One interesting aspect of hosting The Military Leader is that I get to see the website’s viewership stats. Unlike counterinsurgency, online writing has a clear way to measure results. Google Analytics provides detailed reports on the number and locations of visitors, time spent on pages, number of shares, and lots more data that I don’t get into. (Here’s a post about The Military Leader data.)
What’s neat is when people discover and share some of the older posts, causing a spike in that page’s traffic for a day or two. This happened recently and I found it fascinating that thoughts I had months ago were continuing to provide meaning and value for people. The metaphor to leadership hit me like a truck.
Rippling Influence
Leadership is clearly about influence. Passionate leaders spend night and day discovering ways to improve their organizations and have an impact that endures. The best leaders inspire growth that survives their tenure, even their lifetime, and continues to echo positive influence through time.
Some leaders do it through charisma and élan. Others achieve lasting influence by their stalwart performance despite extreme hardship. Some exude a quiet confidence and exhibition of talent that transmits lessons throughout each day.
But what every successful leader has achieved is an ability to relate to the led, to display some quality worth admiring and remembering, which causes the influence to propagate beyond the particular engagement. In the best cases, followers jot down a note or strain to memorize the leader’s words and consequently change their lives because of it.
Leading for Longevity
So, how can military leaders break through the modern-day “noise” to achieve lasting influence that matters? Here are a few thoughts:
- Connect at their level. Soldiers comment all the time about leaders who get stuck on lofty messages with no relevance to “life on the ground.” Take a few moments to envision life from your audience’s perspective and consider their daily challenges. Shape your advice based on that reality, not yours.
- Clarify and rehearse. Military leaders, particularly commanders, do a lot of talking off the cuff. There’s constant opportunity to ad lib, which sometimes leads to a muddled message. Prevent this by taking the time to formalize your leadership thoughts and craft them into talking points that you can refer to during teachable moments.
- “Twitterize” your message. Be concise. When you craft those talking points, make them brief, succinct, and pithy. Write them in a conversational tone that’s repeatable, not an academic tone with too many ideas in one sentence.
- Make it timeless. If you want your message to echo beyond the engagement, phrase it in a way that’s more general in nature and applicable to more situations. For example, change “It’s extremely important that we thoroughly check these vehicles to prevent accidents and maintain a high readiness rating” to “Do your duty with precision and care, and you will save lives.“
- Maximize group engagement. Group settings and formations can get dull real quick if the message isn’t captivating and brief. Approach these opportunities with deliberate care and avoid going in without a plan. Use guest speakers, competitions, examples, and jokes to communicate a message that lasts. Read a few ideas here.
- Stick to your strengths. I once had a commander who didn’t like to curse in conversation, but would try to connect with Soldiers using curse words. It was a dismal failure. His timing, inflection, and word choice were all flawed and he sounded fake and insincere. People will remember what feels emotionally genuine, so make sure your message aligns with who you are.
Questions for Leaders
- In what other ways do great leaders create influence that lasts? (leave a comment below)
- Does your leadership style force people to connect at your level? Or do you reach out to them at theirs?
- Take a look your regular engagements. If you only had 10 seconds to speak, how would you craft your message to have the highest, most enduring impact?