Leadership Lessons From Gettysburg
By Jack Gordon

Experiential training programs offer metaphors that are more interesting than the daily grind of work. But the measure of a metaphor is whether it provides a deeper understanding of that work.

The Battle of Gettysburg was the turning point of the American Civil War. Some 150,000 men fought in the three-day battle in the Pennsylvania countryside in July 1863. More than 50,000 of them were killed, wounded or captured. If you visited the historic site of the carnage—saw the hill called Little Round Top, walked the field where Pickett's Charge came to bloody grief on Cemetery Ridge—the first thought that naturally struck you might be: I wonder what lessons today's corporate managers could learn from this?

Or maybe not.

That thought did occur to consultant and motivational speaker Steven B. Wiley, however, and for five years The Wiley Group of Gettysburg, Pa., has attracted business groups to the battlefield for a three-day leadership training experience called "A Transformational Journey From Gettysburg." Managers and teams from companies including Exxon-Mobil, Black & Decker and Novartis Pharmaceuticals have gone to the battlefield, usually in groups of about 25, to study the fateful decisions and behavior of the military officers in charge. Before arriving at the nearby Antrim Country Inn, they are encouraged to watch the 1993 movie "Gettysburg" and assigned to read The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara's 1974 Pulitzer-prize-winning historical novel, upon which the film was based.

"This is not a course in history, and it's not a course in military strategy," Wiley says. "It's a leadership-development experience. Gettysburg is the metaphor, but it's just a metaphor."

The program does not promise to reveal leadership techniques that are new or startling or secret. Quite the opposite. The idea is to draw from a vivid emotional experience some lasting insights into challenges that have confronted leaders for centuries. What lessons can be learned about how to inspire followers from Union Col. Joshua Chamberlain, commander of the 20th Maine regiment, who turned 120 mutineers/deserters into a force willing to fight to the death to protect the left flank of the Union line? What can be learned about "managing upward" from the failure of Confederate Gen. James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee's second in command, to dissuade Lee from decisions that would prove disastrous for the Army of Virginia? And how can those lessons be applied today by managers at, say, Novartis Pharmaceuticals or MCI to improve corporate performance?

How, indeed?

Working the metaphor
Gettysburg's commanders are not the first historical figures to be mined for corporate leadership nuggets, and they are far from the most eyebrow-raising ones. Wess Roberts' 1985 book, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun (Warner Books, reprint 1990), described Mr. Hun as a master of "win-directed, take-charge management." In 1995, a writer named Laurie Beth Jones tested divine forbearance with a management text called Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership (Hyperion, 1996).

As for experiential training programs that use metaphorical exercises to teach leadership, teamwork and other such topics, their numbers are legion. Businesspeople sign up for high-ropes courses and trek into mountains or forests for Outward Bound-type wilderness adventures. They learn work-related lessons on sailboats and white-water rafts. In the subcategory of military metaphors, an Atlanta company called Afterburner sends former fighter pilots into companies, complete with command posts draped in camouflage netting, to conduct team-building sessions in the form of combat briefings.

Disregarding the quality or value of any particular experiential program, the basic methodology has much to recommend it as an alternative to ordinary classroom training, says author and consultant Karl Albrecht, of Karl Albrecht International in San Diego. Albrecht is a veteran observer of the corporate-training scene, although he is not familiar with Wiley's course.

"When you invoke physical movement and activity in any way, you activate things in the nervous system," Albrecht says. In other words, there is some value in getting learners out of a classroom and moving around for any reason at all. When the activity also packs some sort of emotional wallop, such as when teammates help one another cross a seemingly dangerous rope bridge—or walk a famous battlefield—"you can create a powerful emotional substrate," Albrecht says. "People become somewhat more suggestible, more receptive to big ideas, more engaged with others. That's something a given program can either capitalize on or not."

Emotional or affective learning "is something trainers have been trying to do forever," Albrecht says. Experiential models simply "go whole hog" by building affective learning into a specific instructional design: "Give me a dramatic, emotional environment, then bring in leadership, strategic planning or whatever."

How well will a particular experiential program work to produce the kinds of behavior a company would like to see, back on the job, from leaders, planners or team members? That depends on any number of factors. A big one, Albrecht proposes, is how well the metaphor transfers back to the work environment. For instance, "Has the metaphorical language of the training experience carried over into everyday work? Do people use the lexicon for describing what they do? Do they take advantage of the shorthand value of it? All of that suggests something."

A more direct question is, of course, can you point to hard-number business indicators, such as increased sales or higher profits, that even a skeptic would agree are entirely attributable to the training course? With any form of soft skills training, metaphorical or otherwise, that is notoriously difficult. Albrecht himself would not demand a rigorous ROI evaluation as evidence for the value of a program intended to teach leadership skills. "Maybe the real answer is that if [participants] liked it, it was a good thing to do," he says. "Maybe we should just give up trying to be so analytical about training that doesn't teach people how to screw in a light bulb."

Wiley concedes that programs similar to his could be built around visits to other battlefields, such as Omaha Beach in Normandy. But what's unique about Gettysburg, he says, is that for two years leading up to the battle, "the larger, better equipped organization [the Union army] had been losing to the smaller one. Why? Because [the Confederates] had better leadership. What happened at Gettysburg was that the leadership edge shifted. It wasn't more bullets or sunspots or coincidence. What happened was that the North put better leaders in place."

We come neither to praise Wiley's program nor to bury it. But the Gettysburg course is worth examining as an interesting and unusual example of the experiential breed.

High Ground and Left Flank
Metaphors are central to the experience. One is the concept of "high ground." The Union Army won at Gettysburg largely because it was able to occupy, fortify and hold the hills surrounding the battlefield. Participants are urged to identify and discuss their company's high ground—their strongest competitive advantage.

"For a high-tech company, it might be innovation," Wiley says. "For another company it might be an obsession with pleasing customers. You could maybe name five key strengths that give you a competitive advantage, but we encourage groups to drill down to one."

Another key metaphor is the "left flank"—an organization's point of greatest vulnerability. If, on the second day of fighting, Col. Joshua Chamberlain (a middle manager and not even a career soldier) had retreated before the Confederate onslaught on Little Round Top, the extreme left flank of the Union's position, the South probably would have won the battle. Question: What is your company's left flank, the vulnerable spot it must defend at all costs?

Chamberlain also serves as the course's primary role model of a "transformational" leader, one who inspires voluntary commitment and effort in followers instead of simply demanding obedience by virtue of his rank in an organization's hierarchy—i.e., because he's the boss. "People cry at the idea of what men on both sides of this battle were willing to do for their leaders," Wiley says. But rent the movie or read the book to see why Chamberlain makes a particularly outstanding example.

A third key analogy has to do with Gen. Longstreet's repeated efforts to convince Robert E. Lee that the whole situation at Gettysburg was a disaster waiting to happen—and that ordering Pickett's Charge against the center of the Union line on the final day was a particularly bad idea. He was right, and 60 percent of Gen. George Pickett's division died in vain. The example prompts questions about managing both upwards and downwards. What kind of communication do you have with your boss and your subordinates? Do you welcome honest opinions from subordinates about the wisdom of your decisions? What could you do to convince your boss that he or she was wrong?

A related metaphor was that of J.E.B. Stuart, Lee's "eyes" on the Yankees. During the battle, he had gone a-raiding with his cavalry somewhere far from Gettysburg, leaving Lee blind to the movements of the Union army. (What do you do when you lack the information you need to make good decisions?) And on the first day of the battle, before the Union had fortified its positions, Lee ordered Gen. Richard Ewell, now commander of the late Stonewall Jackson's old units, to capture a key piece of high ground "if practical." To Jackson, that would have meant "take the hill." To the cautious Ewell, it didn't. The lesson: Do you recognize the characteristics of individual followers and adjust your leadership style accordingly?

Money-back guarantee
The program combines three guided tours of the Gettysburg battlefield with classroom work in the Antrim Country Inn, where the Union's recently appointed top general, George G. Meade, spent the night before the battle. In addition to Wiley, faculty members include William Rosenbach, professor of leadership at Gettysburg College and former head of leadership and management at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and Tom Dombrowsky, former director of military history at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.

Costs for the program—including lodging, meals, and pre- and post-course options such as online leadership-style assessments—range from $2,000 to $6,000 per person, depending on group size and whether a company wants to extend its meeting beyond the course's usual three-day run. The average tab is $4,900 per person.

Marketing materials for a presentation on leadership and negotiation skills that Wiley delivers in conjunction with the Gettysburg course include client testimonials to the effect that the presentation paid for itself many times over. But true to Albrecht's observation, hard evidence of a concrete ROI due entirely to the training experience is scarce. Still, Wiley is confident in the program's merits, and the course comes with a dramatic guarantee: If you don't see measurable results worth 10 times the tuition costs within six months after the program, you can have your money back.

"They can measure it any way they want," Wiley says. "We've never had anyone approach us to say they were disappointed."

As with any good experiential program, it's the vividness of the experience that makes the lessons so memorable and behavior change more likely, clients say. Which makes sense to Albrecht. "Even if you tour the Gettysburg battlefield by yourself, you're likely to have a powerful emotional reaction," he observes. You might well ask yourself how you would have behaved. Harness those emotions and that introspection to well-thought-out leadership lessons, and the learning is more likely to stick.

The Gettysburg address
The Wiley Group
1140 Lincoln Way West
Gettysburgh, PA 17325
717-338-9971
www.stevenbwiley.com

Reprinted from Training magazine 

Jack Gordon is editor-at-large for Training magazine. edit@trainingmag.com