Leadership

50 Points of Wisdom For Today's Leaders

Rick Hillier

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781554684946
• eBook ISBN: 9781443404426
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

General Rick Hillier's views on leadership evolved over his three decades as a soldier. Early in his career he watched as many of his superiors made bad decisions. Later he learned at the school of hard knocks as the head of emergency rescue operations in Canada and international task forces in eastern Europe and Afghanistan. Never one to be shy with his opinions, Hillier is as frank and straightforward in Leadership as he is in his #1 bestselling memoir, A Soldier First.

For Hillier, leadership is all about people—embracing those you are in charge of and winning over those you need to work with—not about risk aversion or management fads. Leaders think long and have a plan. Their actions speak, not their words, and they make their own luck. But leaders also act out of moral courage, take advantage of crises, accept failure and remain perpetually optimistic. Whether on the front lines of a business or in any situation that requires strong communication and vision, leaders go with their gut and make the tough decisions look easy. Leadership is an inspirational, easy-to-read and, in true Hillier fashion, often humorous collection of fifty principles that will challenge the way you run your business, start a project or take that next step in life.

PART 1
NEVER FORGET—IT’S ALL ABOUT PEOPLE

CHAPTER 1

PUT PEOPLE FIRST

It’s people who make you, and your company, organization or community, successful or not, in good times and bad. Everyone wants to be successful. I often ask people, “Have you actually ever met anybody who wanted to go to work on a given day and fail?” The answer is inevitably no, and yet the way we conduct ourselves and develop relationships with those who work for us often suggests the opposite: we expect failure and therefore shape our efforts to defend, rather than shaping them to win.

That’s why, as I said earlier, men and women get involved in many things in life: they want to be successful. They coach kids judo, soccer and hockey teams; organize dance groups; lead boys and girls clubs; organize Scotch-tasting clubs; fundraise for local food banks; and through their leadership and involvement help make their communities better places to live.

Your job as a leader—as their leader—is to focus those impulses, to get them to think long term and to adopt your vision for the company or organization. You may even find, if you do that well, that people will help you improve your vision and sharpen its focus. You have to motivate and inspire people, enable them to do their jobs as well as they can, sustain them in their endeavours, recognize them for their productivity and, eventually, say farewell to them with dignity and respect as they leave for their just rewards in new challenges or retirement.

As a leader you want to inspire your people to be so engaged and committed, to have accomplished so much that even when they are ninety-five years old, sitting in a rocking chair on the back porch, they will look back on their time under your leadership with the satisfaction of accomplishment and contribution, and a feeling that they have made a difference. What they will remember most is how you made them feel as they did their work and focused on their job. Only then can your job as a leader be considered complete.

None of the people around you will be supermen or super-women. Indeed, I’ve never met a superhero, even among the incredible men and women I commanded in my more than thirty-five years in the Canadian Forces, and I’ve concluded that superheroes really don’t exist. As journalist Christie Blatchford once told me very forcefully, as only she can, heroes in our society are those who have had the label slapped on them by others. The men and women who look to you for leadership are not going to be heroes. Despite my admiration and love for men and women in uniform, I knew they were ordinary people, but that they accomplished superhuman tasks because of their commitment and dedication to their organization, their belief in the goodness of our country and their faith and belief in their leaders (including, from time to time, me).

One such Canadian is Conrad Cowan, based at Canadian Forces Base, Comox, British Columbia, in central Vancouver Island. Conrad is a member of an exclusive fraternity in the Canadian military: he’s one of only about 140 or so men and women who are SAR Techs (search and rescue technicians). (Women have just recently completed the selection process necessary to be in this gruelling profession, and their tiny numbers will undoubtedly increase.) SAR Techs, with their air and ground support crews, spring into action in the worst of times; that is, when Canadians and, occasionally, those of other nationalities are in danger of losing their lives. Many times, the threats to these people arise because of the dangerous nature of their livelihoods—they are fishers on the high seas whose boats burn or sink, Native hunters in the North who get trapped on ice that has broken free from the land, pilots who encounter unexpected weather or mechanical problems that cause their planes to crash. Equal in numbers, though, are those in danger of dying because of stupidity: recreational fishers who are drunk, mountain climbers who don’t prepare, hikers who have not paid attention to their travels or the time of day. SAR Techs try to rescue them all, no questions asked.

In an average year, our SAR Techs participate in rescue operations involving more than eight thousand Canadians who are in trouble, often in danger of losing their lives, in a wide variety of environments and situations. More than one thousand of those Canadians are probably alive each year only because of the heroic actions of Conrad, his fellow SAR Techs, their aircraft crews and the leadership and sustainment teams that support them.

Conrad and the other members on a Cormorant search and rescue helicopter team were involved in an intriguing rescue that came to my attention. The rescue began when the team was alerted that a climber in the Rockies, a man climbing alone (a basic no-no), had slipped and fallen into a crevice. By the time the climber had reached someone on his cell phone, his life was already slipping away—clinging to a ledge in a deep crevice with night and freezing temperatures to combat, he was severely injured and going into shock. His chances of survival were slim.

Conrad and his ready crew launched in their Cormorant from Comox, just as the last glimmer of daylight faded. They flew the helicopter, something roughly the size of a Greyhound bus with a rotor on top, into the mountains and in the dark winter night found the deep chasm into which the climber had fallen. The pilot held the massive aircraft about fifty feet from the cliff face where the climber was, about one thousand feet off the ground, and tried to hold it steady in the strong mountain cross-winds—hellish conditions even for talented search and rescue crews. Conrad was lowered into the crevice on a thin wire hoist to search for the injured climber. They lowered Conrad down and then down some more, until more than three hundred feet of wire had been let out and the crew in the aircraft had lost sight of him. With only intermittent communication with Conrad, who wore a helmet with a walkie-talkie, the pilot, who is also the mission commander on these kinds of rescues, was ready to abort the mission. After all, with the chances of a successful rescue so low, there wasn’t much sense risking the lives of five people to not save one.

It was at that critical moment that Conrad spotted the injured climber on the narrow ledge and, using the pendulum motion of the cable, managed to swing himself over to the man, then grab him and snap him into the harness. The two of them were hoisted up to the aircraft, and so the injured, shocked and badly chilled man was brought back from the edge of the precipice and death.

I got to know Conrad when I was Chief of the Defence Staff. Just twenty-eight years old at the time of the rescue, he is dedicated and accomplished; he wears several decorations for bravery on his uniform, like so many of the SAR Techs. When he came to Rideau Hall to meet Governor General Michaëlle Jean during a Canadian Forces heroes ball, I had the opportunity to ask him what his thoughts were during those risky hours.

“Conrad,” I said, “when you were on that mission, more than three hundred feet below the aircraft, on a thin wire, deep in a dark and freezing crevice, at enormous risk yourself, what were you thinking?” I was not sure what I expected to hear from him, probably something like “This is what we do” or “Our training prepares us for this” or “The equipment permits us to succeed,” but I was surprised by his response.

“Sir,” Conrad said, “all I could think was, ‘When my wife hears about this, she’s going to kill me!’”

When I finished laughing, my first thought was what a touching testimonial this was to the ordinariness of these incredibly accomplished people. Then I thought about how this ordinary man, a great Canadian, did such astonishing things because of his belief in his mission and his dedication and commitment to the greater things in life. As a leader, you want to inspire and motivate all those whom you lead to be Conrad Cowans: dedicated, committed and armed with an insurmountable will to succeed, even though they are just ordinary men and women. That’s how leaders change the world.

It wasn’t only Conrad, however, who cemented in me this belief that as a leader you are all about people. I saw it everywhere I went. Visiting soldiers recently returned from Afghanistan—those who had been wounded, sometimes severely—always brought the people part to the fore. There they were, often lying in bed with needles and tubes jutting from every part of their bodies, and all of them, every one, came through as the good men and women they were, human to the core.

Corporal Shaun Fevens, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, was in the US Army’s Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany, when I first saw him. He had been wounded badly in a terrible attack on Easter Sunday 2007; six of his fellow soldiers in the same vehicle were killed. Shaun, who had been partially out of the rear hatch doing his job as “air sentry,” that is, observing to the rear and side for threats, was sucked down into the vehicle by the explosion and then blown, along with the armoured rear ramp (weighing at least a ton), away from the vehicle. He regained consciousness quickly and directed fellow soldiers to tie off his badly destroyed legs to prevent blood and fluid loss. Shaun was not about to die—not after surviving an attack like that—because of a lack of application of training. When I saw him about forty-eight hours after the attack, he was as composed and calm as anyone I’d ever met. His concern was for the wellbeing of his mom and his fiancée, Lana. They were obviously worried about him, but his concern certainly was not for himself. His thoughts were on what challenge and opportunity he would have in the future as a soldier. In fact, Shaun’s first words to me were: “Is there still a place in the army for me?” (“Absolutely,” I responded.) His second question then was about when he could finish his mission in Afghanistan (a question I often heard from wounded soldiers), and his third had to do with whether he could still become an officer and realize his dream of more, and different, challenges as a leader.

Everything about meeting Shaun and visiting with him brought home to me the fact that he was human, with emotions, with concerns, and with dreams that he wanted to realize. He was not a process, not something that could be described as a resource (how I detest the term “human resources”) and certainly not a machine. There had to be a human connection for him to perform at his very best, and as a person he needed the respect due him. He and the thousands of others like him are the very essence of our country. As I once said when speaking as army commander back in 2003, “Our best weapons don’t roll on wheels or get propelled by tracks; they travel on combat boots because they are human beings.” This perspective must remain foremost in our work.

People like Shaun must be our focus as leaders. They need us to be equally real to them, that is, to be human, in order to be successful. Seeing Shaun’s concern for his mom and his fiancée, I told him that I was returning to Canada and that I would phone each immediately upon arrival to tell them that I had seen him, touched him and spoken with him, and that he was going to be good to go. And I did just that, though only to find that Shaun had already phoned them to tell them I would be calling. Am I ever glad I did not miss that duty.

My wife, Joyce, and I have been constantly in touch with Shaun and Lana (now husband and wife). We introduced them to Team Canada at the IIHF World Championships in Halifax, held their new baby boy and, compliments of Toronto-Dominion Bank, spent almost a week with them in Charleston, South Carolina, where both of them impressed hundreds of TD leaders and their families as incredible human beings and Canadians who help make our country strong. The standing ovation they received after I introduced them was heartwarming and sent chills down my spine at the same time. At the Atlantic Canada Top 50 CEO Awards dinner on 12 May 2010, I had the great pleasure of introducing Officer-Cadet Fevens to the attendees: Shaun was continuing with his plan for life.

Lieutenant Simon Mailloux, a platoon commander with the Royal 22nd Regiment, the Van Doos, out of Valcartier, Quebec, made a strong impression on me as well. While doing his job leading his soldiers in Afghanistan, Simon was wounded in an attack that killed several of his soldiers. His vehicle was destroyed by an IED (improvised explosive device) and, in the fire resulting from the explosion, grenades and ammunition in the vehicle began to detonate. All of this with Simon lying in the middle of the wreckage, his leg terribly wounded—a leg he would later lose below the knee in surgery. When I saw him at the hospital in Quebec City, he too asked me if there was still a place for him, as a leader, in the army, and how soon he could return to Afghanistan and finish his mission. He also wanted to know what I, as his commander and leader, could tell him about his future.

As I visited with him, the humanity of this great Canadian almost overwhelmed me. Clearly distraught and emotional because he had been unable to prevent the deaths of his soldiers, missing his right leg below the knee, with months of rehabilitation in front of him, he was not going to be content with process, emails, risk management or anything else that did not recognize him as a person with dreams and goals he wanted to fulfill, with a contribution he wanted to make and with emotional baggage that he would carry. He was a person—flesh and blood—and needed to be assured that that was how I saw him.

Simon reminded me yet again where my, and our, focus had to be, and I continue to be inspired by him. Yes, there was a place for him in the army; yes, we needed him as a leader; and yes, he could return to Afghanistan as a leader as soon as he was ready. That he has since done so is powerful testimony to what you can accomplish if you remember that those you work with are human also. One of the great moments of my last hour as Chief of the Defence Staff was inspecting, with the Governor General and my incoming replacement, General Walter Natynczyk, the right flank of the parade, which consisted of heroes from across the breadth of the Canadian Forces, including Simon. The emotion of seeing him, as well as Paul Franklin, Lincoln and Laurie Dinning, Warrant Officer Hooper and so many other heroes, was very moving.

These people who had been through some of the very worst days of their lives together remembered most fondly the days that made them feel hope for the future. Each remembered how others made them feel. The medics in Kandahar—men and women from across our country and from around the world—were remembered by each of our wounded not because of their amazing medical technology or the well-oiled machine that is our hospital and casualty evacuation infrastructure—though both were certainly important to their survival and recovery—but because of the compassion with which they cared for their patients.

I made it a point to visit our hospital in Kandahar every time I was in that country, just so I could speak with, and thank, those men and women who did their life-saving work with such compassion. On one visit I saw an Afghan father, unable to speak English, who had lost two sons in a landmine explosion and whose little girl was injured. Already traumatized by the ongoing encounter with a foreign culture (and particularly one in which women were leaders), he watched with awe and some trepidation as the men and women treated his daughter, the only child he had left. Although she was probably seven or eight years old, she looked to be about four because of malnutrition. She had lost a leg and a hand, was blinded in both eyes and had shrapnel wounds (forty-seven, if I recall correctly) over her entire body. Watching one of our nurses just sit and stroke her hand spoke to me of the power that comes when you enable people to be themselves and meet their aspirations. As Chief of the Defence Staff, I was this young nurse’s leader. My job was to ensure she was trained well and shared my vision of the mission in Afghanistan and how we were to carry it out, to put her in that hospital, then let her do the rest. As a leader, that was one instance where I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

I was touched by every story I heard of the accomplishments of the men and women of the Canadian Forces. My job as their leader was to enable them, to give them the motivation, the plan and the tools to achieve the amazing things they so often did. They were, first and foremost, good people. They were also people with awesome skill sets. And, finally, they were men and women working within an organization that empowered them to do what we wanted them to do in pursuit of success, with world-class tools and technology to support them. That was why those medical professionals were so capable and compassionate. Almost every Canadian soldier I talked to who went through the US military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center was equally effusive in their praise of the men and women there (almost all Americans). The vast majority returning home were just as generous in their praise of the men and women of our own medical system here in Canada. I must admit, it did make me wonder why we beat up on our healthcare system so much of the time. All of these medical professionals, after years of training and preparation, were remembered for exactly the same reason—the way they made people feel. Those soldiers were treated as people, with compassion, humour and love.

CHAPTER 2

BUILD YOUR NETWORK IN GROUPS OF EIGHT

Building for success in groups of eight is a lesson from the First and Second World Wars that we have relearned in the Canadian military since becoming engaged in combat operations in Afghanistan, but the lesson is equally applicable to any company or organization. I became focused on it after a discussion with Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope and others in his leadership team during a visit to his deployed battle group in Taliban-infested country around Kandahar City in the summer of 2006. Ian talked at length about the natural warrior, the one who carried the unit and ensured the mission would be a success no matter what the odds. Ian told me that when facing machine-gun fire and grenade explosions, normal men and women seek shelter, but the natural warrior (which he called Homo furens, Latin for “fighting man”—though there are certainly women in combat operations now too) keeps going. Natural warriors are rare, and it was exceptional to find more than a couple in any grouping.

What we had found, however, was that with good selection, training, mentoring and experience, any group of eight people will almost always give you at least two natural warriors. Any fewer than eight and the chances are much lower that it will include two natural fighters. The important thing was that two natural warriors in a group of eight, what the army called a rifle section, were all it took to make that team of eight soldiers successful. They would be the ones who set the example for the other six to follow; they would be the ones who, when normal instincts screamed to seek cover by going to ground, would get up from shelter and, bringing fire to bear with a coolness that amazed those who saw it, fight through an enemy ambush or defensive position, even if it resulted in their own injury or death.

In any company, the natural warriors are those who under stress find the solution to com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1 NEVER FORGET—IT’S ALL ABOUT PEOPLE
• PART 2 LEADERS THINK LONG
• PART 3 WHAT WORKS?
• PART 4 EXECUTION
• PART 5 GETTING IT RIGHT
• PART 6 TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Copyright
• About the Publisher