Lessons from the Warrior Monk: Jim Mattis

Download PDF version here

James Mattis is one of the most respected and revered military leaders of the last 50 years. Mattis served for over 40 years in the Marine Corp. Mattis in nicknamed the “Warrior Monk,” due to his incredible study of leadership and military history.1 It is reported that he has a personal library of 7,000 volumes on war and strategy.2 Mattis recently published his book, Call Sign Chaos, which details his leadership lessons learned from his military experience.

Leaders across all industries will improve their ability to lead by studying Mattis. Below are eight of the most important lessons Call Sign Chaos:

• Lesson #1: The 3 C’s of Leadership

• Lesson #2: Prioritize Initiative and Aggressiveness

• Lesson #3: Command and Feedback, Not Command and Control

• Lesson #4: The Value of Hard Training

• Lesson #5: Establish and Publish Your Doctrine

• Lesson #6: Action Gets Rewarded

• Lesson #7: Accept the Unpredictability of the World

• Lesson #8: The Value of Mavericks in Your Organization

Lesson #1: The 3 C’s of Leadership

Mattis describes his “3 C’s of Leadership”:

The first is competence

Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master it. That applies at every level as you advance. Analyze yourself. Identify weaknesses and improve yourself…War is fraught with random dangers and careless missteps. Clear orders and relentless rehearsals based on intelligence and repetitive training build muscle- not once or twice, but hundreds of times.3

The Marines teach you, above all, how to adapt, improvise, and overcome. But they expect you to have done your homework, to have mastered your profession. Amateur performance is anathema, and the Marines are bluntly critical of falling short, satisfied only with 100% effort and commitment.

Nothing works unless there is competence across the organization. The perfect leader doesn’t matter if the team doesn’t have the skills to execute the mission. And if the team is competent, but the leader is not, the team will be stifled by the incompetent leader.

Finishing formal school or training doesn’t mean you’re competent. It’s just the beginning. It never stops, especially for those expecting to lead an organization. The path is not easy though. As people advance, their day-to-day responsibilities grow and they have less time for long-term learning. That’s why it’s critical to build competence around you so you have the opportunity for long-term learning, instead of always being involved in the minutia.

Mattis disdains “amateur” performance. There’s a big difference between the mindset of amateurs and professionals. Professionals take initiative and deliberately set out to master their craft, approaching their activity with a dedicated purpose. Amateurs are reactive. They go with the daily flow, rather than deliberately direct their activities.

The second is caring

To quote Teddy Roosevelt, “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

It’s easy to overemphasize technical competence at the expense of relationships. Technical competence can be measured and tracked, so it’s easier to improve than relationships.

It’s hard to measure the quality of a relationship. It’s a qualitative assessment and one that often gets overlooked. We fall in the trap of treating work relationships as transactional – people show up to work, get the job done, and get paid. We’re not there to make friends or develop deep relationships.

But that’s the wrong approach. Like it or not, any high-performing organization is like a family or a team. Relationships matter. Team members need to know you care and that you have their back, especially when times get tough. The stronger the relationships, the more competent the organization.

Because the days are so busy, team members neglect getting to know their colleagues. Leaders have the same issues given their busy schedules. But if you want people to follow you, especially in chaotic times, you need to build the trust that you are looking out for their best interests, not just trying to meet the usual corporate goals.

The third is conviction

This is harder and deeper than physical courage. Your peers are the first to know what you will stand for and, more important, what you won’t stand for. Your troops catch on fast. State your flat-ass rules and stick to them. They shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

People follow leaders that stand for something. Teams need to know that leaders will have their back. Leaders who have other priorities – promotions, taking all the credit, neglecting responsibility, etc, lose any ability to build trust and conviction with their team. In short, these leaders are not reliable because no one trusts the leader’s motives.

The ultimate betrayal is when a leader makes a promise in private to a team member but then won’t stand up for the person in public. As a leader, if you say you will do something, you better follow through and not flip-flop. Leaders who try to please everyone by promising everything will never have the deep trust of their team.

Lesson #2: Prioritize Initiative and Aggressiveness

The two qualities I was taught to value most in selecting others for promotion or critical roles were initiative and aggressiveness…instillation of personal initiative, aggressiveness, and risk-taking doesn’t spring forward spontaneously on the battlefield. It must be cultivated for years and inculcated, even rewarded, in an organization’s culture. If a commander expects subordinates to seize fleeting opportunities under stress, his organization must award this behavior in all facets of training, promoting, and commending. More important, he must be tolerant of mistakes. If risk takers are punished, then you will retain in your ranks only the risk averse.

As mentioned before, many leaders evaluate employees based on technical ability. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with technical competency. It’s absolutely necessary. But don’t forget intangible attributes, especially initiative and aggressiveness. These attitudes will have a bigger effect on a person’s contribution than their hard skills. There’s a lot of people with great skills, but without the right attitude, that provide little to the organization. Attitude is a factor that can be hard to quantify, but it separates the successful, long-term hires from the people that look good on paper but can’t produce.

The best people want more then just checking the boxes. And organizations need more than just getting the base level of work done.

The Marine philosophy is to recruit for attitude and train for skills. Marines believe that attitude is a weapon system. We searched for intangible character traits: a quest for adventure, a desire to serve with the elite, and the intention to be in top physical condition.

Lesson #3: Command and Feedback, Not Command and Control

“Command and control, the phrase so commonly used to describe leadership inside and outside the military, is inaccurate. In the Corps, I was taught to use the concept of “command and feedback.” You don’t control your subordinate commanders’ every move; you clearly state your intent and unleash their initiative. Then, when the inevitable obstacles or challenges arise, with good feedback loops and relevant data displays, you hear about it and move to deal with the obstacle. Based on feedback, you fix the problem.

The military has a reputation for “Command and Control.” As Mattis explains, however, he uses a “Command and Feedback” structure. It all starts with intent – making sure your objectives and goals are clear to the team. Restate the objectives often because once isn’t enough.

Once the message is clear, get out of your team’s way. Give them the autonomy and capacity to find the best solutions to accomplish the objectives. As Mattis states, this doesn’t mean you avoid contact with your team. Use brief updates with the team to monitor underlying progress. But don’t bog them down in micromanagement.

I believe in a centralized vision, coupled with decentralized planning and execution…I needed to focus on the big issues and leave the staff to flesh out how to get there. Guided by robust feedback loops, I returned to three questions: What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?

Lesson #4: The Value of Hard Training

My battalion was trained infantry. But, other than a dozen Vietnam vets, they hadn’t experienced actual battle. Combat involves a level of intensity that is difficult to prepare for even with the most grueling training. How do you prepare your men for the shock of battle? For one thing, you need to make sure that your training is so hard and varied that it removes complacency and creates muscle memory – instinctive reflexes – within a mind disciplined to identify and react to the unexpected.

Most professionals believe learning and training stops upon graduation. But for many roles, the training can never stop. The world continues to evolve and adapt. Those who sit back and rely on their past skills are obsolete. It’s a slow process. It never seems urgent, until you’ve become irrelevant. It’s important to train deliberately. You need to train hard in your specialty. You need to look beyond what you currently do and make a plan on how your role will evolve in the future. You won’t predict it perfectly, but you’ll be way ahead of most people who never get beyond the day-to-day.

Few people will dispute the value of life-long learning. However, do you actually follow through with ongoing learning? Do you actually have a plan and learning routine? It’s easy to say yes, but tougher to actually implement. As Mattis states, there is a tremendous amount of knowledge sitting out there waiting for us to learn. It’s up to us to do it. And it’s up to leaders to create an establish plan to actually get it done for their team. It can’t be left to chance. It must be designed like any other training program.

Mattis talks about how reading is one way to capture that knowledge.

Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who- a decade or a thousand decades ago – set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you. We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.

All leaders should build an ongoing training regimen for their team. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just consistent. It can be as simple as a list of books and resources that need to be studied over the course of someone’s career. It should always remain flexible and open to change. But at a minimum, there needs to be a plan.

Any commander who claims he is “too busy to read” is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way. The consequences of incompetence in battle are final. History teaches that we face nothing new under the sun. The Commandant of the Marine Corps maintains a list of required reading for every rank. All Marines read a common set; in addition, sergeants read some books, and colonels read others. Even generals are assigned a new set of books that they must consume. At no rank is a Marine excused from studying.

When I talked to any group of Marines, I knew from their ranks what books they had read. During planning and before going into battle, I could cite specific examples of how others had solved similar challenges. This provided my lads with a mental model as we adapted to our specific mission.

It’s amazing that almost all the problems we will face have already been encountered, debated, and solved countless times in the past. But since we ignore the wisdom of the past, we waste time trying to figure it out ourselves. That’s the benefit of history – we learn from other’s mistakes and effort. We can choose from the past what will help us today. Don’t blindly accept the past, but instead use it to build a foundation.

I learned then and I believe now that everyone needs a mentor or to be a mentor…there’s no substitute for constant study to master one’s craft. Living in history builds your own shock absorber, because you’ll learn that there are lots of old solutions to new problems. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate – you can’t coach and you can’t lead. History lights the often dark path ahead; even if it’s a dim light, it’s better than none.

Lesson #5: Establish and Publish Your Doctrine

What is a war doctrine? Basically, it’s a written guide, based on historical precedents, of the best fighting practices for commanders and troops to follow. Doctrine lays out principles that have worked in the past and established guidelines for how an organization fights, based on lessons learned in experiments or at great cost in bloody battles. Every corporation and government agency follows a doctrine, whether written or unwritten.

Leaders need to make their intentions, beliefs, and principles as clear as possible. This is only possible if these ideas are actually written down and shared with their team. If it’s not in writing, it won’t be clear to the team and probably isn’t even clear to the leader. The ideas supporting an organization need to be articulated clearly, not lost in vague verbiage. Leaders can’t assume their teams will figure it out. Too many leaders assume the teams will just “get it” and it will all work out. But it doesn’t work that way.

In addition, written doctrines allow teams to really understand and discuss what the organization believes. When teams actively debate ideas, it removes hidden agendas. It forces ideas out in the open, where they can be discovered and accepted. But when they’re not written down and discussed, there’s confusion what the company actually believes. If an idea is vague, it will be ignored and therefore will be worthless.

When there’s a conflict within the team, the principles can be clearly referenced without confusion. It’s a way to get everyone on board and moving in the same direction. Too many leaders hope the team is operating with the same beliefs, but can’t verify it. Hope is not a successful long-term strategy.

Lesson #6: Action Gets Rewarded

Early in my tenure, I visited a brigade headquarters. On the bulletin board were slogans exhorting initiative, like DECIDE THEN ACT, SEIZE THE DAY!, and JUST DO IT! These sounded inspiring, reflecting an ethos that valued initiative, until a battalion commander directed my attention to his commanding general’s division-wide order. It prescribed the exact attire required for physical training that every soldier had to wear while working out-including the color of their safety belt. By prescribing such minutia from the top down, the actual culture of the organization contradicted its own declarations and stifled a kind of real initiative. Initiative has to be practiced daily, not stifled, if it’s to become a reality inside a culture. Every institution gets the behavior it rewards.

Some leaders regurgitate motivational quotes with the mistaken belief that clichés drive change. But teams don’t care about what is said, they care about action. They care about what gets rewarded. Is a company really rewarding innovation and risk-taking? Or is the company rewarding obedience and rule following? Actions, not words, determine what gets rewarded.

Action is often at odds with what leaders say. Talk is easy. Implementing change is hard. Are new ideas rewarded or punished? Are mistakes rewarded or punished? Is pushing back against corporate policies openly discussed or suppressed?

Team members aren’t stupid. They understand what really gets rewarded, regardless of what the leaders say. Leaders need to be honest with their message. If the message doesn’t align with the action, your team will become disillusioned and will stop listening to the rhetoric. Leaders simply need to call it like it is, not hide behind cheap motivational quotes.

Lesson #7: Accept the Unpredictability of the World

EBO (Effects-based Operations) is an Air Force targeting concept utilizing forecasts and precise calculation to attack the enemy. This strategy works great for physical targets that don’t move or change. But when applied to uncertain battle conditions, the concept is less useful, if not irrelevant and destined for failure. Mattis explains:

After reflection, I concluded that EBO had two fatal flaws. First, any planning construct that strive to provide mechanistic certainty is at odds with reality, and will lead you into a quagmire of paralysis and indecision. As economist Frederich Hayek cautioned, “Adaptation is smarter than you are.” The enemy is certain to adapt to our first move. That’s why in every battle I set out to create chaos in the enemy’s thinking using deception and turning faster inside his decision loop, always assuming that they would adapt.

Mattis explains the unpredictable nature of war. Any leader who approaches war with a mechanistic, static approach will destroyed. It’s the same for many professionals and businesses. Any leader who operates with an inflexible, top-down approach that doesn’t allow for flexibility and adaptability will fail.

This is one reason why forward-looking financial forecasts and plans are worthless exercises. The world changes too fast to accurately predict where you’ll be a year from now. The relevant question is never, why is the environment different than what was predicted? The relevant question is: given the environment is different, what will be done about it going forward? How are we adapting and responding? The team’s focus should be forward-looking, not backward. Don’t waste your team’s time tracking down why a forecast was wrong. The forecast had little relevance from the beginning.

Short of a nuclear exchange, war will not abide by a mathematical equation of cause and effect. The EBO approach, misapplied, was a mechanistic, even deterministic view that ignored the simple fact that conflict is ultimately a test of wills and other largely non-quantifiable factors.

Avoid pushing your team to operate as if the world is static and predictable. Change is constant, so make adaptability a key expectation of your team. What was planned on earlier in the year will likely be wrong as the year progresses. People crave certainty. But don’t allow them to accept false certainty. Make them embrace the world as it is, not how they want it to be. When leaders try to fit their team’s activity into a stylized and static approach, the result is failure and an inability to adapt to a changing world.

Lesson #8: The Value of Mavericks in Your Organization

In the same spirit, any competitive organization must nurture its maverick thinkers. You can’t wash them out of your outfit if you want to avoid being surprised by your competition. Without mavericks, we are more likely to find ourselves at the same time dominant and irrelevant, as the enemy steals a march on us. Further, calculated risk taking is elemental to staying at the top of our competitive game. Risk aversion will damage the long-term health, even survival, of the organization, because it will undercut disciplined but unregimented thinking. Because maverick thinkers are so important to an organization’s adaptability, high-ranking leaders need to be assigned the job of guiding and even protecting them, mush as one would do for any endangered species.

Maverick thinkers are the antidote to organizations becoming irrelevant and uncompetitive. But maverick thinking causes pain in the short term because it:

1) speaks the truth rather than what is comfortable

2) doesn’t tolerate things that don’t make sense and will fight to make things right

3) has little interest in “tradition” or “the way things have always been done”

4) will cause conflict in order to get the organization on the right track.

All of these reasons cause pain in the short-term, but are incredibly beneficial long-term. If an organization is focused on short-term comfort, they’ll get rid of the maverick, or more likely, the maverick will leave for better opportunities.

People that keep their heads down and get the job done are essential, but they’ll never move the company in new directions. Not everyone will have a maverick attitude, but those that do, need to be cultivated and supported, not hand-cuffed.

Sources:

1. https://www.army.mil/article/181147/meet_james_n_mattis_10_facts_about_the_new_dod_secretary

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/opinion/jim-mattis-resignation-trump.html

3. All indented quotes sourced from Call Sign Chaos