I recently spoke to Stanley McChrystal, who retired from the U.S. Army as a four-star general after more than thirty-four years of service. In the interview, he talked about the lessons he learned about leadership and managing teams, how an organization scale to meet new business management challenges, how to get team members on the same page, and more.
McChrystal's last assignment was as the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. His book, Team of Teams, is a New York Times bestseller and he is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the cofounder of McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm. A one-of-a-kind commander with a remarkable record of achievement, General Stan McChrystal is widely praised for creating a revolution in warfare that fused intelligence and operations. He is also known for developing and implementing the counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan and for creating a comprehensive counter-terrorism organization that revolutionized the way military agencies interact and operate.
Dan Schawbel: What lessons did you learn about leadership and managing teams from your time in the U.S. army?
Stanley McChrystal: I was fortunate to both be a member and leader of elite teams in the military. When I became commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force, I was leading thousands of individuals, from Special Forces to the broader interagency effort. I quickly realized that while we had the most best and most effective operators and small teams in the world, we were unable to scale. Simply having great small teams did not add up to a successful organization - we were bureaucratic, slow moving, and hierarchical.
Through trial and error, I learned we needed to become a team of teams: scaling the agility of small teams to the organizational level and connecting normally siloed groups. This requires a lot of work on the part of the leader – you have to be the force that pumps information, drives communication, and maintains the culture across your teams.
Schawbel: How do organizations scale their management practices to meet the biggest challenges?
McChrystal: First you have to understand the biggest challenge. Many will be surprised to learn it isn’t strategic – all organizations are struggling from a lack of adaptability in a fast-changing environment.
To become adaptable, you need to scale the magic of a small team. Think of how your immediate team operates in a crisis--you all come together, probably camping out in the same room, sharing information and working together around the clock, exchanging ideas and truly collaborating on a solution. Everyone knows what’s going on and everyone knows and trusts each other. Now picture that working at the organizational level, with different teams coming together to tackle their biggest challenges - a team of teams.
To achieve this in the Task Force in Iraq, we redesigned our headquarters, opening up our physical space to include everyone, and mounted state-of-the-art technology to display information and allow for video-conferencing across multiple screens. We had an almost fanatical focus on sharing information across the Task Force, from the analysts in DC to the operators on the ground in Mosul - we held an organization-wide 90-minute meeting every single day, sharing updates and lessons learned from around the globe with over 7,000 people.
We learned that you have to be connected and collaborative with all of the nodes in your network; no one team has all the answers.
Schawbel: In the army, what was the conventional wisdom on war and how did you adjust to the realities of the new world?
McChrystal: We were always taught that massing combat power decisively and efficiently would win the day..
This was not the case in our fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq. We were the most elite force in the world, with unrivaled discipline, training, and resources, but we were facing an organization that was not our mirror image. AQI was a completely different beast – a dispersed and nimble network. In order to win, we needed to go after the whole network, not only the top few leaders.
“It takes a network to defeat a network” became our mantra, and it was this shift in mentality and our dedication to transforming ourselves that ultimately enabled us to be successful.
Schawbel: What's the best way to get everyone on a team, or organization, on the same page and meeting the same objectives?
McChrystal: Leaders must establish common purpose and build trust within an organization.
From the outside, it appears the US military is aligned and working towards the same goal. This is often not the case. Organizational culture can become tribal, and each unit becomes laser-focused on its own mission, as if they're wearing organizational blinders. Silos between functional teams, geographic dispersion, and a lack of personal relationships further compound the problem; a command of disconnected teams can find itself working at cross-purposes.
When I was leading the Task Force, I found that clearly and consistently articulating organizational objectives helped tremendously in aligning everyone to a common goal and creating shared awareness. Another technique using our best talent as liaisons in order to force teams to put themselves in each other’s shoes and create a culture of collaboration. We embedded an elite operator in another unit or agency, and were able to forge the bonds of trust, understanding, and communication between groups.
Schawbel: What are your top pieces of career advice that you received in the army but are applicable to everyone?
McChrystal: The best advice I received in the Army came from my mentor, Lieutenant General John Vines. He was the perfect model of a “servant leader.”
He demonstrated (and continues to demonstrate to this day) the importance of committing and investing in your people. As a leader he shared his troops’ conditions, and understood their experiences. He led with empathy, understanding the motivations and perspectives of those who followed him.
Another important piece of advice is to view your leadership as being less about giving top-down orders and more about cultivating those who follow you, empowering them to make the right decisions. Many leaders are tempted to lead like a chess master, striving to control every move, when they should be leading like gardeners, creating and maintaining a viable ecosystem in which the organization operates.
This is especially applicable to private sector leaders; the world is moving too quickly for those at the top to master every detail and make every decision. Empowering, cultivating, and ultimately serving those who follow you will unlock massive potential within your organization, allowing you to solve for problems in real time.
