When Doctrine Replaces Courage

Papers falling

I think of the armed forces when the words courage and doctrine come to mind. Students of leadership, such as myself, also know that this academic discipline was born in the military. It was passed on to the civilian business and service worlds, tweaked some, and then passed back. Periodically, academia would get its hands on it, study and tweak it some more, and then toss it back into the game. But somewhere along the way, things got a bit muddled and misunderstood. Whereas military doctrine (policies, procedures, organizational values) supports and guides the courage and insight of its members, civilian organizations can often be found using doctrine to not just replace, but to sometimes undermine and eliminate, employees’ courage and insight. Oops!

There are differences at play worth noting. Employees are not legally bound to uphold organizational values, for example. Nor are they extensively trained by their organization (in many cases). Organizational confidence in its people is high when such training is present and low when absent. However, in cases where training is absent, don’t you forfeit the right to complain and judge employees for those things you “tell them” is unimportant to you? After all, if you valued it, you’d measure it. And if you invested the time in evaluating it, you’d teach it. Right?

My transformation adventure began when I realized that many organizations measured the outcomes desired without sufficient attention to the inputs required. Process matters. How can you courageously innovate when your organization’s processes and procedures have a strangle-hold on the status quo? That’s doctrine replacing courage. How can civilian organizations break this inverted cycle? An after-action-report used in the military could be an internal-customer survey (a la TQM days) for organizations, or just a feedback email address could be a start if acted upon. The solutions are actually simple.

Seeing the blind spots and mustering the courage to forgive the status quo protectors, to let it go and move on, are the challenges. Or is this the adventure? There is a brave new frontier of “how we’ve always done it” waiting to be explored. Join my adventures in the organizational wild™.