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=========================================== Summary: Brent Filson asserts that key to organizational success is not just a function of large movements of capital, people, and infrastructure but in a single, priceless aspect, small-unit leadership. He offers suggestions on how to develop and institute small-unit leadership in your organization. =========================================== A New Age Of Small-Unit Leadership By Brent Filson Recent mergers in many industries remind me of a point that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower often made, "Generals move pins on a map," he would say, "but front-line troops have to get job done."
And key to job is leadership, small-unit leadership, leadership of most basic units or teams of an organization.
Without good leadership in front-line units squad leaders and platoon commanders or their business counterparts, supervisors and first-level managers organizations stumble, no matter how skillfully pins are moved on map.
Yet in bringing leadership programs to many businesses in a variety of industries during past 20 plus years, I've seen many companies neglecting small-unit leadership.
Time and again, I have seen technologists promoted right off lab bench to become team leaders; I've seen assembly workers promoted off line to be supervisors; and salespeople made local managers and yet they were not helped in substantive ways with their leadership skills.
Instead, their employers were focusing on pins and maps, re-engineering, acquisitions and divestitures.
Sure, stocks of those businesses got quick boosts, but I wonder how well-positioned businesses are to achieve consistent earnings growth over long haul without skilled, small-unit leadership.
Consistent earnings' growth is linked to consistent top-line growth. Such growth rests on a tripod. One leg is strategy, pins on map; other leg is resources; and third leg is execution. Small-unit leadership is execution leg.
So I submit that in coming years, businesses will come to realize importance of small-unit leadership to top-line growth and earnings' growth.
In fact, coming years will reveal an exciting new age in small-unit leadership. Businesses that champion such leadership will be tremendously competitive.
Here are a few ideas on how to make it happen.
First, CEO and senior executives must recognize vital importance of small-unit leadership. I'm not talking about their simply paying lip service but having instead a passionate conviction that small-unit leadership is indispensable to growth.
Senior executives must encourage small-unit leaders. Celebrate their achievements. Help them overcome their failures. Measure their leadership performance. Develop compensation that stimulates them to advance as leaders.
The Marine Corps, an organization with a robust tradition of small-unit leadership, has institutionalized high-level commitment to small-unit leaders. For instance, in chow lines in field, lowest ranking troops eat first, highest ranking last.
