Be-Know-Do: Leadership the Army Way

"Leadership is influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission and improving the organization."

— Frances Hesselbein and Eric K. Shinseki, from the Army leadership manual

Hesselbein was CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA from 1976 to 1990, founding president of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation, today the Leader to Leader Institute, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Shinseki was Chief of Staff of the United States Army, that force's highest-ranking officer, and retired in 2003 after 38 years of service. Together they adapted for business, government and civil organizations the Army's official leadership manual, an institution that Drucker said produces more leaders than all the others combined.

The premise contradicts the image many have of the military. The Army doesn't run only on top-down orders: in the field, a sergeant or a lieutenant has to decide without being able to consult, and that's why the institution invests in developing leaders at every level. The book calls this distributed leadership and presents it as the key to the model.

On what the leader must be, the book starts from character:

• The Army's seven values: loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity and personal courage.
• Mental, physical and emotional attributes: judgment, initiative, physical fitness, self-control and stability under pressure.
• Character is tested when living up to the values has a cost, and it is the foundation of your people's trust.

On what the leader must know, it distinguishes four types of skills:

• Interpersonal: communicating, listening, building teams and training others.
• Conceptual: thinking clearly, analyzing and deciding with incomplete information.
• Technical: mastering the work of your area and of the people you lead.
• Tactical: combining all of the above to achieve the concrete objective on the ground.

On what the leader must do, the model has three actions:

• Influence: communicate, decide and motivate, so that people want to accomplish the mission and not just obey.
• Operate: plan, execute and assess to accomplish the short-term mission.
• Improve: develop people, build the team and learn, so the organization is better tomorrow than today.

The book also describes three levels of leadership, and what changes at each. Direct leadership is face to face, with the team you see every day. Organizational leadership is indirect, through other leaders, with horizons of several years. Strategic leadership sets the direction, structure and culture of the whole institution. A good direct leader doesn't become a good organizational leader just by being promoted; they need to learn different skills.

The concept to master is that the third action, improve, is as important as operate. The final chapters on managing change and building learning organizations show that the Army systematically reviews what happened after every operation in order to correct fast. That's why the model evaluates the leader also by how they leave their team and their organization, not just by the mission accomplished.

A simple place to begin: when you finish your next project or launch, gather the team for half an hour and answer four questions: what did we expect to happen, what happened, why was there a difference and what will we do differently next time. Without looking for culprits, and with the leader speaking first about their own mistakes.

As a founder it will help you develop leaders as your company stops fitting in one room, and to remember that your people learn more from what you do than from what you say. And the list of values and skills is a good guide for evaluating whom you promote.