Newswire: The Evolution of Military Leadership
Friend and colleague Karl Moore (McGill University) interviews U.S. Army Commanding General Martin Dempsey on how the military is moving toward a model where trust is a currency more valuable than control. Here are a few excerpts:
- Leadership Lessons From a Four-Star General
by Karl Moore, The Globe and Mail
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 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.
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." So, I think where we're heading is to more trust than control. And we have been the quintessential hierarchical organization. And, in that capacity, leadership will move around the table. Now, we'll always have our rank structure. We'll always have our disciplines. But I think that you will see us evolve into an organization where trust is as much the coin of the realm as control is.
There's a very deliberate process where we take concepts and turn them into requirements, and requirements and turn them into resources. And that has to happen in a hierarchical fashion, so that the government can continue to function. And we have to “nest into” that process. So, at the Department of the Army level in particular, there will always be a hierarchical structure that essentially allows us to compete for resources based on concepts and requirements. But, below that, I think, absolutely we are seeing that there's real potential in decentralizing.
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Posted by Michael McKinney at 04:59 PM
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