KARL MOORE: This is Karl Moore, Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am speaking to a four-star general in the U.S. Army - General Martin Dempsey, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in Fort Monroe, Va. The topic: The evolution of military leadership.
MARTIN DEMPSEY : Good afternoon, Karl. Toujours prêt! [Always ready.]/P>
KM: Do you see that there are differences between when you were a young leader, and what was required then, and what is required among young leaders today? Has it changed in the last 30 or so years since you started out - the nature of what leadership is?
MD: The essence of leadership, and the way you interact, the way the leader interacts with the led, has remained fairly constant, it seems to me. But, the complexity in which the leader must operate - the world was very simple, as you know, before 1990, relatively simple - especially for a military leader. Contrast that with what our most junior leaders face in the fight today. I am in awe of what some of these young leaders do on the streets of Baghdad, or on the streets of Kabul, in terms of dealing with complex problems; and their ability to frame a problem and understand it is quite remarkable.
And, in fact, one of the big questions we've got for ourselves, as an army, is how do we take these young leaders who have been dealing with complexity at the tactical level, the lower levels, and then educate them through the course of their career to be able to deal with those same kinds of complexities as senior leaders? So, the answer is that the environment has become so much more complex, and that's the big difference I see, in the challenge we've got in developing our leaders - to deal with that complexity and uncertainty, in a way that I didn't have to until I probably became a colonel.
KM: It's interesting, because in the business school we might talk about leadership and management as being two different ideas. Do you see a need for management within the military, as well as for leadership?
MD: You know that's a distinction, that won't surprise you, we've wrestled with for some time ourselves. From my personal way of thinking about it, a good leader has both the attributes you describe as leadership attributes, but, also, increasingly, as you gain seniority, it just is inherently a set of management skills you must have to be a leader.
I mentioned that some of the way we develop our young brigadier-generals, for example. We send them to business school, which may or may not surprise you. Because they have certain leadership skills that have been developed over time, in them, but what they lack is some of the management skills to be good leaders.
So, I don't know whether I've further confused the issue. Clearly, the attributes that make a good leader over time, must include management skills.
KM: So, you wouldn't want a leader who can't manage, particularly at a senior level?
MD: That's right.
KM: Nor, would you want a manager who doesn't have any leadership at all, because that would be dispiriting.
MD: That's correct.
KM: It's interesting, because you use the idea of team. When I think of military, and this may be outdated, I think of hierarchy, of saluting, of a set of officers above me. But you see it more as the reality, as a team effort. Does leadership move around the table in the course of a week's work within a military unit?
MD: Yes, it does actually. And, I think that is something we're trying to understand about the - I mentioned this - we call it the operating environment. The change in the nature of the security challenges, in this century, for any number of reasons that we could talk about, whether it's demographic shifts, or globalization, climate change, the information technologies - the environment is changing.
And as the environment changes it occurs first to us that the threats we face will be much more complex, much more hybrid - that is to say, multifaceted, including syndicates of irregular nation-states and criminals, in cases. With globalized logistics networks.
I mean, think of opium emanating out of Afghanistan, or think of al-Qaeda, as a network. And, as result of that, the notion is that, to defeat a network and think of the threats we - and there are some nation-state threats to be sure, but we think our more likely threats we'll encounter will be networked. And we have a phrase, that 'to defeat a network you have to be a network.'
I don't know if you've read The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman. He talks about networked decentralized organizations, and how hierarchical organizations have a very difficult time encountering them. And this is a business book; think Napster and the record industry. And, in our case, think al-Qaeda and the United States military.
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