What Failure Taught Me About Transformational Leadership
If I were to ask you to define your leadership philosophy in three tenets, could you do it? Whereas five is too broad and one too narrow, three will cut to the meat of who you are as a leader. To me, leadership is the process of bringing together a team of vastly different individuals and motivating them towards a shared goal or end state. I learned what leadership meant through a crucible of failure. I want to present my three tenets and challenge you to define your own.
My story goes back to the earlier days of my Army career when I was a newly promoted Airborne Ranger squad leader, conducting a joint exercise with several entities of Army, Navy, and Air Force special operations forces. I led a three man team, tasked with landing a communications vehicle into an airfield seized from the enemy and establishing a command center infrastructure in 15 minutes or less. We ran countless drills prior to that night’s execution in order to perfect our routine. The night of our exercise, we drove up to our Tactical Operations Center (TOC) and set a record time of eight minutes until completion. We were proud for what seemed like mere seconds before a young Army Captain approached me, informing me that network connectivity had not been established. We would not have it for the duration of the night. A battalion of Army Rangers seized an airfield while our Battalion Commander had no visibility because of our failure to complete the mission. Embarrassed and angry, my team and I were directed to report in to work the following day. While the rest of our battalion recovered, we were to run drills to correct our deficiencies. Upon reporting, we got to work setting up our equipment and in our first run through we established network connectivity quickly and without issue. We broke down and did it again. When we accomplished our task a third time, I began to question what had really gone wrong. I approached my supervisor to inform him of our progress. He had been watching us in the cold rain of a Pacific Northwest winter day from the warmth of his office and had been awaiting my report. He had one of his own for me. A printout of network logs from the night before which showed, prior to our aircraft landing, our senior network chief had allocated my IP address scope to another group in the exercise, thus rendering my system unusable. At that point it hit me. While back briefing my team and leadership on our capabilities and plan, I failed to break down the specifics of our system, ensuring everyone knew what we were bringing to the fight. A humiliating performance and precious time and credibility lost all due to my mistake.
My first tenet of leadership is to own your competence unapologetically. The military and civilian sectors will present one doctrine after another; self-help with knowing who we are and developing our leadership styles. While great assistance material, neither we nor the subordinates we lead are robots in need of an instruction manual. Every team member from us as leaders to the newest private in a platoon or a junior developer on your team has a unique skillset to bring to the table. It is our job to identify and utilize it. This is often referred to as Idealized Influence: sharing the risk with our followers and holding true to the principles we use to guide them. I found the ability to inspirationally motivate my team by arousing their spirits and seeing them display enthusiasm despite losing a day of recovery and facing an onslaught of negative critique.
Investing in the team is my second tenet. When I speak of investing, I speak of trading stocks, seeing potential and deciding to buy, knowing the volatility of outside influences and the risk of failure and loss. However, when the market fluctuates and stocks lose money, a cunning investor does not rush to sell. He sees the trend and knows a single bad day does not make or break him. The same applies to leading men and women, both in the military and in the corporate world. One bad day does not a bad team member make. When that member of your team fails to meet your intent or rather, when you fail as a leader, ask yourself what is causing this downward momentum. Is it a trend or just one bad day in the market? This is known as Individualized Consideration, knowing the needs and shortcomings of every individual member of your team whether subordinate, senior, or an honest assessment of yourself. A night absent of connectivity made for a really bad day but it did not define my senior network chief as the subject matter expert, it did not undermine my team as a well-oiled machine, and it did not define me as a leader. We overcame and persevered through my investment in each one of them and their investment in me as a leader.
The final tenet to my philosophy is have a question for everyone and everything. I do not speak of blatant disrespect but rather pushing my team to pick each piece of the puzzle apart until our solutions are air-tight. Playing devil’s advocate is even better. Ask the tough questions. Instill a sense of comfort in self-doubt in members of your team so they know it is okay to assess a solution from every angle possible. This may be the millennial in me but asking why is not unique to my generation. The great pioneers of history questioned what was right; they doubted the way business was conducted was the quickest, the smoothest, or the most effective. As a leader, I expect every member of my team to question my reasons for doing things until I slap the table and make the final call. Comfort breeds complacency and complacency breeds mistakes. After recovering from our failed feat the night prior, my team decided to redesign our equipment’s layout, wanting to do even better the following night’s exercise. We received significant push-back that our system would fail again; the way it has always been done should be left the way it is. Taking the remarks with a grain a salt, we rolled into the night’s exercise and our restructuring led to a record set up of seven minutes to fully established network connectivity. Question the “Standard Operating Procedure” and encourage your team to do the same.
I have crossed paths with many leaders in my career, some wonderful and encouraging, others terrible and tyrannical. All of them however, had a lesson to teach me about being a leader myself. From the plethora of lessons, I formed an amalgamation of three tenets. While I am confident in my philosophy, I continue to learn and reshape the way I lead my team. Nevertheless, I hold true to the foundation that is those three tenets. I challenge you to do the same. Make a list of however many you want. Then narrow them down to what really matters. What you really believe in. Do away with the dilettante “be everything to everyone” garbage. The world has enough leaders like that. Your team wants you for what you and ONLY you can bring to the table as their leader.
