Leadership Challenges in Companies Vs Leadership Challenges in Armed Forces

 

Leadership in any organisation inspires people by providing a purpose and direction. It seeks to accomplish the mission while striving to improve the organisation. Leadership skills are skills that can, fortunately, be learned. It is not true that leaders are born, not made.

Effective business leadership is critical for meeting employee, customer and business needs. Business leadership skills generally centre on the ability to communicate effectively, the ability to focus on the big picture, and the ability to analyse information. Leadership problems in business can stifle creativity, reduce productivity and cripple a company to the point it can no longer remain viable. These problems stem from individual personality conflicts to dysfunctional group dynamics.

Leadership direction in companies needs to focus less on a particular leader who heads the team to win the battle, and more on a mentor that directs and encourage a team and helps advance the company. The complexity of today’s business world requires leaders to be able to communicate on multiple levels and effective communication is hard because it takes commitment.  For example, when one has to create the vision and persuade your team to make it their vision too, he or she has to connect on an individual level and inspire people to move from “I” to “we.” And leaders have to build trust by ensuring their verbal communication and non-verbal actions reinforce each other.

Even the best leaders worry about firing a member of their team. Unfortunately, one would often find that the people who got him/her where they currently are, will not take him/her where he/she wants to be because the company has outgrown the person’s ability to keep up. As the company grows, the leader has to make the tough decisions to continually upgrade his/her talent. People want to work for winning organizations and keeping a team member around who’s not pulling their weight just drags everybody else down with them.

There are three reasons leaders in companies fail to execute. First, they don’t follow their own plan with discipline. Second, they fail to keep score on what matters. Third, they don’t have the right people in the right jobs to make it happen. If they are able to successfully assemble these three puzzle pieces, they can put their company on track to win.

While the leadership attributes in all walks of civil life are more or less the same, military leadership is significantly different— the most obvious difference being the extremely high levels of motivation required to achieve the objectives. The leader is required to motivate his men to be prepared to follow orders, which may result in putting one’s own life at stake. Military leadership requires a combination of persuasion, compulsion and setting examples that makes subordinates willingly do what the leader wants them to do.

The armed forces are increasingly carrying out more and more non-traditional roles like peace operations, internal security duties, disaster relief, etc. which in turn requires for leaders to have an expanded knowledge base and additional skills to be able to adapt efficiently to the changing situations.

Technologically-driven change puts constant pressure on military organisations to reinvent themselves. Therefore, successful leaders have to be proactive facilitating rapid innovation without sacrificing organisational effectiveness.