One of the primary themes in David Bradford's class on High Performance Leadership at Stanford's Graduate School of Business is the importance of "middle leadership"--the idea that leadership is not the exclusive province of those at the top, and that people at all levels in an organization, particularly those who are usually derided as mere "middle managers," need to act as leaders who take responsibility not only for their individual duties but also for the success of the larger teams that surround them. David Kilcullen understands this concept intimately.
Kilcullen is an Australian military officer currently serving the U.S. government as a counter-terrorism expert. In March 2006 he wrote "Twenty Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Counterinsurgency," [PDF] a detailed field guide aimed at company commanders whose units have been deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Kilcullen's paper has apparently provoked a great deal of discussion in military circles over the past year and is beginning to reach a wider audience--see Stephen O'Grady's recent post reflecting on Kilcullen's ideas in the context of "bottom up marketing."
Putting the politics of counter-terrorism aside for a moment, what I find most interesting about Kilcullen's paper is its focus on tactical leadership. Kilcullen is writing for majors, captains and lieutenants--the military's equivalent of middle managers. They're front-line officers facing complex, rapidly-changing situations with little (if any) real-time contact with the superiors who devised the strategy that they're responsible for implementing at a tactical level. But Kilcullen emphasizes that their personal leadership at the tactical level is the key to large-scale strategic success. Here are just three examples of Kilcullen encouraging his "middle manager" readers to think about the big picture:
12. Prepare for handover from Day One. Believe it or not, you will not resolve the insurgency on your watch. Your tour will end, and your successors will need your corporate knowledge. Start handover folders, in every platoon and specialist squad, from day one. Ideally, you would have inherited these from your predecessors, but if not you must start them. The folders should include lessons learned, details about the population, village and patrol reports, updated maps, photographs: anything that will help newcomers master the environment. Computerized databases are fine, but keep good back-ups and ensure you have hard copy of key artifacts and documents. This is boring, tedious and essential. Over time, you will create a corporate memory that keeps your people alive.
18. Remember the global audience. One of the biggest differences between the counterinsurgencies our fathers fought and those we face today is the omnipresence of globalized media. Most houses in Iraq have one or more satellite dishes. Web bloggers, print, radio and television reporters and others are monitoring and commenting on your every move. When the insurgents ambush your patrols or set off a car bomb, they do so not to destroy one more track, but because they want graphic images of a burning vehicle and dead bodies for the evening news. Beware the "scripted enemy," who plays to a global audience and seeks to defeat you in the court of global public opinion. You counter this by training people to always bear in mind the global audience, assume that everything they say or do will be publicized, and befriend the media. Get the press onside: help them get their story, and trade information with them. Good relationships with non-embedded media--especially indigenous media--dramatically increase your situational awareness, and help get your message across to the global and local audience.
23. Practise armed civil affairs. Counterinsurgency is armed social work; an attempt to redress basic social and political problems while being shot at. This makes civil affairs a central counterinsurgency activity, not an afterthought. It is how you restructure the environment to displace the enemy from it. In your company sector, civil affairs must focus on meeting basic needs first, then progress up Maslow's hierarchy as each successive need is met. A series of village or neighborhood surveys, regularly updated, are an invaluable tool to help understand the populations' needs, and track progress in meeting them over time. You need intimate cooperation with inter-agency partners here--national, international and local. You will not be able to control these partners--many NGOs, for example, do not want to be too closely associated with you because they need to preserve their perceived neutrality. Instead, you need to work on a shared diagnosis of the problem, building a consensus that helps you self-synchronize. Your role is to provide protection, identify needs, facilitate civil affairs and use improvements in social conditions as leverage to build networks and mobilize the population.
To be clear, if you're an organizational leader in search of guidance, I'm not necessarily recommending that you read Kilcullen's paper, although it's fascinating in its own right. I'm not one of those people who study Musashi's A Book of Five Rings or Sun Tzu's The Art of War seeking to translate them into guides for contemporary business leaders; analogies between business and war generally strike me as childish. But I do think there's a lesson for everyone in Kilcullen's implicit endorsement of tactical (or middle) leadership.
Thanks to George Packer's outstanding Knowing the Enemy (it's long; here's a printer-friendly version) in the Dec. 18, 2006 New Yorker, which sent me in search of Kilcullen's paper in the first place.
