OPPORTUNITY (Q4.4)

A Position Within A Group That Provides The Holder With Leadership Experience As Part Of An LDP

When choosing Leaders, experience matters

Opportunity is the third phase of the LDP. While Schooling and Apprenticeship are critical building blocks in the Leadership Foundation, no man will ever become the Virtuous Leader he was born to be unless he has the Opportunity to actually Lead. The more Opportunities a Leader has, the better at it he will be, and the more the Groups of which he is a Member will benefit from the Leadership he provides.

Although they are similar, the primary difference between Opportunity and the do-stage of Apprenticeship is responsibility for Outcome. Upon emerging from Apprenticeship to Opportunity a Leader takes on full responsibility for the success or failure of his efforts. He can no longer look to his master, but must now pass on all of the praise and fully shoulder the entirety of the blame.

The success with which a Leader performs in his Opportunities should provide insight into whether he can be depended upon for increasingly important Leadership positions. We say “should” because this is an assessment that many Communities and most Organizations are unwilling or incapable of making properly. Despite the importance of Leadership to Community health and Organizational Effectiveness, the search for Leaders is often conducted without the customary due diligence performed for virtually any other job.

The one question an applicant can count on being asked in any employment interview is “what experience do you have with this kind of thing?” No matter what the actual job is, the interviewer is surely going to inquire into the degree to which the applicant has previously performed the same or similar function elsewhere. All other things being equal, past performance is the best indicator of future outcome. Experience always matters. Except, that is, when the search is for Leaders. In that case, Organizations and Communities consistently disregard a man’s inexperience (often to their detriment), relying instead upon their perception of his character rather than his demonstrated Skill.

It should be the opposite. Any Group that truly understands and values Leadership should insist that its Leaders have multiple and progressive Opportunities to Lead and would be very deliberate about both providing and assessing them. The process would be similar to the development of a pilot’s skills. Pilots first learn to fly on single-engine propellor-driven aircraft. From there (if successful), they move progressively upward to bigger aircraft, dual-props, instrument conditions, jet engines and ultimately (if competent) find themselves behind the yoke of a commercial aircraft with hundreds of passengers.

What passenger would place his life in the hands of a pilot who had skipped over some or all of those progressive steps in his development? No sane person would take that kind of risk with a pilot. But Communities and Organizations take it all the time with Leaders. Without passing any judgment on how he ultimately performed, there is little dispute that the forty-fourth President of the United States was elected despite having virtually no demonstrable Leadership experience of any kind. There could hardly be a bigger (and more challenging) Opportunity than chief executive of the United States of America, and yet that Community placed itself in the hands of a pilot who had never flown before.

How could that have happened? Here are the three reasons, which apply to any Group that hires Leaders:

Demand Exceeds Supply. The demand for Leaders so exceeds the available supply that Groups are forced to abandon experience as a screening criteria. When it comes to Leadership, Organizations are beggars who cannot really afford to be choosers.
Leadership Experience Is Too Rare To Matter. Since most people don’t have any Leadership experience there is no real point in asking about it. In other words, where all applicants are equally inexperienced, experience devolves into an irrelevant comparative criteria.
Ignorance Abounds. Most Groups don’t know how to look for Leadership experience because they don’t really know what a Leader is and does. In contrast, if an airline is looking for a pilot, it can ask an applicant how many hours he has in the cockpit of a particular aircraft. If a church is seeking a pastor, it can ask an applicant how many sermons he has given. But when an Organization needs a Leader, it doesn’t ask such specific questions to determine an applicant’s experience because the people asking the questions don’t know what to ask. As a result, airlines and churches, being Organizations that need Leaders just as much as they need pilots and pastors, just end up relying on those same pilots and pastors for Leadership as well, with predictably mixed results.

The best players do not always make the best coaches

The truth is that most Groups routinely place themselves in the hands of Governance that has little or no Leadership experience. Not surprisingly, most Groups also suffer from a deficit of Virtuous Leaders in their ranks. Consequently, most Groups are effectively Leaders-less, while some Groups (the lucky few) have some Virtuous Leaders.

But simply having Leaders is not the key to Effectiveness. To be truly Effective, an Organization must be an Organization of Leaders, because only an Organization of Leaders will be a Lizard that is efficient at growing its own Virtuous Leaders. Lizards don’t need to search externally for Leadership because it is part of their internal structure. Leaders are to Lizards as steel beams are to a skyscraper–they are what holds the thing up and together.

Leadership Opportunities are easy to find within a Lizard. The culture of such an Organization makes experience an indispensable criteria for Governance. The most obvious example is the military.

My service was in the Army, but I saw enough of the other services to believe it equally true across the board. In the military, the Governance is appointed by a selection process that is largely dependent upon demonstrated Leadership performance in a man’s prior Opportunities.

In the Army, a non-commissioned officer (an NCO) starts as a fire-team leader of 5 men, moves on to be squad leader of 11 men, then to platoon sergeant of 40 men, then to first sergeant of 160 men and finally to battalion sergeant major of 500 men.

In between each of those Leadership positions an NCO will likely have staff jobs that are more administrative in nature, but even there his Leadership Skills and Virtue are evaluated. An NCO’s career is spent in one successive Opportunity after another, during which his capability to shoulder increasing responsibility is evaluated, honed and developed. Based on the results of that development he is selected for increased responsibility. He is systematically given bigger planes to pilot.

The Opportunities for commissioned officers proceeds along a parallel course. In my nine years in the Army, two were spent in Schooling of some kind and the remaining seven were spread across six very different Opportunities. My performance in each of those Opportunities was evaluated annually in writing by both my boss and his boss.

Among the things that the Army required my bosses to evaluate were these eight specific character traits that are inherent to Leadership:

1. Dedication

2. Responsibility

3. Loyalty

4. Discipline

5. Integrity

6. Moral Courage

7. Selflessness

8. Moral Standards

For each of my six Opportunities I received a written evaluation report (called an OER) that addressed these Leadership characteristics. I still have all of my OERs in a loose-leaf notebook with the title The Good, The Bad and The Ugly written on the spine. I wrote that there 30 years ago because what I was reading in my OERs about myself was sometimes good, sometimes bad and often ugly, just like my performance as a Leader was. Just as it is now.

Rereading my OERs as I write this QPoint I can see how the younger version of me was having his Leadership Foundation constructed by the Organization in which I was a Member and Leader. It also reminds me of the Pain involved in doing so. There were times when I questioned whether I had any of the eight characteristics in sufficient quantity to have been entrusted with the invaluable lives of young soldiers and the (merely) very valuable equipment that our nation purchased for our use in its defense.

At 22 years old I was a platoon leader with 24 men and $2MM worth of gear. At 54 (as I write this), I am older than every man in my entire battalion was at the time and wonder if I had any business with that much responsibility at that age. On the other hand, I was not trying to do it alone. I was part of a Lizard whose Leaders were watching over me and my development. And that Organization was nothing if not Effective.

After my first Leadership position as a platoon leader, I had five more Opportunities, each with progressively more responsibility and complexity. Each job was very different but the evaluative criteria the Organization applied to my performance never changed. The same OER form was used by my boss and my boss’ boss regardless of the nature of the job I was doing.

Interestingly, the OER form does not provide a place to assess any of the actual skills associated with being a soldier. Thus, there is no block to grade how accurately I could shoot my rifle, how far I could throw a grenade or how far and fast I could march with a rucksack on my back. How could that be?

The reason is that the Army assumes its Leaders will be Competent in soldiering skills, while it promotes its Leaders on the basis of their Leadership Skills and Virtue. Almost every other Organization does the opposite. Promotion to Governance within most Organizations is usually based upon perceived character or demonstrated Competence within the skill set inherent to the Organization’s Articulated Purpose. So, the president of the Cordwainer Guild will likely be the guy who has an even temperament and makes the most shoes. There is some logic in that, but it does not fully follow that a man who is good at making shoes will be good at Leading an Organization of shoemakers.

Making shoes and Leading shoemakers are two different skill sets, like playing basketball and coaching it.

Because the best players do not always make the best coaches, a Lizard separates its evaluation on Leadership Skills from its assessment on the Skills that are inherent to its Mission.

The Virtuous Leader makes himself dispensable

For those who are willing and able to tolerate the Hardship, the help-stage ultimately gives way to the do-stage. Here, the apprentice Leads alongside the master, encountering his own Problems and fashioning his own Solutions–but with the master close by to offer advice, counsel and Correction. The apprentice in the do-stage is like a student pilot who is flying the Leadership-plane with the instructor available to grab the yoke should his inexperience put the Group-aircraft at risk.

It is in the do-stage that the apprentice first begins to Practice the positive tendencies that the master ingrained in him during the watch and help stages. Many, maybe most, of his initial Outcomes will be less than desirable. The master knows this because it was the same for him when he first began to do himself. Because he is a Virtuous Leader who seeks to Leave Right, the master rewards the apprentice’s Initiative and manages the Outcome, whatever it may be. In this way he Incentivizes I2 within the apprentice and begins developing him into a Sua Sponte Leader.

The development of a Sua Sponte Leader is the goal of the master-Leader. His ultimate objective should be the production of Leaders who are as Virtuous (or more) than himself–in other words, to work himself out of a job. If you have ever been a Member of a Lizard Organization this will not be a novel concept. In the military (for one example) working yourself out of your job by training your subordinates to do it better than you do is a Leadership Principle.

That is where I learned it. On the other hand, if you have spent your life in Organizations that were Bullfrogs and Leeches, the idea will probably be both surprising and threatening. Why would anyone make himself expendable by creating a better (and younger) version of himself?

That is a logical response in a Bullfrog where Existential Continuity makes maintenance of the Status Quo paramount, or in a Leech where it is every man for himself. In those Organizations there is no Group Advantage that results from the development of Sua Sponte Leaders and thus no Incentive for any individual Member to engage in it.

My profession suffers from this ailment. After I passed the bar I was like every other new lawyer, in that I had a tremendous amount of head-knowledge and very little heart-knowledge. I knew the law, but not what to do with it. I (like every other new trial lawyer) was in dire need of an Apprenticeship to learn how to litigate. And I (like most other new trial lawyers) didn’t get one. The reason is that law firms are primarily Bullfrogs with a few Leeches thrown in.

Because Lizards are very rare within the legal world, law firms generally do not Incentivize Apprenticeship. And without Incentive, why would a seasoned lawyer, having struggled to learn his craft and build his practice, pass on what he knows to a young hungry wolf fresh out of law school just to see him steal his clients out from under him? That is a pretty strong dis-Incentive against working oneself out of a job. The result is that the older lawyers I worked with shared their Wisdom grudgingly, only teaching me what I needed to know to be helpful to them.

Without any form of a litigation Apprenticeship, I had to Collision Learn the craft on my own. It was like learning to fly a plane through a series of mishaps and near fatal crashes, each of which allowed me to limp away with a little more Wisdom and Skill than I had before. I felt like was I constantly getting lost in uncharted territory and having to improvise my way back out. It was not a good feeling, but (having no choice) I kept at it.

As the years unfolded I gradually found myself to be lost less often, and increasingly able to rely upon Skills that I had previously developed rather than on ad hoc improvisation that I had to conjure up on the spot out of whole cloth. After about ten years, it occurred to me that I was no longer encountering any new ground. With minor deviations, the circumstances and Problems that confronted me were familiar because I had seen them before. At this point, I was no longer Collision Learning but rather putting into Practice techniques that I had previously learned and improving upon them.

Now, years later, it is me that is the old lawyer who has the choice to either pass Wisdom on to younger lawyers through Positive Habit Transfer or hoard it for myself. Frankly, my natural inclination is the latter, just as it was for the old guys I worked for when I first started out. In fact, that is exactly what I would do if I had not been trained to work myself out of a job when I was in the Army. Because that Leadership Principle was ingrained into me as a young man when I was an apprentice-Leader, it is what I find I must do now as an old man.

In 1986 I was a twenty-two year old infantry platoon leader. Six months after taking over my platoon I went through an evaluation of its readiness that was conducted by officers from another unit who put us through twelve hours of simulated combat operations to see if we were mission capable. To prepare for the evaluation I had made sure that my men knew their jobs and could execute them effectively under stress. I was confident that we would perform well, and we did–for the first six hours of the evaluation, until the evaluators “killed” me. After that, my platoon was evaluated without me, just as if I had been killed in combat.

At that point a huge deficiency in my platoon’s readiness became embarrassingly evident. I had not prepared my men for the very likely happenstance of me becoming a casualty. Although each man knew his job, no man knew my job. I had hoarded all that knowledge for a very selfish reason: so that I would be indispensable. Because I had not worked myself out of my job my platoon failed. More accurately, I failed them.

Six months later we had a chance to do it again. This time I spent as much time teaching my subordinate leaders to do my job as I did making sure that they could do their jobs. When the evaluators “killed” me the loss of my platoon’s “indispensable man” did not render us ineffective. In fact, and somewhat embarrassingly for me, my men seemed to function a little bit better without me hovering over them.

During the after action review the evaluators made this exact point–they had functioned better without me. Although everyone in the room laughed at that, I had a moment of panic. Here I was being evaluated in front of my boss and his boss, and they are hearing that my platoon works more effectively with me dead than alive. But then the chief evaluator said this: “Lieutenant Redding has trained his men to fight with him and continue the fight without him. He’s made himself dispensable and there is no higher form of leadership”. That is when I understood that the Leadership Principle of working oneself out of one’s job, while counterintuitive, was the right thing to do.

Because it was ingrained into me through an Effective LDP I have never forgotten this Leadership Principle. The Virtuous Leader makes himself dispensable by working himself out of his job. He does it so that his Team, Organization and Community can continue the fight when he is gone. This is the essence of a man’s commitment to Leave Right.

The Virtuous Leader encourages other men to Lead early and often

One of the Leadership Principles I was taught in my LDP was that Opportunities should be provided early and often. Like any Skill, the more reps you get the faster you will develop. Moreover, there is no perfect time to start Leading and no good reason to wait. As a result, I often found myself encouraged into positions for which I wasn’t quite sure I was ready. Every new Opportunity I received felt like a stretch for me. Without being pushed by more experienced men, I might have shied away to avoid Failure. The willingness to Lead early and often was an important lesson in my development.

Later, when I was compelled by circumstance to Collision Learn the Skill of litigation, that lesson was invaluable. Just as with Leadership, every new experience I encountered as a trial lawyer felt like a stretch for which I was not quite ready. And, because I had no one to push me I might have shied away. But, because I had learned from my LDP that stretching is how you grow the fastest, I was able to push myself. I knew that the Pain and Chaos of a new courtroom situation would be both a great teacher and increase my Durability. So I welcomed it. I also knew from my LDP that I while I was more likely than not to succeed if I gave it my all, even if I failed the world would not stop turning. I’m just not that important.

Now, whether I am developing new lawyers in my own firm or new Leaders in F3, I encourage them to Lead early and often. This is a critical step in the growth of a Sua Sponte Leader. A man cannot embrace taking charge in the absence of direct authority until he learns to accept the Opportunities with which he is presented–regardless of whether he feels fully prepared. If he shies away, he might miss out on an important step of his development into a Virtuous Leader. Because I am a Virtuous Leader, it is my responsibility to see otherwise.

In order to Leave Right, the Virtuous Leader encourages other men to Lead early and often.