I recently had the honor to speak with the CS and IT majors of the USMA (West Point) Class of 2010.  Recognizing that these young men carry an incredible burden for all of us,  I struggled for what I could tell them.  These young men and women, after all, are going to be the tools of our international efforts against terrorism for quite some time to come and in 5 years will likely see 2 combat deployments.  The price they pay for their “free” education is much higher than the one my partner and I paid and larger still than the 99.9+% of the rest of their generation (those that never serve their nation in uniform).

I settled on trying to pass along four things that I wish I had learned in school – before the Army and before becoming a civilian.  These aren’t four things that I wasn’t taught mind you.  I may have been taught some of them, and at any rate the burden for learning should really be placed upon the student – especially in college.  These are four things that I wish I had recognized, retained or learned on my own; four things that would have made my Army and civilian life much easier.  Here they are as I discussed them with elements of the USMA Class of 2010:

1)      Moral and Ethical Challenges Occur Frequently – More So Than You Might Think

It doesn’t matter if you are in the Army and parts for your dead-lined vehicle magically appear overnight or you are reviewing the use of company assets and find that people are using company assets for personal use – potentially in violation of company policy.  Sometimes even people who are on balance “good” make ethical mistakes.  And make no mistake, there are morally bankrupt people committing unethical acts at an incredibly high rate all around us.

Most of us, quite honestly, are ill prepared to address ethical issues upon graduation.  Many schools barely touch the subject.  Even the service academies, with their strict honor code, too often paint topics as black and white rather than the spectrum of blacks, whites and grays that occur in the real world.  As we’ve written in the past, the journey to moral bankruptcy isn’t one giant leap, but a series of small steps.  Draw lines in the sand early in your career so that you know you are heading in the wrong direction as you progress.  Build a support group of people who will tell you the truth and help guide you should you start to go astray.

2)      Smart People and Terrible Teamwork Equals Crap Technology

Intelligence is only one of many independent variables (inputs) resulting in the dependent variable (output) of overall team performance.  Behaviors of individuals within the team are another equally important independent variable.  Leadership and culture are important moderators of this equation.  It is possible to have brilliant jerks, incapable of getting along with anyone, who completely destroy the output of the team.

We should reward people on their accomplishments and their ability to work as a team.  Intelligence is great, but we simply don’t pay people for being smart.  Who cares if you are smart if you can’t either get something done or alternatively destroy team morale and throughput?  Consider using this 2×2 matrix presented within The Art of Scalability to evaluate the individuals in your team for both behaviors and accomplishments.

3)      Leadership is about EQ – Not IQ

Our frequent readers will also remember this from our postings abroad.  As Malcolm Gladwell has indicated within his book Outliers, all of the evidence points to the notion that the most successful leaders have some minimum IQ.  But IQ alone is not sufficient to be a successful leader.  The greatest leaders have high emotional quotients, often considered a combination of social intelligence and emotional intelligence.

Two of the world’s foremost experts on the topic of leadership and social and emotional intelligence, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee have written two wonderful books on this topic:  Primal Leadership and Resonant Leadership.  In keeping with our theme of 2×2 matrices, here is Richard and Annie’s representation of commitment and emotional quotient.  The Y axis indicates how mindful the leader is of himself/herself (emotional intelligence) and how mindful they are of others (social intelligence).  The X axis indicates their overall emotional tone towards others.  Successful (aka Resonant) leaders have on balance a positive emotional tone and are in touch with themselves and their teams.

4)      It’s All About Performance

See my brief discussion of the model for success.  Superior performance, I argue, is measured as improving long term stakeholder wealth.  This might be emotional wealth in the case of some non-profits or financial wealth in the for profit world.  This means getting things done on time, on budget, in an ethically appropriate manner, with the right quality and meeting the expectations of stakeholders.  Time and experience are just moderators to this equation; they only help performance.  Independent variables are intelligence, drive, commitment, behaviors, etc.  Look to build the right teams with the right behavior at the right time.  Don’t get tied up in how much “experience” people have.  I’d rather have a dedicated person with 5 years of experience than a lazy person with 20.

What type of boss or employee would you rather have, one who is in tune with the team or a competent one? While we usually don’t have to make that extreme of a choice it is often the case that we are faced the decision of keeping or letting go a manager or employee who is technically excellent but difficult to work with. Sometimes this is our boss and we have to decide as an employee whether to stay or not. Two theories on leadership that I’ve come across recently have me debating this question. The first is Extremis Leadership from Colonel Thomas Kolditz who is a professor at West Point. The second is Resonant Leadership by Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee. Dr. Boyatzis is a professor at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Annie McKee is the founder of the Teleos Leadership Institute, and both are co-authors with Daniel Goleman of the bestselling book Primal Leadership.

A simple blog post cannot fully explain either one of these leadership theories and while they do offer generally different perspectives on leadership there is also a great amount for which they complement each other. I encourage you do investigate and read each book but I will provide a quick positional overview that can spark our discussion. Extremis Leadership essentially states that in crisis situations three characteristics of leaders stand out, competence, trust, and loyalty, in that order. And that competency is by far the most important when people feel their lives are on the line. This is to such an extreme that competency can supersede the individual’s rank, which as you can imagine in the military is pretty strong words. There is a promotional video on his site that shows some of the principles that he espouses put into action as Col. Kolditz takes someone through their first parachute jump. The term Resonant Leader, was first introduced in Primal Leadership and refers to a person who is in tune with him or herself, and the people they work with. They create a sense of resonance in the workplace, so great work can be accomplished. Resonant Leadership explains that mindfulness, compassion, and hope are the key elements to enabling renewal and sustaining resonance in leaders that produce quantifiably better results. Additionally they prevent the leader from burning up and becoming dissonant.

An easy way to compare these theories is using our 2×2 matrix that we usually use to explain our “Seed, Feed, and Weed” approach to leadership. In case you haven’t gotten a chance to checkout the rough cuts version of the book we have an expanded section on this concept of identifying the right team members to reward, coach, or encourage to pursue other job opportunities. Below you see how we have overlayed the theories on the axis that they most strongly relate to. Obviously both strive for the upper left quadrant as their goal but each has a dominant axis in which they utilize to get to the upper left.

Having been a part of many crisis situations, including some where people’s lives were on the line I can see how competency can momentarily trump all other characteristics. However, a leader who has produced dissonance in the organization over many weeks, months, or years before the crisis can and probably will be ignored exactly when they are the most useful in spite of perhaps having the best plan.

I would put up with a boss or employee who was extremely competent but difficult to work with for a short period of time to get through a crisis. But having to work with someone for any extended period of time would cause me to discount the value of their competency and remove them from the organization. To me there is an inflated impact rate over time. For every day I have to put up with a person, rather than enjoy their resonance within the team, the value of their competency gets diminished.

As much as I’ve pointed out the differences between the two theories there are many overlaps. For instance, the Resonant Leader is required to display competency but additionally must be able to foster resonance with themselves and their teams. The Extremis Leader displays trust and loyalty among their team in addition to their unflagging competency. I think the answer for all leaders is yes to both. From what used to be the Army’s eleven Leadership Principles, notice the first two:

• Be tactically and technically proficient
• Know yourself and seek self-improvement
• Know your soldiers and look out for their welfare
• Keep your soldiers informed
• Set the example
• Ensure the task is understood, supervised and accomplished
• Train your soldiers as a team
• Make sound and timely decisions
• Develop a sense of responsibility in your subordinates
• Employ your unit in accordance with its capabilities
• Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions