One of the most important lessons we learned during the rebuilding of the Army after Vietnam was the importance of values—a commitment by all soldiers to something larger than themselves. Army officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers alike were adrift in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Knowing that, the Army’s first post-Vietnam chief of staff, General Creighton Abrams, chartered a small group of midcareer officers to look at the Army’s officer corps with particular focus on the moral and ethical foundation of the officer corps.
Abrams was a legend in the Army. West Point class of 1936, he had risen rapidly in rank during World War II, commanding the first tank battalion into Bastogne to relieve the 101st Airborne Division in the tough fighting of the Battle of the Bulge.1 His last job before becoming Army chief was as commander in Vietnam. He knew firsthand the difficulties facing the Army, and he knew how to begin the long job of turning things around. General Abrams knew that the Army needed to reinvest in its deep sense of values by emphasizing people, and commitment to a strong ethical foundation.
The results of the study Abrams chartered were unsettling. It revealed deep-seated cynicism, a perception of widespread dishonesty in determining readiness, incompetence to handle the demands of peacetime, and excessive favoritism and self-serving behavior on the part of many officers. Many would have preferred to avoid the unpleasantness of confronting the problem. But ultimately, this study and similar efforts gave Abrams and those who followed him the basis for tackling this difficult issue. Ultimately, it led to much stronger individual and institutional values.
There are many concrete examples of the resulting shift in emphasis, of leaders taking units back to values. The Army’s core values of courage, candor, commitment, and competence were given a place in both the doctrinal literature and Army Regulations. More important, senior officers were sharing their personal values with their subordinates, in writing and in seminars, to help provide junior leaders with a moral foundation for their actions. That work was carried on in our schools, in our units, and in our literature. Efficiency reports—our periodic performance appraisals—began to emphasize the assessment of such professional ethics as integrity, selflessness, and moral courage. These changes did not create a perfect institution, but they did help to create an institution in which human frailty is not overlooked and values count.
Shared values are the foundation of today’s Army. People and units know what to expect and that they can count on one another. Each soldier can see him- or herself not only as individually important and responsible but also as part of a much greater whole. It is shared values that in October 1993 prompted Master Sergeant Gary I. Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randall D. Shughart to give their lives trying to save a downed aircrew in Mogadishu, Somalia, in an action for which they were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
In the turmoil of downsizing, it was critical that we not lose this strong identification with values. The year 1992 was especially traumatic for America’s Army. The euphoria over our victory in the Persian Gulf quickly gave way to turbulence and hard work. Redeployment involved moving half a million men and women home from the Gulf; at the same time, their equipment was in transit or out of service for refurbishment for months. More than 100,000 Desert Storm troopers had come from garrisons in Europe that were scheduled to be closed; most returned to Europe only long enough to link up with their families and move back to the United States. In the year after the Gulf War we released 213,000 soldiers from active duty and recruited 80,000 for a net loss of 133,000.2 All of that was in addition to demobilizing 147,000 National Guard and Army Reserve troops called up for the Gulf War. Those are enormous numbers. Faced with that kind of turbulence, we knew the Army could change its character at the grass roots very quickly and could easily become disoriented, losing its sense of values and purpose. In 1989 and 1990, Carl Vuono had stressed pace and continuity, warning that rapid demobilization would have a negative impact on readiness and morale. My challenge now was to deal with the acceleration he had warned against.
Our soldiers did not need to be told about change; they were being overwhelmed by it. As the leader, I realized that I needed to emphasize continuity: to help soldiers and their families understand what would not change. I wanted them to understand that the Army might be asking them to do different things and to endure unexpected hardships but that the Army’s essence would not change. Knowing that our roots give us a sense of identity, I knew I could draw on the Army’s history to find symbols of its enduring values.
Thus, I began to use my speeches, articles, and other communications to emphasize normative themes, using symbols to capture the essence of our shared values: the soldier (and by extension his or her family), our sense of commitment, and our sense of duty and service to nation. I did not deny what I called “physical change,” the tough business of getting smaller and relocating, of seeing proud colors retired; and I continued to emphasize growth, the process of becoming something different, to help people gain confidence in the future. But above all else, I wanted to emphasize that in our journey we would not leave our essence behind. I began this in my annual address to the Association of the United States Army in October 1991, when I asked my audience to “take a trip with me.” In our minds we visited Lexington Common, where it had all begun; Antietam with its towering monument: “NOT FOR THEMSELVES, BUT FOR THEIR COUNTRY “; then Fort Leavenworth, the dowager queen of frontier posts and today the crossroads of the Army. Next we went to Normandy and the cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach; then to today’s united Berlin; and finally to the Vietnam Memorial, to which Americans go, day and night, to honor soldiers. I told them, “This is the essence of America’s Army. Competence, character, sacrifice—Duty, Honor, Country; linked inextricably with this nation; achieving victory; protecting the Republic.” I concluded, “I am confident that these values will persevere—today they are our roots, and tomorrow they will be our legacy. There is strength for us in our Army’s history. The values imbedded in our history are the foundation on which change must be based.”3
In later speeches, I shifted my emphasis from past achievement to talk about the men and women who exemplify those symbols around the world today. I talked not only about men like Gordon and Shughart, but also about ordinary soldiers, men and women performing their duties selflessly in the Sinai, Macedonia, Rwanda, Cuba—around the world. One of the most powerful moments in my tour of duty as chief of staff resulted in one such example that I repeated over and over. In December 1993, I went to Fort Drum in upstate New York to participate in a welcome-home ceremony for a battalion returning from Somalia. That’s where I met Chris Reid.
Because of the bitterly cold weather, the ceremony was held in a field house. Family members, friends, and fellow soldiers filled the huge hall. Flags and banners covering the walls welcomed the soldiers home from their difficult campaign in Mogadishu and the surrounding countryside. Their tour of duty had been unusually long, and they had seen and participated in some tough fighting.
As I stood on the small reviewing stand, I noted a soldier with a cane walking with difficulty to take his place in the ranks. I watched him stand proudly with his comrades during the brief ceremony. As the troops were dismissed into the waiting arms of their friends and families, I walked down to see if I could find the soldier with the cane. I did, and I shall never forget him. He was Sergeant Christopher Reid, 3d Platoon, Charlie Company, 14th Infantry, 10th Mountain Division.
Sergeant Reid had been wounded in action on September 25, when fighting had erupted in Mogadishu. He told me his squad and members of his platoon had fought through three city blocks to reach a downed U.S. Army helicopter. The last thing he remembered was the heat of the helicopter burning and everything turning red. When he woke up, he was in a hospital, missing a leg and part of an arm. Chris told me his story in a strong, unwavering voice. He did not have to be there that cold, winter morning, but he wanted to be with his squad, with his friends, one more time. He then looked into my eyes and with great determination said, “You know, sir, knowing what I know now, I would do it again.”
Chris Reid is not alone in my memory. There are many others. In my mind’s eye, I can see their faces. I can recite their names, ordinary men and women somehow raised to greatness. They exemplify what we are trying to achieve: selfless service to their nation and to one another. Invariably, they accomplished more than we in Washington could ever imagine. They are the evidence that a generation of hard work to reinstall values in our Army paid off.
The strength of our values was a theme that I returned to over and over. In a very difficult time, I believe that going back to our values, our essence, gave us the strength and direction we needed. Some may have thought I was too strident or too optimistic, but I think that, if anything, I was not strident enough when I was talking about values. I think a frequent failing of people in leadership positions is that they are likely to be too reticent, too timid about extolling virtue. We have a tendency to want to talk about the “substantive” things, the numbers or whatever. But our people also need to hear us talk about the normative things. Those are the real substance. As the leader, you must create a moral context for what you are trying to accomplish. No matter what your organization does or hopes to do, it revolves around people, and inside each individual there is an ideal person that you must draw out. You have to keep going back to values.
—GRS
Values give an organization a self-ordering quality, a kind of organizational ballast, which provides direction and stability in periods of turmoil, stress, and change. They give both leaders and followers a basis for looking more confidently beyond the issues of the day.
As our organizations come to grips with the need to transform, a well-articulated and widely held set of beliefs about substance enables people to understand that what they do can evolve over time. This is important not just to shareholders, not just to employees, not just to portfolio managers and analysts, and certainly not just to the evening news commentators and other pundits, but also to an organization in its largest sense. Effective leaders understand that core values rooted deeply within the people who make up an organization are the essence of its organizational culture and an enormous source of strength.
In a discussion with the leaders of one of America’s leading companies recendy, we were chided, “Remember, we’re in business to make money for the stockholders,” as if to suggest that as soldiers we did not understand the importance of financial results. We discussed that idea for a few minutes and posed the question “If we could persuade you that the return on your assets would be greater if you were in software, would you get out of the business you are in and go into software?” The answer came back quickly: “Of course not, we’re not a software company.” This company, like many others, in public statements and in private conversation, states a belief that profitability—responsibility to stockholders—drives what they do in a strategic sense. But in fact, that is only one element in a complex mosaic of organizational values.
Think of America’s great corporations: Motorola, with its genuine focus on people and organizational learning; Nordstrom, with its legendary focus on customer service; Coca-Cola, with its exceptional focus on quality and value; Harley-Davidson, which rebuilt itself on the basis of quality and its legendary trademark; L. L. Bean, which has grown from a simple Maine outfitter to a national market leader by sticking to customer service and never compromising on quality; Johnsonx & Johnson, with its deep sense of contribution to society; Hewlett-Packard and its uncompromising integrity. The list could go on; every reader has candidates. The point is that the common attribute of those companies is not longevity or even profitability but a strong sense of values that represents something much more important than what they “do.” In their book Built to Last, James Collins and Jerry Porras write, “we did not find ‘maximizing shareholder wealth’ or ‘profit maximization’ as the dominant driving force or primary objective through the history of most of the visionary companies.”4 The reality is that companies with a strong sense of values are the most successful over time.
In winning organizations, the corporate sense of identity is more important than short-term performance because it creates the strategic context within which an organization can accommodate today’s events and fulfill its responsibilities to all its constituents. A weak sense of identity dissipates energy and focus, contributing to dysfunctional short-term behavior or even failure; a strong sense of identity provides a much better basis for successful action. Make no mistake, you have to achieve, on a consistent basis, recognizable success, be it trained and ready divisions, as in the case of the Army, return on assets, earnings per share, or whatever. It would be wrong to pretend otherwise. “The numbers” are an important measure of success, and people look at them every day. But long-term success derives from a sense of purpose and shared values, which, when all is said and done, is much more substantive than “the numbers.”
RULE TWO: LEADERSHIP BEGINS WITH VALUES
Shared values express the essence of an organization. They bind expectations, provide alignment, and establish a foundation for transformation and growth. By emphasizing values, the leader signals what will not change, providing an anchor for people drifting in a sea of uncertainty and a strategic context for decisions and actions that will grow the organization. Leadership begins with values.
Motorola is one of America’s most remarkable and most successful corporations. One basis of that success is a strong sense of shared values, a common corporate ethic that provides a foundation for individual responsibility. Every “Motorolan” carries a card in his or her pocket or clipped to his or her security badge. It summarizes Motorola’s fundamental objective, key beliefs, key goals, and key initiatives—all on a card the size of your driver’s license. The company’s key beliefs are “A constant respect for people” and “Uncompromising integrity”—not many words, but powerful ideas.
Out of this process of values clarification has come an even more powerful manifestation of values called “Individual Dignity Entitlement” and subtitled “Renewing Our People Values.” Individual Dignity Entitlement is a six-point creed, phrased as questions for the employee and his or her immediate superior:
Do you have a substantive, meaningful job that contributes to the success of Motorola.
Do you know the on-the-job behaviors and have the knowledge base to be successful.
Has the training been identified and made available to continuously upgrade your skills.
Do you have a personal career plan and is it exciting, achievable, and being acted upon.
Do you receive candid, positive or negative, feedback at least once every 30 days which is helpful in improving your personal performance or achieving your personal career plan.
Is there appropriate sensitivity to your personal circumstances, gender, and/or cultural heritage so that such issues do not detract from your success.
Our friends at Motorola tell us that Individual Dignity Entitlement is a hard standard to meet but that, in striving to meet it, they have made progress not simply in strengthening their shared “people values” but in building a climate of shared responsibility.
Some suggest that this kind of manifestation of shared values is window dressing, but the evidence is quite to the contrary. Motorolans strive to live by these beliefs, and together they have built one of the greatest corporations in the world.
One logical place to look for evidence of organizational values is in the published statements an organization makes about itself. An even more important place to look, however, is in the organization’s actions. The official value set—shown by the posters on the walls—may be at odds with actual practice. So the best way to think about organizational values may be empirically, by asking the question “What do you mean when you say…?” For example, if you say your organization values its people, ask yourself how that value is manifested. Ask your people how it is perceived. The declared policy may be quite different from the real one.
Dissonance between stated values and actual values is commonplace. Dissonance tends to be driven by the clock or by the calendar. Investing in values is a long-term undertaking, and in the short term it is almost impossible to measure the bottom-line contribution from programs that develop values. Looking at today’s “in” box, it often appears to be easier to “fix” a problem—any problem—than to try to build a future in which different behaviors will prevent it from occurring. For just that reason, investing in the right values takes real moral courage on the part of the occupants of the executive suite. Thus the question is not whether or not an organization is values-based; every organization is values-based. The question is, what are the values, and are they the ones that will help the organization prosper in the long run?
Core values evolve uniquely in every organization, but there are some common threads a leader can use to begin a process of value clarification and redefinition. Thinking about values as issues will not necessarily yield a poster for your wall, but it does provide a starting point from which you can begin to clarify your real values and think about how you may need to change them.
People who belong to an organization with a strong sense of purpose can identify themselves with that purpose. Like the proverbial medieval stonemason, they can see themselves in a context far greater than their immediate roles—not just cutting stones but building cathedrals. We wanted every soldier to identify him- or herself not merely as a soldier, nor merely with a job or a unit or a base, but as a soldier in America’s Army, something bigger and more important than any of us; something with such an enduring sense of purpose that each of us was enriched by our sense of belonging.
Far too many organizations disregard their history. Often there is a sense, sometimes articulated, sometimes not, that what is done is done; you do not look back. Certainly, there is little to be gained in wringing our hands over yesterday’s decisions; but to ignore our history is to deny ourselves a strength. The past is a reflection of our collective identity and enhances our sense of being. History can give us confidence in the knowledge that others have succeeded in the face of adversity—that we are not the first men and women to face enormous challenges. And it can give us the strength to go on where others have failed. In Chapter 3, we mentioned the 1965 battle at LZ X-Ray in Vietnam. The unit in that fight was the 7th U.S. Cavalry, the unit George Armstrong Custer led to annihilation at the Little Big Horn. Cut off and surrounded by a superior force, Moore remembered that history as he fought nearly a hundred years later. He and his troopers were determined that it would not happen again. The history of the unit’s defeat nearly one hundred years before was a strength. Your organization must preserve its victories, its accomplishments, its heroes—not just because of what they once were but because of what they represent: engineering excellence, research and development excellence, best in class, customer excellence, moral courage, determination, creative genius, community service, whatever. Names are important, trademarks are important—not just because of market equities but because of what they represent to the people who stand behind them. Never underestimate the power of a winning tradition.
People and organization are inseparable; you cannot value your organization without valuing the people in it. You cannot expect your people to have a customer focus or a commitment to quality, or to seek greater responsibility, unless you value them as much as you value whatever it is that you produce. How we value people shows in how we hire and fire them, our commitment to training and development, equal opportunity, pay, benefits, all the usual components of the human resources scorecard. Even more important, however, is how we delegate and share responsibility, how we distribute leadership. We can value our people as a replaceable “factor of production” or as a renewable asset to be developed and cultivated. The choice is up to us.
We sometimes find leaders who want to assume a kind of absolute, unlimited responsibility for everything that happens in an organization. In fact, the leader’s role is not to take responsibility so much as to invest it. Leaders must build subordinates who take responsibility for their own actions and are capable of independent action. That is the real sense of empowerment—not just the freedom to do one’s job but the freedom to define it. Empowerment is not about “power” at all; it is about responsibility. It derives from a sense of responsibility without which the whole notion of empowerment is as meaningless as it is dangerous.
Our use of the word “integrity” as an organizational value is not as a synonym for honesty, though honesty does tend to flow from integrity. Rather, we use it to mean a strong pattern of internal consistency. A colleague, a CEO of a large corporation, told us that in his judgment, he could raise prices 15 percent and still sell as much of his principal product as the company could produce. Alternatively, he said, he could produce more and hold the line on price but at the expense of quality. He said, “Either would be the wrong thing to do. In the short run, at least, we could make more money, but we have an obligation to deal fairly with our customers and to do what’s best for the company in the long run.” His statement shows a genuine integrity, a commitment to consistently doing the right thing for the long run, regardless of the short-term pressures or temptations.
The bedrock of the Army’s post-Vietnam renaissance was the realization, in the late 1970s, that a professional force could be achieved and sustained only by recruiting and retaining quality soldiers. Being a soldier in today’s complex world makes unique demands on a young person, and the best indicators that a person can meet those demands are a high school diploma and above-average test scores. Recruits meeting those standards are more easily trained, capable of meeting higher standards, more easily socialized to their new environment, and more likely to spend less time away from their duties—in other words, bringing in quality recruits gave us better units and a better return on our recruiting establishment and training base. Achieving that objective required building a professional recruiting organization; ensuring an adequate quality of life for soldiers and their families; providing adequate pay and benefits, especially educational benefits; and creating advertising that stressed soldierly values. We were competing for the very best young people in America and offering them the opportunity to serve for a few years or a career, and to return to civilian life enriched by their experience. Every year got a little better until, by the end of the 1980s, virtually all our recruits were mature high school graduates with solid test scores.
The resulting organizational effectiveness has been extraordinary. It was evident in the performance of the Desert Storm Army. The magnificence of that Army was not simply that it performed well on the battlefield but that it conducted the entire deployment with very little of the indiscipline that had always characterized similar operations. Today’s Army is essentially drug free and enjoys substantially lower levels of violent crime than the society it serves. Military offenses, such as desertion, have never been at lower levels than they are today. We knew we could not sustain that quality Army without attracting a constant stream of recruits that met the tough standards of the 1980s and without continuing to invest in education and training.
The second, equally important underpinning in rebuilding the Army after Vietnam was the commitment to formalized leader development, not just for commissioned officers but for all leaders, including the leaders of the Army’s large civilian workforce. By the 1980s, the Army had put into place a structured program of leader development that related formal training and experience to selection, promotion, and assignment for all ranks. From the soldier’s perspective, leader development was the ladder to opportunity. From the Army’s perspective, competent leaders developed to uniform standards sustained quality across the force. A howitzer section chief at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, could now be relied on to perform pretty much like a howitzer section chief in Baumholder, Germany, or Camp Casey, Korea. That kind of leader stability enabled us to handle turbulence with much less difficulty than would otherwise have been expected.
As the extent of the downsizing began to be felt, the most important questions soldiers had concerned our ability to sustain the quality of the force and our enduring commitment to leader development. Sergeants—and many commissioned officers—remembered the “before and after” of the quality revolution, and they knew we could not sustain ourselves as the best in the world if we could not attract and retain the best America had to offer. They wanted to know that we would not walk away from quality programs to save a few dollars or to keep more units on the active rolls. Hence, the first step in transforming the Army was to sustain quality and leader development, and the first value we chose to reinforce was the value the Army places on people.
It is worth emphasizing that this was not mere rhetoric. Keeping the schools open, with most of the same courses, for a smaller force and keeping quality people coming in the front door took real money. Successful recruiting depends on having top-notch recruiters on the street, and the reality of the 1990s is that the cohort of eighteen-year-olds is shrinking. We learned the hard way that a one-third reduction in the force could not be matched by a one-third reduction in recruiters. We actually had to increase the number of recruiters in proportion to the size of the force. In leader development, the Army has been able to scale back some courses and leverage technology, but here also we could not make cuts that were proportional to the end-strength cuts.
Maintaining this commitment to people while downsizing required implementing a number of policies. First, in an apparent paradox, we continued to recruit while downsizing. We also carefully balanced voluntary and involuntary departures to shape the future force. It would have been possible to shrink the Army by simply curtailing recruiting and by creating incentives for indiscriminate voluntary departures. But we had to look ahead five years, ten years, and try to visualize the force we would need. Creating a good sergeant or a competent commissioned officer takes years; the lieutenants the Army recruits this year are the pool from which it will select generals twenty-five years hence. A constant flow in and out was necessary to keep the force refreshed and to ensure an adequate pool of future leaders.
Second, we had to have the right skill mix for the future force. To achieve that goal, we curtailed voluntary departures of people with skills we needed while encouraging departures of those with surplus skills. We could see that by 1995 we would settle down at around 500,000 active strength, so in 1991 we started to structure the force to that number, to that skill mix, even though at that time our strength was still above 700,000. For example, we could tell approximately how many infantry battalion commanders we would need at 500,000, and we were able to adjust the number of infantry lieutenant colonels, from whom battalion commanders are drawn, so that today an infantry officer has the same opportunity to command relative to his peers that his counterpart had ten years ago. Although there are fewer battalions, promotions are coming on time, the very best can aspire to be advanced early, and competition for the most sought-after positions is reasonable.
We paid a price for that. It would have been easier simply to have pulled the plug on raw numbers, to have frozen promotions, or to have stopped recruiting lieutenants; but none of those easier-to-use tools would have led to a healthy environment for those who stayed. Getting the right skill mix for the future force was essential to maintaining both the effectiveness of the force and individual opportunity.
In all of this, we worked hard to treat people with dignity and respect. Everyone in the Army, be they active duty, Army Reserve, National Guard, or civilian, is a volunteer. By treating each departing soldier or civilian and his or her family with as much respect as possible, we affirmed both their importance and the importance of those remaining. We created an entirely new outplacement service to help soldiers relocate and assume new lives as productive civilians. It was an investment we could ill afford in the eyes of some, but doing otherwise would have been inconsistent with our view of the importance of soldiers. We wanted both those leaving and those staying to know that they were individually important to the Army. Even though the Army will eventually downsize by three quarters of a million (active, guard, reserve, and civilian) and in spite of an improving economy (which creates competition for the best recruits) and declining demographics, the 1990s have been the best recruiting and retention years in the Army’s history.
The second basic value we consciously reinforced was commitment—the relationship among soldiers. The commitment soldiers make to one another and to the units to which they belong can be a life-and-death bond; this is different in the military than in most walks of life, but we should not trivialize the role of commitment in nonmilitary organizations. This was the most difficult of our basic values to affirm because commitment is something each individual internalizes in a unique way. We were able to do it by talking and writing about it, and we were helped by our history and tradition. One way we did this was by telling stories that reminded all of us of our commitment.
One such story concerned General Ulysses S. Grant and General William T. Sherman, friends who had first fought together in the western theater in the American Civil War. The story had been used by others, such as Major General Walt Ulmer, who used it with his officers in the 3d Armored Division in 1982. It is part of the heritage of Army values. Telling it was part of the process of handing down values from one generation to the next.
In his 1863 campaign, Grant was frustrated in his attempts to control the Mississippi River. His foes were formidable and the geography was even worse, making it very difficult for him to mass his effort. He realized that the North was becoming demoralized and that if his force was seen as faltering, as had happened repeatedly to the armies in the East, it would strengthen the hand of those seeking a negotiated settlement and the dissolution of the Union. Grant pressed his army into the field, overextending his logistics system. As he closed on Vicksburg in the spring of 1863, he relied on a fragile network of forward supply lines, ultimately cutting them all and living off the land, campaigning the final three weeks on five days of quartermaster rations. This put an enormous burden on his engineers and supply corps to open new bases and roads.
Grant’s audacity paid off by giving him the freedom to maneuver, to mass his force, and to maximize its effectiveness. He succeeded in trapping his enemy inside the fortifications at Vicksburg, and in July 1863 the city fell. Vicksburg had been the last Confederate stronghold in the West, and its capture divided the Confederacy along the Mississippi, opening the rich agricultural areas of the southeastern states to invasion from the west.5
The following spring, General Grant was ordered to Washington to assume command over all the Federal armies, and General Sherman, Grant’s subordinate throughout the battles in the West, took his place. Sherman wrote Grant a letter. He admitted to having had “points of doubt,” but he said this to his friend: “I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come—if alive.”6
The example of Sherman and Grant epitomizes personal commitment, the fact that soldiers can count on one another to perform to the best of their ability, to adhere to standards, to embody organizational values. It is this sense of commitment that we saw in the fighting in Somalia and that we see, displayed less dramatically, wherever we find American soldiers around the world. Talking about it as a virtue helped make it stronger. Talking about it helped people understand that it would not change—that they, when they needed help, could count on one another and on the United States of America.
Finally, we drew on our sense of history to make sure that soldiers understood that, in a democracy, service means much more than fighting and winning the nation’s big wars. For a generation of soldiers steeped in the Cold War and the stories of our big wars, this was not an easy concept to grasp.
“Service to nation” became the basis of our vision. It means the dirty work of ambiguous little wars, long separations from family and friends, and stepping in when the people of America need help, as soldiers did, for instance, in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. The United States Army had done similar things in its long history, but they were unfamiliar to soldiers who, up to 1989, had experienced one of the least active periods in our history and for whom such operations had been a diversion from the vital business of deterring the Soviet Union.
The inner strength that derives from values gives each member of an organization strength and confidence; it motivates and inspires performance and builds genuine loyalty. People are motivated by personal rewards, but there are other, intangible motivations that are much more important. People aspire to identify with organizations that they can respect and to perform work that contributes value in a way that they can understand. Shared values foster both moral courage and self-confidence; they help people understand expectations; they help define acceptable behavior. Shared values provide strength for leaders to look beyond the “crisis du jour” and provide a sense of identity that is insurance against mindless fad surfing. This common set of values fuels an organization’s self-confidence and provides a basis for genuine strategic alacrity, creativity, and boldness.
Ultimately, shared values foster trust. The basic pattern of an Industrial Age bureaucracy is checking and cross-checking to ensure that process complies with standards and that the organization makes its numbers. Such an organization is based on the assumption that getting the parts right will ensure the optimization of the whole. This leftover Newtonian world is deterministic and reductionist. Margaret Wheatley argues that better, more appropriate organizational metaphors are found in twentieth-century science, particularly quantum physics: “When the world ceased to be a machine, when we began to recognize its dynamic, living qualities, many familiar aspects of it disappeared…. In the quantum world, relationships are not just interesting; to many physicists, they are all there is to reality.”7
Shared organizational values make possible the trust that underlies the relationships among the constituents of the organization. There is no simple recipe for building trust. In his book Super Motivation,Dean Spitzer talks about the “trust bucket,” suggesting that building trust is like filling a bucket of water drop by drop. Think how difficult that task would be and how valuable a bucket of water would be in a world where buckets were filled with eyedroppers. Trust begins by carefully defining individual and corporate expectations. Leaders can contribute to a climate of trust by demonstrating commitment, moral courage, honesty, respect for human dignity, and integrity.
Trust, then, in the sense in which we are using the word, is not about adherence to codes or procedures but rather about adherence to values. It is knowing how someone will act in a situation not because the employee manual contains a scripted example but rather because you know how that person will interpret his or her responsibility, think, make judgments, decide, and communicate intent. What the Army found as it brought in quality people and invested in their development is that our traditional approaches had far underestimated most soldiers’ potential. From time to time, individuals do make errors in judgment, but the poor decisions are overwhelmed by the good ones. Today, we see that the very best organizations everywhere are learning the same thing: Leadership begins with values.