Military academies have an impressive record of producing outstanding leaders. This stands in stark contrast to the developmental efforts of many civilian organisations, with Australian research showing that less than 15% of what is learnt in a typical training course is transferred into new workplace behaviours. So what can you learn from the military? Here are four key lessons:
- Be selective about whom you develop
- Connect learners to trustworthy, practical knowledge
- Include strategies that help learners turn new knowledge into new behaviours
- Help learners to change who they are as both leaders and people
The first of these lessons is reflected in the highly selective nature of admissions at military academies. The remaining three lessons were found within the U.S. Army’s Be-Know-Do model of leadership1.
Lesson 1: Being Selective
Investing in leadership development is like investing in the share market in that you are far more likely to get a return on your investment when you are careful about whom you invest in. Just as some companies are likely to show higher share returns, some people are far more likely to develop their leadership prowess than other people. This is due to a combination of:
- A desire to learn (perhaps in response to challenges in the workplace, life stages or an intrinsic desire to be more than they are today)
- A threshold of leadership potential (such as general intelligence and interpersonal ability)
- Learning agility (including openness to experience, adaptability and self-awareness)
The lesson is that, wherever possible, you should have managers apply to take part in your in-house development programs and that you should use sound methods to select only prime candidates from those applicants.
Lesson 2: Include Trustworthy, Practical Content
Most managers learn how to lead on the job through trial and error. They form beliefs about the organisation, about the people within it and about leadership in general based on a small sampling of personal experience. This is somewhat akin to letting people believe that smoking is safe based on the personal experience of one smoker who happened to live to the age of 82. Sadly, leadership programs that peddle the latest management fads muddy these tenuous beliefs even further, as many of these fads have little, if any, grounding in evidence.
At the other extreme is the isolated world of academia, which despite being more reliable can also be too theoretical and obtuse for managers to put to any immediate and practical use.
The lesson is that you need to ensure that your programs connect learners to knowledge that is both trustworthy and practical.
Lesson 3: Help Learners to Develop New Behaviours and Habits
As any sports enthusiast can attest, the world is full of armchair experts. However, there is a big difference between knowing what to do and being able to do it (and do it well).
“The gap between knowing and doing remains a weak link in most of our lives”
Dan Millman, No Ordinary Moments
Leadership programs are more effective when they help learners to bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Imagine for a moment that you wanted to learn how to juggle three balls. You can read and digest the instructions for how to juggle in just a few minutes. However, this does not mean you can now juggle. Learning to do something requires strategies that are different from those used to simply acquire new knowledge about how to do it. Behavioural learning uses strategies such as modelling, practice, review and refinement.
The lesson is that within your program, you need to show learners what to do, allow them to practise doing it and give them feedback on their efforts so that they can refine their future attempts. These initial efforts need to be supported by post-program strategies, such as coaching and action-learning, which help your learners transfer their new skills into their approaches to leadership within the workplace.
Lesson 4: Challenge Learners to BE More Than They Are Today
Leadership is not just about what you know or the skills that you possess. It is about who you are as a person and the sort of leader you choose to be. While lesson 3 highlighted the need to bridge the gap between knowing and doing, lesson 4 highlights the need to close the gap between doing and being. This involves helping leaders evolve their identity, their values and their perceptions.
This form of personal development is not a new idea; it is already central to the military’s process of developing future leaders2. In fact, it provides a common thread between the outdoor challenge programs and t-groups of the mid-twentieth century and ties into our obsession with emotional intelligence[3. See, for example, the content and the developmental process outlined in Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2004). Primal Leadership. Harvard Business School Press.] in the 1990s and authentic leadership3 in the 2000s.
“There is more in us than we know. If we can be made to see it, we will be unwilling to settle for less.”
—Kurt Han, Founder of Outward Bound
However, researchers have only recently started to explore the empirical links between leadership and identity4.
The lesson is that you should help leaders to discern who they are and to redefine who they want to be as part of any serious effort to develop their ability to lead well.
Notes
- You can read more about this model in: Center For Army Leadership. (2004). The U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual. McGraw-Hill. ↩
- Snook, S., & Khurana, R. (2004). Developing Leaders of Character: Lessons from Westpoint. In R. G. Sonnefeld, Leadership & Governance from the Inside Out (pp. 213-232). NJ: Wiley & Sons. ↩
- See, for example, Gardner, W., Avolio, B., & Walumbwa, F. (2005). Authentic Leadership Theory and Practice: Origins, Effects and Development. Emerald Group Publishing. ↩
- See, for example,Van Knippenberg, B., Van Knippenberg, D., DeCremer, D., & Hogg, M. A. (2005). Research In Leadership, Self & Identity: A Sample of the Present & A Glipse of the Future. Leadership Quarterly , 16, 495-499. ↩
