Thursday, July 28, 2011

Bock: Gleaning the Best from the Military's Best

The military spends far more time training for missions than it does carrying the missions out. In business, the reverse is true. Even so there are some important lessons we can learn from the way military organizations do training. The military has learned that if you don't train your leaders at all levels properly, you can't consistently use mission orders and reap the benefits.

The military does a better job than most businesses of training leaders in decision making, training them in the skills necessary two levels above their current position, and creating the situation where there are multiple qualified candidates for every promotion.

Most training in business decision-making consists of working on case studies. Military services teach decision making the old-fashioned way, by creating a simple, but flexible system, having leaders in training make lots of decisions and critiquing the outcomes. The result is that a freshly minted second lieutenant is usually more adepts at decision making that many mid-level managers. It's one reason why junior military officers are recruiting targets for many business organizations.

Read all of this outstanding post by Wally Bock.

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