[September 13, 2015] Most of us are very familiar with the story of General Armstrong Custer and how he was killed after the U.S. Civil War at the Battle of Little Bighorn. But what many people don’t realize is that he graduated last in his class at West Point. In part this explains the fact that his meteoric rise in rank was not due to his academics but to the fact that he was exceptional at building alliances among important U.S. Army officers.
One uncontested truism about great leaders is that they are continually in the business of building alliances. Like Custer and any other great leader, they learn quickly that the most pragmatic way to achieve success can best be achieved with the help of others. This applies of course to military leaders but also to every other human enterprise from business to family life. In other words, its application is universal.
One of the principles of a good alliance is that it benefits all parties involved. It also often means making compromises; except for ethical sacrifices which should never be a concession to pragmatism. The most difficult part of alliances, I have found in my experiences, is to make the alliance work in the long term.
There are many barriers to making and maintaining alliances such as effective communications, planning strategies, and openness. For those who are the most effective leaders in the long haul, they have made building alliances a part of their personal philosophy and help other leaders to do the same.
For those of us who are now older, not only do we recognized the value of alliances but also that those alliances we created when we were young continue to help us. Several good friends of mine and I created a close network of like-minded Infantry officers when we were training as Second Lieutenants at the U.S. Army Infantry school in the early 1980s. While our paths crossed many times it was our deployment to combat nearly 30 years later that we realized its true importance.
General Custer found that building alliances was key to his success as an army officer during and after the Civil War. The destruction of much of the 7th Cavalry and his own death was partly the result of overconfidence and not using supporting elements of other units. He had blundered into a fight with a confederation of Plains Indians who outnumbered and outgunned him.1 Had he relied on other cavalry units, he might have survived the battle.
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