Generally Speaking (34 page)
Public awareness on the plight of millions of American children at risk for neglect and abuse is another First Star priority. Kathleen Reardon, Ph.D., a University of California professor and founding member of First Star's board, is currently writing a book intended as a wake-up call on the extent and degree of the problem so many of our children face. The book will be published in conjunction with a documentary film produced by award-winning filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris.
I am now the chair of First Star, a position that gives me a great deal of personal satisfaction, a sense of spiritual fulfillment, which I know I would not find in any other endeavor. America's children are our future. Too often this nation, the most prosperous and democratic in history, seems to forget this fact. It is too early to tell whether First Star will succeed. But one thing I learned in my long Army career was that you never accomplish a difficult goal without hard work and dedication.
The Leader As Coach
I
grew up well versed in the lore of coaching. My mother's father, “Smiling Jimmy” Haygood, was one of the most beloved football coaches in the South. Often compared to his better-known Northern contemporary and close friend Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, Jimmy Haygood deeply loved collegiate football, but saw the game as a metaphor of life, a means of character building, rather than strictly as a competitive sport in which the aim was defeating the opponent and amassing the most impressive record.
Jimmy Haygood coached football at a number of Southern colleges for almost thirty years before his untimely death from a sudden heart attack at age fifty-three in 1935. Although only a slender 150 pounds, Jimmy Haygood was a dedicated athlete who earned a position as Vanderbilt's quarterback in 1905 through his sheer perseverance—“I used to lie awake for hours at night calling signals aloud and rehearsing plays,” he recalled decades later.
A soft-spoken man with a restrained temperament, he was absolutely dedicated to his players. In Jimmy Haygood's day, coaches had both classroom and athletic responsibility. He taught math and coached at Henderson-Brown College (now Henderson State University) in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, from 1908 to 1925. There he became known as one of the best defensive strategists in the South. But he also earned a reputation as a coach who considered character off the field as important as skill on the gridiron. After coaching at other small colleges, he took over the freshman football team at the University of Alabama for several years, and then became football coach and athletic director of Southwestern at Memphis in 1931, the school attended by my mother, aunts, and uncle, and from which I graduated in 1969. (In 1984, Southwestern became Rhodes College.)
At the time of Jimmy Haygood's death, sports reporter Walter Stewart wrote, “He lost games he could have won—by pushing an injured player into the heat of the scrimmage or by slipping an ineligible tackle into the breach. But Jimmy Haygood didn't play football games that way. He believed that a boy's future was more important than a touchdown.” Even though Jimmy Haygood's teams held their own against powerhouse competitors such as Alabama's Crimson Tide and scored an amazing 20-20 tie against the South's juggernaut Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, Jimmy Haygood always retained the perspective that their glory years of college football would end, and the young men he coached would have to move into adult life. He molded them as team players and discouraged play that we would recognize as the showy superstar ambition of today's college athletes.
In those days, the college football field was not merely an antechamber to the National Football League. Jimmy Haygood took great interest in the young men he coached and kept in contact with them after graduation. Whenever he could, he used his reputation and contacts to help them land jobs in the depths of the Depression. But this generosity was not just limited to his players. Other students came to him, and Jimmy Haygood was always ready with guidance and advice. He carried a much folded sheaf of paper in the pocket of his worn gabardine trousers, a roster of his former players and students who were now working. At the start of the 1934 football season, Jimmy Haygood showed that list to a reporter. “Look at this,” the coach said proudly, “practically every one of my boys has a job. Pretty good jobs, they are, too.”
The Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame inducted him into its ranks in 1960, five years before it installed the much more renowned native Arkansan Paul “Bear” Bryant.
Years later, as a professional Army officer, I recalled hearing the stories of my grandfather from my family. And I believed that being an Army leader and coaching, as Jimmy Haygood had practiced the profession, might actually be closer than was generally assumed. Both involve gaining the confidence of a team, passing on specific skills to its members, inspiring them to practice strenuously (train to meet the mission), and not become discouraged when inevitable setbacks occur.
In many ways, coaching was an extended form of mentoring. While one mentors an individual, the coach guides a group striving toward a common goal. Both coaching and mentoring are relationships that involve mutual trust and confidence.
Ideally, a commander—at least up to the battalion level— should personally know as many of her soldiers as practically possible. The commander, an officer, will never know the soldiers as well as the NCOs because soldiers and NCOs work closely together every day. But to be an effective leader who achieves the trust and respect of those led, either a commander or a private sector executive should try to develop the personal connection with the people in her organization.
I'm not suggesting a leader-coach become personal friends with those on the team. That type of familiar connection is actually counterproductive. People within most structured organizations—certainly in a hierarchical body such as the Army—prefer traditional formality separating those in the chain of command. That's one reason we exchange salutes and other forms of military courtesy as well as address each other by rank. One practices these courtesies in deference to the position, not the person. Deference to one's seniors is a reminder of the importance we place on discipline and obedience to proper authority.
But this formality does not interfere with the commander knowing as much as possible about her soldiers. Like my grandfather's football players, soldiers are people, and can never be viewed as so many interchangeable parts. Soldiers want personal contact with their seniors, especially the commander, not to seek favoritism, but because they want to put a human face on those who exert so much authority over them in the form of duty hours and Efficiency Reports and for whom they are asked to sacrifice so much. Even as generals today discuss rapidly evolving strategic and tactical networks that depend on high-speed data links or e-mail, there is still the need for personal contact between leader and led. As former TRADOC commander retired General William Hartzog noted in the April 2001 issue of
Army
magazine, there will be an ongoing need for “force of personality” on tomorrow's battlefield, “when a subordinate commander will need to hear the tone of the senior commander's voice and see the nonverbal cues that only presence brings. I suspect that no tactical commander will ever value a digital attack order scrolling across a computer screen.” Rather, tactical command will want to hear the “energy and sense of urgency” when such an order is issued. This can be achieved by imbedding an audio-video teleconferencing channel in the digital communications links. But even teleconferencing will not sustain these important bonds of understanding without a background of previous personal contact.
To form this bond, an Army leader must understand the entire lives of the soldiers in her command, just as a successful coach must be familiar with the lives of her team members off the playing field. Both successful coaches and commanders draw upon the resources of the total person on their team. Coaches take their teams on the road and live with them through the tensions, joys, and disappointments of athletic competition. Because commanders deploy with their soldiers, often on short notice, they must understand these soldiers' characters as well as their individual job skills. What is a soldier's level of maturity? How stable is an NCO during times of crisis? Will the younger men and women follow him? So it is essential for the successful commander to learn as much as possible about the lives of the soldiers she leads.
Over the course of my career, I learned a very valuable lesson: Listen to your soldiers' private concerns when they choose to raise them. Many times soldiers will bring up seemingly trivial matters when they are sounding you out to see if they can trust you, to learn if you really care about them.
For example, I recall a young woman announcing in a casual manner, “My daughter is a real handful.” I responded and led this soldier into conversation, during which I learned that her civilian husband, who had not found a job in Germany, was unhappy; their child care arrangements and personal finances were in disarray; and from what she said, I suspected possible domestic violence. It was completely appropriate that a specialist-4 with a young family should raise this issue with her supervisor. She needed help without blame and support in solving her family's problems. We expect soldiers to be on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The Army can order them to any corner of the world on virtually a moment's notice. The lines of trust and respect have to flow both ways.
Years later, when General Dennis Reimer became Army Chief of Staff and I served on his transition team at the Pentagon, he told us to study the leadership ideas of the great college football coach Lou Holtz, who believed that there are three critical questions any two people ask in a relationship, whether it is between parent and child, man and woman, or between a leader and the people led.
Can I trust you?
Do you care about me?
Are you committed to excellence?
With an effective leader or coach, the answer was demonstrably “yes.” In considering the Lou Holtz leadership principles, I often thought of my grandfather Jimmy Haygood, who epitomized them.
Certainly, however, after the experience of the devious NCO in our battalion in Germany, the soldiers had every reason to answer “no” to each question. But when they dealt with Command Sergeant Major Gant and benefited from his invaluable counsel, we regained the trust and respect of the soldiers the Army had assigned us to lead.
Command Sergeant Major Gant and I tried to build normal military standards throughout the battalion, including formal duty rosters and training and promotion boards. At the enlisted level, the soldiers knew where they stood. We operated on a spectrum of discipline intervention ranging from occasional advice to company punishment, to court-martial on the very rare occasions when it was required. Sergeant Major Gant insisted that his company first sergeants maintain good order in their barracks, including clean arms rooms where the weapons were stored and perfectly maintained chemical protective gear for all our people. Even though we were nearing the end of the Cold War, the threat of attack with weapons of mass destruction was real to us, and our unit in Augsburg was ready.
I relied on the mentoring network that Sergeant Major Gant put in place among his subordinate NCOs. It worked beautifully. Again, leadership is a partnership. There was never any doubt that I was the battalion commander. But I was not a micro-manager; nor was Sergeant Major Gant. He too delegated authority and responsibility to the company first sergeants, who in turn worked with their platoon sergeants. On the officer level, the battalion staff coordinated all support my company commanders needed to accomplish their missions.
I also tried to spend as much time as possible on the operations floor, where most of the soldiers worked in rotating shifts. We were a Signals Intelligence battalion, whose soldiers carried out their demanding duties in a huge windowless building. Even though we all had name tags on our uniforms and security badges, I made it a point to learn as much as I could about each soldier and his or her family. For most of the younger ones, this assignment was their first extended absence from home. They were in a foreign country for the first time, still adjusting to military life. The mid-grade and senior NCOs had multiple assignments behind them; they knew the Army well. But most were also struggling to raise their families on inadequate pay and in cramped housing.
I did my best to meet the wives and children, and encouraged my company commanders to discuss the issues their soldiers faced. This served three purposes: It permitted company commanders to share solutions; it gave me the opportunity to provide them additional resources; and it helped synchronize battalion staff work in support of the company commanders. I liked to think of myself as less authoritarian than a more traditional commander. But I realized I had room to grow in this regard when one of my company commanders, Captain John McDougall, walked into my office one day with a notepad in his left hand, pen in his right, and white towel neatly draped over his left forearm.
“What are you doing, Captain?”
“I'm just here to take your order, ma'am.”
We then discussed his feeling that I had been too specific in “tasking” him (to use Army parlance), instead of giving him mission-type orders. This frank discussion helped me realize the unintended effect I had had on him. I adjusted accordingly.
As a young company commander at Fort McClellan, embroiled in the struggle to restore discipline, I also acquired another lesson that I've retained over all these years. A commander, no matter how overworked and harassed by pressing duty, should seek the advice of a mental health expert when dealing with a troubled soldier.
A young basic trainee, diagnosed with clinical depression including the wish to commit suicide, was sent to my company to spend her last week in the Army, pending discharge. I always met with every new soldier reporting for duty. Before she came to my office, my senior officers had told me to keep her from killing herself and to provide a room for her to live in during her few remaining days in the Army, which is not equipped to deal with serious psychological problems. The approach is to identify and discharge such emotionally disturbed soldiers.