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Published: 1 June 2009
Air & Space Power Journal - Summer 2009
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Senior Leader Perspectives |
Dr. Raymond A. Shulstad, Brigadier General, USAF, Retired
It was 21 April 2006, my retirement day from the MITRE Corporation and from my 40-year professional career.1 As I sat in an auditorium on MITRE’s Bedford, Massachusetts, campus and listened to my bosses and others praise and thank me for my contributions, I thought back over that career, which included 28 years with the Air Force, five with industry, and the last seven with MITRE. I reflected on the many different jobs I had had, the challenges I had faced, the leaders who had mentored me, and the accomplishments that I was proud of. I was struck by the fact that either the people who worked for me or my organizations—not I—should take credit for almost all of those accomplishments. They resulted from the leadership and management I had provided to people and organizations and, of course, others’ hard work, initiative, and innovation.
For many years, I recognized that leadership and management, coupled with the performance of talented, hard-working people and teamwork, were the essential ingredients for an organization’s success and mission effectiveness. For that reason, I placed a high priority on improving my leadership and management skills and on developing those of my subordinates. Although I was proud of the contributions I had made over the years, as I sat there listening to my bosses praise my leadership and management, I couldn’t help asking myself if I had done enough to pass on my perspectives and knowledge in this critical area.
As I settled into retirement and reflected on this question, I came to believe that I should have done at least one thing that I hadn’t—formally document my perspectives and knowledge in writing. However, over the past 20 years, I had developed and continuously expanded informal, unpolished notes entitled “Perspectives on Leadership and Management,” which I used in a two-hour presentation at various formal and informal leadership and management training programs. I also gave this presentation (or a derivative) to my subordinates within a month of taking charge in every organization that I led. Although I had been asked for copies of my notes many times over the years, I never accommodated those requests because, although good enough for me to talk from, they were too rough to pass out to my audiences. After my retirement, I received support from MITRE to polish the notes into a report designed to contribute to the company’s development programs in leadership and management. Based on that report, this article reflects my attempt to capture and pass on my perspectives on and knowledge of leadership and management.
I need to mention a couple of caveats up front. First, when it comes to leadership and management, no universal model exists, and I strongly believe that leadership and management approaches must be adapted to the situation. Second, this article is not all inclusive; that is, I have not attempted to include everything needed for effective leadership and management. Nonetheless, the principles, philosophies, perspectives, and approaches presented here have served me and many others extremely well in a broad spectrum of organizational environments. Third, the article is based on the personal knowledge and experience that I acquired over my 40-year professional career. Some of that knowledge comes from professional reading and from the many formal leadership and management programs I attended. But an equally important source is the experience I acquired in a broad spectrum of demanding leadership and management jobs. Finally, the outstanding and competent leaders I worked for throughout my career have strongly influenced my knowledge and perspectives. Each of those leaders, like all of us, had his or her own style, strengths, and weaknesses. I learned something from every single one of them.
Before someone can adopt a leadership or management style, he or she has to consider personal philosophical beliefs. For me, it begins with a deep sense of confidence in people. I believe that they really want to do a good job and satisfy their bosses. Therefore, leadership has the fundamental responsibility of making expectations clear and creating an environment where people can succeed. Second, I believe in the power of positive attitude. In his book Escape from the Box, Ed Hubbard asserts and defends the notion that people can do almost anything if they believe they can and are willing to put forth the effort.2 My experiences over the past 40 years strongly support Hubbard’s philosophy. Third, setting goals is important, but once people have the goal, they need a plan and must measure progress against the plan. Fourth, customer satisfaction and mission accomplishment always come before organizational interests. Most of the time, it is possible to harmonize actions and decisions to support both, but when a conflict arises, the customer and mission must come first. Finally, if a leader wishes to take an organization forward and effect change, he or she must instill both pride in past accomplishments and excitement about future challenges and opportunities. Leaders have the fundamental responsibility of convincing people that no matter how well they have done in the past, their best is yet to come
It is not useful to spend a lot of time trying to distinguish between leadership and management, but since this issue comes up so often, I will comment on how I think about it. First, one should look at the functions that are clearly interdependent and overlapping. Management functions include establishing objectives, planning, organizing, directing, and controlling execution. Leadership functions include setting the vision, goals, strategies, and priorities and then motivating people to fulfill them. Leadership involves getting people to execute management’s plan. In his briefings on leadership, Colin Powell sets the leadership bar even higher when he says, “Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.”3
Others have approached the distinction a little differently. For example, some say that we manage things (e.g., processes, cost, schedule, performance, etc.) and lead people. Of course, most jobs require both. Others, like Warren Bennis, writing in Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge, say that “managers do things right while leaders do the right things.”4 Again, we really need both: leaders who are good managers and managers who are good leaders. Faced with making a choice, though, we should think about Bennis’s observation that failing organizations are usually overmanaged and underled.5
Before getting into a discussion of what I believe are the essential elements of good leadership, I’d like to offer some general comments on leadership.
Many organizations have developed leadership-competency models to serve as the cornerstone of their leadership-development programs. The models highlight qualities or competencies important to leadership, including integrity, vision, technical competence, management skills, communication skills, and a customer/mission focus. Of these, the most important quality is integrity, the bedrock of character because character and integrity are essential to gaining people’s respect and inspiring their confidence. Ultimately, these qualities determine whether people will follow someone and whether that person’s leadership will be effective.
Occasionally, leaders will make mistakes, but most of the time, they can recover and remain effective except when the error involves an integrity issue. At times, doing the right thing can be difficult, but no one ever goes wrong by always doing the right thing! In his lectures, Gen Norman Schwarzkopf has addressed this issue even more emphatically when on occasion he has said, “Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character, but if you must be without one, be without strategy.”
Clearly, leaders are made and not born. As in my own case, leadership is developed through formal instruction, learning from other leaders, and, most importantly, through experience. Leaders must improve their knowledge continuously and then apply it to the job. There is just no substitute for a person’s learning by doing and then practicing what he or she has learned. People who can’t say they are better leaders today than they were five years ago are not working hard enough at it!
Good, effective leaders must (1) care about people; (2) set the organization’s direction in terms of vision, goals, priorities, and strategies; (3) communicate effectively; (4) embrace and instill a positive attitude; (5) stay proactive; and (6) mentor and develop subordinates:
Care about People. The fact that mission accomplishment largely depends upon efforts of the leader’s people, not his or her own, compels a people-oriented focus. Leaders must empower, inspire, enable, encourage, and support subordinates. Their welfare is of great import, and leaders must show them with words and actions that they really care about them. Telling followers what they need to do and delegating the “how” to them enables them to accomplish much more than any leader ever thought possible. Delegation creates a greater sense of responsibility in people that synergistically enhances their strong, innate desire to succeed and satisfy the leader, who should not forget to praise and reward them when they do a good job. Equally important, they should receive immediate feedback if they fall short and disappoint. Finally, if their behavior is inappropriate or their performance substandard, the leader must counsel or reprimand them and take action, including firing in some cases. The morale, order, and effectiveness of the organization as well as leadership effectiveness depend on correcting the situation promptly.
A tough job, whether managing a project or running an organization, demands selection of the right people for the leadership team. In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins advises leaders to put the right people on the bus before even figuring out where the bus ought to go.6 Colin Powell’s lecture “A Leadership Primer” cites 18 lessons in leadership learned over his career. In lesson number eight, Powell asserts that “organization doesn’t really accomplish anything. Plans don’t accomplish anything either. Theories of management don’t matter much. Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved.”7 Further emphasizing the importance of people, he sets forth his rules for picking people as lesson number 13: “intelligence and judgment, and, most critically, a capacity to anticipate, . . . loyalty, integrity, a high energy drive, a balanced ego and the drive to get things done.”8 I agree completely with his rules and would add only one thought regarding how I selected people. I avoided filling key positions with stereotypes of myself, looking instead for opportunities to pick people who had strengths and personalities that would complement mine. The power of diversity cannot be overstated, but leaders must take those differences into account when they interact and communicate with people!
Set the Organization’s Direction. Organizational effectiveness, advancement, and alignment require the leader to collaboratively set and communicate the vision, supporting goals, priorities, and top-level strategy. To optimize contributions to the organization, people need to understand what it aspires to be and to achieve, as well as how it is trying to move in that direction. The organization benefits greatly when its people view their jobs not just as a set of tasks they get paid to do, but as work that contributes to the organization’s success.
Communicate Effectively. I cannot overemphasize the importance of effectively communicating organizational goals and expectations. Over my 40-year career, the root cause of many of the problems I saw was a failure to communicate. If the leader’s people understand the organization and mission, understand their roles, and know what he or she expects from them, I guarantee that the leader will rarely be disappointed. Leaders must work hard—and then harder—at communicating up, down, and across the organization. Here are a couple of examples of things I did to meet this challenge.
Within a month of taking over an organization, I would gather the first couple of layers of senior leaders and talk to them about my leadership and management style, my personality in terms of Myers-Briggs behavioral preferences, my expectations of them, and what they could expect from me. To communicate these matters to my subordinates, I had to take the time for self-reflection and figure these issues out myself. I held this session soon after I took over because I knew that the sooner they understood what I expected, the sooner I would get it from them. I described very specifically what I liked and didn’t like. For example, I told them I liked being informed and did not like surprises; I liked teamwork and did not like activity without action; I liked initiative and innovation and did not like passivity and stagnation; I liked and expected responsiveness when I asked them to do something; and I liked communication and action between staff meetings and did not like internecine bickering and whining.
Staff meetings are absolutely essential to organizational communication, but they are not sufficient. The message that a leader communicates at the meeting gets filtered and translated many times through many layers of the organization. Leaders simply don’t know what message actually gets communicated to many of their people, but they can do several things to address this problem. If the message is especially important, they can put it into an e‑mail or letter and personally send it to all employees. The leader can also hold periodic all-employee forums to discuss the organization’s state of health, celebrate achievements, and highlight current challenges. Another technique entails visiting each organizational unit annually and holding town meetings with a small but representative number of employees. At these meetings, lasting an hour or so, I would encourage their leaders to tell me about accomplishments, current work effort, and any issues they might have. I would then share with them my perspective on key organizational initiatives and challenges, asking for their support. The meetings would conclude with a question-and-answer period during which they could ask me anything.
Embrace and Instill a Positive Attitude. Leaders must embrace and promote a positive, success-oriented, can-do/will-do attitude. They must instill such an attitude in their people. No matter how tough the challenge, leaders should have confidence in themselves and their people. Then everyone must work as hard as necessary to attain the objective. In his famous reflection on the importance of attitude, the renowned philosopher Charles Swindoll concluded that “life is 10% about what happens to me and 90% about how I react to it.”9
Retired colonel Ed Hubbard, an Air Force colleague and hero of mine, spent six-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. In his book Escape from the Box, Ed maintains that he and fellow prisoners survived their ordeal by adopting an attitude that called for supporting their determination to survive with extraordinary efforts to keep their minds and bodies as healthy as possible. These efforts were complemented by a deep faith in their country and the unwavering belief that one day they would be free again and reunited with their loved ones. He supports this assertion with many gut-wrenching stories that illustrate the power of attitude. Simply stated, Colonel Hubbard’s philosophy, as espoused in his book, is that people can do anything if they believe they can and are willing to put forth the effort.10 I firmly believe that his philosophy reflects the kind of positive attitude required to become a successful leader. Embracing and instilling this philosophy in people are the key to and challenge of good leadership. People who don’t do this can’t be good leaders. Those who do, can’t miss.
Stay Proactive. Leaders must be proactive and assertive, taking the initiative and making things happen. They must not be afraid of making mistakes. When they do make one, they learn from it and then move on. They are bold and creative, encouraging their people to be the same. They also push them to become proactive, striving to spend more time preventing problems and less time solving them. They trust their instincts and are willing to make decisions on imperfect, incomplete information. And they accept accountability for those decisions.
Mentor and Develop Subordinates. Leaders have no greater responsibility than developing the leadership and management skills of those under them. They set the example, ever mindful that their subordinates are observing them. They spend a great deal of one-on-one time with their followers discussing organizational challenges, objectives, and strategies. In spite of the demands of carrying out the current mission, not only do they move their people into new positions in which they can continue to grow, but also they make them available for professional-development programs. They do so because they know that investing in their professional development also represents an investment in the future success of the organization.
I view management as having two basic aspects. The first focuses on managing projects or programs, and the second on managing the organization. I have divided this section of the article into these two basic management aspects.
Management of a project starts with a tangible objective that the organization desires to produce or attain. A manager then puts together a plan and a team, directs the team, and controls execution of the plan. Direction and control are facilitated by defining and measuring progress against the plan. Performance-to-plan metrics, which involve measuring actual values in terms of cost, schedule, and technical performance and comparing them to planned values during execution of a project, are essential to effective management.
As I moved into senior management positions, I focused more on organizational management and delegated project management to others. Effective delegation is challenging, but putting someone in charge and holding him or her accountable constitute the keys to success. Doing so can be greatly facilitated by senior management’s approving the objective and plan up front and then moving into a manage-by-exception mode. My subordinates understood that between in-process reviews, I assumed that the project was tracking to plan unless they informed me otherwise. I also consider such reviews fundamental to effective management and believe that managers must inspect to get what they expect. The question is how often and to what depth they must review progress. Unfortunately, the answer is not simple and depends on the importance of the objective and the confidence that managers have in the person they put in charge.
Effective management must orient itself on results and demand the measuring of progress and the taking of proactive action to stay on plan and prevent problems. When problems arise, the manager must take prompt action and get back on plan. I always preferred to use a collegial, collaborative approach to problem assessment and decision making, with participation by the team and outside experts. When building a consensus proved too hard or did not yield the best solution, however, I was ready to make the tough decisions.
Time management is probably the most important daily problem that every project manager faces. Splitting time among managing the project, solving problems, and reporting progress or problems to the management chain can become overwhelming at times. Managers always have too much to do, and they will never have enough staff. I have found that prioritization offers an answer to this dilemma. I operated off a “must do” weekly and daily list of actions as well as a mid-/long-term top-10 list that always had 10 items on it because whenever something was removed, something else replaced it.
My approach to organizational management (1) is goal driven; (2) integrates near-term action to support long-range vision and goals; (3) centralizes top-level planning and delegates detailed planning and execution to empowered, accountable people; (4) focuses on measurable results; (5) actively promotes organizational change and transformation; and (6) strives to align strategy from top to bottom in the organization. It is a tailored version of the Harvard Business School’s Balanced Scorecard approach, developed by Robert Kaplan and his colleagues, beginning in the mid-1990s.11
I had been applying early versions of my own approach, starting in the mid-1980s, as I began a 20-year journey to undertake a series of progressively higher-level organizational-management jobs. From 1986 to 1988, I led and managed the largest multiprogram system program office in Air Force Systems Command by baselining more than 70 programs’ cost, schedule, and key performance parameters. I conducted quarterly reviews of each program to assure it remained on course. Between reviews, I required program directors to report the cause of baseline deviations and send a “get well plan” to me. In 1989 I published the first corporate plan for the Rome Air Development Center, then one of the Air Force’s research and development laboratories. The plan laid out a vision and long-range goals to fulfill through a number of specific, near-term initiatives and strategies owned by senior leaders in the center.
Over the years, I brought the approach to maturity, based on my experience and Kaplan’s many papers and books on Balanced Scorecard. As I arrived in 2001 for my final assignment in organizational management with MITRE’s Air Force Center, I found that MITRE was moving toward such a management framework. With the encouragement of my superiors, active participation of my executive directors, and help from some extraordinarily smart and talented engineers, I seized the opportunity and pioneered the adoption of an advanced, Web-enabled form of the approach in the Air Force Center.
Until my last couple of years at MITRE, I did not openly admit that I was managing the organization using a Balance Scorecard type of approach. Three primary concerns drove my reluctance to do so. First, although Harvard is widely regarded as one of our premier management schools, many people considered a number of its concepts too academic and work-intensive to implement. Second, my review of a number of successful and failed case studies involving the Balanced Scorecard gave me concern that implementation focused too strongly on strategic alignment not linked in a meaningful way to tactical operations and execution. Finally, and related to the second concern, I thought that many of the metrics generated in support of corporate strategy maps overly emphasized easy-to-collect, but not really meaningful, activities instead of actions and results. My tailored approach greatly alleviated these concerns. In spite of my misgivings, I have the highest regard for Robert Kaplan and his Harvard colleagues, whose concepts and work have strongly influenced me.
The underlying operating model of my Balanced Scorecard approach is the formulation of a layered strategy map in which a vision drives long-range goals, which drive a number of objectives or outcomes, which spawn a number of near-term strategies and initiatives ultimately owned by one or more of the leaders and staff. This framework has the great advantage of explicitly recognizing near-term actions as the way to achieve long-term vision and goals. Long-range planning and tactical-operations planning are linked and integrated within the framework.
Over the years I spent in both government and industry, I found that about four or five long-term goals are sufficient to drive an organization toward its vision. One goal should focus on current mission performance and improvement, and another on growth or expansion of the mission. A third should concentrate on the organization’s value proposition, reducing its cost or improving its competitive position. A fourth should address an engaged and productive work force—that is, people. A for-profit company would have a fifth goal, focused on its financial well-being, measured principally by three outcome objectives: (1) an increase in sales or revenue, (2) good profit or margin, and (3) best-in-class shareholder value or return on investment.
In my approach, those four or five long-term goals of the corporation were supported by one or more broad, all-encompassing outcome objectives, each measured by a set of metrics as well as by tracking progress on initiatives that flowed down into the performance goals of the staff. The most important metrics included customer satisfaction, performance-to-plan for project delivery in terms of budget and staff years, work-program value and impact, and staff demographic data tracked over time to highlight trends.
We attained organizational alignment by flowing outcomes and initiatives down to every layer of the organization and ultimately into individual performance goals. From bottom to top, the work of the staff contributed to achieving the outcome objective, which advanced the organization toward its long-range goals and vision. Although this bottom-up contribution is good and essential, it is not sufficient to assure timely organizational responsiveness to a dynamic strategic environment. For that reason, I added a complementary top-down and more strategic contribution to the process in the form of an annual strategic-environment assessment of the implications of changes in our internal and external environment. I used the outcome of this assessment to identify focus initiatives and put a director-level team in charge of planning and making progress in these critical areas.
Before leaving the subject of organizational management, I want to highlight that I also used both the top-down and bottom-up elements of my approach to effect organizational change and transformation. No matter how good an organization, it can be better; and no matter how solid its business base, it can be improved. Spencer Johnson’s book Who Moved My Cheese? urges companies to move proactively to find better cheese before their current cheese goes bad or dries up.12 I believe strongly in his advice—it is far better to be proactive and innovative than remain complacent and risk obsolescence.
Certainly, none of the leadership and management approaches and best practices presented here is new or unique. To the contrary—they are time tested and proven successful by me and many others. I have merely tried to bring to bear my life experience as a real practitioner who has toiled in the trenches at many levels, and to offer a succinct, integrated overview. By sharing this, I hope that other leaders can apply these positive lessons in their jobs, grow professionally, and better prepare themselves for future leadership and management challenges.
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Notes
1. A not-for-profit, federally funded research and development center, MITRE provides systems engineering for information-technology systems to the government.
2. Edward L. Hubbard, Escape from the Box: The Wonder of Human Potential, ed. Art Nicolet (West Chester, PA: Praxis International, 1994), 58.
3. Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003), 255.
4. Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 20.
5. Ibid.
6. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap—and Others Don’t (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001), 13.
7. Oren Harari, The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 258.
8. Ibid., 259.
9. Charles Swindoll, Strengthening Your Grip (Nashville: Word, 1982), 207.
10. Hubbard, Escape from the Box, 259.
11. The Balanced Scorecard approach to organizational management and alignment calls for developing a strategy map to link vision to goals to objectives to initiatives, as well as defining and using metrics to measure progress.
12. This concept is explained in Spencer Johnson’s book Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life (New York: Putnam, 1998).
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Dr. Raymond Shulstad, Brigadier General, USAF, retired. (BS, University of Alabama; MS, PhD, Air Force Institute of Technology), is an independent consultant to industry and government for a broad range of topics, including organizational management and leadership, research and development, and systems engineering and acquisition. In 2006 he retired as the senior vice president and general manager of MITRE’s Center for Air Force Command and Control Systems. Prior to joining MITRE in 1999, he was the director of Strategic Planning for Surveillance and Battle Management Systems for Northrop Grumman Corporation. General Shulstad retired from the Air Force in 1994 after a distinguished 28-year career. His final assignments included vice-commander of the Aeronautical System Center at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio (1993–94), and vice-commander of the Electronic Systems Division, Hanscom AFB, Massachusetts (1991–93). His publications include Peace Is My Profession (National Defense University Press, 1986), a book that deals with the moral dimensions of US nuclear policy. |
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University
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