True humble leadership in wartime

Knowledge is power. A nice quote but not complete. Knowledge is powerful with autonomy would be my version. The reason being: When in possession of certain knowledge you still need to be able to act upon it for it to be powerful.

The story about cracking the jn-25 code (Japanese crypto during WW2) inspired me to this statement since Joseph J Rochefort with his team cracked the code enough to predict the Midway attack. However his boss (John Redman) did not understand how the code worked, thought the attack would be later and was uncertain if Midway was the target of the Japanese. So Rochefort went over his head, straight to General Nimitz office. There they did not question the man. They trusted him and took his info and ran with it. The battle for Midway is in the history books as a big win for the Americans. Four Japanese carriers were sunk in successful counter-attack and all thanks to Rochefort and his team.

The parrallel with business and teams is quite clear. If you have people with appropriate skills and knowledge; don't always try to understand or even comprehend why they give certain advice. Just follow it and the team will get the reward. Even if the advice is wrong in hindsight the leader will still have the respect of his team members to stick with them and next time they will try harder to be right.

Now this sounds simple enough and is in hunderds of management books. Then why even write this article? Because despite this being known in management there is still a great tendency to get into micromanagement mode as soon as something is not completely clear to management. Especially fear of the unknown and a possible fail will invoke this behaviour. "Will this work?". "Yes" says the engineering team but is not believed. Plans have to be (re-)drawn, written and approved in three-way committees. Even after approval there are managers with veto rights who can kill the execution in its tracks before it has properly started. Fear of doing it wrong and demotivation are rampant in teams managed this way. I see and hear this all the time even though every manager should know to steer clear of micromanagement by now.

And then there's the credit. When the engineers think of the idea, implement it and are successful, managers can feel left out. A (humble) leader will always give credit to the team's effort and gain respect from his team and his peers in the process. A manager will always try to show it's their contribution that is the biggest (if successful).

Now here unfortunately the parallel keeps going because Redman got Rochefort demoted after the war for not following chain-of-command. History teaches us Midway would have been taken if Redman had been calling the shots, but alas only in 1986 (10 years after his death) Rochefort got the recognition he deserved.

Rochefort liked to say: “We can accomplish anything, provided no one cares who gets the credit.” The sign of a true humble leader.

CDR Joseph J. Rochefort and "Station Hypo" (navy.mil)