How The Military Adapts To Change — And Big Business Should Too

As the context for leadership changes, how should we rethink leadership and the development of leaders?  In a prior post, I shared the first part of my interview with General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  In that post, we discussed the fundamental shifts in the world today, how the military has adapted to the changes, and how these lessons can apply to business.

In this part of the interview, we discuss leadership development and talent strategies.

This is the second of a two part interview with GEN Dempsey.

Sanyin Siang:  When thinking about leadership, most people think about it as leading down. But, there is also a key leadership role in influencing laterally and up.  We see this in the business context all of the time, especially as people evolve over their careers.  As you’ve moved up in your career, what lessons can you share with us about where you influence?

Martin Dempsey: The way I describe leadership is your first ten or fifteen years in the military, you actually should spend most of your time leading down. You have an organization, which is accountable to you and responsible to you and looking to you for leadership, mentorship, advice, and guidance.

As you become a little more senior, we say the lieutenant colonel, colonel and above, you have to now pay some attention to leadership laterally. How do you get along with your peers? Because your peers, we build in interdependence into our institution. No one unit can do anything by itself. And so the more senior you become, you have to look laterally to build those relationships to be that team of teams.

And then when you get to where I am or a chief of a service or a combatant commander, the three and four star generals, you’re really spending a good bit of your time helping the institution and its civilian leaders (the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, the President of the United States) understand what we can do, what we can’t do and what we need in order to meet the interests of the United States in terms of national security.

So I do spend most of my time now exerting my personal intellect, energy, enthusiasm and influence (to the extent it can be called influence) up. Because if I don’t do that, then it doesn’t matter how effective I am working down.

Siang: I love how you talk about the interdependencies of the various units in the first part of our interview.  I'd like to connect that with fostering a sense of institutional ownership. I think right now we live in a world where people are empowered to be very entrepreneurial and to go off and start things. And they do great things based on their individual capabilities. Businesses have responded to this entrepreneurial spirit.  But, at some point, we need to move towards everyone having a shared sense of ownership or we risk losing our collective sense of self.  We lose potential to have collective impact on a challenge or a problem, and the whole remains just the sum of the parts, or potentially less because of redundancies in effort.

How do you get people inside the organization besides cognitively realize they need to collaborate with one another, they actually feel that need to collaborate with one another and take ownership in the greater organization, institution or society?

Dempsey: That’s a great question and it is a concern of mine because there is a certain sense of leveling in the military that we deliberately undertake in order to have everyone meet essentially a common set of standards. You know, we wrote the book on tasks, conditions, and standards. And, again, this goes back to where do you put your energy as a junior leader and how does your energy change as you become more senior.

For a second lieutenant – a brand new 22 year old young man or woman out of one of the military academies or reserve officer training corp out of Duke University or anywhere else – we just want them to master the fundamentals of their particular choice of branch.

So, signal core, logistics, armor, infantry, artillery, and aviation – whatever it happens to be – and in so doing, if they see it as their responsibility to become the best at that, then I’m not so worried that they’ll lose their personal identity. Because if you commit yourself to not just doing the task but mastering it, you’ll find plenty of self-worth and self-satisfaction in that.

And if they don’t become the best at what they do, this is an up-or-out system in which you either are promoted or you’re separated. We evaluate ourselves frequently, at a minimum annually but most often more often than that.

And then as you become more senior – it gets a little less about this issue of self. At some point, in any organization you begin to feel some ownership for the institution. And for us, I think that happens probably about 20 years in, when you have a decision to make about whether to seek a second career or stick with this career and continue out to 30 or 40 years as I have.

And then, I think, you know, we have some deliberate education system nodes in our professional military education model where we actually grab those young men and women at exactly that point—the point where they’re not so much worried about doing the job they’ve been given, but now you own the institution. And we have a school – we call it the War College, cleverly named, that exists right about there. It’s the intent of that educational experience to get them thinking about their broader responsibilities and less about that which they see in front of them on a daily basis.

Siang: The US Military is known for its ability to develop performance character – resilience, team-orientation, and empathy, and ability to deal with uncertainty. These are all characteristics that corporate America is looking for in its workforce as we face a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. How can corporate America best leverage the talents of its veterans?

Dempsey: My answer revolves around the importance of both character and competence. Where you’ve seen the military face some challenges over the past several years, it’s generally been where we’ve valued competence and perhaps maybe took our eye a bit off of the importance of character. I think we’ve re-captured that by the way, and but it’s something you can’t take your eye off of.

In a profession, but I would also suggest in any endeavor where people matter, you better have character and competence, not just competence. So, that’s one thing you know you’re getting with someone coming out of the military migrating or matriculating into the civilian economy. They they’re going to come with both character and competence.

The other important message is addressing this narrative over the last couple of years that the veteran needs help. Well, I would like to suggest that the veteran simply needs an opportunity.

The veteran doesn’t need help – now, by the way, there are some who very much need help… Wounded Warriors, Gold Star families, those who are stricken with PTSD, but the entire military (despite the fact that we’ve been at war for many years) is not coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan needing much more than not a hand out, but a hand shake.

And if you give a veteran a chance, they will impress you in the workplace. This group of young men and women coming out of years of what is one of the most challenging periods in our history, are very courageous. They’re resilient – you can’t keep them down. They’re patriotic. They are loyal once you earn their loyalty. I think about them as a group that can actually make your business or your industry better – thinking about them as a resource, not as a hand out or as a charity, is the right way to think about it. And so I hope that we can keep that conversation alive.

Siang:  Thank you for your perspectives.  At Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, we have several veterans among our MBA students and they are among our best and brightest.  They are top contributors to the distinctive collaborative leadership culture of our business school.  We are also very proud of the several active duty MBA students we have each year, who, after graduation, return to the US Military Academy to teach the next generation of cadets there.

The engagement with military leaders over the past few years has informed our work at the Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics (COLE) and  how we think about the new context for leadership and the type of mindset, knowledge and skillset we need to cultivate in next generation leaders for business and society.

Thank you for sharing your wisdom and perspectives with us.

A version of this interview first appeared in Forbes.  Sanyin Siang is the Executive Director of the Coach K Leadership & Ethics Center at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is a thought-partner for leaders through serving on advisory boards. as a mentor, and as an executive leadership coach.  For more of her leadership pieces, click the follow button at the top of this post.