There are all
sorts of adages about experience and they are particularly common when we talk
about leadership and management.
But the truth is that the basic fact of experience is often ignored when
it comes to selecting very senior leaders for organizations of any size, to
include our within government.
Thus we elect people with no substantive leadership experience to be
governors (or presidents) and we feel nothing terribly wrong with appointing
people with no leadership experience to head huge departments of the
government.
There is an
obvious problem with a demand for too much experience; you can draw up a dream
resume (I see them all the time) that is so extensive anyone who had actually
achieved all the ‘required’ elements would need to be 150 years old. (I saw one recently – from a Defense
Contractor – who was looking for a recently retired Army or Marine Colonel with
combat experience as a brigade / regimental commander, a master’s degree,
fluency in a second language and extensive experience on procurement of a major
program, with Joint Staff experience.
When you looked at the details it was literally impossible to have done
all that they wanted.)
And other jobs
obviously can’t be perfectly duplicated: you can’t be the governor of a state
before you are governor of a state, ergo, you never did ‘that job’ before.
Which leads to
a simple question: what is ‘enough’ experience to lead a huge corporation or a
state (or the country)?
First, a
warning: everyone has limits. Very
often, more often then we like, someone who did well at one level of leadership
fails at the next. While often
passed over as simply the ‘Peter Principle’ (though real enough), the real
issue is that people do have limits.
The man who is competent running an organization of 100 people sometimes
fails – and fails dramatically - when running one of 1,000.
(The converse
is rarely true: someone is a poor leader in smaller organizations but succeeds
in larger one; there are a few examples, but they are rare and always have some
strange explanation.)
Two points come
to mind: you need several leadership positions before you reach a certain sized
organization; and you need to have had time to think. Let me explain.
You need to
begin with smaller organizations, one that lets you learn the fundamental
dynamics of leadership, how people work, how to communicate, how convince
people and build followers. This
is as true of absolute dictators as it is true of the manager of a corner drug
store: there is a real need for real followers, people who believe in
supporting you – for whatever reason.
A small
organization, perhaps less than a dozen, certainly less 40 is needed for a
start. An organization of such a
size lets you learn ‘up close and personal’ how people relate to each other, to
an organization, and to their assigned tasks. And in very real sense – as I will explain in a second – you
can experience every possible leadership challenge in a small organization; the
differences between a small and large organization can be in many cases only
one of numbers, not the real leadership issues.
(That military
platoons are no larger than 45 men is a demonstration of this point,
particularly when we remember that the leadership of a platoon really rests in
the hands of the platoon sergeant; that is why the platoon sergeant is there:
to lead the platoon and to teach the brand new officer with the titular
leadership role. It is, in fact,
and ideal structure to learn how to lead.)
Once you have
had some experience leading a small organization you need some time to sit and
think about what you have learned – a rotational schedule of 2 years in
leadership and a year out is probably best. Under ideal circumstances you would
have one or two small organizations, and one or two medium organizations (100
to 200 people in size) before you end up with an organization of roughly 500.
The 500 man
organization (and the number can fluctuate up and down a bit – the more
structured, the larger) is a key experience, as it is the last organization
that anyone can actually lead and feel and see and know the whole
organization. What everyone finds
is that it is at this sized and organization that they have the most rewarding
leadership experience. Having led
several organizations of this size, and several larger than this, the key is
the realization that with a 500 man organization you are right on the edge
having a personal contact throughout the organization.
Every leader or
manager when he first takes over such an organization will feel that it is
perhaps just a bit too large to control.
As they gain some experience they will learn at first to control it, and
later find that the level of interaction and response from such an organization
is almost the perfect fit, just the right size to both ‘be in charge’ and have
enough size that the organization can accomplish significant things.
Then you get
moved up the ladder and you find yourself in charge of 1,000 or more
people. And suddenly everything
has changed.
The truth is
that this is the break point. Somewhere
between 500 and 1000 people it become truly too large to control. If you are smart and capable you
realize this quickly and count on your staff and your deputies – the folks who
are in charge of those departments underneath you that have anywhere from 100
folks to 500 folks. If you aren’t
smart you try to run 1000 people the same way you ran 500 – and you will
eventually learn that you can’t.
This is the key
leadership lesson: once you reach 1000 people you find you are back to leading
that team of 20 or 30 or 40. You
have your key staff, and you have your key deputies – the leaders of the
smaller units. They become the
people you actually lead. You must
lead them, train them to manage and train them to build followers, and give
them the ‘tools’ and resources so that they can do their jobs.
(Again, in the
military a battalion – anywhere from 450 to 650 men – is the largest medium
sized commands, and commanders are still in the field with the troops. The next command echelon, known as a
‘major command,’ is a brigade (or regiment in the Marines) and is one that is
commanded by a colonel and a staff and the ‘hands-on leadership’ is with the 3
– 5 battalions found within each brigade.)
This leadership
lesson is the key one to transition between running a small and medium sized
organization and a large one. Once
you have learned the lesson you can arguably run an organization of 10,000 or
100,000 or 1,000,000, because the real lesson is the same: you are no longer in
direct control, you have staffs and deputies and others who are real, regular,
daily contact with the people who do the real work. It is a simple lesson to learn in one sense: you can learn
it the first time you are “in charge” of a large organization and realize that
the folks doing the work have no real idea who you are or what you really
want.
The truth is
that the majority of senior leaders never learn the lesson. Most – the vast majority – of the
leaders of large organizations (and the military is as guilty as anyone else)
either end up trying to run the organization as if it had only 100 people all
located under one roof, or they try to run it as if it were nothing more than a
large-scale accounting problem, just a bunch of numbers that can be moved
around. Neither works. In most large and well funded
organizations there is enough management ‘padding’ that senior leaders can
focus on stock prices and quarterly returns and technology and their lack of
leadership skills are ignored until a problem develops and then they are promoted
to the board and someone else is brought in. This can go on for quite some time with institutional
inertia preventing collapse. In
the end real leadership is needed to save the organization (if it private), but
the truth is most private organizations don’t last that long. (The number I have heard quoted is that
the average $1 billion business lasts 12 years before being bought up by
someone else.) So, they can
develop a good idea or business model, grow too large for the ability of their
leadership, stumble along for a decade or so, and then be bought up.
This is equally
true in government, where we routinely see large departments in state and
federal government headed by someone who was a senior staffer or elected
official for decades and who has no leadership experience of a large
organization. So, they come in,
run the department for 2 years, it stumbles along – often wasting a great deal
of money – and then the department head goes off to a new position (often to
head a large corporation) with a well credentialed but misleading resume.
But if you want
someone to take the organization into the future, to actually grow it and make
it thrive, you need real leadership.
And that means the leadership needs real – meaningful – experience.