What Empowerment Looks Like

Normandy, 0730 hours, 6 June 1944: As his landing craft nears the shoreline, Brigadier General Norm “Dutch” Cota strains to see through the dust and smoke covering the beach designated Dog White. The men of the first wave have encountered heavy fire, meaning Cota’s dire predictions have come true: the defenders have not been destroyed or driven off by the pre-assault bombardment. Instead, they are killing Cota’s men in the perfect ambush site the Americans have named Omaha Beach.

When the front ramp drops, Cota pushes into the water as men beside him crumple. Bodies twist in the surf alongside dropped rifles, deflated life vests, torn limbs.  At the water’s edge burn the pyres of the handful of American tanks that made it ashore. The Germans in the cliffs above have the perfect vantage point; any GIs who don’t move will die here.

Cota had done his best to prepare his subordinate commanders for this: the plan in shambles, the landing craft coming in at the wrong places, the defenders untouched by the bombardment.

His message: leaders at all levels must feel empowered to improvise, adapt and press on. Decisions will be made at the front, by whichever leader is on the spot.  

Cota wades onto the beach, cajoling some infantrymen to follow him. In front of them is the shingle, a kind of shelf of large stones; then the seawall; a barbed wire entanglement sown with land mines; a narrow swamp; then the foot of the bluff; which rises some sixty or seventy feet and is pockmarked with dug-in German riflemen and machine gunners. Cota and a GI use a bangalore torpedo—a long aluminum tube filled with explosives—to blow a gap in the wire. The first man to rush through is killed in full view of the few stout hearts who are following the general.

Suddenly the fifty-one year old Cota is on his feet, running. He makes it through the gap to the base of the hill.

Behind him, others follow.

A GI finds a footpath and the men use it to climb, Cota pacing back and forth and urging them forward. They reach the top of the bluffs around 0900, where Cota organizes assault teams to attack the defenders from the inland side, taking Normandy yard by bloody yard.

Cota and others like him saved the American effort at Omaha Beach when both senior and—more often—junior leaders took charge of their little circle of hell.

What did empowerment look like for these leaders?

1.        They figured out what was necessary and led by example:

Many of the men Cota found crouched by the sea wall were nearly “combat ineffective,” physically incapable of fighting. Sleep-deprived for days, wet and seasick for hours, they stumbled into an abattoir and faced slaughter unless a leader stepped forward. On this stretch of beach, Cota was that leader; he showed what was possible and tapped into the soldiers’ pride. If this old man can do it, so can I.

2.        They built a new plan consistent with the Commander’s Intent.

The Commander’s Intent (or the Leader’s Intent) is a powerful component of any plan. 

The Commander’s Intent is a clear picture of the desired end-state.

Think of it as the answer to the question: what do we want to have happen?

The Commander’s Intent empowers subordinates and teams to come up with a new plan to get to the same goal in the event that the original plan is overcome by events.

An enormous staff worked for months planning the Normandy invasion, producing a document of incredible scope and detail. Yet the Commander’s Intent for D-Day from Eisenhower, the overall commander, can reasonably be expressed as “get ashore with enough combat power to stay ashore in the face of German counterattacks.” At each level of the organization, commanders interpret the intent for their own teams.  

By the time we get down to Norm Cota and his few thousand men on Omaha Beach, the commander’s intent could be expressed as, “eliminate the defenders and open the beach exit.”

Shortly after H-Hour it became clear to Cota and the rest of the assault force that the plan had misfired, but the intent was still the same. They came up with a new plan. Instead of a frontal assault led by American tanks, the attack was an infiltration, led by a few score foot-soldiers who found their way to the top of the bluff to assault the Germans from their weaker, inland side.  

The men who pushed inland shared many attributes that made this possible—courage, perseverance, tactical skill. Among the most important, they were armed with a clear leader’s intent, a critical tool for any team operating amid uncertainty and volatility.

Does your team have that tool?