Military Review English Edition March-April 2016 | Page 86

A Trust-Based
Culture Shift

1st Place, General Douglas MacArthur
Military Leadership Writing Competition,
CGSC Class 15-01

Rethinking the Army Leadership
Requirements Model in the Era
of Mission Command
Maj. Gregory M. Blom, U.S. Air Force

I

n January 2015, the U.S. Army Command and
General Staff College (CGSC) hosted a lecture by
bestselling author Ori Brafman. At this lecture,
Brafman discussed agile leadership with an audience
of eleven hundred military field grade officers. Prior to
taking their seats, each audience member received an
index card. Midway through the presentation, Brafman
instructed the officers to take out their index cards and
list one way the Army could more effectively engender
trust and enable mission command.1
When the audience members had written their
ideas on their cards, they passed them to others in the
crowd who read the ideas and assigned them a numerical value, one through five. The better the idea,
the higher the numerical value assigned. The audience
repeated the process of passing and grading five times
before totaling the scores. Brafman next asked audience
members to raise their hands if they held a card that
received a perfect score of twenty-five. The individuals
identified revealed those “top ideas” to the audience.
Surprisingly, most of the ideas discussed shared the
same theme: soldiers did not feel empowered; rather,
they felt micromanaged and scrutinized by bureaucratic processes.
This result may come as a shock to senior Army
leaders who have attempted to empower