
Leadership is the activity of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to achieve the mission and improve the organization.
-Army Doctrine Publication 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
An activity is something that you do. It can take many different forms and require many different skills. An activity is also highly context specific. Driving is an activity, but you can drive on a racetrack, or you can be driving in a military convoy, or you can drive a Zamboni. The activity is functionally the same (accelerate, steer, break, etc., but the required skills are very different.
So, if you find that you are struggling to lead, fear not — leadership is an activity, and you can improve.
Improving
“Leadership is the activity of influencing people…”
Now that we know that leadership is an activity that you do, you might ask, “how can I do that?”
Once again, the US Army has an answer for us in ADP 6-22. As it turns out, the Army recognizes nine methods of influence. ADP 6-22 goes into more detail than would be appropriate here, but let me give you a flavor of each of the nine methods of influence1:
1. Pressure occurs when leaders use explicit demands to achieve compliance, such as establishing deadlines for the completion of tasks and communicating negative consequences for those not met.
2. Legitimating occurs when leaders establish their authority as the basis for a request when it may not be obvious.
3. Exchange is an influence method that leaders use when they offer to provide incentives for gaining a higher level of compliance with orders or instructions.
4. Personal appeals occur when the leader asks for a subordinate’s support based upon their personal or longstanding professional relationship, generally out of loyalty.
5. Collaboration occurs when the leader engages with subordinates or peers to apply influence by contributing to the outcome.
6. Rational Persuasion requires providing a broader context, logical argument, or explanations showing how a request is relevant to the goal and why something should or must be done.
7. Apprising happens when the leader explains why an order or request will benefit a subordinate or team, such as explaining how performing a task a certain way will save time.
8. Inspirational Appeals occur when the leader creates enthusiasm for a request by arousing strong emotions in support of a decision they must make or have already made.
9. Participation occurs when leaders ask others to join them in determining how best to address a problem or meet an objective.
These methods of influence are arrayed along a continuum or spectrum of compliance to commitment. If you are exerting pressure on someone, or using exchange, you are inherently focused on getting someone’s compliance, and so your actions would fall more on the compliance side of the spectrum. On the other hand, if you are using collaboration or inspirational appeals, you are building and relying on commitment to the organization or the mission, and your actions would fall more on the commitment side of the spectrum.
There is no wrong method of influence, they each have an appropriate context, and you can use the same method of influence in different ways so that your actions fall on different places on the spectrum.
When you say, “Johnson! Get me those reports by the end of the day or you’re fired!” That is using pressure on the far end of the compliance side of the spectrum. You can also say, “Johnson, before you leave for the day send me those reports, please. That is also pressure because you are essentially saying, “you can’t leave until you send me those reports,” but it is not as far on the compliance end of the spectrum as saying, “I’ll fire you!”
The same is true on the commitment end. You can say, “Hey team, we are the best! I know that you can complete this task because I know that you are the best!” This is using inspirational appeals on the far end of the commitment side of the spectrum. But you can also express disappointment in an inspirational appeal. “Is that the best you can do!? I know you can do better than that!” That is using an inspirational appeal that is not as far on the commitment end of the spectrum.
Now, obviously you are almost never using just one method of influence in an interaction. A leader is almost always combining methods of influence in various ways. The most effective leaders are the ones who best combine and match the methods of influence to the situation in a way that produces the optimal result in terms of accomplishing the mission or improving the organization.
But a lot of people in leadership positions struggle to use the right method of influence for their situation because they have a natural bias towards one side of the spectrum or the other.
If these biases become too severe, they turn into pathologies or diseases.
Pathologies of Leadership
Most people will feel a natural pull towards either commitment-based methods of influence or compliance-based methods of influence. That natural bias is simply a product of personality and experience. But that natural bias means that many leaders will simply ignore several methods of influence entirely.
By focusing on only a few methods of influence regardless of the situation, you are at risk of developing a leadership pathology. Here are three different pathologies that I came up with.
The Tyrant is someone who relies almost exclusively on compliance-based methods of influence. They rely on fear, and they are very sensitive to anything that seems like insubordination or lack of respect. This type of leader can be very harmful to an organization because in this environment, people tend to shift blame to avoid the tyrant’s wrath, and they are afraid to take initiative and try new things.
The Milquetoast is the opposite of the tyrant. This type of leader relies almost exclusively on commitment-based methods of influence. They want people to love them, and they will go to great lengths to avoid offending people or avoid doing anything that they think might harm a relationship. This type of leader can be very harmful to an organization because it creates a power vacuum, and people will take advantage of them. This can lead to perceptions of unfairness or incompetence.
The Bi-Polar Leader is someone who only uses methods of influence on the far ends of the compliance to commitment spectrum. Half the time they are super nice and open, and the other half of the time they are tyrannical. This type of leader whipsaws the organization back and forth and people are never able to predict what their day will look like.
I am sure there are a bunch of other pathologies one could come up with, but these are just basic ones based on the idea that the actions of a leader fall along a continuum of compliance to commitment.
The first step a struggling leader needs to take is to identify what bias they have with respect to compliance and commitment.
As a young platoon leader, I had a heavy bias towards commitment.
Learning from my mistakes
The key mistake I made in leading my first platoon was relying too much on commitment-based methods of influence. I thought that I could lead with inspirational appeals, collaboration, and participation. I thought that if people knew how much I cared about them, that the feeling would be mutual.
At 21 years old, I was a milquetoast, a pushover. I didn’t stand my ground. I put too much trust in my NCOs to have my back. I didn’t enforce standards. I didn’t demand compliance, even when I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that I was right. It never even occurred to me that I could use compliance-based methods of influence. In fact, I thought that ever using those meant that I was a bad leader. But neglecting compliance not only hurt my ability to lead, it hurt my entire platoon—they needed a strong and confident leader to push and pull them where they needed to go, not a pushover who was focused on trying to build strong relationships. Another platoon might have needed that, by that platoon at that time needed a platoon leader who could exert control over NCOs who were, more or less, out of control.
As I punished myself and reflected on my first platoon, I taught myself that it was okay to demand compliance when appropriate. But I knew that I also didn’t want to overdo it the second time around. I learned that I could demand compliance, but I didn’t want to become a tyrant. At the end of the day, I knew that I would care deeply for my Soldiers, and that it wouldn’t be fair to them or to myself if I were to overcorrect and tyrannize them by constantly demanding compliance.
My epiphany was that I needed to harmonize commitment and compliance. While I had a natural urge to build relationships and see the best in people, I had to grow a spine and not be afraid to force people to do things, even if they didn’t want to do them. I knew how to do that—I had done it consistently during infantry training and Ranger School, where I would routinely issue confident and direct orders that required immediate compliance. But for some reason I had struggled to do this as the leader of a real platoon.
When I took over my second platoon, I was determined to be the type of leader that my Soldiers needed.
The second step for a struggling leader is to consciously harmonize compliance-based methods of influence and commitment-based methods of influence with their unique environment, goals, and personnel.
This is easier said than done! So, you have to practice.
Uncomfortable
A few weeks before I took over my second platoon, I sat down and wrote out initial counselling memorandums for my new platoon sergeant, squad leaders, and team leaders. I laid out my expectations clearly with commanding and authoritative language, and I practiced the things that I was going to say over and over again. I was not going to be pushed around again. I was determined, but I was nervous.
When I sat down with my new platoon sergeant, I handed him the memo and gave him my rehearsed speech. I made it clear that I was the platoon leader, that I wanted him to be my teammate, that I wanted to work together, but that at the end of the day I was the one in charge. After listening to my spiel, my platoon sergeant looked at the memo and read it closely.
I was panicking on the inside. None of this felt natural, not even a little bit. I was so uncomfortable I thought I might puke or cry, or both. What if he hates me? What if he tries to secretly undermine me? What if he tries to get me fired?
I was shocked and relieved when he looked up with a smile and said, “this is great, sir! I think we’re going to work really well together. What you’ve laid out here is really clear and I am confident that I can match these expectations.”
We then had a really long conversation about the platoon and the mission and the things we wanted to focus on in our roles. We worked well together the entire deployment, and we still talk to this day.
I pushed myself to do something that I wouldn’t normally do: I demanded the respect due my rank, laid out expectations and made it clear that meeting them wasn’t optional.
That was how I practiced using compliance-based methods of influence—primarily pressure, exchange, and legitimating. Even if it was through subtext and my general vibe what I was saying was, “I am in charge. You must meet my expectations. If you do not meet my expectations, I will counsel you on paper and you could get a bad evaluation. If you meet my expectations, then we will work really well together, and you will get a good evaluation.”
After practicing being assertive once, it got easier and easier. In my essay Standard, I tell the story of a react-to-IED drill that I ran for my platoon the day after I did my initial counselling with the platoon sergeant. I had to consciously not go too far in demanding compliance, but I had gotten over my fear of using methods of influence that did not come naturally to me.
That is why practice it so important.
Practice
Before I jump into this section, I want to emphasize that this type of practice is for people who are struggling to lead. If you are in a leadership position and things are going well, just keep doing what you are doing and focus on harmonizing the methods of influence with your situation. If you are getting good results and the people you lead are content, you don’t need to put a lot of focus on deliberate practice—if it ain’t broke then don’t try to fix it!
This section is for people who are really struggling and who need help. If that is you, then you need to practice.
To start practicing different methods of influence, it helps to know what they are and track how you currently use them. There are a bunch of ways that you could do this. You could print out the nine methods of influence on a small card that you keep in your pocket, and whenever you exert some influence or give guidance, you can pull out the card and make little tick marks next to the methods of influence that you think you used.
Alternatively, you could ask some of the people you work with and who see you regularly what methods of influence they typically see you use and ones that they never see you use.
During this learning process, you have to be brutally honest with yourself about your behavior. It isn’t fun to admit to yourself that you are a pushover or that you are a tyrannical ass. But if you lie to yourself, you will never improve. If you make an honest assessment of yourself and your leadership behavior, you will start to see what kind of behavior you tend to exhibit and how you can improve.
Once you determine what methods of influence you are neglecting, and what side of the commitment-compliance continuum your actions tend to fall, you need to start consciously practicing the ones that you struggle with or that make you uncomfortable.
If you are like me and you tend towards commitment-based methods of influence, you need to consciously practice using compliance every now and then. If someone makes a mistake that you would typically overlook, you might consider using pressure by writing them up or at least confronting them about it and telling them that the mistake is not acceptable. You don’t have to overcorrect or be a different person, but you have to do something that would typically make you uncomfortable. You also have to be consistent about enforcing that standard.
If you know that you are at risk of becoming a tyrant and that you lean too heavily on compliance-based methods, then you need to consciously incorporate commitment-based methods. If there is a certain task that needs to be done, and you want it done a certain way, try using collaboration, rational persuasion, or apprising to get the person to do it how you want it. But you also have to accept the outcome if you do not get your way. You also have to make it clear that you are not demanding it be done a certain way. You can use phrases like, “do you think you could help me by…” or “I want you to do this task how you think is best, but you might consider…” or “I trust you to get this done how you think is best.” You then have to follow-through by being supportive and not jumping down peoples’ throats if things don’t go perfectly.
Focusing on and practicing compliance can be done in relatively short bursts—you can make a correction, or make a plan and say, “This will be done.” But focusing on practicing commitment-based methods is, in many ways, more challenging if they do not come naturally to you. This is because it isn’t about short interactions, but about changing your behavior over time to give more grace, to accept things as less than perfect, to not demand that someone be blamed for a mistake. Compliance is something that you can get quickly. Commitment is something that takes time to build.
So, if you are trying to be more commitment oriented, just know that it takes time and it requires trust.
Not just influence
To be clear, these are the basics of leadership. As I talked about earlier in the essay, successful leaders at all levels must have a whole host of other skills than just influencing people. Influencing people is only the means to accomplish the mission and improve the organization. If all you are doing is influencing people to benefit yourself, then you aren’t leading, you are manipulating.
Becoming a good leader requires an understanding of strategy, risk calculus, process implementation, resource allocation, task-organization, leader development, industry or job specific knowledge, and much more
Wherever you are on your leadership journey, I hope The Distro has helped you become a better leader and think about organizations and systems in new ways.
Wrapping up
In this essay we established that leadership is an activity. Because it is an activity it is something that you can practice and improve. The thing that you are doing when you are leading is influencing others. There are nine generic ways, according to the Army, that you can influence people. These nine methods, and how you execute them, fall along a continuum of compliance to commitment. If your actions fall too far on the compliance side, then you are at risk of becoming a tyrant. If your actions fall too far on the compliance side, then you are at risk of becoming a milquetoast.
To improve as a leader you must first determine which side of the spectrum you tend towards naturally (compliance or commitment), then you need to seek to harmonize your actions by applying the methods of influence appropriate to the situation, regardless of your natural inclination. But to do this you need to practice.
To practice, you must consciously apply methods of influence that don’t come naturally to you. Doing this is uncomfortable but necessary.
These are all directly quoted from 6-22.
Great essay Austin, with lots of solid insights and practical advice! I admire the way you mixed doctrine with the realities of leadership in a unit and the importance of self reflection, self improvement and not giving up.
This essay focuses on self reflection and actualization as part of your personal journey, which is wonderful. However, I must ask if your Platoon Sergeant or Company Commander played any role in this journey (other than the negative one you mention)? I was always taught, and experienced to different degrees, that part of a senior NCO’s job, and certainly that of my immediate commander, was to help to train me as a leader. I surmise this did not happen, but please correct me if I am wrong.
Thanks for your service. Seriously.