Personalities and Systems: Achieving a Balance Built to Last
By Brian Fiallo and Andrew Hale
While it lasted, my time as a cavalry troop commander felt like every young officer hopes it will feel. My line troop was routinely considered for tough missions where the squadron commander needed to trust that we would be disciplined and see our missions through to accomplishment with minimal oversight. Our soldiers were proud to be a part of our troop and our squadron, due in-part to my attempts to inculcate them with what I’ll term a ‘Rakkasan’ mindset.
The 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, nicknamed ‘Rakkasans’, is no different today than most other Infantry Brigade Combat Teams. Yet from the day soldiers arrive in the unit they are told that they are different, special, and better just for being here, and that they will always be a Rakkasan and part of this brotherhood for the rest of their life. This mindset translates to an attitude and confidence that no achievement is outside these soldiers’ grasp and I was proud to see them emulate it. I had stressed a command philosophy based on personal accountability and growth within the organization, encouraging soldiers to be ready for the plethora of challenges we would face, stressing preparedness to be the “next man up” and take over any areas that needed attention with their own initiative.
By relying too much on my own actions to ensure things got done, I did not build systems that could withstand my removal by either my incapacitation on the battlefield or handing over command to someone who did not share my style of leadership.
But as we will see later in this story, I had unknowingly failed to provide them the conditions necessary for this preparedness. By relying too much on my own actions to ensure things got done, I did not build systems that could withstand my removal by either my incapacitation on the battlefield or handing over command to someone who did not share my style of leadership. I asked the co-author of this piece to share with me his perspectives on the consequences of my way of leading and corroborate my thoughts on them as someone who endured the following years with the Troop and was thrust into the NCO leadership role in the midst of the transition.
All of the good things were made possible not because of some innate ability of mine, but through a host of blessings that surrounded me and my formation. I was handed the troop in excellent condition by the previous commander, who was supremely competent, hard-working, and academically brilliant. As a subordinate leader within a larger organization, I thrive on the extreme end of the spectrum of Mission Command versus Command and Control, closer to what the Germans term Auftragstaktik. I was blessed to have a squadron commander with whom I shared a vision, and who provided me clear intent and allowed me to execute my understanding of his intent with minimal interruption. I had a First Sergeant, executive officer, and platoon sergeants who supported my intent and guidance in word and deed, and platoon leaders who showed eagerness to learn and better themselves.
My time as commander ended with a training exercise where our troop was chosen to represent not just the squadron, but also our country, by being attached to a Canadian brigade for their rotation to the Canadian version of our National Training Center. As I said goodbye to my soldiers at my change of command ceremony, I expressed to them how high they should hold their heads for all they had accomplished.
In my thoughts, things had gone well for so long that I had wrongly assumed systems were in place to ensure that things continued to work as they should.
My successor in command of the troop had been with the squadron for some time as a staff officer, but my interaction with him had been minimal until the beginning of change of command inventories. But even during our property handover, I was busy preparing to assume command of the Headquarters and Headquarters troop (HHT), as well as ensuring that my shortages for the line troop were accurately reflected on our documents. The brevity of our exchange was compounded by the fact that for a good portion of the handover we were still in Canada after completing the aforementioned exercise, and the situation left little room for discussion of many other necessary organizational functions and systems aside from property accountability. In my thoughts, things had gone well for so long that I had wrongly assumed systems were in place to ensure that things continued to work as they should. I handed over the troop with the confidence that regardless of his abilities, the troop would continue to do well.
I remained in the squadron for a further year, commanding the HHT for the next ten months before beginning the process of leaving Alaska for graduate school. Not long after the change of command, I began to hear words of dissatisfaction from my old soldiers. The squadron footprint was relatively small — between visiting the squadron headquarters and seeing soldiers around in the motor pool, my inquiries as to how they were getting along were met with the not-so-facetious question of if I was willing to come back and command the troop.
I did my best not to support these notions, as I did not want any part in undermining the new commander, and yet I confess that inside it made me feel like I had done well by my soldiers where he had not. It is natural for us to feel good when we are wanted back in places where we have left, and yet I knew this feeling was not appropriate and that their continued success without me should be what I sought instead. Further down the road in our training pathway to the National Training Center, it became clear that this was not a case of a new commander just getting into his groove.
Success is ‘We’, Failure is ‘I’. I had relied too much on leading the troop with a forceful personality and had not placed enough emphasis on building systems within the troop that could survive the loss of an individual, including myself.
This is when it occurred to me that the gravest failure was mine, not the new commander’s. A squadron executive officer whom I served under on staff at Fort Campbell had imparted to me his maxim that “Success is ‘We’, Failure is ‘I’.” The meaning of this phrase is that when speaking of good things that happen, we should always refer to the victory as belonging to the larger team, whereas when things go wrong, the first person we should be looking to blame is ourselves. Looking at my old troop from my position in HHT, I began to feel like I had failed them by not building something that could stand the test of time.
I had violated my own command philosophy that I had posted in the troop, which urged everyone to teach their job to the soldier two echelons below them, and for every soldier to strive to learn the job of the next highest echelon. I explained this as crucial to our success, because in combat anyone can fall at any time. Neither the mission nor the troop can collapse because of the absence of a single person. I had relied too much on leading the troop with a forceful personality and had not placed enough emphasis on building systems within the troop that could survive the loss of an individual, including myself.
My absence was compounded by our First Sergeant, the senior enlisted advisor to the commander, leaving as well, which in itself caused downstream effects. The co-author of this piece was thrust into the vacant NCO role. While he was extremely capable and up to the task, it left his platoon to be led by subordinate NCOs who themselves were new to the platoon as a result of heavy turnover inherent to an OCONUS unit. This is where published Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) at every level of the organization could have mitigated the negative effects.
As time went on, it became apparent that my failures in this regard were myriad. As a commander, it was greatly important to me that soldier personnel actions, through which someone’s livelihood or career was affected — pay actions, leave forms, school requests — were handled immediately. I had a personal policy of never allowing any paperwork of this nature to remain in my inbox overnight. I had even allowed soldiers to walk their paperwork straight to me if it was urgent, bypassing the orderly room all together. In doing so, I had deprived the orderly room personnel of training and the chance to build an enduring system for tracking these actions, which became quite obvious after I had left command as paperwork piled up and the training room had no idea of the status of paperwork that remained unactioned.
Another example pertained to training resources and my interactions with higher staff. Having served as the squadron logistics officer in the year prior to my command and for a further two years in my previous unit, I had a good understanding of staff functions and was also thoroughly networked with my brigade staff counterparts. Because of my desire to see my troop have all the resources it needed, whenever I felt dissatisfied with the squadron staff’s efforts in a given area, I would bypass them and go straight to the entity from whom I needed action, be it a logistical element, external aviation unit for our air assault training, or whatever it was.
While this did great things for my troop’s training and for my personal staff acumen, it did a disservice to the systems of my squadron staff as well as my troop’s future training when my replacement was not so well networked. Again, a continuity book of sorts could have aided in this regard, giving the new commander a place to look for points of contact and our way of doing things, provided he was willing to seek assistance.
The balance between personality-based and systems-based leadership is a tough tightrope to walk. You must have a system for everything that your organization is required to do, yet maintain the personality to reach in and fix it when your system isn’t working.
The balance between personality-based and systems-based leadership is a tough tightrope to walk. While I have highlighted my failures in leaning too heavily on the force of my personality to carry the day, there are dangers in relying too heavily on systems as well. To paraphrase my first brigade commander while in troop command, “the Army is indeed a bureaucracy, and a good one as bureaucracies go, but sometimes the system breaks down, and that is the point where commanders must reach into this system and salvage an action or event with command presence and initiative.”
It is unacceptable to allow the failure of a system, whether its awards processing or some other personnel action, training resource requests, or anything else, to negatively impact our soldiers when simple action and presence of a commander could have prevented it. We should not make a habit, as I did, of resorting to commander action frequently when there is a broken system, but instead invest and work to restore the system so that we can place our command emphasis elsewhere and allow this system to function when the commander is changed.
If I may summarize the balance as simply as I can, you must have a system for everything that your organization is required to do, yet maintain the personality to reach in and fix it when your system isn’t working. Without the personality to drive the creation of systems, enforce their use, and repair them when necessary, systems will either never exist or those that do will be allowed to fall into disrepair never to be fixed. Moreover, it may be useful to those leaving command and those taking it to reach out early once the command slate is locked and go over the many requirements of commanding an organization and determine what systems are in place and which need work. When things are going well, we often don’t ask ourselves why they are, and had I done so I may have been able to correct the shortfall I had created.
About the Authors:
Brian Fiallo is an active duty Army Armor officer preparing to attend the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Andrew Hale is an active duty Army Master Sergeant preparing to serve as the Senior Military Science Instructor at the University of Minnesota.