This time of crisis and remote working is a golden opportunity to empower your people, developing them to become truly resourceful humans, not just human resources, says David Lewis
As a leader, you might be feeling that your organisation is slipping out of control. Your people are far away, working from home with competing family responsibilities, peering at you through screens on tiresome virtual meetings – and in a context of growing uncertainty as the implications of the current pandemic multiply.
If you were wondering how to get things better under control, our advice is don’t! This time of crisis and remote working is a golden opportunity to empower your people, developing them to become truly resourceful humans, not just human resources.
How might you do so? Lessons from history can often provoke valuable leadership insights, and in an unprecedented crisis, military history in particular may have much to teach us – as military commanders have to decide and act fast in the fog of war, with stretched or broken lines of communication.
Detailed instructions
One critical learning moment from military history was the shock defeat of the Prussian army by Napoleon’s forces at the Battle of Jena in 1806. At least by their own account, the Prussians had been the best trained soldiers in the world: they could shoot with precision, march in perfect time and follow orders to the letter. And yet, notwithstanding the bonus of superior numbers, they were overcome by the French leading to the subjugation of the European continent to Napoleon for the next six years. Reflecting on this catastrophe as he reformed the Prussian military subsequently, Helmuth von Moltke, diagnosed an excessive reliance on befehlstaktik, befehl translating as an order.
Detailed instructions were to be given from the top; the job of middle managers (those in charge on the frontline) was to cascade those orders down to the troops, and to escalate back up to the top for further instructions if the original orders were unclear or circumstances had changed. The principle was to achieve great clarity on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’: controlling what was to be done and how to do it.
Von Moltke saw that first of all it was impossible to control events and people in the fog of war. In practice the chain of command would be broken again and again. And with no instructions coming through those in the front line would simply stop or perhaps more sensibly go home. And the need to iterate decisions, update plans and transmit instructions up and down the line led to the deadly danger of delay when confronted with an enemy that could decide and act faster. The missing piece was the ‘why’. Given clarity throughout the organisation on the ‘why’ – the purpose or mission – those at the top could loosen the leash on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.
This is the ground on which von Moltke famously defined his principle of empowerment: auftragstaktik, where aufstrag means ‘mission’. In an empowered world of auftragstaktik, middle managers and junior leaders understand the ‘commander’s intent’. Those at the top give the absolute minimum of orders: ‘The higher the authority, the shorter and more general will the orders be. The next lower command adds what further precision appears necessary…
Each thereby retains freedom of action and decision within his authority.’
Trust
Empowerment of this kind requires an extremely high degree of trust from those at the top: trust that their subordinates can meaningfully interpret the commander’s intent and execute it effectively. In the military context, this implied rigorous training, requiring middle managers and junior leaders to act as if they were in positions several levels higher than them in the organisational hierarchy, and to practice decision making again and again over a wide range of uncertain situations.
If, on this basis, large numbers of people could make more or less the right decisions most of the time – and quickly – they would become winners. And practising empowerment on this basis would remove the burden of doubt and escalation that von Moltke had seen paralysing the Prussian military. One of his famous sayings was that ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy’. And that did not matter, because those on the frontline were empowered to make the plan over and over again themselves.
Writing in a different context, one of our favourite more controversial philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, said that ‘he who has a way to live can bear almost any how’. This echoes the final principle of empowerment through auftragstaktik: the empowered must have the ‘joy of taking responsibility’. Empowerment is a two-way street.
In our work with managers across a wide range of organisations we often hear the complaint: we are not empowered. The complaint is directed at those higher up the hierarchy. And sometimes in response to the complaint those higher up attempt to empower those lower down. The problem is you can’t empower other people you can only create an environment in which empowered people can apply their ideas and talents. The managers and executives that follow the von Moltke auftragstaktik principle do just that, they create an environment in which empowered people will step forward.
So what does it mean to act as an empowered person?
It means to strive to do what you believe is right despite the constraints you face. It is to act in accordance with the belief that your contribution matters and it is your responsibility to make a contribution. This is not the right to get what you want nor the certainty that what do you want is right.
In the Republic, Plato, reported the words of Socrates, exploring the, ‘what difference do I make’ question through the idea of spiritedness (thymos). Socrates describes the soul as comprising three parts, reason (rational thinking), desire (appetite) and spiritedness. He defined spiritedness as our sense of honour – doing what is right.
Socrates himself embodied spiritedness. He lived in a time in which Athenian dominance was in decline in the face of Spartan ambition. His outspoken questioning of the Athenian government led to him being put on trial. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by poisoning. His friends tried to persuade him to escape as they had the means to get him out of prison, but he refused. His arguments for remaining in prison and facing his fate revolved around his principles and determination to do the honourable thing, the right thing.
We see another example of spiritedness in Nelson Mandela’s decision in 1985 to decline to be released from prison on the condition that he take no further part in political life. He was eventually released five years later with no strings attached. That is the act of an empowered person. What he would have gained by accepting the offer would have been a more comfortable life that many people would reason he deserved. What he would have lost is everything he stood for, his honour.
A manager of remote workers who adopts the lessons of von Moltke depends on remote workers who adopt the spirt of Socrates and Mandela. Successful remote working depends on leadership, not solely on leaders, not solely on followers, but on people who choose to act without compulsion and face the consequences, some of which, if not most of which may be unknown at the point of decision. This is leadership.
David Lewis is Programme Director for Executive Education and Dominic Houlder Adjunct Professor in Strategic and Entrepreneurial Management at London Business School. They are co-authors of What Philosophy Can Teach You About Being a Better Leader, published by Kogan Page, priced £14.99.
