Mission Command Rules! — How Google and Army Leaders Win in a Complex World

Afterburner’s William Duke recently published a post about how the U.S. Army leadership philosophy of Mission Command is “winning big in corporate America.” Duke focused primarily on Amazon, but I’d like to bring the comparison to another tech powerhouse: Google. In his fascinating book about Google’s HR approach, Laszlo Bock describes the ideal leader attributes for their managers. The parallels between Google’s leadership philosophy and Mission Command are rich, and the few differences can provide lessons to both organizations.

Similar Environments

The Army and Google both face a similar competitive landscape, which drives their approach to leading. The Army’s Operating Concept “Win in a Complex World” describes how competitors like Russia and China are eroding the United States’ technological military advantage, so the Army must develop “agile and adaptive” leaders to obtain a competitive advantage in terms of leadership and innovation. Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 6–0: Mission Command explains that wars are human “contests of wills”, characterized by “continuous and mutual adaptation by all participants.” This continuous adaptation results in a “complex, ever changing, and uncertain” environment. Similarly, tech companies compete fiercely for talent in order to achieve their competitive advantage in an industry characterized by rapid innovation and change.

Mission Command

ADP 6–0 defines the Mission Command Philosophy as “the exercise of authority and direction by the commander using mission orders to enable disciplined initiative within the commander’s intent to empower agile and adaptive leaders in the conduct of…operations.” ADP 6–0 then outlines the following guiding principles that allow leaders to blend the “art of command” with the “science of control”:

• Build cohesive teams through mutual trust
• Create shared understanding
• Provide clear commander’s intent
• Exercise disciplined initiative
• Use mission orders
• Accept prudent risk

Finally, ADP 6–0 explains that in order for Mission Command to work, leaders must:

• Drive operations through the activities of understand, visualize, describe, direct, lead, and assess
• Develop teams
• Inform and influence audiences, inside and outside of the organization

8 Project Oxygen Attributes

In Work Rules! Laszlo Bock describes Google’s study to determine if managers were necessary, and what attributes defined their best managers. They called the study ‘Project Oxygen’ because “having a good manager is essential, like breathing. And if we make managers better, it would be like a breath of fresh air.” Google failed to prove that managers don’t matter, but did arrive at the following eight attributes that statistically correlated to their best managers:

1. Be a good coach
2. Empower the team and do not micromanage
3. Express interest/concern for team members’ success and personal well being
4. Be very productive/results oriented
5. Be a good communicator-listen and share information
6. Help the team with career development
7. Have a clear vision/strategy for the team
8. Have important technical skills that help advise the team

Comparisons

Since both the Army and Google operate in similar environments, they share very similar approaches to leadership. Despite different wording, about 75% of the specific instructions listed above match. ‘Use Mission Orders’ from Mission Command doesn’t carry over to Google because that’s a specific form of Army communication. ‘Have important technical skills’ doesn’t appear in Mission command because the Army expects institutional training, written doctrine, MOS certification, and promotion boards to make this a moot point. That leaves three specific instructions that don’t match, but can provide lessons to both organizations.

1. Understand, Visualize, Describe, Direct, Lead, & Assess

Google expects managers to ‘have a clear vision/strategy for the team,’ so this point matches well with the Army’s commander task to ‘drive operations.’ But ‘vision’ and ‘strategy’ are very different things, and ‘clear’ is not the most specific term. While Google has to apply this to a multitude of different managers at different levels, the Army heuristic ‘understand, visualize, describe, direct, lead, and assess’ is an excellent tool for all of them. Understand the context, visualize an ideal end state, describe that end state to your team, direct and lead them towards achieving that end state, and assess the results. This heuristic can really operationalize that Project Oxygen Attribute.

2. Be Very Productive

Mission Command doesn’t specifically tell Army leaders to be very productive, even though that’s definitely an unspoken expectation across the Army. But words have meaning, and formally defining an expectation ensures that it sticks. Army leaders face a daunting mountain of bureaucratic tasks that take time and attention away from being involved leaders. Productivity skills can quickly separate great leaders from the rest, but are rarely taught in the Army. Productivity tools abound, such as The Secret Weapon or David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and clearly articulating the value of productivity in Army Doctrine would raise awareness for this skill among more Army Leaders.

3. Disciplined Initiative

Mission Command instructs leaders to enable ‘disciplined initiative’ while Google specifies only to prevent micromanagement. Some may argue that this is a matter of context, since straying outside the manager’s intent could result in an unexpected and valuable creation at Google, while straying outside the commander’s intent in the Army could result in fratricide. However, I think this difference is worth exploring. The negative instruction ‘do not micromanage’ could influence a novice leader to be passive, absent, or provide no purpose or direction to a team. Without purpose and direction, the team can drift away from the organization’s goals and the manager will not contribute any value. Jim Collins argues in Good to Great and How the Mighty Fall that great companies foster a ‘culture of discipline’ in which they fanatically stick to their ‘hedgehog concept’ (what they’re the best at, passionate about, and drives their resource engine), and shun opportunities outside of that hedgehog concept. Failing to adhere to this discipline decays the company’s ability to consistently achieve tactical excellence, and causes the company to decline.

Mission Command elaborates on Google’s ‘empower the team’ by providing two tools to enable ‘disciplined initiative’: commander’s intent and shared understanding. Commander’s intent is a clear and concise expression of purpose and end state, connected to the higher level strategy of the organization. This provides what we in the Army call the ‘left and right limits’ within which subordinate leaders can innovate. Shared understanding is achieved through collaboration and trust, and informs all members of the organization of the environment, purpose, problems, and approaches to solving them. This way, all members have the same information available so they can quickly and independently make decisions that are aligned with the commander’s intent.

Operationalizing

The final comparison between Google and the Army is how they operationalize or implement their leadership philosophies. The Army has multiple doctrinal manuals on Mission Command, and summarizes it in this busy chart:

Figure 1. The Exercise of Mission Command, ADP 6–0

Meanwhile Google conveys the Project Oxygen Attributes in an 8 step checklist, with a corresponding employee survey to provide managers feedback on how well they’re achieving the Project Oxygen Attributes. A chart with eight boxes, arrows, and tons of words conveys an almost identical leadership philosophy as eight bullet points. The Army’s leadership philosophy is sound, but the Army could learn a great deal from Google on how to implement doctrine across the entire force without cognitive overload. Doctrine should be developed with the intellectual rigor of a PhD Thesis, but it should be communicated in a manner that enables all soldiers to immediately implement. I’ll cover this topic in another blog post.

What do you think? How does your organization promote leadership like Mission Command or the 8 Project Oxygen Attributes? If it doesn’t, how does that affect your organization?

If you want to learn more about Mission Command or Google try Transforming Command by Eitan Shamir or How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg.

Keith Hannah is an Infantry Captain in the U.S. Army, and currently works at the Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course at Fort Benning, Georgia. He plans to transition out of the Army in February 2017.