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| The Three Streams of Leadership |
| 2015-09-15 |
[RealClearDefence] Major General Robert Scales, former commandant of the US Army War College, recently lamented his role in returning the novel Once an Eagle to prominence in the military.“The book’s lasting attraction for soldiers is the personal and moral battle within its pages between true and false officership as embodied by Sam Damon, a former enlisted man and true soldier’s soldier and Courtney Massengale, a West Pointer who embodies all that is evil among the grasping and politically driven elite… For years the book became a bedside volume and often I would, like many in my generation who had seen insensitive staff REMFs in Vietnam, warn too-clever officers not to ‘act like a Massengale’… With reflection I think, in part as a result of the book, the Army today venerates Sam Damon too much and castigates Courtney Massengale to its detriment. Its pages might well have contributed to the conflation of two views of careerism between the good warrior versus the bad staff officer.” Scales’ main point — staff officers might be service-oriented as easily as self-oriented, just as line officers might be self-oriented as easily as service-oriented — raises a larger point. We often confuse affiliation or complexion — one’s job or one’s personality — with the weightier matters of character and service. One classic formulation of this confusion is ‘Manager vs. Leader.’ In any of a hundred stories, I recall friends describing some individual in a position of formal authority ‘a manager, not a leader,’ because of their tendency to treat their people like objects to be manipulated and controlled rather than comrades to be inspired and cared for. While I wholeheartedly ratify the substance of their critique, I would argue that the core issue — treating people as means rather than ends — is fundamentally a failure of character rather than style. What I mean by this is I have seen a good number of excellent leaders whose command style was very quiet and technical, but genuinely loved their people, gave them the room and resources to flourish, and led their units very effectively. They generally got less credit than they should have, because their ability to build excellent organizational architectures and place the right people in the right places meant that their people, not themselves, took center stage. Conversely, I have seen some number of people who were quite personable, generally well-liked, and often seen ‘out in front,’ but were at their core profoundly selfish and lazy. These individuals may have been seen as leaders for a time, but their troops would generally realize at some point that their leader was more interested in personal angles rather than their well-being. This generally occurred when a failure to do homework or due diligence in planning created some sort of catastrophe. The suave authority figure then either sweet-talked or blame-shifted their way out of the frag pattern, which fell on their subordinates. The worst of these were the Pied Pipers, who left time-bombs for their successors by spending down organizational capital to secure their own prosperity, and visited harm on their subordinates through neglect, yet were so well-liked that neither successor nor follower figured out that they had been done a disservice until years later. More at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |