First, who am I?
Graduate U.S. Naval Academy, Masters degree in Computer Systems Management, over 30 years managing people in groups of up to 1300, over 20 years on U.S. Navy surface ships, command of two ships (a destroyer escort and a nuclear-powered cruiser), 4 years in charge of the nuclear reactors of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, plant manager of a large fossil powered electric generating station, executive in charge of over 1000 unionized employees conducting overhauls of electric generating station boilers, turbines and auxiliaries.
In the process of managing people for 30+ years, I made every error in managing people known to man, many repeatedly. But the main point is that I did learn the solutions to all problems and was able to stop making any errors of importance.
My education at the Naval Academy taught me a lot about leaders, specific leaders like John Paul Jones. I learned a lot of stories and studied Naval History. Leadership was not taught as a science with theory and methods. It was presented more as an art form, but given great stature because of the considerable accomplishments of famous naval leaders. Those officers who achieved something extra special were termed great leaders.
At the same time, my education gave me lots of very specific knowledge of combatant ship systems such as weapons and propulsion or skills such as navigation and seamanship, complete with theory and methods. By comparison, leadership had no foundation and few how-tos.
For my first 12 years, I was assigned to positions of authority on 5 different ships. I was very busy. The days were long (generally 12-18 hours), the responsibilities were great ( e.g. ship at sea or a 2 reactor 24/7 test program) and I was never quite able to do everything I knew was needed. I applied myself to getting things done the best way I could. I was considered to be an outstanding, tough officer, well respected and somewhat feared by those who were poor performers.
During this time, I knew that I was supposed to be a leader and that I had to manage my assigned group. What I did not know at the time was the connection between the two; that managing people is all about leadership, no more and no less, no other way than leadership because of how people act or react to bosses. Without this knowledge, I read a lot about leadership in the civilian world, but it remained undefined, an art form. No matter where I searched, leadership did not have the backing of the reliable theory and specific how tos which were so much a part of the other aspects of my professional life such as navigation, naval gunnery or mechanical and electrical engineering.
As concerns managing people, I was uneasy about lots of things. Among others, I was
I was particularly concerned with not being able to improve the performance of my mediocre and worse sailors. I was a great believer in force, the use of power to gain performance. What other tool did I have?
After 12 years of long hard days, I was assigned to the Naval Postgraduate School to pursue a Masters degree in Computer Systems Management. I decided to make use of the library in an attempt to learn what I should do to improve as a manager of people. I found two bits of wisdom.
One of the books I read was a large one on organizational behavior, a series of case studies by Harvard professors. One of the case studies portrayed a short, somewhat ugly, stooped over and poorly dressed manager who was continually coughing up flem. This man was a terrible manager who exemplified how bad one can be in managing a group of people. He was greatly disliked by his people.
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This same man was the focus of another study done some years later, but this time he exemplified how an exceptionally good manager, president of a large company, can achieve truly superior results with his people. He looked, dressed and coughed the same as he had in the previous study, but was adored by his people. When asked what he did to make such a change, he related how mad he had been at reading the first study of himself and how after calming down he had realized it was true. After that, he embarked on a journey to learn all that he could about managing and leading people. The Bottom Line? Anyone can change from being the worst to the best, if they want to do so badly enough. What’s more, you don’t have to be big, good-looking and well dressed.
The second bit of wisdom I learned came from one of the conclusions voiced in the same book. The conclusion was a sort of Copernican theory that workers do not rotate around the boss (the sun). No, the boss actually rotates around the workers and without the warming heat of the workers, the boss dies.
I thought about this Copernican theory long and hard. It made a lot of sense. I admitted that my ship would never be any better than the sum of all the actions taken by each and every sailor to operate and maintain its equipment, electronics and machinery. I had to admit that the sailors were producing the only useful output while what I produced was solely to support their efforts by way of tools, procedures, technical support, rules, discipline, training, direction, and the like. If the sailors did everything well, the ship would be one of the best. I could only make their jobs easier or harder to perform.
This thinking made me realize how important the troops really are. So I reviewed my own performance over the past 12 years and realized that I had spent very little time listening to the troops. I had been much too busy figuring out what my next order would be to find out what the troops thought about things. But if the Copernican theory was right, and I could see no possibility that it wasn’t, how come I did not spend more time listening to them? I determined to do exactly that.
As soon as I started listening to the troops, asking what they wanted to know, did not like or wanted to suggest, I found that they had lots of questions which should be answered and that they made some good points in their complaints and suggestions. So it was only fair that I try to resolve every issue as best I could and then find out from the originator if my resolution was satisfactory. Sometimes, just a little explanation or making known things they did not know or did not understand was enough to resolve the issue. I made sure that I was good to my word in getting back to them with the answers or resolutions. Much of this was done at group meetings of 40-60 people.
Surprisingly, not only did morale and spirits improve but so did performance. The more problems I resolved, the more their performance improved. I won’t go into any more detail of this part of my development except to relate what I learned from a few years of experience. Suffice it to say that I learned a great deal by listening.
I learned that Leadership is one side of a coin called Core Values and that the flip side of that coin is stamped Following. I learned that leadership (or following) is all about values or more succinctly about the standards of each value being transmitted to and received by each employee. I learned that every person knows that the good core values, call them shared values if you like, are those such as honesty, industriousness, fairness and forthrightness. They also know that the opposites of the good values are bad values.
I also learned that every event, condition and piece of paper in the workplace sends one or more core value standard messages to employees. From these many, many leadership messages, most employees derive a set of value standards, some good and some bad. They use this set of value standards, not their own, to perform their work, to determine how to act toward customers and each other -- how honestly or dishonestly, how responsibly or irresponsibly, how industriously or lazily, how courteously or discourteously and on and on.
Please think of the standard as being on a 1 to 10 scale. We all know that love is a good core value, but due to having had different experiences some of us think that love is terribly important (10) while others think it not very important (2). The workplace may actually be communicating a negative love standard (-5) which means hate (5) so that is what followers may use to treat others in the workplace. This is what really happens.
I also learned that only, MEANING NO OTHER WAY, by listening to subordinates could I determine where I needed to improve my own leadership, leadership which would reflect higher standards for only good core values, never bad, leadership which would lead followers to better performance.
After these discoveries, I applied myself to making sure that most events, conditions and pieces of paper reflected only the highest standards for every good core value. Employee performance improved as those who were followers, 90% plus of all subordinate bosses and juniors, followed the improvements in my leadership. In essence, they had always been waiting for better leadership from me and I had not known it before my discoveries. Before this time in my leadership development, I had been too concerned with leadership style to realize that followers only absorb a leader’s transmission of core value standards and could care less about his/her style.
At
about the same time, I noted that the performance of those who were not
followers, performance that had always been high, did not change much. I will
refer to these people as non-followers because they refuse to blindly follow
the boss’ transmitted value standards. Non-followers use only their own value
standards (all of which are good values as opposed to the possibility of the
boss’ transmission of bad values) to determine how industriously, honestly or
whatever to perform their work and treat their customers. Non-followers also
use 100% of their brainpower on their work while followers use most of theirs
in trying to conform and in detecting what they must conform to. This means
that non-followers unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation,
productivity, motivation and commitment (all of which come from the brain) while
followers are too busy conforming to unleash theirs.
Unfortunately, I was too busy at the time leading followers toward
higher standards to integrate this significant observation into my leadership
theory or to develop the leadership skills to make use of it. That came later.
At this point, I shifted jobs and was replaced by a manager who cared much more about whom he had to know to be promoted than about providing good leadership to his people. As he allowed events, conditions and paper to degrade to lower standards, performance dropped and within a year the performance of the followers had fallen back to their original low level. I was very disappointed, and I mean very, very disappointed that I had built a house of cards.
Later, the light went on in my head! Why not make everyone a non-follower so that they will not waste their brainpower on conforming and won’t ever follow bad leadership back down again?
After a lot of effort spent learning about non-followers, I created and proved a set of leadership skills, actually techniques, complete with supporting leadership theory, by which to lead followers to be strong and independent non-followers. The first key to creating non-followers was to almost force followers to use their own value standards in performing work rather than the standards they spend so much valuable time detecting and absorbing from workplace events and conditions. The second key was to release them to the power of their own suppressed motivation. This is what I now consider to be “true empowerment”, the freeing of followers from the bondage of following.
I must admit that I was as surprised as anyone when the use of these leadership skills resulted in over 300% per person productivity gains in a 1000 person unionized group. At least 40% of this gain and possibly as much as 60% was due to making followers into non-followers, my version of empowerment. Please realize that without conversion to non-followership, people can easily be led back to mediocrity or worse. And this much-larger-than-I-could-have-dreamed productivity increase showed me that what we normally expect people can achieve is far, far below their true capabilities. Think about that for a minute.
This is the end of this story, but it tells only a part of the development of my leadership skills. The skills in my book were founded on the concepts and principles related above as well as others too numerous to mention herein. The leadership skills to which I refer are a set of whats, whys (leadership theory) and how-tos which I personally developed, used and revised over a period of more than 30 years.
These leadership skills were the core of the leadership training I provided to my junior bosses, people of varying backgrounds, personalities and beliefs. These bosses proved over time that average people can learn and successfully use these leadership skills with relative ease, regardless of personality. In the process of becoming exceptional managers of people, their leadership and management styles became non-issues.
This experience proved to me that leadership can be considered a science based on specific human characteristics which are common to us all. The whats and how tos contain rules and uses which always apply without exception, just the way it should be with any science.
Leaders have too often been placed on high pedestals while the art of leadership has too often appeared to be beyond the comprehension of common people. This is a delusion at best, a means to keep us all in awe at worst. Leadership skill as well as leadership theory is easy to understand, straightforward and inherently natural to humans. The tools which make this art easy to learn and easy to implement are what I present in my book, “Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed”. I use the term “easy” since these leadership tools fit perfectly into the way each of us would like things to be because of our commonly shared core values and other characteristics.
BUY at AMAZON, "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed" (previously titled "How to Unleash
the Power of People")