The following reflection highlights how a transparent, communicative, engaged leadership approach helps mitigate one of the truths of fighting a war: "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." In the fluid and rapidly changing situation we find ourselves in, it might be wise to lean on some military wisdom in our response.
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I was an air cadet in the 1980s in Mississauga. One of the major pillars of that program is teaching leadership. I took summer courses on it and spent at least dozen hours over and above school each week working through cadet syllabus on it. It's safe to say air cadets was a seminal experience for me in that it not only showed me how I can best fit into an operational structure, but also how to run one effectively in a changeable environment.
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While all the other flight sergeants split their groups up into the standard squads (one experienced NCO leading 4-5 very excited and inexperienced younger cadets) and ran things top down, Pete differentiated his leadership approach based on the human resources he had at hand. His plan was to create a massive group of all the new recruits who were anxious and a bit freaked out and move into the exercise with this slow moving but unstoppable unit. He knew he had a few experienced and gung-ho junior NCOs who wanted to run, so rather than hold them back in the big group he told us to recon where the other teams were and report back.
We began hoovering up squads and about an hour in I stumbled across the other team's flag - the one we had to capture that would end the game. I barely got out of there alive (if they pulled the flag off your arm you're considered retired), they had two of their most experienced squads on defence. I managed to get away and ran back breathless to tell Rudin where the flag was. Ten minutes later it was all over as our hive swarmed over the hill into the dell where their flag was hidden. The two squads they'd put on defence couldn't believe what was coming at them. Our youngest, tiniest new cadet took the flag and ended the game (I think Pete made a point of that).
Afterwards, I asked Flight Sergeant Rudin how he came up with this bizarre approach. He said something I've never forgotten: "I figured if I tried to keep you guys back with the big group you'd be hard to manage and it wouldn't help things. We'd perform better if I didn't have to micromanage when you wanted to be doing something else that would produce better results for all of us anyway. The little ones looked terrified, so I wanted to keep them with me and build their confidence."
We were the younger team in that capture the flag, with less experienced NCOs - the other team was cocky and confident because they had many ringers. Rather than open up the rule-book and follow homogeneous protocols designed around top-down control that would have ended up with us losing, Pete differentiated his leadership approach and gave each of his people just what they needed to succeed. He also arranged things so that everyone was in contact with everyone else and made communication easier by giving us a clear focus to return to, it really was a brilliant piece of planning beautifully executed.
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I ended up retiring a sergeant in cadets. Others have suggested that only making it half way up the command structure is somehow a failure, but I don't see it that way. I finished my career as Rifle Guard Commander and Colour Party Commander and occupied a specialist role in our large organization. The metacognitive awareness of how I can operate most effectively in a large organizational structure was another invaluable result of my time in cadets. I'm very much a sergeant - good at dealing with tangible, immediate issues in small groups collaboratively and imaginatively (handy classroom teacher skills, eh?). Given latitude I liked to exercise initiative and move quickly - did this sometimes get me into trouble? Yep, but the leaders I had recognized those skills and made a point of leveraging them. That made me feel like a valued member of the organization, rank wasn't the only thing that defined me.
I was good friends with many of the younger cadets who ended up in charge of our squadron - many of them attended my 50th birthday party last year (we're all old now, so those year or two differences don't matter any more - but then they didn't back then either). They didn't make rank about exclusion, privilege and control and they acknowledged their cadets' expertise and experience by making productive use of them by differentiating the roles they assigned.
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I'm missing that transparency, clarity of purpose and engagement now, even though not one of the teens I just described had a post graduate degree in leadership. If we are indeed at war as Colin suggests, then we need to quickly engage and develop effective communications and a clarity of common purpose, or all of those secret plans being developed behind closed doors won't survive first contact with an enemy we've too often underestimated. Initiative is lost, but it's never too late to try and get it back.