Mikhail Illarionovich, Prince Kutuzov
Creative commons photo (CC BY-SA) from Errabee
Context Makes Or Breaks Advice
Look to Military History for Lessons in Crisis Leadership
Marc Feigen, Benjamin Wallach and Anton Warendh
July 01, 2020
https://hbr.org/2020/07/look-to-military-history-for-lessons-in-crisis-leadership
I’m busy, why do I care: There’s often both more and less to advice than meets the eye. It pays to take a critical look at what’s on offer, to avoid being misled.
Approximately 1800 words (7-10min read)
On a battlefield, the penalties for making bad decisions or failing to adapt are the harshest imaginable. This makes war an often-terrible experience for those who fight, while leaving us rich veins of lessons learned under the harshest conditions. There is a rich tradition of tapping those lessons and applying them to completely unrelated efforts.
Any time we reach across domains or back into time to draw lessons for ourselves we need to think hard about doing it right. History is complex, but reaching busy audiences requires us to be concise. If too many nuances or contexts are stripped out, we’re left with generalized anecdotes. As the article being reviewed shows, this often leads to unfortunate and helpful conclusions.
Written by three members of a CEO advisory firm, the article opens on a strong note. The authors discuss how business leaders have been caught off guard by the unexpected seriousness of the Coronavirus crisis. They compare this to the well-known idea of the “fog of war” and offer leaders guidance from a series of seven anecdotal incidents from military history.
It’s in these anecdotes that the article falls down.
Be Decisive: The authors frame this around the example of Marshal Kutuzov. With Napoleon rampaging across Russia in 1812, Kutuzov allowed him to capture Moscow--which burned to the ground in the process--rather than risk being defeated defending it and then rebounded to victory. The lesson the authors extract from this is “Don’t dwell on your losses.” Fair enough, although there’re stronger lessons here.
Kutuzov used delay, attrition and scorched-earth tactics, which were driven by his side’s weakness. When he tried to fight the French head-on,it was a near-disaster. The battle of Borodino, fought in September 1812 between Napoleon and Kutuzov, went to the French on points. Far from being decisive, it is mostly remembered for being the single bloodiest day of fighting in recorded human history until the First World War. Saying anyone “won” this is an exercise in relativity considering the human cost for both sides.
A better lesson from Kutuzov’s experience may be “remember Borodino”: be ruthlessly honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses and play to the strengths.
Bottom line: What matters here is context. Simply urging leaders to “be decisive” serves them poorly if they’re pursuing unattainable or counterproductive goals.
Be In The Trenches: We are told: “Great military leaders fight side by side with their soldiers as Hannibal did in the Second Punic War. The Duke of Wellington is said to have remarked that Napoleon’s very presence on the battlefield was worth 40,000 fighting men.”
Wellington’s words are revealing: “It is very true that I have said that I considered Napoleon's presence in the field equal to forty thousand men in the balance. This is a very loose way of talking; but the idea is a very different one from that of his presence at a battle being equal to a reinforcement of forty thousand men.” (My emphasis.) Napoleon maximized his value by using his talents well, not by trying to out-soldier his own soldiers.
Leaders need to be where their vision and skills will have the greatest impact--and that may well be far to the rear and not in “the trenches.” Hannibal and Napoleon had to be physically on the battlefield to perform their leadership roles. This is no longer the case. For example, Eisenhower oversaw D-Day from England, not a foxhole in Normandy.
Technology makes it possible to communicate from a distance, as well as to exercise executive control. Visits to the front line have critically important symbolism--the people on the front lines need to see that their leaders are interested in and supportive of their work. But the blanket suggestion that we only lead well from the front has been overtaken by events.
Bottom line: Effective senior leaders understand where they need to be to exert the greatest influence.
Be Agile: Generically solid advice. The authors lead with an odd example, though: “When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May of 1940, he attacked the slow-moving British war bureaucracy by printing red “ACTION THIS DAY” labels, which he personally pasted to many documents he dispatched.”
This looks like an example of treating symptoms and not underlying causes. If the war bureaucracy was an impediment to victory, then something was seriously wrong at a far more fundamental level. A few labels are not going to fix that. At worst, this can also be understood as attempted micromanagement of the war effort.
Churchill was a talented and insightful leader who was also a masterful communicator. I wonder if the “Action This Day” labels, although no doubt useful to blow off steam, were meant more to send a symbolic message to the bureaucracy: the Prime Minister is paying attention. That, I think, is plausible and a reasonable senior leader action.
Bottom line: It’s important to discern what the real impact of action is, and focus our efforts on getting the most bang for the buck. Being agile is a useful trait, but only as long as it’s in service of a truly important outcome.
Lead With Confidence: As with the advice to be decisive, the devil here is in the details. We are told that “Great military leaders know they must lead with confidence underpinned with optimism.” Confidence and optimism are force multipliers. But a great leader grounds her attitudes and plans in reality. She relentlessly questions her prior assumptions before acting, and has solid decision-making systems to maximize her chance of success:
Napoleon doubtless projected confidence and optimism while leading his army into Russia in 1812, just as in previous campaigns. His appreciation of the situation turned out to be tragically incomplete.
Systems are more important than goals. We can make decisions badly but still succeed, at least for a time, if we’re lucky. Equally, we can do everything right and sometimes still fail. It takes confidence and optimism to go into situations like that and absorb the inevitable failures and setbacks. Those attributes don’t work in a vacuum--and misguided optimism and confidence are deadly.
Bottom line: Confidence which is not informed by a realistic and clear understanding of the environment is often the prelude to disaster. Question and update your assumptions about the world before making major decisions—then move out with confidence and optimism.
Communicate to Inspire: Providing actionable guidance and a healthy level of motivation is absolutely one of the KPIs of any talented leader. But, as they note, you also have to know how much is too much--excessive communication is as counterproductive as too little.
This focuses on what a leader does rather than what they are, which is where this can go wrong. Great communicators like Churchill had a solid understanding of his audience, and at his best spoke to the British people where they were -- not where he might have wished them to be.
Emotional intelligence plays a key role here. Leaders need to read their audiences and adjust accordingly. Assuming people will listen to you because of your title is a quick route to failure if you can’t back that up with careful action.
Bottom line: Communicate to inspire, but make sure you have the right audience and message first.
Move Leaders and Tasks Rapidly: “In war,” we are told “some leaders rise to the occasion.” Those who do are promoted quickly and get more responsibility. Weaker leaders “are not fired, but their workload is reduced and step-by-step instruction is given until they are effective. In this way, all leaders perform at their peak.” Napoleon and various Prussians are cited as good delegators who promoted victorious subordinates.
Organizations dealing with existential threats (and that’s by no means limited to the military at war) have strong incentives to identify and groom high performers. But they have equally strong or stronger incentives to unload leaders who are a danger to themselves and others as quickly and decisively as possible.
The meaning of “tasks” here is unclear. There is a strong case to be made for keeping hard-won experience and expertise at least generally in the fight. A key decision in World War 2, for example, was the US habit of rotating successful combat pilots between war zones and instructor roles, where they increased the quality of new pilots. The inability of the Germans and Japanese to do this is widely viewed as having helped cripple their air arms.
Bottom line: Carrying weak performers is never good for an organization, but be generous in rewarding strong performers—and tapping into their skills in ways that multiply their impact.
Rest the Troops: The authors understand and articulate why “the troops” need regular R&R to recover from the strain they’re under, but seem to place commanders (or executives, in a civilian context) in a separate category.
It may be true that Churchill took very little “leave” during the Second World War, but that oversimplifies senior leader resilience. In fact, as the importance of the decisions we ask leaders to make goes up, so does the importance of making sure they’re in peak mental and physical condition.
There is extensive scientific literature on what habits support high physical and cognitive performance. None of it, at least from any reputable source, makes any sort of distinction between leadership or followership roles in terms of the impact of fatigue and stress.
Bottom line: Leaders carry a heavy burden in critical times; they need to be as attuned to their own performance and resilience as they are to that of their followers.
Conclusion: Parting Thoughts
Look to Military History for Lessons in Crisis Leadership has some good ideas, but suffers from taking an oversimplified look at events. This may been, in part, because of limits in the length of the piece itself. That’s understandable, but it reinforces the earlier point that in the struggle to be concise, important nuances and context can get lost.
The authors express some noble sentiments, but it’s not clear that they’re appropriate advice. The authors concentrate too much on what leaders are or do in terms of roles, and too little on what really makes a difference: who they are, and their qualites and genuine nature—or lack of them—that they bring to being leaders. That’s where leadership is made or broken, not on a generalized set of behaviors.