Force Multiplying leaders amplify the capabilities, effectiveness, and morale of their teams at cultural, strategic, and tactical levels. People on their teams perform better together than they would on their own. At the highest level, those teams amplify the capabilities, effectiveness, and morale of other teams by thinking, communicating, and operating as one organization.
At one level, this is in line with Eugene Shen and Phil and Allan Maymin’s “Skills Plus Minus” framework and its analysis of the power of leveraging complementary strengths across attitudinal, relationship, and behavioral elements. At a whole different level, that framework requires the right leader – especially when it comes to making the entire organization.
In Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, authors Willink and Babin tell a story about swapping the leaders of the dominating and lagging boats during SEAL training Hell Week. The previously lagging boat started winning. The previously dominant boat kept doing almost as well as the now winning boat. The lesson goes to the immediate and enduring effect of a strong leader.
John Hall has led military and commercial teams as a Navy SEAL Platoon Commander and then CEO of Voxtec International and COO at Platform Science. He shared his perspective with me and in an article on Force Multiplying Leadership.
His fundamental premise is that the strongest force multipliers are servant leadership teams, not individuals. The power is in the plural, not the singular.
As individual servant leaders, their first question would be “How can I help?”
But they’re not thinking like individuals. As servant leadership teams, they ask the second question, “How can WE help?” It’s about people with individual and distinct expertise sharing a “collective attitude of cooperation and commitment” to serving others. They think as a team. They act as a team. They talk about team successes. They constantly improve the way they work as a team.
Then, teams operating at the highest level ask the third set of questions, “Who else can we help?” and “Who else needs to know?” “Who else will be affected?” “Who else can benefit from what we’re doing and learning?” This is all about communication and coordination – sharing information, tactics, intelligence, improvements to standard operating procedures with the broader organization. That’s the ultimate force multiplier.
As a NAVY SEAL Platoon Leader, Hall focused on the 16 SEALS that made up his platoon, reminding them on a regular basis of these three sets of questions so they operated a single unit inextricably linked to the broader organization. As a corporate CEO, his department leaders forged their departments into high function teams while Hall set the culture of the overall organization. He co-created the strategy with his department leaders. Then he stayed out of their way so they could make unencumbered tactical adjustments – for their teams, for other teams, and for the organization as a whole.
Implications for you:
- Assemble people with complementary strengths. High-performing teams are made up of people with different innate talents, different learned knowledge, different practiced skills, and different hard-won experience. In some, but not all cases, teams may need experts with craft-level caring and sensibilities.
- Rally team members around an inspiring shared purpose, making sure they all understand why what they’re doing matters (the mission,) what success looks like for them and for others – including other teams adding up to the overall organization (vision and intent.) Servant leaders that believe why what they are doing matters ooze a desire to help from every pore.
- Invest the time to build trust in other individuals’ and teams’ intentions and capabilities, and what Stan McChrystal calls a shared consciousness so they are well enough connected to each other and a shared situational awareness to be able to best leverage each other’s strengths. This goes to Hall’s question about who else needs to know.
- Be clear on how leadership nests with the overall organization’s leader guiding the culture (who we are), making sure all voices are heard in setting the strategy (where we play and how we win), and letting the person with the most appropriate strengths and ground-level feel make tactical decisions (deploying resources at the decisive point.)
- Put in place an accountability and feedback loop so each individual, team, and the overall organization become ever stronger and more capable.
Click here for a categorized list of my Forbes articles (of which this is #941)
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