Leading at the Decisive Point

Leading at the Decisive Point: Starting from the endstate and working backwards toward leader behaviors.

We’ve all read the books and sat through the seminars. We’ve learned the models, the theories, and the four-quadrant charts that promise to make us better leaders. But what happens when the neat lines of those models collide with the messy, high-stakes reality of a true crisis and your life or those of your subordinates is on the line? What do you do when you’re in a ditch, the plan has fallen apart, and the people you lead are looking to you for a way forward when all options look grim? This is the decisive point in Leadership. It’s the moment where the outcome hangs in the balance and a leader’s actions will determine whether the team survives or breaks. In these moments, traditional leadership theories about motivation or transactional rewards often fall short. They weren’t built for this.

My journey to understanding this concept came from years of experience on the battlefield, followed by a deep dive into the science of leadership at West Point. I went from learning the art of leadership by emulating great leaders to studying the science of it through academic models. Yet, something was still missing. The models were helpful for organizational management in stable environments, but they couldn’t explain the dynamic I experienced one Christmas Eve in Iraq. Pinned down by enemy fire with a small team, I looked to my seasoned NCO. His response wasn’t a solution, but a simple, powerful statement: “I have no idea [what we should do], but we can’t stay here.” He then looked at me, ready to follow. Why? In that moment, he wasn’t evaluating my transformational leadership qualities or how effectively I used motivational theories. He was making a gut-level decision based on one thing: trust.

I had spent my early military career learning leadership through the art of emulation. I would look at someone I admired and try to figure out what made them tick and what made them successful. I eventually went on to earn my MBA at UNC, where I encountered scientific leadership models. Shifting from leading by instinct and emulation to being informed by frameworks that generally transcend context was a significant moment in my career. Seeking to better understand the science of leadership led be back to West Point where I taught PL300: Military Leadership–a flagship core-course that brings models grounded in the behavioral and organizational sciences to the nation’s future leaders of character. I learned through self-study, teaching, and reflection about understanding yourself, leading and motivating others, and building organizations. I went on to earn my PhD, studying leader development, character development, and intentional self-regulation.

Last year, I began teaching a course called Leadership in Combat. The course is designed to take our scientific understanding of leadership and apply it to a very specific context, In-Extremis and combat situations. None of the existing models really helped me frame or describe the situation in Iraq many years ago. Like all models, they were useful, but they were all wrong. They were simplifications of a very messy, complex reality. I realized that the models were missing the decisive point.

The decisive point, in military doctrine, is the point of no return. It is the point where we are going to win no matter what the enemy throws at us. We put all of our resources onto that one time, that one moment, and if we can concentrate our effort there, we will win the fight. The enemy doesn’t have a chance. But how do you know if you’re at such a decisive point? And more importantly, what makes leadership successful at that point? The answer, I came to understand, is trust. At the heart of the decisive point, when someone is either going to run out in the open and do something that could cost their life or cower back, the two things they care about with a leader are whether they are competent and whether they have their best interests at heart. Trust is formed via perceived competence and perceived motive, not credentials or rank alone.

In the military, we always conduct backward planning from the decisive point, often referred to as the “X” which is the doctrinal representation in military graphics. Figure out what we need to accomplish to maximize the chances of success, then work backwards from there. I also found that backwards planning from the decisive point is the key to understanding how to lead when much of the nice to haves are stripped away from leadership. No one cares about your title, your accomplishments, or your bank account when their lives are on the line. They only care about your competence and motive. The endstate for a leader is to have earned enough trust that your team will follow you, even when the path is dangerous and the outcome uncertain.

Most leadership models focus on behaviors that a leader should do to be considered good. Focusing on the endstate instead of behaviors (building trust through competence and motive) is something we work towards instead. The leader behaviors are actions that support the endstate, not actions to be done prescriptively to hopefully achieve an endstate. When lives are on the line, followers aren’t thinking about your charisma. They are subconsciously asking two fundamental questions: Are you competent? Do you have my best interests at heart? Keeping the endstate in mind as the superordinate goal, helps us craft leader development plans and behaviors that are actually effective.