Former Navy SEAL offers tactical business advice

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One of the biggest challenges for leaders is accomplishing change, particularly at moments of crisis and risk.

Chris Fussell, managing officer of the McChrystal Group and the author of One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams says his biggest military lesson is that team decisionmaking must be decentralized “down to those frontline elements, that are closest to these fast-changing problems.”

From this lesson sprouted an entire process in the special operations community by which organizations can follow to “establish communication models and modify leadership behavior structures inside the organization,” the former Navy SEAL Officer said.

“It’s more than just theoretical. The whole ‘Team of Teams’ model is built on implementing a similar system inside enterprise,” said Fussell.

His model for leadership is tuned to the information age more than many current business leadership models. “It’s no one’s fault. We still have these well-built, purpose-built, bureaucratic models that have years of effectiveness… what’s changed is the external environment,” he said.

The idea is to take advantage of the instant communication between individuals that’s afforded by modern technology, allowing for decisionmaking to happen lower down the ranks.

“In today’s environment, your structure is your strategy. So, if your structure is traditional, hierarchical, solely, then your strategy is going to map to that,” said Fussell. He noted how imprtant agility is when it comes to issuing requiring quick reactions and proactive information gathering, such as data breaches or misinformation campaigns.

The danger is “your product can be negatively spoken about in the social media space before it’s even on the shelf! And you don’t have the systems in place to keep up with that,” Fussell told What’s Working in Washington. This is why Fussell encourages front-line team members beng given more agency to make decisions.

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