Episode 10 - Leadership Is Simple But Difficult, with COL(R) Jay Powers

Aaron and Spencer talk with COL(R) Jay Powers, former commander of 5th Special Forces Group and now a Scaling Up coach and high school wrestling coach, about why leadership is simple but difficult and why a leader's priorities so rarely reach the last person in the organization. #LeadershipEconomics #Podcast #Priorities Jay Powers and Spencer were West Point classmates. Jay went into the infantry, then Special Forces, and spent most of his 26-year career in 5th Special Forces Group, where he led at every level from a 12-soldier team to command of the entire Group. Since retiring in 2022 he has taught leadership through the University of South Florida, coached business owners through Scaling Up at his firm, Legion Consulting, opened a D1 Training facility, and become the head wrestling coach at Plant High School. Jay's central idea is what he calls the paradox of leadership: it is simple but difficult. He teaches four foundations of leadership, integrity, respect for others, accepting responsibility, and setting the example, and he says they are necessary but do not make anyone a good leader. Something like six thousand leadership books are written each year, so the challenge is not knowing what to do but doing it. People are influenced most by what a leader does, then by what the leader measures and decides, and last by what the leader says. Two stories from Jay's own career show how hard the doing gets as an organization grows. As Group commander he had three priorities. He talked about them constantly and walked the Group every Wednesday to see how the work was going. On one of those walks he met a junior leader in a key position who had no idea what the three priorities were. In Iraq in 2009 his headquarters made building local relationships the number one priority, with a written order, weekly briefings, and metrics. The team doing it best did not know what the program was. His explanation is that the number of connections in an organization grows much faster than the number of people. His answer is fewer priorities, as when Admiral McRaven took over SOCOM and named three things for 70,000 people, and his rule is that you only prioritize when you say what is not important. The conversation also covers September 11, when Jay's team received deployment orders marked "indefinite" where the return date belonged. It covers why time is a person's most important resource and people are an organization's, so that a leader who spends time developing other leaders is investing the one in the other, and it covers Scaling Up's four areas of people, strategy, execution, and cash. Jay's advice for tomorrow is to build feedback loops that tell you how you are actually affecting people, because the more senior you get, the more likely your impact differs from what you think it is. Mentioned in this episode 5th Special Forces Group, the 101st Airborne Division, and Ranger School The MacArthur Leadership Award (2002) and the Phoenix Award (2024) Legion Consulting, Scaling Up, D1 Training, and Plant High School wrestling The University of South Florida, the University of Tampa, and Tampa Bay Wave Todd Howard on leading by example (Episode 9) Coach Doug Morrow, Spencer's high school football coach Admiral William McRaven and his three priorities at SOCOM Pat Work, "at some point your soldiers don't recognize your voice in the dark" The Army's mission command philosophy and its principles Verne Harnish, Scaling Up, and Bob Verdun Jim Collins, Good to Great and Great by Choice The Night Stalker Creed Kirkuk, Iraq, 2009, and "180 Lunches" Chapters: 0:00 Cold Open 0:29 Introduction 4:28 Leading Yourself: Formed by the People Around You 8:02 Water Molding a Rock 11:36 The Paradox of Leadership: Simple but Difficult 14:16 Accepting the Pain: Goals, Wishes, and Potential 19:40 September 11 and Orders Marked Indefinite 25:48 Deciding Without Enough Information 29:54 Why Communication Breaks as Organizations Grow 36:57 Priorities Are Allocations 39:33 Time Is Your Most Important Resource 44:46 Main Effort, Supporting Effort, and Scaling Up 49:40 Missing the Huddle: D1 Training and Environments Where People Thrive 53:46 You Can't Coach Try 57:13 The Courage to Lose by Yourself 1:01:16 180 Lunches 1:06:22 One Thing to Start Tomorrow: Feedback Loops Listen on the website: https://leadershipeconomics.com/podca... Newsletter: https://leadershipeconomics.com/ RSS: https://feeds.transistor.fm/leadershi...