Dec. 8, 2014
Stanley McChrystal and Michael Flynn Offer Insights for CEOs
Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal on how beer and white-water rafting can make for more cohesion and better decisions from the National Security Council.
The demands of corporate leadership are changing as globalization and a growing flood of information make chief executives’ jobs more complex. The old hierarchical style of leadership can’t keep up, but what should take its place?
Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, former commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan and co-founder of McChrystal Group, and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and before that director of military intelligence in Afghanistan, spoke with The Wall Street Journal’s John Bussey about the keys to effective leadership. Here are edited excerpts of their discussion.
Getting Things Done
MR. BUSSEY: Gen. McChrystal, you’re teaching at Yale University , a course on leadership. You’re speaking to a number of these CEOs, coaching them on leadership issues. Tell us what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.
GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: The biggest problem is an organization can get the strategy right but then can’t execute it.
What I see in many firms is a siloing across different parts of big, geographically dispersed firms, difficulty communicating because of cultural barriers and distance and other things. There are also problems with decision making: People will meet and then not make a decision or they will make a decision and then it won’t be implemented.
So it’s the execution of the organization. And while that seems mechanical, it’s really an art. You can’t do checklists and make that work. It’s relationships and it’s processes that you set up that make an organization effective.
MR. BUSSEY: You say in your writings that a CEO, a real leader, should be a decision facilitator, not a decision maker.
GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: What I found in my own experience at Joint Special Operations Command was I’d grown up as an operator, so my tendency was to want to make decisions on operations. They’d bring together intelligence and I’d want to get down and draw on the map how we were going to do it.
But in reality things had changed enough where I didn’t have the most expertise in doing that, and I had a lot of other people who could. I found that when I finally got it where I thought it was closer to right, I made very, very few decisions.
What I really did was I was sort of the ringmaster for this constant conversation across the command. That was my contribution, creating an ecosystem where the different parts of the organization spoke to each other.
If I tried the hierarchical way, where they came up and asked me for decisions, by the time the information got to me and I made a decision, even if it was right when I made it, by the time it got back down again it was now wrong because the situation had changed too much.
Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn: ‘When you’re uncomfortable, you’re probably doing the right thing.’ PAUL MORSE/DOW JONES
GEN. FLYNN: One of the things that we are facing today is the speed in which information is almost bombarding the decision-making processes that we are faced with. For me, what I kind of describe is trying to maintain a fingertip feel for your organization and the operating environment that they are in, at the same time making sure that everybody understands that we have one big strategy that we are trying to achieve.
What Stan’s highlighting is the ability to empower the organization down as far as you can, to the point where you’re almost uncomfortable allowing decisions to be made at a certain level. And when you’re uncomfortable, you’re probably doing the right thing.
Making Teams Work
MR. BUSSEY: Gen. McChrystal, you talk about teams, and the importance of that kind of organic unit driving decision-making in companies. What exactly is a team, and how do you talk about teams with executives and generals who are managing tens of thousands of people? When does a team suddenly become a department or a battalion—just an unwieldy element to integrate into decision making?
GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: We’ve all been on sports teams or other things where you could finish each other’s sentences. You had enough familiarity that you had a common sense of what you were about, identity, and what you were trying to do.
The problem is, that’s not scalable beyond a certain point. So when you get beyond a small group where you have constant interaction, you really have to go to something I call a team of teams. It can’t be one big team, because you’re not rubbing shoulders with people. Instead, you’ve got to create a number of small teams. But then you’ve got to link them so that there is a common, shared consciousness.
MR. BUSSEY: Gen. Flynn, tell us a little about the leadership style of al Qaeda, the Taliban, Islamic State. What have we learned about their leadership style?
GEN. FLYNN: As Stan just highlighted—I would describe it a bit differently, but we’re facing a team of teams, if you will.
They are extremely adaptive. They have networks and subnetworks, and their ability to leverage technology should not be taken for granted. They’re very smart, the leadership, and enlightened in some cases in how they function and how they connect to each other, how they get their message out, how they internally speak to themselves, how they learn. They are a learning organization and an organization that pays close attention to their failures as well as their successes.
Lessons of War
MR. BUSSEY: What leadership lessons should we take from the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan?
GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: The first thing is we didn’t do due diligence before we went in. We didn’t understand the problem to the depth that we needed to. We didn’t take the time to do it, and we didn’t nurture the experts.
If we gathered all the Pashtun and Arabic speakers in the U.S. military, we could probably fit them on this stage. And yet, after World War II began, after Pearl Harbor, we trained more than 5,000 military members to speak Japanese. We just haven’t made that level of effort.
The other thing is we go at this with different parts of our government. Every agency wants to help but they want to protect their equities, and you can’t do a complex endeavor like this unless you can build a truly integrated team in which everybody is focused.
We had great efforts to try to do that. Made a lot of progress, but it was much more difficult than it should have been. Part of that is interpersonal. Part of that is organizational equities. Part of that is cultures. But it stops or limits our effectiveness to a tremendous degree.
MR. BUSSEY: If you had the president and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a room, what would you advise them from a leadership standpoint on what to do now in Afghanistan?
GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: I’d tell them to go get three cases of beer and go white-water rafting. It sounds like a joke, but when you get in the National Security Council room for your first time you think, “Boy, I made it. I’m in this room. This is kind of amazing.” And you look around and you’re not really a team. You’re polite to each other, and you talk. But think about it. We’re fighting a war. You spend months preparing a football or a baseball team for the season, but we take the most senior leaders, we put them in a room, we expect them to be a cohesive team to make tough decisions.
And so, I would do things that started to build relationships so that you have something to fall back on when you disagree on the issues.
I see the same thing in boardrooms for corporations. If they come in periodically, they don’t really know each other, they’re not cohesive, you’re not apt to get a very effective outcome. And I think that’s huge. The strategy part is not that hard. Figuring out what to do, you can do on a Saturday morning.
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