Leadership Is Overrated

June 26, 2023
“Small but dedicated teams of empowered individuals can and do outperform large organizations driven by top-down leadership,” contend business consultants Buckett and Mefford (Hiring, Firing and Creating an Amazing Team Culture for Leaders in a Hurry) in their ho-hum program. Buckett draws on his experience as a platoon chief in the Navy SEALs to suggest that corporate leaders recreate in the workplace the force’s collaborative spirit. Anecdotes from Buckett’s time in Afghanistan illustrate the benefits of a cooperative team, but are short on specifics. For example, the authors emphasize the importance of fostering a culture of “approachability, trust, and openness” by noting that the camaraderie of Buckett’s platoon made them the envy of other units, but the authors don’t describe what Buckett did to create such a culture. Stories from the business world offer more actionable advice, encouraging leaders to “listen more, talk less” by discussing how Jungkiu Choi, the head of consumer banking at Standard Chartered, served employees breakfast during surprise visits to various branches and solicited their suggestions for improvement, the implementation of which boosted customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, the war stories don’t always have clear takeaways, and the business advice, while reasonable, is unoriginal. It’s not quite mission accomplished.

July 15, 2023
Another entry in the library of special-forces warriors-turned-business gurus, but with many points worth pondering. "Most people don't quit their jobs. They quit their bosses." So write former Navy SEAL Buckett and corporate executive Mefford, who reject the current mania for business-leadership books in favor of what a CEO such as the late Jack Welch would likely consider anarchy. The operative notion is that bosses hinder the more productive organization of loose teams whose members are eager to contribute ideas and actions to the common good, much as military people ideally operate as colleagues in a common enterprise. One exercise to test whether a given civilian enterprise is working as an effective team is "killing the leader," borrowed from the military as a thought experiment to find out what would happen if the leader were suddenly to be absent, whether because of death, retirement, or vacation. "What we learn from combat," write the authors, "is that if you are weak, eventually something stronger will come to take you out." A major contributor to that weakness in the business world, they add, is a bad boss, either uninspiring or incapable--and all too often inclined to petty tyranny. Workers don't want that, write Buckett and Mefford. Instead, they want to feel as if they're not cogs in a machine, trusted and as autonomous as possible, with leaders who encourage but don't interfere. "The solution to workplace dissatisfaction doesn't lie in high-functioning leaders; it lies in high-performing teams," they write. The point is well taken not just on the civilian front, but also by scanning the headlines--with, for instance, a democratic Ukraine holding its own against a better-armed and more numerous but poorly led Russian army. Better than most books in the genre and a welcome manifesto for creating productive workplaces.

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