Learn to Lead by Leading

Manager's Tools looks at the issue of leadership and reveals how the military produces so many extraordinary leaders. An excerpt:

When the military talks about leadership training, they just mean leadership.
What I mean by this is that the military has discovered that one thousand hours of leadership training are worth about 15 minutes of actual leading. Being given true responsibility for people, budgets, projects, missions, lives, and being asked to do one’s best and learn from success and failure is the best way to develop leaders. The military trains leaders by giving them real responsibility at the lowest levels (by pushing decision making down the chain of command as far as possible), and allowing junior leaders -soldiers, sergeants, young officers - to take action and learn as they do. The military does this not IN SPITE OF the chance that soldiers might die because of a mistake, but BECAUSE they might die, and they need their leaders to learn more quickly than in any other endeavor. A leadership professor might say this is “frequent, early feedback.” A corporal would say to that, “yeah, whatever. But I want my lieutenant to know what the hell he’s doing, and it doesn’t seem to me that they teach that in school.”

I spend a lot of time dealing with this when clients find out that I am a Military Academy graduate. Several have even said, “Make my folks into a bunch of West Pointers!” I invariably say “the way to start is to stop taking them places and ‘teaching’ them things, and start giving them real work that has consequences . Give them feedback and coaching until they are blue in the face . Make them work on hard things and big projects - things their bosses are working on now. Let the bosses pick their heads up off the day to day, and let that ripple up the chain so that senior leaders aren’t proofreading advertising copy.” This is how the military “trains” leaders.

Read it all here.