Ignore Business Advice From Military Leaders?

Find out why you should ignore most business advice from military leaders.

After winning the U.S. Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant, one of the most admired leaders in American history, struggled as our 18th President in gaining and maintaining support for reconstruction and the advancement of formerly enslaved African-Americans. 

His experiences before and after the war show that, civilian leadership is harder than military leadership.

I used to think that leadership in the military was more challenging than leading civilians. The stakes, after all, tend to be more significant, particularly in combat. 

After consulting for private, nonprofit, and public sector organizations for the past decades, I’ve revised my thinking. Civilian leadership is much harder. 

Why Civilian Leadership Is Much Harder

First, the civilian world lacks formal authority, so you can’t just order people to “lead, follow, or get out of the way” and expect compliance (it doesn’t work well in the military, but plenty of officers delude themselves). Civilian leaders must rely on persuasion, buy-in, and relationship-building to get things done. These skills aren’t always taught well, so many former military leaders have difficulty changing from ordering to persuading, while civilian managers err on the opposite side and get walked over. 

Next, people self-select into volunteer militaries, knowing they give up considerable personal autonomy for the greater good. You wear the same outfits, swear the same oaths, and march to the beat of the same drum. Employees in civilian organizations expect far higher levels of autonomy, which heightens the values-clash risk, accounting for an estimated 89% of turnover when near hires leave within the first eighteen months.

Third, accountability is more straightforward in the military because you have a transparent chain of command with explicit authorities to reward and punish. Accountability can be more diffuse in the civilian sector, especially in so-called matrix organizations where people have multiple bosses with competing agendas. Whereas military leaders can fall in love with their power to make people “embrace the suck,” civilian leaders must find a more delicate balance that holds people accountable for meeting standards without pushing them out the door. 

Finally, the military trains its leaders through a professional military development system as officers and noncommissioned officers progress through the ranks. There are exceptions, to be sure, but the tolerance for abusive or ineffective leadership is low, and the expectations are high. Most companies lack formal development requirements, so you get a much wider dispersion of leadership behavior. It’s not uncommon to promote your best salesperson to sales manager and ruin both positions.

Providing Tools

Business leaders can learn a lot from the military and vice versa, but you have to be highly selective about what works in both worlds and what doesn’t, and for the latter, you need to know how to bridge the differences. So, before demanding that “leaders eat last,” you need to give people the tools to take care of themselves before they try to help others.

The most important thing you can do for your company’s managers is to provide them with tools and coaching in addition to the mentoring you provide daily. Most managers lack explicit processes for achieving the fundamentals, like clarity, buy-in, and accountability, so they default to what they’ve experienced in the past and what they perceive as working. 

The challenge with these intuitive processes is that you cannot teach, evaluate, or improve them. People maintain the same practices even if they don’t work because it’s what they know how to do. 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a compelling visual model is worth a thousand pictures. The military uses visual models for attacking and defending, for example, so everyone sees the big picture and their role in it.

When you give the managers in your company visual models for processes like buy-in, conflict management, and accountability, you immediately get them on the same page. You can recognize what success looks like, diagnose what’s missing, and take effective action. 

You’ll reduce time wasted due to miscommunication (averaging eight hours per week per employee), improve performance (do you use an employee value proposition?), and substantially reduce your biggest drains on profitability: presenteeism, absenteeism, and turnover.

I’ve developed a vast array of visual models for the most vital aspects of leadership, culture, and strategy, and can customize them for you. 

If you find value in practical tools that get results, your company might benefit from my signature programs:

• Antietam & Gettysburg leadership seminar (on-site, in-person)
• Becoming a WHY Leader® by Mastering the Art of Leadership, 
• Building an Inspiring Culture®, 
• Strategic Thinking and Decision-Making, and 
• the 5-D Strategy Process®.

If you’d like to test-drive visual models, please join my next masterclass, Beyond Servant Leadership.