Leadership

General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of U.S. and International forces in Afghanistan gives an engaging TED Talk on leadership.

The military – with its core of discipline – sometimes seems like a world apart from a business environment. However, it is interesting how many of General McChrystal’s comments prove relevant to business leadership today. I’ll expand on a few of these extrapolated from the general’s talk:

Preparation for leadership begins long before events happen that reveal that leadership front and center. In his TED Talk, it becomes evident that the journey to a leadership position begins long before the assumption of that role. While leadership is always important, events that accentuate the critical and strategic importance of leadership happen infrequently. Nevertheless, it is often in times of crisis that true leadership is revealed. McChrystal talks about his training, his upbringing, and the mentorship that helped to shape his readiness to assume the key leadership role in Afghanistan. General McChrystal’s Ted Talk affirms Vince Lombardi’s quote: “Leaders are made, they are not born.”

Leaders allow you to fail without making you feel like a failure. General McChrystal said his best lessons in leadership were from superior commanders who let you fail, but in the process made you feel confident in your abilities, your team, and your own capabilities to lead that team.

Leaders now need to be able to interact with virtual teams via technology. Military (and business) leadership has changed. Collaboration (with a coalition) is the order of the day. Strategic leadership roles today are not about managing a tightly knit platoon that you can see and physically interact with every day. Today major leadership roles are about managing a vast array of resources, people, interests, points of view and conditions using technology to communicate, collaborate and direct others. What becomes evident in McChrystal’s talk is that virtual teams are here to stay, and anybody who is in a key leadership role today, needs to understand how to harness these virtual teams to obtain important objectives.

Leaders need to build “shared purpose.” With collaboration and virtual teams being the new order of the day, one of the biggest challenges for today’s leaders is creating a strong sense of shared purpose amongst a diverse group of people and perspectives.

Leaders need to rely on good data. In the military, they use the term “intel” (military intelligence), but bottom line in the military or business, it is all about data and turning that data into useful, strategic information that will provide insights for effective action. Bad intel or data, will eventually lead to poor decisions.

Leaders need to stay credible even with an “inversion of expertise.” According to General McChrystal, the military has an inversion of expertise. The younger people in the military often have a better grasp of digital technologies (and their usefulness) than their leaders. The same can be said for organizations today. With the rapid integration of digital technologies into the business and marketing landscape, younger team members at a firm often have superior knowledge in this subject area. This can most recently be seen in the explosion of social media and content in the business environment. Leaders need to stay credible in spite of this inversion of expertise and it is why smart leaders need assimilate these new points of view into their leadership competencies.

General McChrystal’s talk is a true lesson in leadership. I think you will find it well worth your while to listen to what he has to say.