A Case Against Luck

It didn’t take more than a few months of being in the Army before I stocked ready-made leader professional development questions in my uniform pocket. Whether impromptu or planned, visits and speeches from senior leaders always included a portion where questions would be expected of the audience. My questions have ranged from asking leaders thoughts on bridging the generational gap in the Army to querying their professional or personal reading preferences. I’ll admit upfront that keeping a pre-formulated question on-hand is a bit of a cheat. It turns out that I’m not the only one who uses it, though. I realized this trend recently while sitting in series of professional development session. Several senior leaders sequentially spoke, and as they did — providing their thoughts on keys to success — I noticed another trend. A fellow officer asked each one in turn what position or action they attributed to their success. Each speaker providing independent answers, they answered deliberately and humbly that they were simply lucky. They expanded on their answers in various ways, but it still left me dissatisfied, even irritated. I can reflect on leaders I’ve worked with in Sustainment, Maneuver, or Intelligence and see a myriad of jobs, experiences, talents, and proficiencies. I cannot accept that senior leaders in these and other areas of expertise were solely lucky to “just make it.” Telling young leaders that luck is solely what makes them successful misconstrues, or even ignores, the tedious and monotonous work that produces that so-called luck.

Louis Pasteur said that luck favors the prepared, and it is important to note that preparation has concrete by-products. In the Army, these products span from briefs completed with enough time to review and reflect on how to improve it; to range coordination completed prior to the suspense to allow time to confirm land usage; to face-to-face problem solving of a bureaucratic sticking point. College professors and students studying Humanities know this through a meme: first draft does not equal final copy. Sharing the success of how to accomplish daily actions points leaders in a better direction for success than through alluding that they should leave the results to chance. We can scoff at the idea that a Battalion or Brigade Commander would ever tell a Platoon Leader that as long as they have run a few ranges, they will eventually be put into command, and that if the ranges were all successful, then it was luck anyway. Executing a few tasks well and then considering the result luck is foolish. This comical example is the short-term equivalent of what we hear of this misnomer when asked about long term success. While there surely are some jobs that are “The Hard Jobs” and others that are not, it is the summation of the daily practices that result in a person’s success.

There are numerous qualities, different personal dogmas with which a person can exercise leadership (just ask Barbara Kellerman in Bad Leadership). There is no magical formula, no singular path. But there are commonalities between lieutenants and colonels. I suggest that among these is hard work. Sometimes hard work is physical (preparing for Ranger School), intellectual (doctrine self-study), or personal (networking). But it is all work. And senior leaders sharing their methods for success in execution of those individual tasks — whether the task spans minutes or months — gives leaders at all levels the tools to be prepared when opportunity comes knocking.

Malcolm Gladwell put it another way when he posited that it takes 10,000 hours for someone to become an expert in their area. Assuming someone is honing their craft 50 hours a week for 48 weeks a year, they will have put forth 2,400 hours annually towards that achievement, potentially reaching mastery in just over 4 years. Considering that this is the present Army timeline for promotion to Captain, this sounds like a glorious revelation! Mastery of company-level tasks in just four years! However, there is a practical problem to this logic. We in the military never train for our current job, we end up learning it on the job. And yet…we should be training for our next job, looking forward on the horizon. While it’s great that a Lieutenant should have mastered some junior officer skills by the time they would promote to Captain (as the Army would expect of them), they have yet to learn all of the skills to be a successful Captain, much less Major. This brings me back my dissatisfaction with senior leaders telling subordinates that they were lucky. They were surely not lucky that they dedicated themselves to proficiency in their tasks as a junior officer. They may have been — by chance of their senior rater’s decision — assigned to a platoon with a seasoned, proficient platoon sergeant instead of a platoon that was struggling. However, the decision for that assignment was a deliberate mixture of previous performance, talent management, and supply and demand. Also, it is by no means through luck that a leader repeatedly builds the habit of scheduling self-study, physical training, or other preparation for their key developmental assignments, and then continually dedicates themselves to those activities. These acts build repetition and help to progress towards mastery, training a focused eye for a future assignment where it was anything but luck that they were prepared to execute.

Humility is not helpful in describing or teaching success. Having an attitude of clarity and confidence is what is needed in revealing one of the various paths to success for those seeking advice. All advice is autobiographical, and the expression that hindsight is 20/20 vision is true; some patterns from the past only become clear upon reflection. Perhaps upon their own reflection, a leader might realize that, while there was some chance in their being offered a job at a certain point in their career when they were primed to accept it, the primary reason they were offered that job was because of the previous work they had done to get to that point in their career. The more an individual works to increase their proficiency, the more prepared they are to react appropriately to an opportunity, and only then, yes, in a sense, to be lucky. The following expression summarizes why explaining the mechanics of this process and an individual’s journey through them is so important to articulate in totality: “your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so small that other people won’t feel insecure around you.” We in the military are servant leaders, to both country and each other. Sometimes that means explanations and education for or to those junior to us. To that end, when a junior leader is asking a senior leader, such as a Colonel, their reflections and recommendations on their career, there is already a measure of insecurity present by virtue of the difference in rank or the pressure to ask a question in the briefing. Acknowledging that this is already occurring means that leaders of all ranks and experiences can move forward from that place of understanding together, both with a better understanding of the work to be done. Doing otherwise robs both students of the opportunity to learn, and in a profession predicated on traditions, there is too much at stake to use humility as a protective shield against personal vulnerability. So during the next professional development program I attend,

I hope to hear, yes, about the shared credit with NCOs, teachers, mentors, and peers who helped carry someone through their experiences and military service, and I expect to hear about some measure of fortune in an assignment being available with all too convenient timing, but I also want to learn about suggestions for good habits, good failures, and ways to overcome challenges. For leaders looking to impart knowledge on a younger generation in the Army, that’s a far better answer than luck.
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This post was written by Mandi Rollinson, a Human Resources professional and Captain in the U.S. Army. She is a 2011 graduate of the United States Military Academy whose career has included assignments in INSCOM and FORSCOM units. This post reflects her opinions, not those of the U.S. Army or Department of Defense.