Military and civilian management training

I argue in Managing Leadership that civilians managers should not look to the military for lessons in individual leadership training. The environments, organizationally relevant factors, and dynamics are so distinctly different that there is not much to be learned from military bosses about the personal nature of individual leadership; at least, not unless those managers are planning on joining the military.

With regard to drawing lessons from the military, my argument is that military units can teach us a good deal about group dynamics and organizational leadership as a part of those dynamics. Moreover, other critical management skills such as decision-making, situation awareness and analysis, logistics, delegation, and the like have been highly developed in the military. However, efforts by civilian managers to draw lessons about how an individual can impose leadership on an organization is unequivocally misplaced. For this reason, I do not recommend study of military biographies for emulation by civilian managers.

There is a converse element to this: Military commanders, it must be said, have little to learn from study of civilian management techniques. There is ample evidence that efforts to impose civilian management techniques in the military environment have proved inappropriate - even disastrously so - whether these attempts have been made in the military services themselves or in their senior civilian departments.

But it is nevertheless being attempted again. Both the Navy and the Air Force are beginning to send flag-rank officers (admirals and generals) to business school. This will prove to be, at the very least, a waste of their time. It is comparable to sending a senior VP or C-level executive to a standard business program. Officers at this level - just as high-level executives - are unlikely to benefit from such training.

What they do need is targeted education on the transition from hands-on manager to executive-level commander. The span of control and organizational issues and responsibilities encountered here can be so vastly greater in scope that many lessons learned by a manager enroute to this level need to be unlearned in order for him or her to be successful there. But then, civilian executives need this as well. Both groups, unfortunately, are left largely to learn much of it, hit or miss, on the job.