Who the hell are you?

I'm Batman?

Every leader has experienced failure. You made a bad decision, or acted too quickly, or acted too slowly, or promoted the wrong person, or hired the wrong person, or you didn't spend enough time getting a consensus from the team, or you missed a critical deadline because you were desperately trying to achieve "alignment" from your project team.

Sometimes you have to answer the most basic, fundamental questions before you can begin to unravel the mystery of an unsuccessful project or mission. Who are you?

Most people do not see themselves accurately and in the resulting gap between perception and reality is where all of the blind spots, strained work relationships, missed promotions, and team failures live. Similarly there will be gaps between teams that need to coordinate as part of a larger effort. Teams will see themselves in a certain way and will be perceived in another way and the delta between the two will account for the miscommunication, the mistrust, or the "friction" between the different teams. The military refers to gaps in intelligence as they prepare operations and attempt to fill these gaps to allow commanders on the ground to have access to everything they may need to make good decisions. Army Generals will assign Special Forces units to go to a specific location and verify the presence of the enemy and in what strength and posture.

Sometimes you have to answer the most basic fundamental questions before you can begin to unravel the mystery of an unsuccessful project or mission. Who are you?

The only personality test I've ever taken was given to me during my Special Forces training. Though it may seem strange, the Army's Special Forces Command has been administering a test for years and has established a baseline from all the previous graduates. So assuming that you want more officers with the same personality as the ones currently serving, the wannabe Green Beret officers (like me) needed to fit within a permissible range of this baseline. The value, or lack thereof, of this mindset is worthy of another topic on another day. Unlike traditional personality tests on this test there were definitely wrong answers. I had no idea how to fake my results, or if I needed to. How do you fake a personality? Going into the test I was worried, but the only plan I could come up was my normal plan - be honest, tell the truth.

The results were delivered in a fairly typical SF manner. I was summoned to a small office with my instructor and was told that based on my personality I was going to kill everyone who worked for me through sheer stupidity and ignorance. My scores were mostly in line with the personality baseline of an SF officer, with two notable exceptions. First problem, I have an extremely high tolerance for risk. I will just start to get an inkling that something I'm about to do might be dangerous long after my fellow officers have said, hell no I'm not doing that. Second problem, I have an aversion to authority. Ok, this one is bad, I resist authority. And I'm an Army officer.

So lets set the stage - you have a young, 28 year old Captain, me, who is leading a 12-man team in a remote location doing Special Forces things. The only contact with you, his boss, will be with a daily encrypted situation report, at best. Worse still, if he needs help it will be hours or days before a friendly military ground unit can arrive. You need to "lead" this young Captain from 500 miles away. You know that he's an extreme risk taker and that he will resist any constraints you try to place on him or his team. The only conclusion you could draw about my future as an officer in the Army, let alone in Special Forces, was stark. I'm a leadership powder keg. I'm an Army mule way up on a mountain walking an icy path under a heavy load. Or one of those absolute maniacs who walk on a tightrope. One small mistake, a brief loss of concentration, plain bad luck. Bang. Dead young Captain, dead Green Berets.

I did not enjoy the encounter with my instructor that day. But I never forgot it. I have an Achilles heel, a tragic flaw. Given the right circumstances I will get people seriously hurt or killed just because of the way my personality is hard-wired. Here was the question for my instructor and me - if the main character in a story knows his tragic flaw, is he still bound to fall victim to it? Or does the flaw have to remain unknown or misunderstood in order to be tragic? To the reader both the flaw and the coming tragedy are seen with absolute certainty. If I'm the main character in the story of my life I now had the information about my predilection for risk and anarchy. That brief discussion changed the trajectory of my career in the most subtle way. I now had information that I desperately needed on a problem that I had not even known existed. A perfect example of an unknown unknown. I had a leadership issue about which I was not aware. Fortunately for me, he allowed me to continue my training and later he and I served together in the same battalion in the 5th Group.

Changing those types of behaviors requires focus and discipline, but it's just like any other positive behavior or activity that you add to your life. You need a plan, you need discipline, and you need repetition. An accountability partner is helpful as well. Before every combat mission, I made sure that I got a "sanity check" from either my boss or a veteran teammate. As we all gained combat experience I assigned my team to develop criteria on how and when to make the decision to prosecute a particular target, while I oversaw planning. These small steps incorporated into my planning process effectively negated my risk tolerance as a threat to the team. Instead of doing extremely risky missions, we only did regular risky missions. Just as a brief aside, pushing the execute authority down to the individual teammate working on a potential target was the smartest, selfish-accidental thing I have ever done and it produced unbelievable results. I wanted the team to develop the criteria for launch to temper any dangerous ambitions I may have had. Not only was this achieved, but the team also became incredibly efficient. Instead of taking days or weeks to organize meetings to gather information and then organizing a new meeting with me to get my approval we streamlined the process and could develop target information and act on it the same day. We began hitting more terrorist cells, bomb makers, former Saddam regime officials, and terrorist financiers than we ever had. The team got so busy and strung out gathering intelligence during the day and conducting mission each night, I ended up with a different set of problems. We needed a rest plan to ensure we respected the violence and danger of our environment and to prevent a lapse in judgment or sloppy mission preparation. We also had to develop a detailed maintenance schedule for our weapons, vehicles, and equipment because of the use. You can never forget that your team's success requires the same level of leadership as a failure.

So how do figure out who we are? You probably don't have access to the Special Forces personality test but you don't need it and that is not necessarily a test you want to do well on for most professions. There are plenty of reputable personality tests that can give you an indication of potential strengths and weaknesses for you to start paying attention to. I want to stress that the results are directional, and should not necessarily be taken as absolutes. If you are an introvert, like me, and are uncomfortable with public speaking you may have already taken steps to overcome this trait. Besides taking a test you can also speak to a previous boss, cubicle mate, roommate, or divorced mate and tell them what you're working on and ask for honest feedback about any tragic flaws hardwired into your personality. You might come out of these encounters with a renewed sense of humility but you will have an answer to a critical question that most leaders never ask. Who am I, and how does my core personality impact the performance of my team, or my relationships with my boss, my coworkers, my spouse, my kids? What are the steps I can take to mitigate or eliminate these flaws?

And besides, humility should be every leaders default state.