FOREWORD
Navigation is especially challenging when your destination isn’t just unknown—it’s unknowable.
One of the first things you learn in the Army is land navigation. In fact, I learned it before I ever set foot on the battlefield; it is a mandatory course at West Point. Land navigation sounds incredibly challenging (and it is), but its core principle is simple: soldiers must learn to follow a route through unfamiliar landscapes with tools no more sophisticated than a compass.
Learning about land navigation is critical for a number of reasons. In an environment where armies fight symmetrically on the battlefield, knowing your position (and seeking to ascertain your opponent’s) allows each side to create complicated and precise plans for striking their opponents. Land navigation also helps to build strong teams, as each soldier works toward a shared objective. Perhaps most important, with the changing nature of warfare, land navigation helps us to orient ourselves in a world without the luxury of the Internet or the GPS.
The key to land navigation is to constantly be aware of your position in relation to your destination. This is not easy, given that your position is shifting at any given moment. Critically, these steps require a map. Without knowledge of where we stand, the world around us, and where we are hoping to go, we run the risk of wandering without a purpose. In this sense, land navigation is not entirely unlike leadership—there are many paths to reach an ultimate destination. But how can we know where to go without a map?
I have spent most of my life studying leadership. It was the core of my time at West Point, my career in the Army, and the beginnings of my time as a founder of McChrystal Group. With every new challenge, I reflected on my values and the paths of those who had come before me. In so doing, I thought that I was as much of an expert on leadership as there could be. Society seemed to agree; I have been blessed with modest success. During my command in Iraq and Afghanistan, I faced many tough decisions, but my team and I scored more victories than we ever expected. Nine years ago, I began teaching a course on leadership at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, a course I continue to teach today. McChrystal Group has created new methodologies for developing leadership in the private sector.
I know how unbelievably lucky I am, but I also believe that my leadership has played a role in my triumphs. I am a skilled land navigator, and I spent my career successfully leading teams toward our destination. However, in writing my memoirs, I began to recognize that the path to my destination has required many diversions. As I drilled down to the details of my time in the Army, I began to see how my successes truly came to be. Even in my own story, I found myself to be a supporting character, not wholly responsible for the achievements my team has attained. Rather, in looking back, it was clear that our focus on adaptability was key. Depending on the context of a given moment, my job (and my role as a leader) shifted based on the needs of my teammates.
In the time since I published My Share of the Task, I have started to reformulate what it means to be a good leader, an effective leader, and the best leader that I could be. All of this broad and philosophical thinking helped me to realize that leadership isn’t what we think it is—and it never has been.
Leadership is not something I learned in the classroom and implemented over the course of my life. It has been a product of the relationships that I have made throughout my life. There was no map that would have led me to take the route from a young cadet to my current life in Alexandria, Virginia. Only with the benefit of hindsight can I see the true nature of where I have traveled, and the means by which I have become the person that I am. At any given moment in my life, it was an internal compass that guided me only to my true north.
Perhaps, then, leadership is about building a path for ourselves; and more critically, leadership is accepting the fact that starting that trip with any idea of where we will end up may be a fool’s errand. We can always aspire to grow into the leader that we envision ourselves becoming, but we cannot rely on an existing map to tell us how to get there. If we could, then it would be easy for us all to determine the traits, actions, and choices that will set us on the path to virtuous leadership. However, given that we each find ourselves uniquely positioned in our own lives, there are no common mapped-out routes that every person must take to get where we hope to go.
Leaders are less like navigators in that way, and more like cartographers. We carve our own path forward into the future, knowing that we cannot predict what lies ahead. This uncertainty is exciting—we should not be afraid in facing a world of possibility. Rather, we should be emboldened by the knowledge that while we can learn from the paths that others have pioneered, the route we map is entirely our own. We are navigating a new world, one that no one else has seen through our eyes. The journey that we ultimately take creates the person that we become—this journey is the path of our leadership.
BUT WHERE TO BEGIN?
The question is a daunting one, to be sure. The book that you are reading, Welcome to Management by Ryan Hawk, is a remarkably good place to start. His work provides nuanced and articulate insights into the best way to begin developing a plan for bringing to light how we should lead—and it starts with reexamining ourselves.
When cartographers begin their voyage to the unfamiliar, they begin with what they can identify and observe; they situate themselves in the world by looking to what they know best. As Ryan identifies, in developing our path toward leadership, we must begin with ourselves, both inside and out. Only then can we begin to build our teams, lead our teams, and ultimately seek to have our leadership stand the test of time.
It should be said that cartography is an onerous task, and one that has fallen out of fashion, as Ryan aptly notes. We rely on technology to point us in the right direction; in the same way, we shirk the kinds of profound thought that force us to grapple with who we truly are. Today’s society, no matter how complex and machine-driven it may be, requires leadership more than ever. It takes courage to be a cartographer; while it is hard work, it is the right work.
In that vein, writing on leadership today is a special kind of challenge. With every week, new books appear on the shelves, claiming to have the one true method for becoming a good leader. Few books revel in the process of leadership, though, the experience of what it means to grow into a leadership role. As you read Welcome to Management, think about what it means to be a successful leader in your own mind. Analyze the eventual payoff that he discusses, and how it looks in your mind. And most important, make the conscious decision not to rely only on the roads traveled by others—as Ryan writes, your journey begins with you.
After you finish this book, you will have many ideas about how to begin growing into the leader that Ryan discusses. When you do, I have one piece of advice: put down the map, and pick up the compass. I can’t wait to see where you’ll go.
General Stanley McChrystal U.S. Army (Ret.)