How to improve morale and confidence.
“It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs,” said Kenneth Clark at the end of his classic TV series Civilisation.
I was struck by this when I watched the series years ago and it rattles around in my brain quite often.
In countries, companies and, yes, individual lives the importance of confidence, of morale is critical to success but often overlooked.
Just today, I came across William Slim’s book Defeat into Victory on my bookshelf. He stands alongside Montgomery as one of the outstanding British generals of World War II. But since he was self-effacing by nature and fought the ‘forgotten war’ in the Far East, he had less fame than Monty. He deserved more.
It fell open at a well-marked page which I think captures the point better than I ever could. He is writing about a time in the war when the British were on the back foot in Burma and things, generally, were very bleak.
Morale is a state of mind. It is that intangible force which will move a whole group of men to give their last ounce to achieve something, without counting the cost to themselves; that makes them feel they are part of something greater than themselves. … I remember sitting in my office and tabulating these foundations of morale something like this:
1. Spritual
(a) There must be a great and noble object.
(b) Its achievement must be vital.
(c) The method of achievement must be active, aggressive.
(d) The man must feel that what he is and what he does matters directly towards the attainment of the object.
2. Intellectual
(a) He must be convinced that the object can be attained; that it is not out of reach
(b) He must see, too, that the organization to which he belongs and which is striving to attain the object is an efficient one.
(c) He must have confidence in his leaders and know that whatever dangers and hardships he is called upon to suffer, his life will not be lightly flung away.
3. Material
(a) The man must feel that he will get a fair deal from his commanders and from the army generally.
(b) He must, as far as humanly posssible, be given the best weapons and equipment for his task.
(c) His living and working conditions must be made as good as they can be.
Substitute ‘company’ for ‘army’ and ‘career’ for ‘life’ and change ‘he’ to ‘he or she’ and I think you have a pretty good recipe for creating an extraordinary company.
Richard Young wrote:
Interesting - and this mirrors a keynote given to the FDs’ Forum last year by Col Tim Collins, he of the famous eve of war speech in Kuwait in 2003. Collins cited Sir Gerald Templar, our man in Malaya in 1952, as an example of how to get a job done. (Templar apparently coined the phrase “winning hearts and minds”.)
Templar had been given vague direction by the Churchill government to “make things better”. But he pestered his political masters until they delivered a definitive goal: ready Malaya for independence by 1960.
That enabled Templar to set out the mission for his regiment – and allowed him to set the first of six key pillars of leadership: clarity of purpose. Once a clear goal was in place, everything else – pacification, establishment of civil institutions, sound administration – could flow through.
Second was get the organisation right. Templar had a reputation for closing down departments that couldn’t explain why they existed – and only opening them again when someone else noticed their disappearance and said they couldn’t cope without them.
Third, get in the right people. Collins conceded that in military life – and more so in business – it’s hard simply to remove “bad” people from the equation. But by understanding their characteristics, you can allocate them to the most appropriate – and sometimes least destructive – roles.
The fourth key is getting the right spirit into the organisation – in the British army, with its regimental system, this means loyalty to the badge and to your colleagues.
Fifth, get your day-to-day instructions right. “Your people have to know what they have to do,” said Collins. “Give your orders, then consult with the departments and get them to report back to you what they have understood they’ve been asked to do.”
Finally, said the colonel, “let them get on with it.”
Collins’s point was that once you have “a man and a plan” – the right leader, team, ethos and a clear mission – the job is done. Tinkering doesn’t help.
Posted on 02-Apr-08 at 5:45 pm | Permalink
Richard Young wrote:
Sorry, that should read Templer, not Templar. I blame Leslie Charteris.
Posted on 02-Apr-08 at 5:56 pm | Permalink
Christopher C Dean wrote:
Just found your blog through Visual Thesaurus and liked what you wrote. I downloaded Windows Live Writer to give it a try. I’ll be checking back often to read what you have to say!
Posted on 04-Apr-08 at 3:33 am | Permalink
Bad Language / Patterns of conflict wrote:
[...] readers will know that I have an interest in military history. (See How to improve morale and confidence and Interview with Stephen Bungay.) I’m reading an excellent biography of John Boyd (Boyd: [...]
Posted on 19-Jun-08 at 5:46 pm | Permalink