FIRST, MANAGE YOURSELF


FIGURE 1


Another thing that is happening is that customer expectations are always rising. So customers expect more from compa- nies, but they don’t necessarily want to pay proportionately more for what they expect. When the iPhone was first introduced, Apple found that customers wouldn’t pay a premium price, and Apple had to reduce it. I suspect the military faces similar pres- sures—more is expected from the military but, given your budgets, you have to figure out how to do more with less.


I haven’t done any work with the mili- tary. But I know there is a lot of effort to modernize the Army, to make sure that you have the talent that can actually use the kinds of high-tech equipment, artifi- cial intelligence or data analytics we see these days. And I think that in the mili- tary, you have always had demographic diversity—probably more than we see in business—and you probably have even more these days. And for the military, the stakes are as high as they get—national security and people’s lives.


We are living in a relatively slow economy with all kinds of political uncertainties. Budgets are very tight, and you need to have money to invest in new technologies and to attract and retain top talent. I can only imagine that in the military, you truly need great leaders, not just good ones, who can cope with the complex- ity of issues and constituencies and the dynamism you face.


We talk about those three imperatives of leadership—managing yourself, man- aging your team, and managing the network of all those people over whom you have no formal authority but you are deeply dependent on to get your job done—both inside and outside the mili- tary. Everybody cares about what the military is doing. Managers everywhere have to figure out how to manage up,


80


THREE ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITIES TO BUILD


Increase your team’s ability to solve problems innovatively by replacing the judgment-free—and occasionally therefore decision-free—practice of brainstorming with the concept of creative abrasion, whereby members of the team advocate for their ideas but are also open to rigorous questions. Moving from idea to prototype or other quick experiment gives you creative agility. The essence of creative resolution is that the team knows exactly who’s going to make the final decision, but all viewpoints are welcomed during the search for a solution. (SOURCE: Figure III-2 from “Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation,” by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove and Kent Lineback. Reprinted with permission.)


manage across and manage down. Even the very senior ones—and they also have to deal with Congress and the public.


Army AL&T: In the introduction to


“Being the Boss,” you say your dad taught you that integrity and caring are at the heart of great management. What did your Army life tell you about the role of adaptability in an organization that


is


now 242 years old and is bound to some extent by tradition and yet is trying to invite intellectual diversity?


Hill: One of the things I saw my father have to do is go into many different kinds of settings and figure out what was going on, establish credibility, develop a strategy and start to deliver in whatever context he found himself in. So, like in business, military leaders have to have both contextual intelligence—the ability to diagnose situations—and emotional intelligence, the ability to build relation- ships with diverse others quickly and in new environments.


Army AL&T Magazine


July-September 2017


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161  |  Page 162