Battle Tested! with Col. Jeffery McCausland (ret.) - Part 1

A battlefield can teach you more about leadership than a bookshelf ever will. We sit down with retired U.S. Army Colonel Jeffrey McCausland—former Dean of Academics at the U.S. Army War College and CEO of Diamond 6 Leadership and Strategy—to translate Gettysburg’s hard lessons into everyday decisions leaders face right now.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Two‑Part Setup
• 1:16 Introducing Col. Jeff McCausland
• 2:36 Why Study Gettysburg For Leadership
• 4:20 Eisenhower’s Definition Of Leadership
• 7:50 Leadership Versus Management
• 10:35 Leading Up, Across, And Self
• 12:10 Moral Dimension Of Leadership
• 16:05 The Leader’s Unique Job: Decide
• 18:20 Meade vs. Lee: Decision Styles
• 22:08 Clear, Concise, Compelling, Timely

Transcript

John Broer: 0:05

Welcome back to The Boss hole Chronicles, everyone out there in The Boss hole Transformation Nation. This is your host, John Broer, welcoming you to another installment of The Boss hole Chronicles. Actually, this is a two-part episode. Uh something I recorded a few months ago, and I've been very excited about sharing this with all of you out there because today you're gonna get a chance to meet retired U.S. Army Colonel Jeffrey McCausland. You may recognize that name because earlier this year I had a chance to go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for an immersive leadership experience with Jeff and his company, Diamond Sticks. This is something he does for corporate groups, nonprofit organizations, and Diamond Sticks offers these immersion experiences in different parts of the country, but using the lens of history and these well-known military engagements as a way to understand leadership today. As I said, Jeff is a retired colonel from the U.S. Army, he is the former Dean of Academics at the U.S. Army War College, is a visiting professor of national security at Dickinson College, and a national security consultant for CBS Radio and Television. Just to give you a little bit of his professional background, he is the founder and CEO of Diamond Sticks Leadership and Strategy. Make sure you go into the show notes. I will have a link to Diamond 6 in there. He has served as the Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control for the National Security Council staff in the White House, Director of European Studies at the U.S. Army War College, and the Officer for Strategic Planning in the Office of Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans in the Pentagon. He's got some credentials, you know, but we are going to be talking about the lessons from not only the experience at Gettysburg, but also his book entitled Battle Tested: Gettysburg Leadership Lessons for 21st Century Leaders. And he co-authored this book with Tom Bossler. So get ready. Here is part one of my two-part episode with Jeff McCausland. You're gonna love this. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode. Well, Jeff McCauslin, welcome to The Boss hole Chronicles. Good to have you here.

Jeffrey McCausland: 2:54

John, it's a great honor and pleasure to be with you.

John Broer: 2:57

I'm so excited about this. Gosh, we met through a mutual client. And interestingly enough, we met out at the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And our audience knows about that experience that I had, and I had a chance to meet you and other members of the Diamond Six team. By the way, everybody go into the show notes, learn more about Diamond Six, and also Jeff's book, Battle Tested, great book. But I wanted to have Jeff on here. I wanted to have you on here to talk more about how the timeless nature of leadership principles and how I just found it so effective about how you took us out onto the battlefield and the immersion of being in Gettysburg and realizing that all of these leadership principles that you talk about are present today, are very present today. So I'd love for uh I think we can just jump right into it and start talking about it. How does that sound to you?

Jeffrey McCausland: 3:52

Sounds like a plan.

John Broer: 3:55

Well, um, I know that one of the definitions you like to use when it comes to leadership comes from one of our former presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and of course, um uh noted leader of the uh Allied forces in World War II. Why don't you start there, if you don't mind, Jeff?

Jeffrey McCausland: 4:13

Yeah, I was thinking about this, John, because it seemed to me only appropriate to start off with a common definition when you talk to a group. So you have a start common start point.

John Broer: 4:21

Okay.

Jeffrey McCausland: 4:21

And if we were to Google the word leadership for definitions, we'd get probably hundreds, and many of them would be quite long. But I was taken by this definition from Eisenhower, which is very simply leadership is the ability to decide what has to be done and get others to want to do it. And I like that definition really for three reasons. Reason number one, obviously it comes from a pretty doggone good leader. I mean, there's a guy who'd been a five-star general. I think we forget that Eisenhower not only led U.S. forces in the invasion of Europe uh in 1944, but he commanded all the all the forces, okay, all the Allied forces. So imagine trying to keep Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery, and George Patton work working together. Okay, think about that as a challenge. Four bigger egos you could you could never find.

John Broer: 5:13

Right.

Jeffrey McCausland: 5:14

He went on to serve quite of course, twice as president of the United States. And actually, historians today treat the Eisenhower presidency a lot more favorably than they did when he left office in 1960. A lot of people are unaware, but from the time he will leave the Army until he becomes president, Eisenhower was president of Columbia University, a very prestigious university in New York City. So he's had these senior leadership rules across a number of things. Second thing I like about this definition is it's short, okay? I can remember this. Yes. You know, longer definition. No, no, but leadership about deciding what has to be done, getting others to want to. I can remember that one. Like I don't have to write it down. I got it. And then finally, and perhaps most importantly, I like the second half of that definition, getting others to want to do it. Because you might assume, I mean, hell, if you've been a five-star general and you've been president twice and you've been president of a major university, goodness gracious, all you got to do is give orders and everybody's gonna rush off and work as hard as they can just to please you. And I think what Eisenhower is suggesting very wisely, that your positional authority will get people to do things. I'm in charge and you're not.

John Broer: 6:22

Right.

Jeffrey McCausland: 6:22

But if I'm gonna get maximum performance, I got to get them to buy into what this is all about. And then one of the biggest challenges I got is how much time am I gonna spend trying to get buy-in? I'll never get 100% buy-in almost on anything. Right. How much time I got before I I've got to execute and we've got to move on. How much time have I got to do all that? And so that's why I like that definition and I like to start there. I also like, and I learned this from you as well, I think it was very important, that leadership different from management. That's not to say one's less important. They're both uh important. I'm sure you would agree. Poorly managed organizations fail. Yeah. But man good management's about work standards, resource allocation, and organizational design. Controlling complex institutions. And the study of management will take you back to around the World War I when Harvard and other places start having MBA programs.

John Broer: 7:16

Right.

Jeffrey McCausland: 7:16

Leadership's about vision, motivation, and trust. And trust being the most important, I think, of all, because I like to say trust is what glues the leader to his or her organization. They may follow you out of positional authority or comic amusement, but they're only gonna follow you in a in a vigorous and in a in a committed fashion if they actually trust you as a human being. Yes. So it's about moving people into the future, it's about dealing with change. And I always like to say, you know, I worked for a general in the Pentagon who used to say, if you don't like change, you're gonna like irrelevance a lot less. Yes. And what I enjoyed learning from you was thinking about this in terms that if you manage something or a group of people, you've got a position in a hierarchy. It might be a temporary position. You're a project manager for an individual project. Right, right. I'm in charge of others. It's a hierarchy, and we all know how that works. Leadership you do from wherever, wherever you are in the organization. You can lead your boss. Smart bosses should want to be led. You can lead or lay or led by your peers, you lead others, of course, which is what most of the literature is about. And then ultimately you have to also think about leading yourself, which can be a real challenge.

John Broer: 8:29

Yeah. Yeah. You know, uh, one thing, Jeff, that I absolutely remember from our discussions in Gettysburg, when you talked about the leadership in World War II, just to use that as a frame of reference, you had Dwight D. Eisenhower, you had leaders on the Allied in the Allied forces. There were leaders on in the Axis forces. Sure. I mean, but one of the distinctions you made is, you know, you had a leader, you had leaders that were advocating and pressing really an evil mission, and there's a there's a morality aspect to it, which I I thought that distinction I thought was really interesting. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Jeffrey McCausland: 9:09

Yeah, because if you think about you know that definition, leadership is about deciding what has to be done and getting others to want to do it.

John Broer: 9:15

Right.

Jeffrey McCausland: 9:16

Well, then you have to say Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Paul Pott, Osama bin Laden were all fantastic leaders. Right? Did they they decide what what needed to be done in their twisted little minds? Yep. Yes, they did. Did they get others to want to do it? And sadly, in some cases, very enthusiastically. They certainly did. Right. Hitler did not do the Holocaust by himself. Osama did not do 9-11 by himself, right? They inspired others. So if we were talking to Ike right now and we said, Hey, hey, General, by the way, he preferred being called general to Mr. President.

John Broer: 9:52

Did he really? I didn't really know.

Jeffrey McCausland: 9:53

He really did, yeah. Might we say, hey, that's a pretty good definition, but what about this integrity, character, ethics piece? Right. And I think Eisenhower would look at us and say, that's just a given. In a in a liberal, and I mean liberal with a small L democracy like ours, if you're going to inspire trust over time in a group of people, they have to believe that you are a person of character, integrity, and ethics. In fact, Norman Nor Norman Schwarzkopf, who was my commander during Desert Storm and I worked for in the Pentagon, he uh would return to uh West Point after that particular conflict to speak to the cadets. And he finally said to him about what he'd learned over the entirety of his career. He said, Leadership's about two things character and competence. He said, if you're incompetent, I might love you, but I'm not gonna follow you because you're dangerous. Right. Right. Uh and the second thing is character because I'm not gonna follow you if I think you are an unethical or a person that lacks integrity.

John Broer: 10:52

That's um interesting. I remember early on in my career, Storm and Norman was, I mean, he was it was iconic. I mean, it was just he he he it would there was something about him. There is this charismatic just presence of confidence and this leadership. But I remember one thing he said when put in charge, take charge. I and again, it's when I've shared that with people, it's like, look, if you've got a responsibility, it doesn't mean that you're a uh an abusive and coercive leader to take charge, but you're you have responsibility and you have to you have to make decisions that influence so many people. And I and that's where I want to go next. I want to I want I love your take on decision making, and I think there are very relevant facets to this. One other thing, really quick, that we talk about during leadership development and the the idea of buy-in. Uh a lot of times, and especially in a in a non-military setting, we have the benefit of, or leaders have, more, I would say, license to get input from their team members or their direct reports. Sometimes in in battle, of course, that doesn't happen. You have to give direct orders and put people in harm's way. But one of the things we say, if you want to get people to buy in, you got to let them weigh in. And when they feel like they have, and I think, I think, would it be fair to say that this was a difference between like General Meade and Lee, correct? Meade, Meade actually would get the input from his generals uh, you know, that reported to him, which was unique, but he'd also been in that position for a very short time, correct?

Jeffrey McCausland: 12:29

He had been in that position by the evening of the second day, which was the most fateful evening. This is the day before Pickett's charge. Right. He'd been in command a grand total of four days.

John Broer: 12:39

Wow. Wow.

Jeffrey McCausland: 12:40

And Lee had been in command 16 months at that point in time. Right. But you know, uh, it's funny when you say this because when I talk about the definition of leadership to back up a little bit, I always ask groups, okay, what's the one thing a leader gets to do that nobody else gets to do? And I just stand there very quietly and wait for somebody to speak of it.

John Broer: 12:57

Yeah.

Jeffrey McCausland: 12:58

And only about half the time does the group get it. And they go, Oh, he or she decides. I go, Yeah, that's exactly right. Right. Right. That's exactly right. And no other do they decide, they decide when they're gonna decide. So they control the organizational clock, which is an inelastic and invaluable resource. But we all have leadership style. So by that fateful evening to take us back to the 2nd of July 1863, here are these two generals. Uh they both know they have to make a really faithful decision for the next day. They both have it's interesting, they both have the same choices. Let's walk through what we could do. I could surrender. Well, I don't think I'm gonna do that. Okay, I could leave, I could attack, or I could defend. That's it. I'm the I'm done. Okay, each of them have the same four decisions. But how they go about determining that is very, very different. And Lee takes his own counsel, talks with a few staff officers, does not meet with his principals at all that night, uh, and makes his decision the next day, which ends up being ticket of charge. Lee, as you as you point out, calls all his generals together, listens to them, and ultimately takes a vote. Now, oddly, I think he had I think he had decided what he was gonna do.

John Broer: 14:12

Right.

Jeffrey McCausland: 14:12

And there's a certain degree of going through the motions here, but maybe it was a matter of each one of them, though, to be a little bit appreciative of Lee, realizing I don't need to do that. I got the full trust and confidence of my people. I've been and on and in a way that's good news, but it can be bad news. And I always tell people, beware of becoming uh the icon in your organization. I mean, who can walk up to the icon and say, you know, boss, that is the stupidest idea that you that I've ever heard of, okay? And we really should do that. Um, and that I think is is part of Lee's problem. He has become kind of an icon. He is generationally older than all his subordinates, frankly. Yeah. Mead mead is more of a peer, back to this leading your peer business. Right. Plus, he's only been in command four days. So I think he sees a greater demand to spend that time to get that buy-in, where Lee may assume, I've already got that, I've earned that for the last 16 months.

John Broer: 15:13

I that's interesting because I mean, as it's portrayed, and as you read about it, I mean, General Longstreet on the Confederate side. I mean, he I I my impression was that he was trying to, he was uh imploring Lee to rethink this. And he didn't. And I and I think Longstreet took it as far as he could. But the difference, I think that to take take this away, you know, George Meade, General Meade absolutely saw the benefit, and maybe it was just prudence or necessity to get input from people, and it it just was a difference in leadership style. So so let's let's go back to that idea of deciding. And you're right. When you're what what does a leader have to do? They have to decide, and they have to decide when to decide. One of the things, Jeff, that you talk about is decision making. You talk about four facets to it, that it has to be clear, concise, compelling, and timely. Can you talk a little bit more about the critical nature of that?

Jeffrey McCausland: 16:05

Absolutely. It has to be clear. I'll give you the example. The first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, a guy named John Buford will send a message to his boss, and which is very clear. It's about three sentences. One, I have occupied ground to the west of Gettysburg. Number two, the enemy is here in force. Number three, bring up the infantry first thing in the morning. Those three sentences result in this whole thing happen.

John Broer: 16:28

Okay.

Jeffrey McCausland: 16:29

Clear and concise. It's compelling as well, I think, because uh it goes from Buford to his boss, John Reynolds. And these two guys had worked together for a long period of time. So Buford is back to what I like to talk about leading the boss. He's a one-star general. Reynolds is a three-star general. Now, Reynolds could have said, Well, I'll tell you what, why don't you come back? You know, we'll create a couple of committees, we'll we'll study the problem. Right. We'll sit, we'll sing three verses of Kumbaya, and then we'll kind of figure out what we're gonna do. Yeah.

John Broer: 17:03

Yeah.

Jeffrey McCausland: 17:04

But Reynold Reynolds back to trust. Reynolds trusted his subordinate as well as Buford trusting his boss.

John Broer: 17:10

Right.

Jeffrey McCausland: 17:10

So if that's what John Buford says we should do, that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do it right now. Okay. So we're making decisions at the speed of trust. And that gets back to being timely. Yeah. Because again, time is that inelastic resource. The perfect decision is never taken because we're trying to make it perfect. Okay. And I always say, either in battle, certainly, you want to get inside the decision cycle of your opponent. You can make decisions more quickly than your opponent can, higher probability of winning. Right. But that particular concept also translates anywhere else. If you're in the business world, if I can make decisions faster than my competition, I have a higher probability of being successful. Oh, by the way, I have to make decisions faster than the environment I'm operating in is changing. So there's a constant pressure on the leader, I think, at times to make timely decisions with good information, while at the same time, how well am I doing getting my organization to buy into them? And how I balance out those variables gets back to time.

John Broer: 18:18

Yeah. Yeah. You hit on something right there that we talk about a lot, especially when it comes to making decisions about people and when I have good information, because making decisions on questionable or incomplete information, obviously we can see that that results in it can result in catastrophe. Whenever we do work, we always we always talk about looking at it through the lens of objective data. I mean, you know, I mean you you know some of the tools that we use at Real Good Ventures, but one of the things we like to say, and I borrowed this from Billy Bean. He was the the from uh Moneyball, the care then the athletic the Oakland athletics uh manager for a while.

Jeffrey McCausland: 18:59

Oakland Athletics, yeah.

John Broer: 19:00

Yeah. And he said that data makes transparent all critical decisions. And that's a bit of a paraphrase, but it's true. And I'm sure you see this, Jeff, that in organizations today they talk about change velocity. That and it's like, you know, it's i I love what I love how you talk about what was the statement again? If you don't like change, you're gonna like irrelevance even less. Right. That is so true. But if you don't, if you don't understand change readiness in your people and yourself and how to navigate that, I I just think you're going to fall into that vortex and and be uh be just chasing your tail.

Jeffrey McCausland: 19:35

I would take you back to Gaysburg again because one of the big differences between these two armies is the army actually, under General Hooker, had created for the first time what we would call an intelligence analytical unit. Okay. I got a guy who was a lawyer from New York, and he put him in charge of this, and they were using what we would call crude matrices. So they would interview deserters, guys who had been captured, civilians, and from that information, they would try to calculate um what units from the Confederate Army had arrived. And by the evening of the second day, this meeting we just talked about, he's able to go to uh General Meade and say, General Mead, every division in the Confederate Army has been committed except one. The only division that has not been in the fighting yet is Pickett's division. He can lay out all that information for him right there.

John Broer: 20:23

Right.

Jeffrey McCausland: 20:23

Okay.

John Broer: 20:23

Right.

Jeffrey McCausland: 20:24

So from a data standpoint, I would argue Meade is making an informed decision on what he does next. Robert E. Lee has nothing like that.

John Broer: 20:33

True.

Jeffrey McCausland: 20:34

Okay. Yeah. And so he is making intuitive decisions. Okay. Uh so this whole idea of data and and and data analytics becomes very important. Colin Powell used to say P equals 40 to 60, P equals probability of success. And what he meant by that is when you have 40 to 60% of the information you'd like to have, it's time to pull the trigger. Because if I keep trying to get a hundred percent of all the information, I'll never make choice.

John Broer: 21:01

Right.

Jeffrey McCausland: 21:01

And in the modern age, I often talk to people and say, I worry that technology discourages leader from making choice because we're constantly bombarded by information, right? So I can I can do one more search, I can send out one more survey, whatever, you know, and it sort of encourages me to delay choice. And furthermore, the even it also discourages initiative because I was working with a to use an illustration, a very uh large uh energy corporation, multi-billion dollar energy corporation. And we're standing up and we're actually talking about this uh on the um no kill. And this one guy is kind of shaking his head, and I thought he was blowing me off, so he always watched body language. I said, I said, What do you think? And he looked at me and he said, That is so true about technology discouraging choice. He said, My problem is I train a group, I send them out to West Texas, which gives nowhere a whole new meaning. I give them all kinds of resources to build pipelines, right? Yeah, something something goes wrong, and what does the guy in charge do? He calls me in Houston, Texas. Okay, I'm 1,500 to 2,000 miles away. He doesn't reach me, so then he sends me a text and an email. And he said, You know what he does then? I said, I said, No, what does he do then? He tells everybody to lean on their shovels until I get back to him. And when he finally gets a hold of me, I said, Why in the hell did I bother training you?

John Broer: 22:28

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Jeffrey McCausland: 22:30

So I have the boss's cell phone. I pretty much know what I should do, but I have the boss's cell phone. I have John's cell phone. Therefore, even if I know what to do, hey, I should I should call John. So in terms of decision making and technology, I fear that it encourages people to push decisions to the very top just because of access.

John Broer: 22:52

Well, I hope you enjoyed part one of my conversation with Jeffrey McCausland as much as I enjoyed having that conversation with him. Trust me, part two will be as rich and as impactful as part one. So make sure you tune in next week for this continuation of Battle Tested with Jeffrey McCausland. See you next week.