I came across a great article written by my colleague Steve Leonard, the brain behind the magnificent Doctrine Man community, which has for many years served as an important connection and collection point for military veterans online. Go for DM’s insightful posts … stay for the epic comment threads.
The article was on the topic of “pulling rank.” This is military jargon for exerting authority to shut someone down and close a discussion. This is not uncommon in military life, and there are understandable reasons why it pervades the culture. These include the occasional military necessity to follow orders without question and the reality that individuals are largely defined by their rank and position.
Steve offers sharp insight through the lens of his own experience and closes with five things someone should consider before flexing their authority to achieve an objective.
Easily my favourite words of his article:
“If you’re in a position of authority, that speaks for itself. You don’t have to browbeat others or resort to feats of strength to prove your worth. Do you feel threatened by other opinions that are different from yours? Does someone junior to you with more experience in an area cause you to question your value? Maybe it’s you and not them.”
This incisive reasoning gets straight to the heart of the matter: those who over-use authority usually do so because of something within themselves rather than a genuine need to foreclose an issue and move along.
When I see someone flexing position or rank, I presume I’m observing insecurity, and immediately begin questioning the wisdom of the plan or direction being pushed. My commitment is limited by the method before I’ve even considered the content.
Let’s bracket these thoughts for a moment.
If you haven’t worked in private enterprise, you might imagine that things are completely different, and that rank plays a smaller part in organizational culture. You’d be partially correct.
While job titles and position labels are less important, they are not totally stripped away. Any organization which succeeds will need to scale, and with scale comes verticality. With verticality comes the authority of one person over others, and at a certain point in the scale, the reality of an executive at the top of a massive pyramid of activity exercising huge authority.
Authority structures like this bring with them economy and clarity of decision-making. They bring order and they stabilize expectations.
But they bring liabilities as well. People can be afraid to challenge authority. They can seek approval from authority figures. They can be pragmatic rather than intrinsically motivated in an effort to curry favour with authority. And leaders can inadvertently shape and influence the actions of teams simply by the shadows they cast.
What I have seen in my time with one particular organization is the use of a leadership principle to help guide everyone through this thicket of potential issues. That principle is called “Disagree and Commit.”
The way this works is that the authority figure actually invites others to disagree with the direction being taken. This opens a debate. Everyone shares their views, supporting their position with data, evidence, precedent, theory, and experience. At some point, the debate is foreclosed, and a decision is made. At that point, the expectation is that everyone commits wholly to the decision and moves forward.
This is extremely powerful.
It dignifies every member of the team by inviting and caring about their views. It tempers and influences decisions in a collaborative way. But most crucially, it means no one will feel coerced into a course of action. They will feel it is a result of consensus.
When a leader is actively seeking collaboration and consensus, they’re opening themselves up and being vulnerable. They’re saying that the initial course of action might be wrong. This nullifies concerns about lurking insecurity and builds confidence that the eventual course of action will be viable.
When a leader flexes authority and doesn’t invite discussion, it feels coercive to the team. They are doing what they do next because they must, which feels disempowering. When they’ve been part of the disagreement preceding the decision, they are at least somewhat empowered.
This is critical. Coercion leads to minimalist effort. If you disagree with something but you must do it anyway, you will do only what you have to do. Consensus leads to discretionary effort. You will work as hard as you can to land the next steps because they are partially yours. You weren’t forced into them without a voice.
Now, this principle only works when its unspoken corollaries are understood and respected. In my mind there are three of these.
First, invocation of Disagree and Commit cannot be pro forma. It can’t be the case that the decision is already made and is irreversible, but the leader invites disagreement in order to synthesize buy-in without a genuine opportunity to influence the decision. Teammates will pick up on this instantly, and it will make them distrustful of the process from that point forward. If a decision will not change, there is no point pretending. This adds dishonesty to the sin of coercion. Better to admit something can’t be challenged and move on.
Second, the use of this principle cannot be ornamental. The leader has to genuinely listen (which Steve also calls out in his article) and genuinely incorporate the ideas of the team into the decision process. If, after 100 debates, the leader’s 100 original positions stand unchanged, the team will conclude the whole thing is a charade and they will stop participating. They will also lose confidence that the leader has enough humility for their position, because no matter how strong a leader’s judgement, no one gets it right without input all of the time.
Finally, the leader absolutely cannot, under any circumstance, hold the contents of a debate against anyone, ever. This destroys openness. It kills debate. No one will brave it again, and at that point the leader is on an island. It’s fine to critique how someone participates in order to help them grow. But this must be done carefully, as even a hint of judgement when someone has made themselves vulnerable is likely to shut them down for good.
Here’s the kicker: inviting disagreement is also an important element of growing future leaders. It sets the expectation that having backbone and harbouring convictions about important issues is expected.
This gives an organization a better chance of raising senior leaders who operate from a place of character and principle. Without these ballasts, organizations can quickly find their cultures untethered and their leaders making self-interested, myopic, or default decisions which do not advance strategic interests.
Disagree and Commit, when properly applied, is an excellent framework calibrating the use of authority. It engenders more commitment and reduces the resentment and disempowerment created by flexing.
Tony Carr is a seasoned senior leader with private and public sector experience building and developing high-performing teams marked by mutual support, positivity, and best-in-class delivery. The views expressed here are his own.