The Adaptive Engineer Leader

Engineer: The Professional Bulletin for Army Engineers, May, 2001 by Lieutenant Colonel Christopher J. Toomey

As leaders and managers face rapidly changing environments and circumstances--at a pace accelerated by the dramatic influx of information that literally assails decision makers in the digital age--the search for new methods leads to a rethinking of leadership approaches needed to exercise command and control in our increasingly informationoriented Army.

Adaptive leadership postulates an approach that best fosters success in today's environment. In this article, I will define adaptive leadership, identify why it is useful for engineers, and identify some strategies that we can use to help nurture and grow adaptive leaders.

Defining Adaptive Leadership

There are a great many views on adaptive leadership within the literature. According to the Center of Army Leadership, an adaptive leader is-

"A leader who ca influence people-by providing purpose, direction, and motivation-while operating in a complex, dynamic environment of uncertainty and ambiguity to accomplish the mission and improving the organization."

A major characteristic of adaptive leadership is the internalization and application of adaptive thinking. Adaptive thinking is the key to the art rather than the science of war. Adaptive thinking is characterized by--

* The ability to react to unexpected changes during operations.

* Knowing how to think rather than what to think.

* The ability to attain a multidisciplinary conceptualization of battlefield events and use this understanding to decide and act. [2]

In addition to these views on adaptive leadership and thinking, FM 22-100, Anny Leadership, identifies four leadership skills that define the adaptive leader:

* Interpersonal -- dealing with people.

* Conceptual -- handling ideas and information.

* Technical -- employing job-related abilities.

* Tactical -- solving unit combat problems. [3]

Maximizing these skills within the context of adaptive thinking, it is evident that adaptive leaders are proactive and exert influence over their environment, not merely reacting to situations. Adaptive leaders use available information and their knowledge of their units to generate creative solutions to complex problems. By encouraging innovation and junior leader/soldier involvement in solving problems (rather than merely dictating top-down solutions), they create the conditions where their units actually grow and get stronger while meeting challenges.

But how does adaptive leadership apply to the engineer leader? Arguably, engineers traditionally perform well-defined tasks and missions. Our success is often predicated on what some consider near-mechanical execution.

Do we need adaptive leaders? To see a need for adaptive leadership and the need to develop adaptive leaders, we must identify the changing environment and situations that face our engineer leaders and then see how adaptive leadership can help.

The Engineer Challenge

If Army engineers only had to deal with their mission-training-plan-based tasks, then our need for adaptive leadership would perhaps be limited. All we'd need to do is train each soldier and subordinate leader to be a cog in a well-oiled machine. Most engineers would only embark upon tasks within the limits of their technical specialty. Combat-heavy engineers perform construction. Sappers prepare to breach and conduct demolitions. Perhaps an over-simplification, but by and large, engineers have often occupied and acted within a very well-defined and highly evolved niche within the military organization--deliberate operations in highly static environments that intentionally minimize ambiguity.

Today's reality is different. Today, we ask much more of our engineer leaders. We face innumerable and often conflicting challenges. Given the nature of small-scale contingencies (SSCs) and stability and support operations (SASOs), the same unit that must be expert in conducting the combined-arms breach must also be able to rapidly transition to rough vertical construction. Sappers who normally train with a mine detector find themselves building tent pads.

Few branches in our Army face more diverse challenges within the context of a single operation than the Engineer Regiment. Typically working with ad hoc units that are combined, joint, multicomponent, and include both military personnel and civilians, Army engineers are expected to face challenges as diverse as minefield clearing to demolitions to road construction. Engineers are expected to be troop leaders, technicians, diplomats, financiers, and moralists. Any examination of the role of engineers within SSCs and SASOs reveals that engineers are asked to "step up to the plate" across the spectrum of combat, combat-support, and combat-service-support functions.

Consider engineer operations in places such as Haiti or the Balkans. Aside from being prepared to conduct combined-arms operations before deployment, the same engineer leaders are thrust into situations where they must execute the full range of engineer missions, often with soldiers who are not routinely trained in the tasks. They work lines of communication, develop force-protection measures, oversee demining operations, and build/design bridges. They must do this in rapidly changing and often unpredictable environments--environments with multiple degrees of freedom that include competing objectives and pressures from nongovernmental and governmental agencies, tribal and ethnic groups, and often less-than-unified coalition forces.