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Friends,
In 2017, I moved to Fort Benning to take command of a squadron in the 1st Security Forces Assistance Brigade. The SFAB was the first of its kind in the Army, built for one purpose: to advise foreign militaries, and it was the Chief of Staff's top priority. That priority came with real advantages. We got to hand-pick talented leaders from across the Army, and we moved to the front of the line for equipment and training. It also came with a cost that I did not fully appreciate until later. When you are somebody's top priority, you ruffle a great many feathers on your way to becoming one.
We found out how many when we landed in Afghanistan in February of 2018. It was clear almost immediately that many people did not want us there. We had been pushed onto the theater, and nobody was quite sure what to do with us once we arrived. There was a sense in some corners that we were a bunch of cowboys who had come to disrupt whatever was already working. That was not true, but I understood where the sentiment came from. We were new, we were untested, and we had arrived with a great deal of attention on us and no obvious place to sit.
So we had a choice: We could have spent our energy arguing for our legitimacy, defending the concept, and reminding everyone how we had been selected and resourced. It would have been satisfying, and it would have accomplished nothing. What we chose instead was a mantra so simple it almost sounds like nothing at all. Wherever we go, make it better.
That was the whole thing. Advisors partnered with an Afghan battalion, make it better. Working alongside the Brits, the Australians, and the Turks, make it better. Whatever room we were put in, whatever job we were handed, whether it was the one we wanted or not, we would be the professionals we were, demonstrate competence, and leave the place better than we found it. We did not need permission to do that, and it did not require anyone's approval. It was the one thing entirely within our control.
It worked, and not because we won an argument. We never had the argument. Our people were spread all over the country in a dozen different roles, and the record is fairly clear that wherever they landed, things got better. That is how the resistance quietly dissolved. Nobody wrote a memo announcing that we belonged. We just kept making things better, and eventually the question of whether we should be there stopped being interesting to anyone.
Every leader eventually walks into a room that did not ask for them, a new job, a new team, a program somebody else built, a place where people are respectful but not exactly glad you came. In those rooms, the instinct is to justify yourself, to explain your credentials and your mandate. The instinct is almost always wrong. Nobody has ever been argued into respecting a leader. They watch what you do to the place where you are standing.
So that's the question. Not whether I am wanted in the room, and not whether the assignment is the one I would have chosen. Just this: is this place better because I am in it? It is a plain standard that applies whether you are running a company, a program, or a locker room. Make it better where you are. Everything else takes care of itself, and if it does not, at least you spent your time on the only part that was ever yours. |
