In my last duty assignment in the U.S. Army, I served as the Brigade Adjutant (S-1) of the 94th Air Defense Brigade while stationed at Rhine Ordnance Barracks in Kaiserslautern, Germany. My job generally included overseeing human resources and personnel assignments for the units within the brigade, which at the time numbered about 1,500 people. I learned a valuable leadership lesson in my unique vantage point observing the commanders of each battalion within the brigade. I learned that there are basically two kinds of leaders, and not just in the military.
One kind of leader views his or her people as finite resources that will perform only up to a certain level; that each person within the organization has a ceiling of performance and that the job of the leader is to motivate his or her subordinates to reach the ceiling or get as close to it as possible, often by whatever means is necessary. Winning is important. The tendency, however, is to view people as commodities and that they are often expendable, either through normal attrition, rotation or replacement. The morale in these kinds of units is typically mixed. The morale is sometimes high because these kinds of units often excel at evaluations and competitions. The downside, however, is that there’s often a culture of fear. Subordinates will generally go far for their leader, but less out of true loyalty than out of pressure of being fired or replaced. The saving grace for many is that the unit assignment is only a few years long.
The other kind of leader is more relational and views his or her people as people; that each person within the organization has some unknown level of performance. The performance level could be lower or higher than anyone could possibly expect. I’ve seen people in these kinds of units do things they never thought they could do. Winning is less important, however. In competitions, the unit might place a distance second or even third to the first kind of unit. When progress is made, it’s often slower in comparison. But, what I observed about this second kind of unit is that the people would follow their leader anywhere and that there’s a certain steadiness and depth to the organization. Loyalty is created out of mutual and personal respect, not extracted.
I often think about these two basic schools of leadership in the context of government. Frequent elections tend to more often create the first kind of leadership environment than the second. It’s a short-term style of leadership. Putting points on the board quickly takes precedent over developing a more nurturing sense of leadership that would otherwise establish a deeper and arguably more effective culture within government. Sadly, I too hear government employees talk about “riding it out” until the next election, or retirement.