Leadership Hubris

There was an article In the New York Times last week that ran under the headline “Russian Military Is Repeating Mistakes in Eastern Ukraine, U.S. Says.” The article immediately struck me as a real-time case study in our immense human ability to repeat the failures of the past. 

One passage from the article that stood out described the source of the Russian ground troops’ challenges:

“At the top of that list is the Russian army’s lack of a noncommissioned officers corps empowered to think for itself, Pentagon officials said. […] Russia’s military follows a Soviet-style doctrinal method in which troops at the bottom are not empowered to point out flaws in strategy that should be obvious or to make adjustments.”

Of course, the benefits of decentralized command and empowering those closest to the action have been known for a few hundred years, and is standard practice in professional Western armed forces. 

Another passage from the article cites Evelyn Farkas, a former Pentagon official for Ukraine and Russia and now executive director of the McCain Institute:

“We keep hearing accounts of Putin getting more involved… We know that if you have presidents meddling in targeting and operational military decisions, it’s a recipe for disaster.”

This reminded me of the various anecdotes in General H.R. McMaster’s book Dereliction of Duty about President Lyndon Johnson’s micromanagement of the Vietnam War effort, especially after the effort turned sour. One striking example from that book: “Washington retained the authority to cancel missions due to poor weather….. [The head of command in Vietnam, General William] Westmoreland told Wheeler that this form of control from Washington was absurd, considering that the weather changed faster than people in Vietnam could inform Washington of those changes.”

Of course, I certainly don’t wish that Russia was more capable of waging war. But it’s stunning to see an approach to organization and decision-making that runs counter to the documented lessons of the past.

How does that happen? My guess: Hubris. 

Are the rest of us immune from those kinds of thought processes?

I think you can guess my answer to that. :)

The other day, I was talking to a leader who works in a hierarchical organization with lots of cumbersome review and decision-making processes. I asked her to imagine a manager running a factory that is producing substandard products. And to solve the production problem, that manager thinks, “Hey, I’m experienced here. I used to work on the factory floor, and I was pretty good. Why don’t I just run every machine to make sure it’s done right?”

Obviously, that’s an absurd thing to do. 

Yet I often see leaders behaving in a similar manner—as if their judgment is superior and as if their abilities are enough to overcome suboptimal work around them. 

It may not be manually operating every machine, but it often looks like insisting on being the final decision-maker before every action, or having to review every document before it’s released. Even if they pay verbal tribute to the need to empower their teams, that empowerment doesn’t occur in practice. 

So as I talked to that leader in the hierarchical organization about their attempts to reduce hierarchical decision-making and eliminate burdensome review processes, I nudged her to not just look at the processes, but to also scrutinize and address the mindsets that created the processes in the first place.

If they do so, my guess is that the solution set will involve helping leaders shift their mindsets around their own capabilities and approaches.

General Stanley McChrystal described his journey on this in his book Team of Teams. He wrote: “I came to realize that, in normal cases, I did not add tremendous value” to a decision and that “more often than not those below me reached the same conclusion I would have.” 

As a result of that insight, his efforts to design more agile and effective processes required de-emphasizing his own role in decision-making, which usually just caused delay. McChrystal reframed his role to be mostly about cultivating an ecosystem in which others can make the right decisions. 

In the book, he compellingly describes how hard this is to do. “Although I recognized its necessity, the mental transition from heroic leader to humble gardener was not a comfortable one. From that first day at West Point I’d been trained to develop personal expectations and behaviors that reflected professional competence, decisiveness, and self-confidence. If adequately informed, I expected myself to have the right answers and deliver them to my force with assurance. Failure to do that would reflect weakness and invite doubts about my relevance.” 

But making that mental transition is necessary for leaders who truly want to empower their teams.