High-Risk Situations Demand Mutual Trust Between Leaders and Followers

If competence is the building block of in extremis leadership, trust is the house. The leaders we interviewed often spoke of competence leading to trust relationships in dangerous contexts:

It’s taken a year and a half to get to the point where I think we are still six months away from being where I fully want them to be, but I think we are now at the point where to make an entry, if I’m the third guy in the door and the first guy goes left and the second guy is going right and he is driving his corner, he’s not worrying about the guy on his left, he knows that that guy is taking care of any threat in that corner. And that’s a good place to be. (Special Agent James Gagliano, FBI SWAT team leader, New York City Office)

In addition, it was made clear that such relationships were not incidental but were built quite deliberately:

I mean, really, I established a relationship with all my subordinate leaders and the soldiers. They weren’t just a name on a battle roster, a voice uttered into the radio to me, and I wasn’t just a voice uttered on the radio to them. Everything I was saying, basing on where I wanted to go on, was building a team, a group that completely trusted each other. You aren’t going to establish that if you can’t talk with each other, if you can’t interact with each other. It wasn’t just my XO [executive officer] or one or two platoon leaders, it was all my platoon leaders, all my platoon sergeants, my first sergeant, all the leadership of the troop. You know, I didn’t do anything without that cast of ten or twelve buying off on it. We went to lunch every day together, you name it. I mean, I had high standards, but I communicated those standards and they knew why I had high standards, but to be some dictatorial commander with blinders on that just says "This is the path we are going to follow," I don’t think that kind of leadership style and mentality could succeed with today’s soldiers and NCOs [noncommissioned officers]. (Captain Clay Lyle, Commander, A Troop, Third Squadron, Seventh Cavalry)

And, predictably, when such trust-based relationships were never built, organizational cohesion was nearly nonexistent in in extremis conditions, as indicated by this Iraqi soldier describing how his own leader failed in this regard:

The Mair Liwa [brigadier] left and went to his family. He was an authoritarian, and left everyone afraid of the other. Saddam [Hussein] made a situation where even a brother cannot trust his own brother. We don’t trust anyone. (Captured Iraqi soldier, Um Qasr, Iraq)

Interestingly, at the same time I was conducting interviews in Iraq and back at West Point, someone else was in Iraq collecting information on trust in in extremis conditions. Lieutenant Colonel Pat Sweeney had left the safety of graduate school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to accompany the 101st Airborne Division into combat. He had formerly commanded in the division and was in graduate school to finish his doctorate in social psychology, en route to West Point and a teaching assignment.

Sweeney has boundless energy, and he decided to gather some data from his vantage point in the division’s headquarters. The two main purposes of his interviews were to map the attributes of a leader who can be trusted in combat and explore the relationship between trust and influence in combat as scientifically as possible in an in extremis environment. Pat interviewed dozens of soldiers, and seventy-two of them completed an open-ended questionnaire that was designed to explore trust and leadership in combat. The soldiers were conducting combat and civil military operations in northern Iraq, and Pat visited them at their respective base camps in Mosul, Tal Afar, and Qayyarah West Airbase.

Sweeney’s questionnaire asked soldiers to describe in their own words the attributes they look for in leaders they can trust in combat. They then were asked to discuss why each attribute influenced trust, rate the relative importance of each attribute to the establishment of trust, and share their perceptions of how trust and leadership were related.

The soldiers Sweeney interviewed cited leader competence as the most important attribute for influencing trust in combat. In in extremis conditions, followers depend on their leaders’ technical expertise, judgment, and intelligence to plan and execute operations that successfully complete the mission with the least possible risk to their lives. After organizing the followers’ responses into categories of attributes, Sweeney quantitatively determined the top ten attributes soldiers look for in leaders who can be trusted in combat. They are listed in order of importance in Exhibit 1.2.

I consider Sweeney’s work to be the fullest explication of trust and competence in in extremis conditions to date,7 and his findings reinforce and underscore the in extremis pattern:

• Trust and loyalty follow after competence in terms of relative importance.

• Leading by example in dangerous conditions means sharing risk and requires confidence and courage.

• Self-control is necessary to be a level-headed, low motivator focused outwardly on the environment.

• Integrity, sense of duty, and personal connection bind leaders and followers through a common lifestyle that reinforces trust.

Exhibit 1.2. Attributes of Leaders Who Can Be Trusted in Combat
1. Competent
2. Loyal
3. Honest/good integrity
4. Leads by example
5. Self-control (stress management)
6. Confident
7. Courageous (physical and moral)
8. Shares information
9. Personal connection with subordinates
10. Strong sense of duty

Note: The attributes are shown in rank-order of importance as rated by their followers.

The in extremis pattern emerges consistently when danger is present.