Managing Leadership^®

Some years ago there was a horrific crash during training maneuvers by a US Air Force precision flying team. All four aircraft in the group failed to pull up from a steep dive, and piled directly into the desert floor. The official statement blamed a mechanical malfunction in the lead aircraft, but the general view among military pilots seemed to revolve around a sort of human error peculiar to this special type of formation flying.

A fighter pilot explained it this way: These teams perform extraordinarily precise maneuvers at stupendously high-speed; there is no room for miscommunication or even collaboration. There is one leader, and three followers. Screaming above the desert floor at hundreds of miles an hour with perhaps only inches separating their wingtips, each follower focuses intently on maintaining constant speed and direction, with his single reference point being his relative position to a particular physical point located on the lead aircraft; he focuses on maintaining that exactly as specified, to the exclusion of all other facts roaring by.

As for the leader, his job is to follow the choreographed route, executing the exactly specified directions and speeds for the precisely specified durations. He has no time to check to make sure his followers are in position behind and around him; he relies on their focus on him for that, and they rely on his focus on the itinerary to execute the drill.

In the course of this, the leader will use features on the ground or the surrounding mountains toward which he may be momentarily heading to help him maintain direction. When the prescribed time for the current leg expires, he will shift to the next maneuver, and the next landmark.

This all requires a degree of focus that is so intense as to exclude all else. No peripheral considerations, no stray thinking allowed. The leader intent on his object, the followers on the leader.

In the case of this accident, the general impression of other fighter pilots is that the lead pilot may have became lost in the intensity of his concentration on the desert floor landmark he had selected for that leg of the drill, which then resolved into a hypnotic fixation. Losing even the limited perspective that his function restricted him to, he drove his aircraft straight into his focal point on the ground. His followers, intent as ever only on doing their jobs while wholly dependent on him doing his, drove straight in after him, maintaining perfect formation to the end.

Precision drill teams like this do great good for the military and the country, acting as grand ambassadors for the Armed Forces, exhibiting the great pride and honor inherent in uniformed service, as well as demonstrating the inspiring discipline, spectacular skill, and quietly relentless courage that such service both requires and elicits from those who answer its call. There is sometimes a great cost paid in providing this good, and this accident is an especially devastating example of that.

But we want to note here that the things these teams work so hard to display so stupendously is what we have just noted above: pride, honor, discipline, skill, team spirit, dedication. Not leadership.

The form of leadership/followership that can nominally be drawn from the interaction of the drill team members offers a dramatically visual depiction of much of what the modern leadership movement (MLM) teaches about individual leadership and the roles of those who are expected to submit to and partake in it. Indeed, while metaphors typically can’t bear all of the burden placed on them, this one doesn’t carry enough to faithfully describe the expectations made of the sort of leader the movement promotes. It is pretty good, however, at depicting the complete and rootless dependence the MLM expects followers to invest in that leader.

An interesting difference, though, is that the faith placed by the drill team “followers” in their leader is justified (extraordinarily rare accidents like the above notwithstanding) precisely because he is not the sort of leader promoted by the MLM. His “leadership” is tightly choreographed and scripted. His expression of it is tightly circumscribed and detailed. He is not a visionary the consequences of whose actions and decisions we are supposed to simply accept on faith to be constructive. They have been pre-planned, calibrated, tested. Everyone – whatever their position in the formation – has contributed, studied, and internalized them before taking to the air to perform the drill.

So these drills are not a display of leadership at all. Certainly not of the sort that is practiced in the mission-oriented, highly decentralized, and dynamically shifting operating structures of the modern US military.

Nor should they be the pattern you impose on or submit to in your own organizations. You want to limit your perspective or your freedom of action neither to the inviolable constraints of an inflexible script, nor to an inflexible and ill-advised faith in a leader whose qualities you don’t understand and whose “leadership” you don’t collaborate with.

No individual, and no organization, can bear the great rush of disorienting dynamics unleashed by such a relationship. The unscripted and unconstrained individual leadership promoted by the MLM, combined with the tightly scripted and willfully constrained followership expected to multiply its power, is virtually assured to produce the cataclysmic results that are the exception in the military approach. The MLM prescriptions for individual leadership ultimately and inescapably generate a closed, self-referential system which careens who knows where with who knows what results around it in the real world.

One day such a leader will become dangerously disoriented by the unnatural and unsustainable relationship you have established with him or her, and lead the entire organization to an unexpectedly sudden doom, everyone all the while completely content and entirely unaware that there has been the slightest cause for concern. The leaders and the followers, mutually misled and hypnotically unhitched from reality, will head together, fatally enmeshed in their increasingly unrealistic relationship, right over the cliff.

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Today’s tips: Speaking of delinking focus from perspective, please see this piece from The Presurfer, describing what happens when squads of foraging ants are separated from the main colony.

And speaking of the military, please see this piece from The Economist about a stunningly innovative new communications antenna – here when you need it, gone when you don’t.

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