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Americans have a 70% approval rating for the United States military! So what does the military really teach about leadership? Put simply, it teaches a servant-leadership model. In simplest terms, servant-leadership teaches that a leader’s role in life is to put their mission first, the welfare of their team second, and their own welfare a distant third.
THE LEADER’S CODE
Accomplish a worthy mission.
Without an overarching, all-encompassing mission that focuses us away from ourselves—perhaps to faith, a country, an organization, or a higher calling—we have no compelling reason to serve anything other than ourselves. A mission cannot be centered on our own happiness or the pursuit thereof.
One thing is certain: if we do not know what our mission is, we will definitely fail to achieve it. And there is one constant that helps us test whether a mission is worth achieving: our cause must be more important than our comfort or well-being.
Take “the Tombstone Test”: “If I died tomorrow, would I want whatever it is that I am pursuing today engraved on my tombstone as my epitaph?” Another test is to take a look at your checkbook and calendar. From those, you can quickly see what you value.
Beginning a leadership journey with the end—a worthy mission—in mind allows us to plan our course with the same deliberation with which we plan anything else important in life. A good mission helps a leader plan their course, serve their teams, persevere through hardship, and guard against complacency. A worthy mission has the following characteristics:
- Service to something beyond personal welfare;
- Clear, measurable goals; and
- High ethical standards.
Pursue character above all else.
Humility
President Lincoln was known for a singular quality—his humility. This virtue allowed him to build one of the most talented cabinets in America’s history during what was arguably the country’s most difficult period, a time when talent was needed more than ever. Lincoln had no need to prove his superiority or to be right all of the time. Rather, he set aside his own feelings, insecurities, and anything else that got in the way of understanding the situation confronting his country and using the best resources to make the best decisions. His humility allowed him to make the best use of the best people, and eventually, Lincoln would earn the steadfast loyalty of his team.
The United States Marines use the “After-Action Review” Process to instill institutional humility. This process takes place after every major battlefield engagement. The first part is informational. What really happened, when, how, and why? Who saw what? When and where? Once the situation has been pieced together, as best as possible, the second part of the after-action begins: the evaluation where the leader looks at what they and their team did well. Then, they look at what they did poorly, starting with the leader, moving to the team, and ending with the system.
Humility in a leader is one of the few indicators of true strength and genuine confidence. A lack of humility only signifies weakness, insecurity, and a brittleness that is unable to admit to and cope with mistakes. The humble leader must take the time to pass along their self-assessment to the team. Painful or not, leaders have to expose weaknesses so that their teams can help them avoid pitfalls.
Nitin Nohria, Dean of the Harvard Business School, noted that of all of the studies the department had done on various types of leaders—intellectual versus emotional, executional versus strategic—he and his researchers could find only one quality that the successful ones shared. That quality was reflectiveness. Successful leaders reflect regularly on themselves—their successes and failures, their strengths and weaknesses.
At its heart, humility is nothing more than a realistic picture of ourselves and an ability to transmit that picture accurately to others. It is not weakness, hesitation, or self-doubt. Humility is a virtue that disappears the moment we are confident that we have achieved it.
Excellence
For the purposes of leadership, excellence means applying our best efforts, every day, to the tasks we choose to take on, regardless of the personal benefits we may accrue or the costs we may incur. Excellence is defined more by the input than the outcome.
Our mission gives us drive, humility helps refine and restrain that drive, and excellence helps sustain it. We must pursue excellence in a balanced manner across all major categories of our life: our families, our friendships, our communities, and our professions.
Before we look to be excellent anywhere else, we must first be excellent in our homes.
Kindness
It sometimes seems that kindness is a soft trait in a hard world, a virtue that leaders cannot afford lest they appear weak, undisciplined, or unfair. Indeed, society often rewards—and sometimes lionizes—unkind leaders, deeming them “tough,” “no-nonsense,” or “hard-nosed,” to name just a few of the often-used adjectives. To lead, it seems, one cannot afford to be kind. However, like many other popular leadership notions, this one is entirely untrue. The best and most effective leaders are those who practice kindness regularly and intentionally.
The virtue of kindness has four elements: compassion, action, grace, and sacrifice. Kindness in action is all about: taking the right actions to meet the right needs in a focused and deliberate manner. Kindness reinforces reflectiveness, for it forces us to think of the needs of others and how we can meet them.
Many studies have revealed that the number-one reason people quit a job isn’t, actually, the nature of the job itself. Rather, it’s the person for whom they work. People don’t quit companies; they quit leaders. But if a leader is kind, and if people feel valued, then they become extremely unlikely to leave.
Discipline
A couple of definitions of the word discipline are “orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior” and “training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character.”
Lack of ethical discipline can bring down a team, a company, or even a country. We cannot afford to let ethical failures go unchecked. Ethical failures usually start small, with the idea that a leader will compromise “just this once.”
A commitment to executional discipline is just as important as a commitment to its ethical cousin. To begin with, our integrity as leaders hinges on our ability to uphold the standards we mandate. Without discipline, three things happen, each with catastrophic consequences for a team:
- All organizational standards become confused and then irrelevant.
- People lose their personal commitment to the team’s welfare and mission. We move from a “we’re-all-in-this-together” mentality to an “I’m-going-to-get-mine” one. The mission becomes subordinate to individual self-interest. Indeed, in the absence of discipline, self-interest becomes the mission.
- A leader’s own priorities become impossible to discern. If we cannot train ourselves to do what we say is important—to demonstrate our values by our actions and our sacrifices—then we cannot expect our teams to intuit what it is that we hold dear.
Rather than contradicting kindness, discipline actually complements it. In fact, if done fairly, the act of punishing the individual can be a form of dispensing kindness to a team and to that individual. We also need to focus on both halves of the disciplined whole. The executional without the ethical is directionless, but the ethical without the executional is ineffective.
At its heart, discipline revolves around teaching and instruction rather than punishment and correction, and its whole purpose is to make an individual and a team as effective as possible in a given set of circumstances.
Courage
Moral courage is that form of courage that overcomes fear to speak the truth to power, even—and especially—when power doesn’t want to hear the truth. To become effective servant-leaders, we must pursue both moral and physical courage. Physical courage involves sacrificing time and energy doing something that we are afraid of—something that is demanding and unpleasant, for example—so that we can better serve our team.
Moral courage has four fundamental pillars:
- Clear identification of our own unbreakable values;
- An acceptance of negative outcomes if necessary in order to uphold those values;
- Willingness to shoulder responsibility for failure; and
- Open admission of mistakes.
Nothing says “my team and our mission are important” better than making sacrifices of time and physical comfort to serve something other than ourselves.
While discipline speeds things up by allowing everyone to play by the same rules, courage speeds things up by getting the team off the starting line quickly. If we can layer courage on top of discipline, then we will find that we reinforce our integrity, magnify our credibility, and increase the pace at which we and our teams act, react, and innovate.
Wisdom
Wisdom helps us to choose well in moments of decision and act correctly in moments when we need to execute decisions. While we cannot always know why things happen, or what’s going to happen in the future, we can in fact make the best possible decisions in the present. We can choose the right actions with the right intentions.
Wisdom is founded on humility, the second of our virtues, because humility helps us to see ourselves as we truly are rather than ourselves as we wish to be.
In combat, those who are the wisest—those who male the best decisions under extreme pressure—are often those with the least education but the greatest willingness to learn. Those who think that they know everything and listen to no one, on the other hand, get people killed.
Three characteristics mark wisdom in a leader:
- A wise leader understands where their sphere of control begins and ends. Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous Serenity Prayer sums up this concept as well as any: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And the wisdom to know the difference.”
- Live in the present and try their best to enjoy it thoroughly. A wise leader works hard at whatever it is that each day has set before them. They make the most of the time that they have and if they can persist, they become better at everything they get their hands on.
- Reflect on the fact that wisdom finds its fullest expression in action. Wisdom is ultimately a practical virtue, and its goal is to choose the best means to the best ends.
If we achieve all of the other virtues but fail to synthesize them into wisdom, our ability to lead well will be significantly impaired.
Serve others before serving yourself.
The Marine Corps has learned over three hundred years of combat history that only the servant-leadership model works under fire. Servant-leadership is the only form of leadership that inspires people to keep going through the most difficult times, when they have nothing to look forward to other than wounds or death.
For us to be true servant-leaders, each of the above character traits is necessary if we hope to effectively practice the servant-leader model in our own lives. Servant-leaders realize that they have warts and that the more they surround themselves with people willing to point those out and prevent them from transferring those flaws to others, the more likely everyone is to succeed.
A clear mission inspires servant-leadership, humility guides it, and excellence sustains it. Mission is the spark, the passion, that inspires us to pursue the servant-leader model, but it is excellence that keeps that pursuit going, day in and day out, when the daily grind threatens to extinguish the embers of inspiration.
Excellence also produces contentment, a satisfaction with life’s journey rather than its outcomes. And contentment allows us to serve our teams by maintaining our composure and radiating optimism regardless of the circumstances.
If excellence helps our teams to do their best every day, then kindness helps them to be their best every day. Without kindness, we would easily lose the human dimension—and the human costs—of leadership in the quest for our best efforts in service of the best mission. If excellence helps give the servant-leader model the energy to keep going, discipline helps give it the daily direction to stay on course.
Without courage, the servant-leader model will falter because at some point in time all of us are going to be faced with a stark choice: persevere in our mission—keep doing what we believe is right with the best of our abilities—and risk severe consequences or compromise our mission and our ethics—give something less than our best or perhaps quit entirely—and avoid any unpleasant consequences. Sooner or later, we as leaders will have to consciously risk our reputations, our careers, and perhaps even our lives to uphold our mission and take care of our people. Without courage to help us make the hard choices, we will make the easy ones.
Combined, all of our other virtues produce wisdom, and it is wisdom that caps off the model. Wisdom allows us to serve our teams by keeping them grounded in reality.
Like anything else worth doing, there is no shortcut to servant-leadership, no easy way to sustain this model over time. The only way to consistently apply this model to our teams and to our lives is to intentionally build our own character over the course of time.
Personal Code of Conduct
Finally, we can establish our own personal Code of Conduct. Though it takes time and reflection, fortunately there is no need to reinvent the wheel to do this. We can model our own code after that of the military. To do so, we need to keep it short and break out the following three components:
- Who we are and what we stand for, broadly speaking.
- The things that we believe we must do.
- The things that we believe we must not do.
May you develop your own “Leader’s Code”, as you shoot for the stars!