A Trust-Based Culture Shift: Rethinking the Army Leadership Requirements Model in the Era of Mission Command

1st Place, General Douglas MacArthur Military Leadership Writing Competition, CGSC Class 15-01In January 2015, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) hosted a lecture by bestselling author Ori Brafman. At this lecture, Brafman discussed agile leadership with an audience of eleven hundred military field grade officers. Prior to taking their seats, each audience member received an index card. Midway through the presentation, Brafman instructed the officers to take out their index cards and list one way the Army could more effectively engender trust and enable mission command.1When the audience members had written their ideas on their cards, they passed them to others in the crowd who read the ideas and assigned them a numerical value, one through five. The better the idea, the higher the numerical value assigned. The audience repeated the process of passing and grading five times before totaling the scores. Brafman next asked audience members to raise their hands if they held a card that received a perfect score of twenty-five. The individuals identified revealed those "top ideas" to the audience. Surprisingly, most of the ideas discussed shared the same theme: soldiers did not feel empowered; rather, they felt micromanaged and scrutinized by bureaucratic processes.This result may come as a shock to senior Army leaders who have attempted to empower soldiers through a service-wide implementation of the mission command philosophy. That philosophy enables military forces to respond quickly to ambiguous situations and supports the tenets of Army operations in The U.S. Army Operating Concept: Win in a Complex World (2014). 2 Successful mission command requires leaders to provide clear intent, then delegate and empower subordinates to encourage disciplined initiative. However, the Army leadership requirements model, the standard the Army sets for leaders to meet, does not reinforce these premises.3Additionally, bureaucratic processes and recent service-wide policies have eroded trust across the force, a mission command requisite. The Army leadership requirements model needs modification to reinforce the missing mission command leadership principles. Explicit codification of these principles will serve as an embedding mechanism to reinforce mission command and foster a trust-based cultural change.The principles espoused in the mission command philosophy are not new. The German concept of mission command, Fuhren mit Auftrag (mission-oriented leadership), more popularly known as Auftragstaktik, goes back two centuries.4 Following the crushing defeats at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806, the Prussians realized their mechanistic way of conducting war had become insufficient. The Prussians began encouraging more nimble command systems and military organizations, which were championed by Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.5 In a 2010 Journal of Strategic Studies article titled "The Long and Winding Road," Eitan Shamir discusses how Moltke viewed Auftragstaktik:Superiors specify the mission objectives and constraints and allocate resources, leaving the rest to their subordinates. The latter's skills, creativity, and commitment, or lack thereof, will ultimately determine the battle plan and its execution.6Like the U.S. Army's mission command philosophy, Auftragstaktik relies on leaders to provide direction then delegate and empower subordinates. It encourages individual initiative, skill, and creativity. Embedding those principles into the Prussian military culture served as an effective driving force in German tactical victories in the Second World War.7The assimilation of Fuhren mit Auftrag into Prussian military culture was gradual.8 The assimilation of mission command into U.S. Army culture will also be a measured process. Compounding the challenge is the Army's managerial approach, which according to Shamir is "characterized by centralization, standardization, detailed planning, quantitative analysis, and aspires for maximum efficiency and certainty. …