Ranger Leadership

I liked the passage in Haskin's essay where he states, "leaders matter less than we think. Most leaders - the evidence is quite clear on this - are pretty average. 

Replace one and an organization will soon resume its previous course" (Salas et al., 2013, p. 7).   In my organization, we build and develop custom CBT's for our members. For years we had a terrible narrator. We found great CBT content could be brought down by poor narration, and great narration could make poor CBT content better.  

For me, the untold part of this is that leaders, even great leaders, can't affect or overcome poor processes, nor influence too much beyond good, streamlined, and efficient processes. This tells me that a good process can overcome bad leadership and bad processes can undermine poor leadership.

A link I see in Buzachero's essay is the fact that there are layers of teams and team leaders that can help overcome poor processes or poor leadership. In my unit, we had three squads, with one weapons squad in a platoon, three platoons, and one weapons platoon per company. 

When planning platoon-level missions we always ensured a 3:1 ratio in terms of attacking manpower to a defending enemy force, but also we planned to have one team or platoon in reserve to bolster and take up the slack for unforeseen problems. The need for this reinforcement might be due to poor planning, poor execution, or even poor leadership. We knew which team leaders, squad leaders, and platoon leaders were weaker than others, even if we never would admit it.

Haskins brings up that leadership doesn't matter as much as process and procedure. Buzachero shows that successful healthcare organizations have teams that are mutually supporting and are tied together with a hierarchy or framework to help lead the organization. Neither of the authors tend to believe that leadership, even greatly charismatic leaders, are a necessity nor are poor leaders debilitating if you have good, solid processes and other teams and frameworks that can help when needed.

Reference

Salas, E., Tannenbaum, S., Cohen, D., & Latham, G. (Eds.). (2013). Developing and enhancing teamwork in organizations: Evidence-based best practices and guidelines (Vol. 33). John Wiley & Sons.