Commander’s Intent
Everyone, or at least almost everyone, likes to be in control. But, if you are a Chief Executive Officer, senior executive, or rising entrepreneur, then you understand that in business and often in life, control is an illusion for the strategic leader. From Sun Tzu's perspective, you want clients and your competitors to think and believe they are in control. In both cases, this is good for business. Control is an illusion both in strategy and in business and has a call as strong and as dangerous as the Siren's call to sailors of old.
There is, however, something that is better than control. It is a concept called "Commander's Intent," a little-known military leadership tool that gives subordinates the information they need to accomplish the mission. Instead of controlling your subordinates, your goal is to unleash them. Rangers and other warrior types know that when it comes to warfare, the Commander's Intent is one of the most critical things on the battlefield. What is true for Rangers and the Special Operations community is true of business leaders who need to drive results and profitability.
As most prominent thought leaders on leadership and development espouse, influence is the most vital factor in leadership itself. Let us say that leadership is, indeed, influence. The question then is how does one grow, nurture, and build influence? Influence, defined, is to affect the character, development, or behavior of someone or something. In the leadership development space, we would add the word "positive" to positively impact the development or actions of someone or something.
In many cases, influence simply rules, dominating one's ability to lead effectively. Influence is so crucial to future combat arms and special operations leaders that you must successfully navigate the world's most challenging leadership school with the gauntlet of peer reviews and evaluations. If there are no supporting peer evaluations, then there is no graduation from Army Ranger School.
If you have been in business for longer than, let's say, two weeks, you know there is a considerable difference between positional leadership and authentic leadership. Positional leadership is where a subordinate might have to follow you or lose their job. That is not how great organizations are made. There are a lot of command-and-control leaders out there who dominate their individual space but are secretly loathed by their followers. These organizations have employees that stay in their current job, doing the minimal amount required until they find somewhere else to work. And, as you probably well know, employee engagement across almost all business sectors is a staggeringly low 21%. In case you have yet to see the recent Gallup global survey recently, nearly 80% of all workers in America are practically disengaged from their work.
Leveraging Commander's Intent is one way to maximize employee engagement and unleash your organization from the old command and control days. What is Commander's Intent? Commander's Intent is the summation of what you want to see your employees accomplish if you do not have time personally supervise them. You can call it the leader's intent. Whatever its name, it is a powerful business tool that is game-changing. Commander's Intent, or CI, will change your business and, often, personal life.
Consider the words of Brigadier General Tom Kolditz (then Colonel Kolditz, then founder of The Leadership Center at West Point), "The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy," says Colonel Tom Kolditz, …. "You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen—the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, and the enemy responds in a way you don't expect. Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into the battle." (Made to Stick, Heath, Kindle Location 402)
CI fixes all of that.
Let's give you a warrior example to set the stage. Say you are in charge of a group of warriors who must take out a communications node (radio tower) before an impending counterattack on enemy forces. Your mission is to place explosives at the tower's base and drop it hard to make it inoperable for enemy use. You have a team of 16 broken down into two squads. 1st squad has six warriors with a single mortar tube in support. 2nd squad has seven warriors with a sniper attached. Your three-warrior command team rounds out the group.
Given only 30 minutes before a Blackhawk Helicopter picks you up for insertion, you don't have time for detailed planning. The "Helo" is only available to operate under cover of darkness, and the radio tower is 40 miles away. Enemy defensive positions block the roads, and no high-performance aircraft are available for airborne insertion. You make sure your team has the equipment you think you will need for the mission and a 72-hour pack each in case you have to escape and evade after your team drops the tower.
Before you load the Helo, your commander back briefs you and says at the end of the briefing, "Make sure that tower is inoperable by sunset tomorrow." Eight hours later, the sun is coming up. You and your force are one kilometer away from the radio tower and observe the area around the tower for enemy defensive forces from a piece of high ground unoccupied by enemy forces. You realize you have about 12 hours of light before the mission must be completed. What next?
You send out a recce team of your point man and your best team leader, and you have them cloverleaf the objective, taking still and video imagery from each of the major cardinal directions. You stay back to help set up the 60mm mortar system in case you need it for the mission, which will commence before sunset in the next few hours. You and your sniper then build out a range card to ensure you can use him effectively if you need him later.
The Recce team returns 4 hours before sunset. Bad news, between you and the objective, an entire battalion task force (500+) of enemy warriors are assembling for battle. Sure, your teams can sneak around them and emplace the explosives without being found. However, the enemy will look for blood once those explosives go off. Delayed ignition is not an option due to the time and necessity of making the tower inoperable. Unlike the movies, sometimes explosive charges fail to detonate fully.
You look over to the mortar team and wish you had a laser-designated round to drop the tower once and for all. You don't, so the mortar won't guarantee mission success. What about air support? None are available till after the sun sets. Explosives were your primary tool; what now? Taking a knee next to a large mountain laurel-type tree, you grab your team leaders and drop a poncho liner over the three of you to disrupt the sound from your conversation. Your first team leader couldn't hear what the commander said to you directly during the debrief and back brief right before you boarded the Helo. He asks you to review what was discussed. That sparks the memory you need to accomplish the mission without compromising and "Lone Survivoring" your team. You tell the Team Leader to grab the sniper and your RTO or communications expert. They crawl over to your position and take a knee under the poncho liner.
You ask your RTO to review the film of the tower itself. He takes a look, and you ask him, after the tower, what is the most vulnerable element in the enemy radio tower setup? He looks at the video again and notices the radio tower requires a generator to keep it running and operable. You recognize the generator as a piece of kit that you and your sniper drew on the range card. The generator, and the backup generator, are 800 meters away. Unlike the tower's base, which is covered in sandbags to protect it, the generators are out in the open, and their sizeable auxiliary fuel bladders are exposed to the elements.
A smile comes over your camouflage-painted face, and you brief your team on what they will do next." Men, there are too many enemy forces between us and the radio tower to ensure we can place explosives and detonate them in time to make the radio tower inoperable by the last light. However, our commander gave us his intent right before we loaded the helicopters. He did not say to destroy the radio tower; he said to ensure it is inoperable. Sierra-01, our sniper, is ready because we ranged those generators earlier today, and they are well within range. Instead of placing explosives, we will use our mortar team to create confusion and cover the sound of our sniper engaging the generators and fuel bladders, ensuring the radio tower is inoperable for the next 24 hours and days to come. We can accomplish the commander's intent without leaving this elevated and highly defensible position. We will execute a sniper engagement 30 minutes before the last light, masked by a 2-minute artillery barrage covering the direction and distance of our sniper rifle, aiding our ability to hide from the enemy forces that nearly surround us.
Twelve hours later, your team lands safely in the Blackhawk helicopter at your patrol base, miles behind the lines, and now safe from artillery bombardment by enemy forces. For the cost of 4 sniper rounds, 12 60mm mortar shells, and the energy required to move the 15 Kilometers to your extraction point quickly, you have completed the mission according to the commander's intent, with no losses of life or limb to your team. Though you could not accomplish the mission briefing, you accomplished a successful mission by knowing and meeting the Commander's Intent.
Your debriefing reveals that the communications node will be out of service for up to a week. Although they had a spare tower in close vicinity, in case a backup is needed, generators are outside a week's drive to that location. Find the mission brief alone could've killed your team, and just accomplish a mission for a few days. Because you understood the commander's intent, you kept the node out of action for over 2X longer with no casualties. Commanders' intent and the mission accomplished.
As you can see by this military example, ensuring that your teams not only know the mission but fully understand the intent of the mission allows them to accomplish the strategic goal. In case a problem arises that prevents the plan from being followed. In business, as in warfare, it is so much better to unleash a team that understands intent on a specific mission than it is to tell them precisely what to do, then face the consequences of Murphy, or your competitors, preventing success for a team that can only follow literal directions.
