[February 9, 2016] These pages could easily be filled with anecdotes of leaders who made a major decision without fully contemplating the requirements to do so. Those failures, and sometimes successes, can be spectacular much like General Armstrong Custer’s decisions and subsequent massacre at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The lesson for leaders is: ready, aim, fire.
Ready simply means to be prepared. Who hasn’t heard the advice, “never shoot from the hip”? The Boy Scout motto is “be prepared” so it would astonish many of us that leaders often make decisions without much planning or thought behind what they do. Should they have made the decision in the first place, or waited longer, or have given the task to someone else? Should they have done their homework and studied all the requirements to ensure the right outcome? This is how failure creeps up on leaders without them noticing it.
Aim is ensuring the conditions are right for a successful outcome. Even if a leader is fully prepared but selects the wrong time to start a mission, or all the required resources are not available, or a decision to go forward is unnecessary, then the chance of failure is higher. Are the leader’s people ready and do they have everything they need? Are all the risks properly weighed so that the outcome is worth the possibility of high costs?
Fire means to execute. From my U.S. Army Infantry days, we called it “crossing the LD” (the Line of Departure (LD) is the point where you have committed to attack the enemy). Once committed, all the planning and preparation can still go wrong and that is why a strong leader is needed to help rally people around the mission. Leaders have been known to “fire” too early, or late, or not at all. They’ve sometimes fired but failed to follow-up to ensure everything is going well and risk failure.
When I was preparing for my first deployment to combat as a Captain, a medical officer approached me on the pistol range. We were shooting for qualification; one of the many requirements to deploy. The colonel medical officer asked me if I’d ever fired the Army issue pistol before (it was an annual requirement). He had never fired it because, as we say, he “paper qualified” with his pistol. Clearly he was not prepared to go to war and I was not going to help him paper qualify. Imagine if he were my buddy in battle.
Leaders frequently fail to follow the simple three-step guide to getting things in order. Good leadership means to always use ready, aim, fire to help ensure success.
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