It Worked For Me (14 page)
Authors: Colin Powell
Make sure correspondence is excellent. No split infinitives.
I want the best possible correspondence. Human writing. Avoid stilted, puffed-up, hyperbolic, over-adjectived bureaucratic claptrap. Write to me as you would talk to me. Another lesson John Kester drilled into me was a hatred of split infinitives. Split infinitives have become more acceptable in recent years (and my writing is not free of them), but I still insist on eliminating them to force my folks to read every line carefully. Getting rid of split infinitives is not what counts. What counts is reading every line carefully.
Never, never permit illegal or stupid actions.
Any questions?
No surprises. I don’t like to be blindsided. Bad news doesn’t get any better with time. If there is a problem brewing, I want to know of it early—heads-up as soon as possible.
If you run on an even keel, and have a good team whom you trust and who trust you, then your folks won’t be afraid to share the worst with you as soon as possible. Your team will know they can bring you a problem without you blowing up and that you’ll give them guidance to start working the problem. Bonds of mutual trust and confidence among all the players will take you a long way down the road to a solution.
Speak precisely. I often fudge for a reason. Don’t overinterpret what I say.
I like short declarative sentences with lots of protein and no fat. I try to speak precisely. Don’t read more into what I say than what’s there. And don’t be upset if I fudge. The fudge is part of the precision. Don’t try to interpret it, expand it, or contract it. I have always fudged for a reason, even if you don’t know what it is.
Don’t rush into decisions—make them timely and correct.
Time management is an essential feature of decision-making. One of the first questions a commander considers when faced with a mission on the battlefield is “How much time do I have before I execute?” Take a third of that time to analyze and decide. Leave two-thirds of the time for subordinates to do their analysis and make their plans. Use all the time you have. Don’t make a snap decision. Think about it, do your analysis, let your staff do their analysis. Gather all the information you can. When you enter the range of 40 to 70 percent of all available information, think about making your decision. Above all, never wait too long, never run out of time.
In the Army we had an expression, OBE—overtaken by events. In bureaucratic terms being OBE is a felonious offense. You blew it. If you took too much time to study the issue, to staff it, or to think about it, you became OBE. The issue has moved on or an autopilot decision has been made. No one cares what you think anymore—the train has left the station.
I have found over the years that my new staff welcomed these rules. They got us all playing from the same sheet of music. But they are not my only technique for getting a new team in harmony with each other and with me. This one almost always upsets them, but the indigestion goes away quickly:
“In our first weeks together,” I warn them, “I will drive you to drink or worse with my constant corrections and nitpicking. You will think you are not doing well. But in a few weeks, as we adjust to each other, the little notes stop, the corrections are fewer, and we will settle into a comfortable pattern.”
I use my torture technique to speed up the process.
Your staff needs to become your family as quickly as possible. Create a constructive environment and you’ll have a winning team that will not let you down. In all my years as a general or senior official, I never had an IG complaint filed against me.
W
hen General George Joulwan was our Southern Command commander some years ago, he ended all of his messages with the slogan “One Team, One Fight.” He greeted you in person the same way. After a while we started smiling whenever we heard George’s slogan. But it was a good idea—worth taking to heart. It was a constant reminder to his command that everyone had to come together as a team to prosecute a fight that everyone agreed had to be won. It remains a good idea.
I tried to capture that spirit as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Chairman is an advisor and commands nothing. He works through influence and persuasion. The other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are also advisors, but the Chiefs of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force also have large organizations to run and protect. It was important for me to understand this duality of responsibility, recognizing not only their role as service chiefs, but also their larger duty as members of the Joint Chiefs.
I worked hard to create a sense of “One Team, One Fight.” I commissioned a manual to capture this spirit. In its preface I wrote the following:
When a team takes to the field, individual specialists come together to achieve a team win. All players try to do their very best because every other player, the team, and the home town are counting on them to win.
So it is when the Armed Forces of the United States go to war. We must win every time.
Every soldier must take the battlefield believing his or her unit is the best in the world.
Every pilot must take off believing there is no one better in the sky.
Every sailor standing watch must believe there is no better ship at sea.
Every Marine must hit the beach believing that there are no better infantrymen in the world.
But they all must also believe that they are part of a team, a joint team that fights together to win.
This is our history, this is our tradition, this is our future.
Fast-forward a few years to the State Department. The State Department consists of Foreign Service officers and the specialists who support them—civil servants and the Foreign Service local nationals who support our embassies. The Foreign Service officers are the most widely known. They are our diplomats and ambassadors—elite experts. Our Civil Service consists of professional and enormously capable support personnel.
Every year we observed Foreign Service Day, a day when retired Foreign Service officers returned to the State Department for rebonding and briefings.
I wanted to penetrate the cultural and other boundaries that existed between Foreign Service and Civil Service employees. With that in mind we introduced leadership training for mid-level and senior Civil Service managers and took other steps to emphasize their importance.
As part of that effort, I decided to change Foreign Service Day to Foreign Affairs (FA) Day and to invite retired Civil Servants to attend.
Whoops. We got noise from the Foreign Service community. They felt something was being taken away from them. There were mutterings that many would not attend. We worried about the turnout, but on FA Day, the auditorium was filled with Foreign Service officers and a significant number of Civil Servants. No one’s ox got gored. And the Foreign Service realized the value of this kind of bonding. “One Team, One Fight.”
Every good leader I have known understands instinctively the need to communicate to followers a common purpose, a purpose that comes down from the leader and is internalized by the entire team. Armed with a common purpose, an organization’s various parts will strive to achieve that purpose and will not go riding off in every direction.
I have also seen many organizations that resemble nothing less than warring tribes. They usually fail.
T
he military encourages competition. War is a competition, the ultimate test of purpose, preparation, determination, courage, risk, and execution. Business is a competition. In fact, in almost every human endeavor where there are two teams, groups, or sides, there is a competition.
People need to test themselves, prove themselves, not just to show that they are better than the other guy or the other team, but to show that they have trained and raised their skills as high as they can. Winning is great, and always better than losing, but perfecting our skills and capabilities is great, too.
In 1986, when I commanded the V Corps in Germany, the corps participated in two major international military competitions. One was called the Boeselager competition; the other was the Canadian Cup. These were World Series events. Boeselager was an annual competition to pick the best NATO cavalry troop. The Canadian Cup was an intense competition to determine the very best tank platoon. You weren’t competitive in these tests without putting forward an extraordinary effort to prepare the crews. Once you designated the unit that would represent you, every effort was made to find the corps’ best leaders and experts and transfer them to those units. You then gave them priority for training ammunition, access to firing ranges, and whatever other resources they needed. Other units had to sacrifice for these Super Bowl–level competitors.
A case can be made that this kind of competition is not healthy. You don’t go to war with your Super Bowl team but with every team in the league. Nevertheless, I did whatever it took to win, within the rules. I didn’t like the idea of shorting my other units, but once you decide to go for a win, you give it all you have. You mass your resources, you explain to those being shorted why that must be done, and you go for the win.
Although I was transferred to the White House before the competitions, the teams we put together went on to win both events. No one corps had ever won both in the same year.
A more down-to-earth example occurred earlier in my career, when I was a battalion commander in Korea.
Every day, I set aside time to walk through the battalion area checking things out. One day, I saw one of my soldiers approaching from the direction of brigade headquarters. He looked a little down and was wearing his dress uniform rather than our normal fatigues. He saluted, and I asked him what was wrong, fearing he was just coming from a court-martial.
“I’ve just been in the Soldier of the Month competition,” he told me, “before a board of senior sergeants.”
“How’d you do?” I asked him.
“Not good. Sorry, sir.”
“Thanks for your good try, soldier,” I told him. “Too bad it didn’t work out.” I felt a lot of sympathy for him. “By the way,” I asked, “when did you learn you were going before the board?”
“Last night.”
I patted him on the back and went straight to my office for a come-to-Jesus session with my command sergeant major and first sergeants. “We will never do this again,” I told them. “We will never throw our soldiers into a competition or into a battle, any battle, without preparing them and taking the necessary time to get them ready to win. That’s what leaders do; we prepare our troops.”
Our battalion won the Soldier of the Month competition for the next few months, until the other battalion commanders caught on and put in their own best effort.
Soldiers given a task they haven’t been prepared for lose confidence in themselves and, fatally, in their leaders.
But sometimes you can be surprised.
In 1976, I commanded the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. We put together a team to compete in the division’s annual boxing competition—a pretty good team and a heck of a coach. We set out to win, but we had one missing link. We didn’t have a boxer who could compete in the featherweight class (120–125 pounds). Not until my adjutant, Jim Hallums, came in one day. He’d found a very small young soldier, Pee Wee Preston. Pee Wee had never boxed, and he was tiny. He would qualify for the featherweight competition. The real hook was that no other unit had a soldier who could make the weight. We would win the class by forfeit. We asked Pee Wee if he was willing to be on the team; he would probably never have to fight. He agreed to do it for the brigade . . . especially after we assured him that if he did, he would not have to go to Panama with his battalion for jungle training. Pee Wee was deathly afraid of snakes.
We insisted that he train just as hard as everyone else. He was taught the basics of boxing; he hit the bag, sparred, jumped rope, and did everything everyone else did.
The week of the tournament arrived, and our team was doing well. Pee Wee got in the ring twice, got the forfeits, and we got the points. But on the third night, disaster struck. One of the other units found, or imported, a Panamanian featherweight who was a miniature near double for the great Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran. This guy was going to fight Pee Wee. Yikes.
We told Pee Wee he could forget the deal; he didn’t have to fight. But he wanted to go ahead. His whole battalion was leaving for Panama late that night, and they were in the stands watching. He couldn’t let his guys down.
Pee Wee got in the ring, and the other kid raced across and proceeded to whomp up on him. Pee Wee never threw a punch back, but he took the other kid’s punches, keeping his arms up, protecting his head and body, the way he had been taught, and he made it through round 1. Our side was cheering tentatively: “Attaboy, Pee Wee! Hang in there, kid!” Round 2 was a repeat, but he kept going. He was in shape, and he wasn’t getting hurt. The other guy was looking winded and frustrated, just from the sheer effort of pounding on Pee Wee. The cheering for Pee Wee had grown a lot louder. He hadn’t thrown a punch, but he was game. He had spirit. Round 3 opened and the other kid came out slowly. He was tired and weakened from beating up on Pee Wee. He was not in shape! You know what comes next: Pee Wee landed a single punch, and the other guy dropped his arms and quit—a TKO for Pee Wee.
His buddies went nuts in the stands. Pee Wee was the 101st Airborne Division featherweight champion. He had been prepared for a fight we never thought he’d have to fight. But he had been prepared enough to win.
Later, unfortunately, when we went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for the XVIII Airborne Corps competition, the 82nd Airborne Division entered a real boxer, and Pee Wee lost. But no matter—he represented himself and us well.
There are many kinds of competition. You can have a constructive competition that goes beyond just finding a champion. I am a believer in lots of intramural competitions within units. Best supply room, best soldier, best clerk, best armorer, you name it. Do it every month, and do it with standards that make it possible for anyone putting forth the effort to win.
Without competition, we all become dull, unfocused, and flabby—mentally and physically.
