Two Tactics for Distributed Cultures - Team of Teams
This is part 2 of a series focused on creating a blueprint for building positive & supportive organizational cultures. This series is adapted from a workshop at the Aspen Institute’s First Mover’s Summit in October 2023. You can find our first post on the full blueprint here.
I love the quote, “Culture equals values plus behavior,” from Lt. George Flynn, USMC.
Culture begins and ends with individuals. So much of what we do as leaders is motivating individuals to take specific actions each day. These add up to the massive scale of moving an organization forward. Raindrops become rivers. Those decisions and the ensuing culture yield business results, whether incredible, terrifying, or middling.
Success depends on how we motivate people. In the literature around culture, giving individuals autonomy and freedom rises to the top in how to drive human motivation. Not more pay, not better benefits, but independence. We don’t like other people telling us what to do. We’d rather find our own way forward. The values on the wall don’t matter unless people feel like they can live them out in their own way.
Creating a Team of Teams - Leaders as Gardeners
“The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.”
Enter Stanley McChrystal and his terrific book on distributed leadership. McChrystal took command of the US military in Iraq across all armed services, weighing in at 130k personnel in ‘03, and growing to 170k by ‘07. As he took command, the world’s most sophisticated and best-trained military struggled to counter the violence led by Al Qaeda, a highly decentralized and networked organization. A local community using broken-down cars and homemade bombs consistently outmaneuvered the best of the best. David beat Goliath by playing a very different game.
Part of McChrystal’s command was the special operations task force (JSOC), truly the best and brightest across all military branches. McChrystal and his team decided they needed to operate more like their enemy as a fast-moving, highly distributed relationship-based network vs. the slow-moving command and control hierarchy.
Two tactics for distributed decision-making
The strategy consisted of two tactics:
1 - Share priorities and sensitive information in real time. For McChrystal’s team, this evolved into what eventually became a 7,000-person daily virtual stand-up. The stand-ups bristled a military brass that preferred secrecy and the chain of command, but they successfully aligned the entire armed forces around what was happening on the ground.
2 - Push decisions down in a policy of “empowered execution.” McChrystal’s general rule was, if it advances the effort, do it (assuming it’s moral and legal).
McChrystal knew he was winning when the centralized task force (aka “management”) became uncomfortable. Troops were making calls traditionally made by officers & generals. Decisions were made more quickly, and the quality of those decisions improved because the people closer to the information were better equipped to make them.
Autonomous decision-making combined with real-time information sharing led to the eventual successful strike on Al Aqaueda leader Abu Zarqawi in 2006, an operation that could not have happened without empowered execution. In so doing, creating a team of teams in Iraq transformed modern military operations by making leaders gardeners vs. chess masters.
