A military outfit is a great place to study organizational dynamics, and one of the best places among them is a fighting Navy ship. You can come to an appreciation of what truly matters, what really contributes to victory under stressful conditions, and the role that leadership actually plays.
When the complex arrangement of systems that a ship is becomes joined in combat, its officers are often – even typically – unable to influence the action or even the attitude of their sailors in real time. The truth is, many Army and Marine observers of such crews question whether there is much leadership present on these ships at all, much less during combat.
But if you have ever seen a ship’s crew respond when called to general quarters, you know it is there. It is in the sailors themselves: in their training, the systems they have learned to animate, express, and integrate. It is in their shipmates, the nature of the emergency, the instinct to overcome it.
A ship seemingly sedated into lethargy by the most mind-numbing and endless routine suddenly erupts, transforms. There is an overwhelming burst of the most irresistible activity and energy. Sailors rocket to positions, compartments are sealed, equipment fired up, weapons trained. There is no mayhem in this, but electrifyingly coordinated discipline and training.
Then, just as suddenly, the ship is still again, but with tension – it is a weapon, and it is ready. Ready for the real mayhem to come, from within which each crew member will fight to do the work that everyone depends upon.
There is a lot to be said about how these dynamics appear, unfold, and interact, but one of the most interesting came to mind during a documentary about the USS Hornet in the midst of a vicious, extended kamikaze attack. A sailor involved in the fight was describing the principle emotions that swept through the crew: fear and anger.
One, he noted, overcomes the other from time to time.
Think about what is said, in that statement, and about what isn’t. Consider about whom it is said, and about whom it isn’t. Try to imagine what keeps this crew going, doing its duty, perceiving the evolving emergencies and needs the ship faces and scrambling on its own initiative to meet them – all while overcome, from time to time, by one or the other of fear and anger.
What is the role of leadership here? Where is it coming from? How are we, if we are, to understand the role of “followership” in this scenario, as it is described by the modern leadership movement? What is the role of management? Is there something else – some other place or time – for the contribution of what we understand as the executive role?
In the face of an emergency – whether opportunity or disaster – how would your organization respond in your absence? Does that say something about the value – or about the true nature – of your role? What might that be?
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Today’s tip: Speaking of general quarters, please see this Washington Post piece about Pope Benedict’s call for the world economic system to be reorganized on the basis of social responsibility and ethics. A forceful and well-intended argument, but do you think this plan will work without powerful individual leaders, possessed of considerable ability to influence all the action in real time?
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12 Comments
An interesting bunch of thoughts, Jim. I will comment based on the 20+ years I served on U.S. Navy surface ship combatants.
A ship is a highly integrated collection of machinery and weapons, each of which is highly dependent on the others. Without reliable and regulated electrical power and cooling, most weapon systems cannot function. Without internal communication the ship can’t coordinate functions. Without propulsion, the ship is a siting duck. And similar statements can be said about anti-air warfare weapon systems, navigation, radars, sonars, missiles, guns, torpedoes, ammunition hoists, damage control, spare parts, food service, etcetera, etcetera.
In order for the ship to be an effective fighting unit, this multitude of systems and functions must be maintained through preventive and corrective maintenance at a very high level as well as operated with great skill. The more sophisticated they are the more difficult it is to achieve these two goals. Both of these require continuing training and oversight of the crew’s actions to maintain and operate, and regular drilling of the crew as a whole to ensure that they coordinate their actions in fighting the ship and using it to defeat any enemy.
Superior performance cannot be achieved without superior leadership. A ship without a rudder is useless and as the old saying goes “A ship is its Captain.” In my 26 years of naval service I have seen the full spectrum of ship performance, from very poor to excellent. I was assigned command of two ships during my career, each being described as a disaster by the officers to whom I reported. They both suffered from extremely poor leadership. Correcting that turned them into excellent performers in relatively short order.
That army and marine observers could see no active “leadership” in a fight is testimony to the fine leadership that equipped each sailor with what he needed to fight ahead of time. As Lao Tzu said “A leader is best when the people are hardly aware of his existence.”
Best regards, Ben
Hello Ben,
A good description of an element I was driving at with the question about the exeuctive function.
I agree that superior performance requires superior leadership. My argument though, as you know, is it isn’t provided by any particular individual, including – especially – the boss.
As you said, you took command of those ships, which had suffered from weak command previously. You maintained standards, set goals, trained, disciplined, supervised. You cultivated and managed the leadership inherent in the ship, so that you knew it would stir itself to productive action should you find it necessary to sound general quarters.
If you wish to call that individual leadership emanating exclusively and exceptionally from your own person, then we have a disagreement. But I an confident it is principally a semantic one.
Thanks for stopping in with this thoughtful comment.
No, Jim, I don’t wish to call that individual leadership emanating exclusively from me.
That said, it had to start from someone and since I was the skipper then it had to be me. If I had acted as the previous Captain very little improvement would have resulted. What I started was to allow everyone to take charge of their thing, their part, so long as they were willing to meet high standards. I did not care if they did not meet them at first, but if I could provide a better way that would achieve a higher standard. I expected them to use it or convince me it wasn’t better than theirs. Many leaders came forth and excelled, and without them I would never have been able to change such a large organization. People love to excel and all they need is help doing so.
To give you a measure of how important the Captain is, after successfully turning around a destroyer escort in 18 months, I was sent to a different duty station, Reactor Officer of NIMITZ in its pre-commissioning nuclear reactor test program. I was relieved by a man who did not in any way share my methods or priorities. In about a year, the ship returned to being very close to disaster state as related to me by a couple of very sad ship’s officers.
Best regards, Ben
Excellent, Ben. And another good illustration.
My point in these pages isn’t to diminish the role of the boss, but that of so-called individual leadership. Many will say that what you displayed was precisely that, but my argument is that you gave your ships what they needed, a strong, disciplined commander. They provided, as you point out, the rest.
Thanks!
I really don’t understand the difference, Jim. Isn’t individual leadership what the boss uses to manage subordinates? Please explain.
Best regards, Ben
The boss manages juniors by managing them. The point of this series, of this blog, is that the boss also manages the leadership inherent in the organization and its people.
You infer that managing juniors is somehow different than managing the leadership inherent in the organization. Please explain.
My experience is that how the boss manages juniors is the boss’s leadership. And that leadership leads everyone to use the same leadership in performing their work and in treating customers, each other and their bosses. Thus the boss sets the tone for everyone’s leadership in the organization. This is a pure case of cause and effect.
Best regards, Ben
Skipper / Ben:
With all due respect sir, get Jim’s book. It’s really good and you will enjoy it. I was a naval officer myself, without a fraction of your accomplishments. I so admire the people that successfullly skipper a man o’war. Congratulations. E.
Jim,
I really would appreciate if you would explain as I requested in my last post. Or is the only answer that I must read your book as suggested by E?
Best regards, Ben
Hello Ben,
I really can’t see any point in repeating the posts in the comment threads. Your question points to what I’ve been writing about publicly – in the book and here – for the past several years.
Suffice it to say that bosses manage juniors by managing – not leading – them. If they are leading them, then the irony is that they very likely are not developing them as managers, which is what they need to be, but rather as followers, which they most decidedly do not need to be.
There are semantic aspects to this, which I suspect are the greater part of the problem you are experiencing, but they, surely, are not what I am addressing – but rather the model of the indispensable, superlative individual leader promoted so destructively by so many today.
Thanks for your persistence.
Thanks for explaining, Jim.
I don’t sense any semantic difficulties, but we most certainly disagree on the substance.
IMHO, the best managers lead their people to become self-directed, self-starting non-followers, freed from the bondage of following and released to the power of their own motivations.
All this is in my book
Best regards, Ben
Ben, you are making the common error of assuming it is necessary to apply the label of “leadership” to whatever is deemed good or effective. Leadership – both as classically defined and even as understood by the modern leadership movement – is a neutral term that is understood as an individual characteristic which produces specified dynamics between the putative “leader” and others. It does not in and of itself infer anything positive, and history is replete with examples of its production of much that is decidedly negative.
To say that good managers lead their people to become effective is to say little, really, other than they are effective managers, doing good work for the organization. To apply the term “leadership” to them or to what they do does nothing other than further dilute the meaning of the term, as discussed directly or indirectly in many posts on this blog and in my own book, as E alluded to.
And I do encourage visitors to link through to your site and acquaint themselves with your book.
Thanks again for your visit.
Inasmuch as we seem to have reached a point where new elements of the discussion are failing to surface, and, as noted previously, I do not intend to repeat previously published posts in comment threads on call, I will be closing this post for comments.
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