As The General Ordered

Having spent a short while in the army and also by the virtue of managing people as a line manager for over 15 years now, I do pride myself in understanding the concept of leading from the front. Leading from the front has often been described as 'to show the way or to guide or direct the course'. It also means never asking someone to do any thing that you cannot do better (or yourself) and also willingness to being in the thick of things and leading the team by example.

Recently, my father, who was a 3 star general (Lieutenant General) in the army, and held many command & staff positions in the army as well as went on to join the board of multi-billion dollar companies during his service &  post his retirement, explained a very interesting concept to me. Since he is one of those rare personalities who have proved his prowess, in both the fields that need high leadership skills to rise to the top (military & business), I found his concept extremely thought provoking.

He believes that organizations(be it either the armed forces or the corporate world) have changed vastly over the last 20 years. The Armies of yesteryear were limited to having only infantry, artillery, armored corps and small elements of engineering & support. They were designed for tactical battles. However, armies of today have all of the above and also more specialized & super specialist elements such as electronic warfare, unarmed drones, nuclear systems, close air support wing, naval assets etc. This means that the traditional commander who once knew the nitty-gritty of how each element under his command used to function or would progress in any combat situation now has a limited knowledge of these specialized systems available to him and how they might actually function under fire. Officers are trained to be better than the men they command, they are expected to know more than them, hence enabling them to lead from the front. However, now with so many varied elements under his command and outside his realm of understanding, how is he expected to lead from the front?

This situation is no different in the corporate world as well; organizations have undergone a paradigm shift in the way they are designed & operate. Organizations, from being uni-dimensional (largely focusing only on either production or sales & distribution) have now become very complex entities. Business Leaders, who traditionally were trained in one field & mastered certain functions, now have a very difficult task of managing multi-disciplinary teams, who may or may not be from the areas that they have had any previous exposure to (case in point being a manager who has only had exposure to sales & marketing now being made head of a unit which has engineering, production, QA elements or vice versa). How in such cases is the manager supposed to lead from the front, when the team he leads knows very well that their manager does not fully understand their trade or cannot do their jobs better than them. Business leaders (like army commanders) till recently were usually subject matter experts. They had mastery over a few fields (thanks to tons of experience & training) and typically rose through ranks to lead somewhat similarly aligned teams (case in point is a person who has spent say 15-20 years in sales, typically was only considered for a VP/CMO role in any organization, and was never expected to lead a unit that included other functions such as production or engineering for example or vice versa). This naturally led to greater acceptability of the leader by the team, and his feedback & thoughts on how the function should be run was often appreciated by his subordinates.

Ergo, my dad’s hypothesis was, the concept of leadership from front is passé. He believes that Leader of today (due to complexity & diverse nature of teams, skills & functions involved, and nature of business transacted) cannot be an effective leader if he attempts to lead from the front. His team will see right thru this inability to comprehend some of these specialized functions and his lack of understanding the nuances of that function therefore leading to resistance from his subordinates as well as in extreme cases non-implementation of his thoughts/ideas.

The style more suited for today’s military & corporate was therefore, where the leader does not lead from the front, but rather leads from the center. The leader has to be the hub (as in a wheel) around which his unit revolves. The leader himself may not know the intricate details of what each functional head does (neither does he feign knowledge of these functions), but rather he focuses on continuously getting feedback from these functional/Subject matter experts , reads the situation and finally gives a broad direction in which this  wheel needs to  roll.

Leaders (be in the corporate world or in the modern military) of today need to place themselves in the center of the unit managing the direction and leave the actual running of specialist functions (be it sales, production, engineering, QA etc.) to the subject matter/functional experts available to him. This, of course is not abdicating responsibility; it simply implies the leader should be focusing more on guiding the course of the organization or business.  

A good example here would be a captain of the modern day aircraft carriers , who may not know how to fly the plans that take off from this ship , may not know how the engine room machinery works , may never have seen any combat on land and therefore has no understanding of what tactics the commando/military detachment on his ship deploy when in action , but yet , he sets the mission targets for the aviators  , he tells the engine room at what speed he wants the ship to cruise at and also outlines the tactical plans to his commandos/ military detachment .The captain however does not tell either of these personas how to do their respective jobs. He leaves it to these subject matter experts to carry out their jobs as they best feel fit, he just checks back from time to time to ensure things are moving in the right direction and his ship is running smoothly.

The captain of the modern day aircraft carrier leads from the center; it does not imply he is not in the thick of things, it just means they he does not lead from front. He is available to his officers for setting targets, guiding them & ensuring that his ship is meeting the strategic objective that the navy has in mind. What he does not do is, telling his officers on how to do their jobs in which they specialize (each officer in the modern day aircraft carrier, like corporate of today, has specialist training & roles), but rather relies on their individual subject matter expertise to get the job done.

A leader who decides to lead from the center could also be looked upon as the hub (in the unit), wherein, while he has connects & sensors which give him the overall ability to read the situation on ground well, he, as an individual, focuses more on balancing the unit, getting everyone’s buy-in, getting everyone on board with ideas he wants implemented & finally providing the overall direction to the wheel to meet these goals or objectives. The unit gravitates around him, the organization continues to meet its business & overall objectives, however he is not seen, and his leadership & guidance is only felt.

Some good examples of business leaders leading from the center would be people like Bruce Ashby, Rahul Bhatia & Aditya Ghosh. They started and ran IndiGo as a low cost airline & have steadily added more aircraft's, routes, taken it international & made it into the most profitable airline in India; however most of the people who fly IndiGo or experience its service would not know these Gents. I can also think of Samsung CEO Choi Gee-Sung as another example of someone who has made this relatively unknown player, whose only goal 10 years back was to catch up with Japanese rival companies, to being a technology leader pioneering cutting edge products like galaxy note and topping revenues of over 140 billion dollars.

While I have giving examples of only a few business leaders, this list is endless and we can probably think of countless leaders who follow this style of leadership (maybe unknowingly and in varying degrees). However, as we all know (and have experienced) there is no right or wrong style or theory in leadership, for every manager who lead from the center there were/are countless leaders like Steve Jobs, Napoleon Bonaparte, Bill Gates & Jack Welch who were/are equally (sometimes even more) successful as leaders & managers. They were very hands on & believed in leading from the front and took their respective organizations to great heights as well.

However, Leaders who are not seen but whose leadership is felt, who know how to bring out the best in people, who know how the art of getting the job done through others (without always getting neck deep into it)  are surely what I would like to call “Transformational Leaders”. Their ability to strive for balance and build consensus from different people with diverse crafts, multiple perspectives, and divergent agenda’s is what perhaps my old man (the good general) wishes for today’s complex & multidimensional organizations. Maybe that was his secret of success too! Sir…Yes Sir!