Listen to the soldier for field information

At a higher level of management, you will have multiple levels of interactions within your organisation. There’s a risk that you can lose track of what the real “field information” is.

“Listening to the soldier” seems to me necessary in order to be able to have a better sense of what’s going on within your company / business unit / team / ….

Recently I have been listening to Simon Sinek’s podcast a lot.

One of the latest episode involved a discussion about leadership with CQ Brown, General of the US Army.

One specific topic was the relationship General Brown cultivated with lower level soldiers, in order to get the most qualitative information.

If you make a parallel with business, you would have the General (top management), an officer (middle manager), and a soldier (executive).

The general, in that case, would ensure that for any type of project he would meet at the same time his officer and his soldier.

From the general’s perspective, he would benefit from an unfiltered information thanks to the interaction with the soldier. And align them for future actions

From the team’s perspective

• the soldier would have an increased engagement because of the consideration of impacting directly top management

• the officer would be in line to follow through

It made me think how we sometimes (often) conduct projects, relying only the officer to make sure information, or feedbacks are delivered top down and bottom up.

We forget that there’s an important loss of information each and every time we put an intermediary, it is scientifically proven.

Keeping that in mind, I’ll be more careful on making sure the person with the purest form information is at a meeting.

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Ideas for future subjects

• Famous generals keeping in touch with field information

• How great leaders manage to be told the brutal truth