Major Benjamin “Jim” Jimenez is an active-duty officer in the U.S. Army currently assigned as Executive Officer to the Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff (G-2) at the Pentagon. He has a passion for leadership and in his limited free time enjoys reading books on leadership and history. As he's traversed up the leadership ladder, he's come across a lesson or two that he'd like to share with you all here.
There are a plethora of articles out there for how to be a good senior leader, or how to grow to become one. Not enough attention is paid to how to be successful in middle management. Books exist; one of the most helpful to me has been Seeing Systems by Barry Oshry. But though I have a library of books on leadership and management that have plenty of lessons to be gleaned, the fact remains that they’re almost all written for lower or upper management.
In the Army, there is a significant divide between the lower and middle management layers. And as I’ve made that transition myself, one of the biggest takeaways I found from both living it and talking to mentors about how to be successful, was that many have difficulty making the transition to “field grade leadership.” The ranks of major, lieutenant colonel, and colonel in the Army are where that divide occurs for the military. As we transition from leading organizations in the 40 -150 range to leading organizations that can have between 250 and 5000 folks, as well as key jobs as chiefs of staff for even larger organizations, we don’t do a good job as an institution teaching people how to make the transition between, “what worked in the past,” and “what works now.” I have come up with the following five points that have helped me through that transition and continue to help me learn and grow.
1. Be where your feet are but keep an eye on the future.
The simple fact is that most of the jobs at this level are neither fun nor desirable. We’ve moved beyond direct leadership – having a team small enough that we can really get to know each individual and help them unlock their full potential. Few are the kind of jobs that motivate people to come running to fill them. While it’s always important to have an eye to the future - after all, they are “developmental” jobs that are a crucible that tests whether we have senior leader potential - the key to doing well at them is to figure out how to be successful and focus on doing it. There’s no quicker way to fail than to always have one foot out the door looking for other opportunities. “Be where your feet are,” is some of the best advice I’ve gotten about any job, and it’s certainly a key element of what’s enabled me to be successful thus far.
2. Thinking outside the box is only possible if you understand what’s inside the box first.
There are a host of memes going around about the Army that purport to have feedback from our adversaries of the past (Nazis, Soviets, etc.) that say that what made the American Army so hard to defeat was that we don’t follow our own doctrine! Unfortunately, I’ve worked for and with a lot of people who interpreted that to mean that we don’t need to study our doctrine – the bedrock values, principles, processes, and procedures that show us what right looks like. The people in the past who are held up as paragons of “thinking outside the box,” whether that be General Eisenhower or Jeff Bezos, spent a lot of years learning what the “box” was. They learned what the rules were for how to be successful, and only once they mastered that, could their creativity and rule breaking truly be effective. It has become popular both in and outside the Army in the past few years to be a “disruptor” or to foster that mindset. But it’s hard to disrupt something successfully if you don’t fully understand what it is you’re trying to disrupt. Thinking outside the box is great, but you have to exhaustively plan, research, and achieve understanding of the limitations first in order to break them effectively. Range by David Epstein is an excellent book on this – showing how learning a lot about different disciplines enables people to be successful at charting new courses and leading innovation.
3. Prioritize.
It has become a common mantra in my time in the Army that the “higher ups” give us too much to do and there’s no way to get it all done. In 2015, “a study at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., revealed a training deficit of 258 days—so nearly 20 months of annual mandatory training crammed into a 12-month calendar year!” What I have found though, that people’s abilities are vastly more than anyone thinks they are – what they lack is priority. It does take time as a leader to not only shotgun blast people with tasks, but to give them priorities too. But when people know what order to approach problems in, which balls they’re juggling are “glass” and which are “rubber” I have found both for myself and for the teams I’ve led, that their capacity increased dramatically. The Agile Methodology, as originally described in “Scrum” by Jeff Sutherland is a good example of how to achieve tasks. And the “Eisenhower Matrix,” which organizes tasks by both how important and urgent they are, was another tool I have been able to use to great effect.
4. Begin with the end in mind.
This dictum has been shared many times, most notably as the second of the famous Seven Habits, but it is often the simplest things that we forget. The perfect example from an Army perspective is the War in Afghanistan. What the Army thought it was being sent to do and what political leaders actually wanted done were two very different things. Tactical military success was achieved many times, but since the end wasn’t well-defined, the experience cost thousands more lives, and lasted multiple years longer than needed - ultimately ending in an ignominious withdrawal. If you can define for yourself and for your teams where you're going at the outset, it’s easy to plan how to get there. If the end isn’t defined, you can run 100 miles per hour for as long as you want and “arrive” at completely the wrong point.
5. Talent vs. Practice.
It’s become popular in the Army in my time to say that leadership is a skill that anyone can develop. All we need to do is identify the right skill set and practice those things until we get good at them. That is absolutely true. But some people are more naturally talented at different aspects. Some people are great at mentorship, some at planning, some at communication, some at the crucial yet often overlooked skill of getting inside the boss’s head and translating what she truly wants. In the same way that Mozart and Salieri were both famous musicians at the same time but weren’t equally talented, so too can people be leaders and not be good at the same things. It’s an old adage that people tend to get promoted one level beyond their competence. Truly knowing yourself and your team and putting the right people in the right jobs doesn’t need to be a negative on those not selected – even when it’s you! But it’s often worse to be in a job for which you’re not suited than to not achieve an unrealistic dream. This is true both on an individual level – in having accurate goals for ourselves, and also crucial for when we select key team members, and then help them practice the things that truly make them assets to an organization.
This is not an exhaustive list, and I’m still refining the things I focus on as a leader. However, these five things have served me well as I’ve transitioned to higher level management roles and I look forward to refining this list as I take on new, exciting opportunities! I would love to hear from you in the comments too, as to what you think about this list, or what are some items you think should be added!