While on the
topic of “Leadership” in my activity director class, I picked up the
autobiography of retired army 4-star general, Ann Dunwoody. A woman general should have some insight on
leadership, after all. Now, a lot of the
details in her book, A Higher Standard,
are strictly military issues. But, at
the same time, Dunwoody explores how the military deals with staff:
assignments, training, evaluation, advancement, and discipline, as well as
planning, appropriations, logistics, and office politics. All good stuff for an activity professional.
I was
especially drawn to her assessment of the goals of training. Dunwoody describes the irony of training to
meet “standards.” A standard might be
something like being able to hit a target 65% of the time when you shoot a
gun. This sounds reasonable until you
think back to school days. What is
65%? That’s a grade of “C.”
Dunwoody points out, “We spend a lot of leadership time
at the lower levels training and retraining soldiers so that all of our troops
can meet the standards. For what? A whole unit of C students?” P.28
She goes on
to state her own goal of challenging her soldiers to make their own personal
standards something much more than average. And she feels it is important to “eliminate, separate, isolate, or
retire those who are not willing to improve.”
P.30
She "wanted them to be proud of what they did and to be the
best at what they did.” P.31
Obviously, Dunwoody
didn’t lead where she hadn’t been. Her
personal standard was extraordinary enough to land her the position of general
in charge of the U.S. Army Material Command (AMC), moving and tracking equipment and
supplies all over the world. In other
words, she is an expert at organization and planning. One of her major successes was in convincing
the army to change the way it was doing things and adopt a centralized online
tracking system. That Culture Change
allowed the AMC to move into the modern world, and it was just barely in time
to meet the current world military situation.
Dunwoody wanted
her soldiers to be successful, too. She did
all she could to make sure that the training she gave them (plus the right attitude
on their part) could actually lead to success and advancement. What a gift!
©Donna
Stuart, ADPC September 19,
2015
Dunwoody,
Ann. A Higher Standard. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2015.
