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The Case Against Nuanced Leadership

Nuanced:
1 : a subtle distinction or variation 2 : a subtle quality : nicety 3 : sensibility to, awareness of, or ability to express delicate shadings (as of meaning, feeling, or value)

There is a quote, attributed to General Erich Von Manstein. I have seen several translations, this one is the best attributed.

“I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Most often two of these qualities come together. The officers who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Those who are stupid and lazy make up around 90% of every army in the world, and they can be used for routine work. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!”

-Bruce Condell, David T. Zabecki, On the German Art of War: Truppenführung, Lynne Rienner, 2001

The Case Against Nuanced Leadership

Imagine a car driving down the road. A child steps off the curb without looking. The driver brakes as hard as she can. The car comes to a stop. The child is safe. Leadership is the choice to buy a safe car. Nuance is understanding the advantage of a certain tread pattern for greater stopping power. That subtle variation, is critically important to stopping the car, but it is also not something that buyers consciously worry about. Unknown engineers took care of it. The consumer evaluated the whole of the product (crash test ratings, stopping tests, fuel efficiency, payload, power windows, heated seats) and chose. Their fundamental choices were based on a knowledge of the big picture, not the nuances of the picture.

The quote above regarding four kinds of officers is something we can all directly relate to, military and civilian. We have all met the industrious yet stupid coworker who lays waste to well laid plans with their pointless flailing. We have met the masses of stupid and lazy people, who do their job, but won’t go an inch out of their job description. We marvel at the clever and industrious, the volume of work they turn out so well. We don’t really understand the clever and the lazy though. They could be clever and industrious, but yet they chose not to be. Why? Leaders are clever and lazy. They must be in order to be effective. The key to effective leadership is knowing that you can only get so many things done. You have to be able to prioritize them properly, and put the rest to the side.

A leader’s perpetual challenge is to understand, and then act on, the big picture. No leader is an expert on every field they must understand, no human is. A leader must have a capable staff to feed him useful information. That is the true test of whether a leader is clever or stupid – the staff the surrounds him. Smart staff is the sign of a smart leader. However, the leader must still be lazy and have an industrious staff. Otherwise the leader will be trapped in the minutiae that his staff should be taking care of.

Nuance is the little variation that colors the big picture. Politicians, poets, artists, doctors, and engineers all worry about nuance. Doctors know that a subtle nuance in how a patient expresses symptoms is the difference between life and death. Mediocre poets, artists, and politicians create endless nuance, the great ones express the big picture. Engineers understand that subtle variation in heat treatment can render metal useless for its intended role. Nuance matters – on the implementation level. Once the decision has been made to admit the patient to the doctor, the doctor reads the nuances of the patient to determine the treatment. Once the decision has been made to hire an engineer, the engineer understands the nuances required to build something. Neither of them decide the big picture of “should it happen”, they add input to the question of “how should it happen”.

This is the collision between nuance and leadership. Both are needed in the decision making process, yet they exist at very different levels. The big picture isn’t nuanced, it is a distillation of a problem into its most basic portions. The decision to do X over Y isn’t nuanced – it is the culmination of nuanced information that has been gathered, processed, and turned into actionable information for the leader to use. The staff, the clever and industrious people, must be aware of the nuances in their respective fields. The leader must see to the heart of a matter and make his decisions at that level. At the leadership level, nuance becomes minutiae. Minutiae leads to paralysis. Leaders need to lead.

The Realist is an Air Force Academy graduate, holding a master’s degree in Unconventional Warfare from the American Military University, and a co-founder of The PULSE Review.