What the Army Taught Me About Leadership

If you take a look at my about page, you’ll see that I spent 5 years in the Canadian Army, primarily with 1PPCLI. I found the experience enjoyable for the most part, and looking back some ten years (!) later I realize that I learned a lot about myself, people in general, and the world around me.

If you’ve been exposed to military life at all, specifically the infantry, you know that there are basically two constants: things that go boom and leadership. The army lives and breathes leadership. It is constantly looking to harness the power of effective leaders, and continually examining failures with the way it approaches situations or people. To this day, I’ve yet to find an organization that is as adaptable and open about these things the way the military was.

Today, I thought I would take the time to share some of the things the army taught me about how to be a leader.

Lead By Looking Down

It’s common to see leaders in modern corporations look to advance up the ladder as fast as possible. Often, they do so with little regard for their peers and charges. Being an infantry section commander taught me that what good leaders do is concern themselves not with the opinions of their superiors, but with those of their juniors.

This constant regard, respect and sense of responsibility for those under your command translates into high performing teams, and high performing teams get noticed by themselves. Military leaders at all levels become very attached to the welfare and plight of their men. Sometimes, this attachment is so great that losing people in battle can have lasting traumatic effects on the leader.

This respect for those at the bottom of the pile makes its way into all sorts of actions that add up to form a bond between leader and team that simply isn’t seen in the corporate world. An environment that allows team members to feel that they will be put ahead of the interests of the leader is such a comfort that performance improves a great deal simply because it exists.

Your Team Will Decide Your Worth, In Fact They Already Have

Soldiers can be quite a particular bunch. They play favourites and are extremely hard to please. I suppose when you’re placing your life in the hands of a 23 year old you tend to be pretty particular. Because of this, inept leaders in infantry units are not exactly well kept secrets, at least among the men and women on the ground. Any soldier can tell you who the good leaders in their larger unit are. More than that though, most of them could tell you whom among their peers should be promoted into a leadership role.

It’s this understanding and perception of leadership among peers that ends up forgiving the mistakes of the respected, and ignoring the accomplishments of those who don’t quite cut it. I’ve seen many satisfactory would be leaders fails miserably because of the simple fact that their soldiers didn’t think them adequate to be their peer, let a lone their leader.

The lesson here is that soldiers are people, and that although not all of us will wear our dislike on our sleeves, this type of attitude can be extremely damaging to the leader and the team when it is shown. The simple way to correct for this is for the leader to earn respect. They need to know what they can do and what the have difficulty with and respect the ability and confidence of those they lead.

Earning respect takes time. It comes from building relationships and allowing yourself to be evaluated as a peer, and not just a leader.

If Nobody Died, It isn’t That Big a Deal

In other words, don’t sweat the small stuff.

A simple but true adage that affects every person on the team. The army is a stressful place. Somebody is always yelling. Situations are loud dangerous and confusing. Something always needs to be done. Everything is important to somebody important. Part of the position of the leader is to deflect and channel all of this noise into workable action items for their team. It doesn’t work to simply pass on commands from others, a leader must also filter the priority of tasks into those that are important, those that are somewhat less so, and those that the team doesn’t need to be aware of; either not at all, or simply not at the current time.

Allowing your team to manage stress by giving them less to worry about is a great way to keep them focused and performing. The key factor for success here is learning how to properly prioritize and shelter your team well. Too much information about the irrelevant is bad, but too little information (or information provided without enough time to react) is even worse.

You Might Receive a Sudden Promotion

In combat, people die. The thing is, the people shooting at you have a knack of consistently finding leaders and removing them from the equation. The only way to defeat this effect is to quite simply make everyone a leader. That means that every person needs to know the job of their senior in such a way that they will be able to take over when the time comes.

The military establishes a very clear hierarchy - even between those of the same rank - to achieve this. There were many times that we had a good chuckle about Joe Private being delegated the leader of himself when everyone else was dead and gone.

I wouldn’t think that corporate life would ever need something so detailed. After all, it’s not often that you’ll have three or four members of an eight person team suddenly cease to exist. The principle however is sound, and it provides not only a clear path of succession, but a vision and understanding of the leader’s expectations of his or her team.

This isn’t done anywhere close to enough outside of the military, in my opinion.

If You’ve Overstepped Your Authority, Someone Will Let You Know

I used to get the same general review every year: “Shows potential, should be promoted at earliest opportunity, needs to learn to use initiative more often.” Nearing the end of my stint, it was starting to get a little repetitive, so much so that I began to think that it was just what people wrote if they couldn’t think of an area that you needed to improve on. These days, I know the truth - you can never use your initiative enough.

In the army, leaders are so overwhelmed with information that the less they need to worry about details, the happier they will be. Whether in a junior leadership role, or simply a senior team member, making decisions and acting reasonably with available information was never frowned upon. Sometimes the wrong call was made. Sometimes things didn’t turn out as planned. Regardless, I can never remember a time when anyone was disciplined for taking the initiative and acting in the absence of a higher authority or existing command. I certainly wasn’t.

Make the call, make it fast and make it right. You need to be able to think on your feet, and you need to be able to make a decision and advance to your goal. If you aren’t moving, you lose momentum, and losing momentum can be the difference between success and failure.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I learned so much during my time with the military, and it formed the foundation of skills that I continue to build on. These topics I touched on here are only snippets of information, but at the same time they’re valuable to new leaders, and seldom seen - or learned - in civilian corporations.