Introduction
The Retrospect section of the AAJ is designed to reproduce interesting articles from the Australian Army’s earlier journals, notably the Commonwealth Military Journal and the Australian Army Journal (AAJ) from the 1940s to the mid 1970s. In this edition of the new AAJ, we are reprinting an edited version of an article by Field Marshal Sir William Joseph Slim, KG, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, GBE, DSO, MC (afterwards 1st Viscount Slim), then Governor-General of Australia. This article appeared in the November 1957 edition of the earlier AAJ. The Governor-General’s article was based on the text of the William Queale Lecture, ‘Leadership in Management’, which he delivered to the Adelaide Division of the Australian Institute of Management in April 1957. The article remains notable both for Slim’s articulation of a philosophy of leadership and for its exposition of how one of the great commanders of World War II viewed the relationship between leadership and management.
Leadership in Management
In any great city—Adelaide, if you like—day and night, an immense variety of activities, public and private, go on. Hundreds of thousands of people are fed, clothed, housed, moved, educated and entertained. Vast quantities of materials are transported; large-scale construction, manufacture and maintenance are carried out; police, public health, water and communications services are provided. Churches are active; law courts function; the output of newspapers and the radio is ceaseless. A thousand other needs of a modern community are met. Yet there is no activity among all these that is not carried out on a daily basis also in the Army—and carried out too, often under conditions far more difficult than those with which municipality or industry has to grapple.
What industrial corporation has attempted an enterprise comparable in extent, complication or difficulty with the invasion of France [in 1944] or with any of a dozen operations of the last war? Yet generals planned, organised, coordinated and carried out those vast undertakings; they managed them and, on the whole, managed them successfully. Why should they not do so? After all, soldiers were the first to practise—and what is more to study—organisation and management. After the thousands of years we have been practising management and passing or failing our tests in it, we should have learnt something about it. So perhaps, after all, a soldier need not be too shy at speaking on management even to such an informed audience as this one.
There is one point, however, that must be made clear. People are always ready to tell generals what they ought to do, or more often what they ought to have done. I am not returning the compliment. I am not telling you how to run your own businesses. All I will try to do is to say something about the Army’s view of management. How far, if at all, anything I say could be applied to your work and your problems is entirely for you to judge. The problems met at the top of any great organisation, whether military or civilian, are basically the same: questions of organisation, transportation, equipment, resources, the selection of men for jobs, the use of experts and, above all and through all, human relations. Now while the problems are much alike, there are certain differences between the military and the civil approach to them, and in the climates in which they have to be solved.
To begin with, in the Army we do not talk of ‘management’, but of ‘leadership’. The use of the latter term is significant. There is a difference between leadership and management. The leader and the men who follow him represent one of the oldest, most natural and most effective of human relationships. The manager and those he manages are a later product, with neither so romantic nor so inspiring a history. Leadership is of the spirit, compounded of personality and vision; its practice is an art. Management is of the mind, more a matter of accurate calculation, of statistics, of methods, timetables and routine; its practice is a science. Managers are necessary; leaders are essential. A good system will produce efficient managers, but more than that is needed. We must find managers that are not only skilled organisers but also inspired and inspiring leaders, destined eventually to fill the highest ranks of control and direction. Such men will gather round them close-knit teams of subordinates like themselves and of technical experts, whose efficiency, enthusiasm and loyalty will be unbeatable. What should we look for? Where are we likely to find it? When we have found it, how shall we develop and use it? Can the experience of the Army be any help?
In this tradition of leadership we in the fighting services have, of course, certain very marked advantages over civil life. The principle of personal leadership is traditional and accepted. There is a strict legal code for the enforcement of obedience to lawful direction. Officers and men recognise that they are on the same side fighting together against a common enemy. Commanders do not, in war at any rate, have to pay so much regard to the financial effects of their actions. I can well understand a businessman saying, ‘if we had all that, management would indeed be simple’.
Lest you should think that military leadership is easy, let me remind you that personal leadership exists only as long as the officers demonstrate it by superior courage, wider knowledge, quicker initiative and a greater readiness to accept responsibility than displayed by those they lead. Again, military command is not merely a matter of ‘bawling orders’ that will be obeyed for fear of punishment. Any commander’s success comes from being trusted rather than from being feared; from leading rather than driving. Officers and other ranks feel themselves on the same side only as long as the officers, in all their dealings, show integrity and unselfishness and place the wellbeing of their troops before their own welfare. In war, the general may not be haunted by finance, but his is the responsibility for good management and economy in matters more important than money—his men’s lives. These things, not stars and crowns or the director’s Rolls-Royce, are the badges of leadership anywhere.
When we talk of leaders in the Army, what sort of individuals do we picture? Not the explosive old generals of the comic strips, whose complexions are indicative of blood-pressure and of the consumption of port—both high; whose conversation is limited to reminiscences of Poona and of blood-sports; and whose only solution to any political or social problem is: ‘Damn it, sir, shoot ‘em’. If these generals ever existed in real life, they were well on their way out before I joined the Army. No, the first qualities we require in a leader are character, which will be discussed later, and an alert mind. Of course, it will be a military mind. Every profession produces its own kind of mind that shows itself in its trained approach to any given question.
Other professions are trained quite rightly not to reply to questions until they have the exact and correct answer, some to give an answer made up of alternatives or possibilities. The military mind must provide not necessarily the perfect answer, but one that, in the circumstances as far as they are known, will work. The commander has to back his judgment, face the risks, force his plan through and stand or fall by the result. It seems to me that would not be a bad kind of mind to initiate and carry through enterprises in other fields—possibly even those of commerce and industry.
What is leadership? I would define it as the projection of personality. It is that combination of persuasion, compulsion and example that makes other people do what you want them to do. If leadership is this projection of personality, then the first requirement is a personality to project. The personality of a successful leader is a blend of many qualities: courage, willpower, knowledge, judgment, and flexibility of mind. Courage is the basis of all leadership, indeed of all virtue in man or beast. Courage is no less in the higher than in the lower levels of command, but the greater the responsibility, the more the emphasis shifts from physical to moral courage—a much rarer quality: rare, but essential to higher leadership.
Willpower is a most obvious requirement in a leader’s make-up. Without it, no man can remain a leader for he will have to force through his purpose, not only against the enemy, but against the weariness of his troops, the advice of his experts, the doubts of his staff, the waverings of politicians and the inclinations of his allies. These obstacles are undoubtedly duplicated in industry because willpower is as needed in the boardroom as in the council of war.
The main task of a leader is to make decisions, but if he has not the judgment to make the right decisions, then the greater his strength of will, the higher his courage, the more tragic will be his mistakes. When looking for your leader, make sure of his courage and his willpower but see that he has judgment, that he is balanced. I said a leader must have knowledge. A man has no right to set himself up as a leader—or to be set up as a leader—unless he knows more than those he is to lead. In a small unit, a platoon say, or maybe a workshop gang, the leader should be able to do the job of any man in the outfit better than he can. As the leader rises higher in the scale, he can no longer, of course, be expected to show such mastery of the detail of all the activities under him. A divisional commander need not know how to coax a wireless set, drive a tank, preach a sermon, or take out an appendix as well as the people in his division who are trained to do those things. He does, however, have to know how long these jobs should take, what their difficulties are, what they need in training and equipment and the strain they entail. As the leader moves towards the top of the ladder, he must be able to judge between experts and technicians and to use their advice, although he will not need their knowledge. One kind of knowledge he must always keep in his own hands is that of men.
Flexibility of mind is becoming more and more important to leadership. The world, in material and scientific matters, is advancing much more rapidly than most people can keep up with. A leader is surrounded by new and changing factors. What it was wise to do yesterday may well be foolish today. Some invention, some new process, some political change may have come along overnight and the leader must speedily adjust himself and his organisation to it. The only living organisms that survive are those that adapt themselves to change. There is always the danger that determination becomes only obstinacy, flexibility mere vacillation. Every individual must work out the balance between these for himself; until then he is no real leader.
Now if a man has all these qualities—courage, will power, judgment, knowledge, flexibility of mind—he cannot fail to be a leader in whatever walk of life he is engaged. Yet he is still not the leader we seek; he lacks one last quality—integrity. Integrity should not be so much a quality of itself as the element in which all of the others live and are active, as fish exist and move in water. Integrity is a combination of the old Christian virtues of being honest with all men and of unselfishness, thinking of others, the people we lead, before ourselves. Moral reasons are, strangely enough, the ones that both in war and commerce tell most in the long run. This spiritual aspect, this attitude—and there need be nothing soft or sloppy about it—has a practical material value. The real test of leadership is not if your troops will follow you in success, but if they will stick by you in defeat and hardship. They will not do so unless they believe you to be honest and to have care for them.
I once had under me a battalion that had not done well in a fight. I went to see why. I found the men in the jungle, tired, hungry, dirty, jumpy, some of them wounded, sitting miserably about doing nothing. I looked for the CO—for any officer; none was to be seen. Then as I rounded a bush, I realised why that battalion had failed. Collected under a tree were the officers, having a meal while the men went hungry. Those officers had forgotten the tradition of the Service that they must look after their men’s wants before their own. I was compelled to remind them of the integrity and unselfishness that always permeate good leadership.
So much for the kind of man we want as leader. How in a big organisation are we to find him? In the Army we believe that it is vitally important to recognise the potential leader at an early stage in his career. Then, while cultivating the natural root of leadership in him, to graft on to its growth the techniques of management. I think we have done this more deliberately, more systematically and more constantly in the Army for the past forty years than has been done in industry. Our aim is to extract the potential officer at the start of his career and begin his grooming for leadership as soon as possible. Responsibility breeds responsibility; the best training for leadership is leadership.
The greater the size of an army, of an organisation, the more difficult it becomes for the leaders to make their ideas and intentions clear and vivid to all their thousands of subordinates. In my experience there are many things that can be done to keep in touch, but if they are to be effective, they must all be based on two other factors. The head man of the army, the firm, the division, the department and the workshop must be known as an actual person to all under him. Second, the soldier or the employee must be made to feel that he is part of the ‘show’, and that what he is and what he does matters to it. I believe that a good system is one that passes on to every man information of what is going on outside his immediate view.
From washing machines to electronic brains, we live increasingly by technology. Technicians are vital to our industry. We do not, however, make a man a general in the field because he is an expert in explosives; the most brilliant surgeon is not necessarily the best man to run a great hospital; nor the best-selling author to run a publishing house. The technically trained man is not the answer to the management problem. The only way in which the growing need for leadership in management can be met is to find the potential leader and then start his training and give him his chance to lead.
In industry you will never have to ask men to do the stark things demanded of soldiers, but the men you employ are the same men. Instead of rifles they handle tools; instead of guns they serve machines. They have changed their khaki and jungle green for workshop overalls and civilian suits. But they are the same men and they will respond to leadership of the right kind as they have always done. Infuse your management with leadership; and they will show their mettle in the workshop as they have on the battlefield.
