by Ed Ruggero

When I was a young lieutenant in the Army, deployed to Korea, our unit's supply system fell behind when we went to the field. The chow wasn't where it was supposed to be, troops didn't arrive on time, even the mail wasn't getting through. (This was back when letters written on paper were important to the morale of soldiers far from home.) The trucks were my responsibility, and there were lots of factors—many of them, like the weather, out of my control—contributing to our poor showing. A no-nonsense senior officer (his first name was Shelby; we lieutenants called him "Bad as Hell-bee Shelby") told me to get to the bottom of things. I did some cracker-jack poking around; I was all about root cause analysis and getting the right data. I got the numbers on how old our trucks were and how often they were breaking down; I detailed the over-scheduling and overly optimistic time estimates, which led to missed maintenance and tired drivers who got lost on unmarked country roads. I wrote everything down in my spiffy little notebook and reported to the major. He listened without comment or expression, then asked simply, "What are you going to do about it?"

It was not a comfortable moment for yours truly, but Shelby had made his point and didn't prolong the moment. I scurried out of the office with an important lesson: I wasn't getting paid to admire problems; I was supposed to come up with solutions.

In the years since, I've come to realize that Shelby squeezed a great deal of leader development into that one rather pointed question. Consider the messages he sent me:

• My job is to come up with solutions
• He thinks I can do this
• I have a degree of autonomy, scary as that may be
• I am responsible, and he will hold me accountable
• I have to be creative: there is no manual for this, just as there are no manuals for much of what I'll deal with as a leader.

I didn't get all this at once, of course, and Shelby's work with me wasn't finished with his one comment. He let me know the standards, he held me accountable and he set the example himself—all of which were as or more important than any bullet-point teaching.

As I look back from a perspective of years, I also realize he was patient with me. I was a new leader, a work-in-progress, and failure was part of the learning process. He managed the risk: we weren't in combat then and there were no lives at stake; the organization was robust enough to recover from temporary setbacks. By the time it was my turn to teach new lieutenants, I'd figured out that it was my responsibility to see that they actually understood the messages I sent. It may have been that Shelby's icy stare drove the lessons home quickly, and as a teacher I just wasn't similarly equipped. With my lieutenants, it took repetition as well as patience. But the message remained the same, just as it is still true today for junior leaders in business. Too often, we senior folks take it for granted that they already know this stuff. But that isn't an assumption we should make; we need to test and reinforce their knowledge.