Fostering a Humane Performance Culture

My reading pattern often follows a kind of daisy chain. When reading the Harry Truman biography I wrote about last week, I was interested in learning more about George Marshall, who served as Army chief of staff during World War II and later as secretary of state and defense under Truman. That led me to George Marshall: A Biography, which pointed me to two more books—The Generals and Generals at War.

I was intrigued by several aspects of Marshall’s approach to talent development. 

First, as a junior officer during the First World War, Marshall saw firsthand the Army’s shortcomings. As a relatively small force mobilizing at scale for the first time, the U.S. sent many inexperienced troops and officers into the field, resulting in uneven—and sometimes very poor—performance. After the war, Marshall became determined to prevent the same circumstances in the next conflict. 

Thus, when Marshall led infantry training at Fort Benning, rather than giving junior officers detailed orders and fixed strategies to follow, he shifted training from the classroom to realistic settings and encouraged students to explore their own ideas and decision-making instincts. One student, J. Lawton Collins, said that “if anybody had any new ideas he was willing to try them.”

Marshall’s approach to developing leaders was a reflection of a shift in technology that meant that war could not be conducted in a centralized fashion. Instead, those closest to the action would need the skills to make their own decisions at speed. In a dynamic environment, senior leaders would need to give up control, and junior leaders would need experience exercising their power.

The upside of Marshall’s role at Fort Benning was that he was able to discover the promising leaders who filled out his roster of commanders in World War II, including future four-star generals Collins (“Lightning Joe”) and Joseph Stilwell (“Vinegar Joe”), and Omar Bradley, who, despite not having a catchy nickname, nonetheless earned five stars. 

Marshall also changed the Army by shifting the promotion system from one based on seniority to one based on promise, performance, and matching people to the right jobs. Debi and Irwin Unger write in George Marshall: A Biography that Marshall disliked the seniority system because he thought the older officers lacked the “vigor” required for long stints in combat and had their minds set in “outmoded patterns” that would prevent them from being adaptable in the upcoming war—i.e., learning what’s required for the situation at hand, rather than how things were in the past. Thus, to find talent to fill roles in a rapidly changing field, Marshall looked beyond the obvious candidates and thought several steps ahead on talent development.

That approach is how Marshall tapped a relatively junior officer with limited combat experience, Dwight Eisenhower, for assignments that would prepare him for higher command. Based on Eisenhower’s experience, it made little sense to select him to lead campaigns in North Africa—surely others were more capable and, indeed, his performance in those campaigns was uneven. 

However, Eisenhower brought other skills to the table. As Freddie de Guingand, the chief of staff for British field marshal Bernard Montgomery, wrote of Eisenhower, “[H]e had a magic touch when dealing with conflicting issues or clashes of personalities; and he knew how to find a solution along the lines of compromise, without surrendering a principle.” Marshall was able to leverage these traits because he thought ahead to the future need to manage a political and complex inter-service and inter-country effort. Rather than having one template for “good leadership,” Marshall saw many. 

Finally, I found it interesting how Marshall fostered a high-performance culture without some of the distasteful aspects of such cultures. As Thomas Ricks writes in The Generals, “It was inevitable when selecting human beings for extraordinarily complex and difficult jobs that some percentage would fail.” And when people failed in their assignments, he was quick to relieve them of command. “Marshall saw relief as a natural part of generalship. Firing, like hiring, was simply one of the basic tasks of the senior managers.”

What’s worth considering, however, is that Marshall ensured that failure was not the end of the story for officers. Instead, “[o]n his watch, relief usually was not a discharge from the service but a reassignment.” Rather than having an approach to talent that asked for universal judgments of officers—e.g., Is this person good?—Marshall’s approach asked how best to apply their talents. What are they good at? 

The first question would make failure a mark of shame, whereas the latter enabled officers to bounce back and find roles that either led to second-chance opportunities or that were a better fit for their skills. The approach was both more humane and better suited to the organization's needs.

In World War II, it’s obvious how important this talent strategy was. If Eisenhower was judged only on his combat leadership in North Africa, he would have been discarded rather than groomed for a different kind of role.

If George Patton had been sent home every time he exercised poor judgment or offended someone—of which there were many examples—he would not have been available for the later stages of the European campaign when the Allies were racing across France and Germany. That would have been a loss to the effort, since, as Eisenhower wrote in At Ease, Patton was “the finest leader in military pursuit that the United States Army has known.”

Indeed, Marshall himself was not distinguished as a combat commander, but he clearly excelled at the organizational work of building and sustaining a fighting force.

Most of us aren’t preparing for or fighting a world war, but Marshall’s approach still holds a great deal of wisdom. In a changing world where new technology demands entirely new capabilities, it’s essential that talent development systems look beyond today’s realities and instead optimize directly for the future. And in a world that is both different and complex, talent systems that don’t allow people to bounce back from failure or sort into roles that best use their strengths are unlikely to serve the strategic needs of the organization.