Leadership Crisis

What is it about you that makes you the leader among your team? Why do the people that work with and for you do what they do with you? Why will some people work with you or choose to put in 100% versus do just enough to not get fired? What is it that enables you to get the best out of those on whom you depend to grow your company – the people?

I learned something about the answers to these questions during my first career – as an Army Officer.

I joined the Army in 1990, about six months before the start of the civil war. I am often asked by people who know that both my parents were Christian missionaries, teachers and university professors with no history of military experience in their careers, why I joined the Army.

Sometimes I playfully tell them my army aspirations were created by my experience as a 12-year old boy when I was held up at gun-point by a drunk and high Ghanaian soldier at Kotoka International Airport in the early days of the PNDC military junta rule in the early 1980’s.

I was guilty of the gross legal infraction of taking an illegal shortcut: running up the grass to get from the car parking lot to the arrivals area of the airport instead of walking an extra 90 yards to get to the concrete stairway to get to the same area.

My mother was apoplectic as she saw her son being held at gunpoint by a soldier whose breath alone was a weapon of mass destruction, struggling to maintain his balance, pointing the working end of a military assault weapon on her adolescent son and ordering him to pump and run up and down the stairs. Thankfully, the soldier’s inebriation did not affect his motor skills and he did not inadvertently fire off a bullet.

To set the stage for the story, I need to let you in on the state of the Sierra Leone Army around the time of the story.

They give 30% – 60% because they have to, in order to not get sacked. In today’s competitive world, as Africa becomes more connected and competitive, we need our people to be their best and give their best, because it will impact our business

In 1990, when the Sierra Leone civil war started as little more than a cross-border skirmish initiated by Charles Taylor and Foday Sankoh in a bid for control of valuable diamonds to fund Taylor’s battle for Liberia, the Sierra Leone Army was composed of 3000 personnel; a largely ceremonial army that had been defanged by a long term President (Siaka Stevens) whose distrust of the army stemmed from his early days as a President in 1967 when he had been deposed by the army.

By 1994, due to a military coup that vaulted the army back in political power and the demands of fighting a civil war, the army had ballooned in size from 3,000 people to over 10,000 personnel.

This was due to large intakes of new personnel that were authorized by the military government (NPRC), to support the battle against the rebels (RUF).

The RUF or Revolutionary United Front started as a group of Sierra Leoneans that led the National Patriotic Front of Liberia elements across the border in an attempt to replicate Charles Taylor’s earlier success in toppling the Liberian government.

The RUF was created by Foday Sankoh, a former corporal in the Sierra Leone Army who had been previously jailed for his suspected involvement in a previous coup attempt in 1969.

Unfortunately, recruiting people into the army in wartime is hard to do, and the Republic of Sierra Leone Military Force (RSLMF), in their bid to find sufficient soldiers to fight, started to recruit ex-convicts and prisoners to join the Army and to provide alcohol, cannabis, and cigarettes as “morale-boosting” rations to the soldiers.

This had a negative impact on unit, individual, and organizational discipline in the Army, and the problem was not helped by the fact that rifles and ammunition were made freely available to military personnel.

Additionally, the practice of adding soldiers to units mid-stream, changing and moving officers from one unit to another conspired to ensure that there was very little unit integrity which, when combined with the indiscipline and the lack of training, left the RSLMF, despite its overwhelming numerical and firepower advantage over the RUF, incapable of defeating the RUF.

The indiscipline in the Army was not limited to the enlisted soldiers’ ranks. Army officers were equally guilty and culpable. Theft of army equipment, theft of soldiers’ rations, insubordination, rape, alcoholism, and looting was rife among officers in the war front and permeated down the ranks.

One of the unfortunate practices of the Sierra Leone Army that propagated this indiscipline was the practice of paying soldiers in cash. Officers would leave their duty station and travel to the Army Headquarters in Freetown to collect their salaries and the salaries of the soldiers in their unit.

They would then proceed to misappropriate the salaries of some of the soldiers in their unit, and then claim that the money was never paid to them, or that the money may have been mistakenly appropriated to another officer in another unit.

The non-use of electronic tracking, combined with poor record-keeping, made tracking these monies a near impossibility. Soldiers would go months without pay, and this negatively impacted discipline and encouraged unit desertion.

Eventually, the soldiers started to suspect that their officers were misappropriating their money and occasionally exacted their revenge on their officers in the fog of war through fratricide.

Officers discovered that while it was relatively easy to get soldiers to do their bidding during peacetime because of their rank, it was more difficult to achieve this in war time, and during a battle, with bullets flying about, it was near impossible.

In 1994, after graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point as an Army officer I returned to Sierra Leone which was in the middle of a civil war and was immediately thrust into a civil war that was created by and exacerbated by a crisis of leadership.

In 1994, Within a few weeks of my arrival, I was assigned to combat duty and recognized that I could not depend on the vast majority of the soldiers to be competent at handling themselves in battle.

Many of them had not even fired a weapon in basic training and could not shoot straight even when they were sober! I needed to adapt to survive and thrive.

At that time, it was common and accepted practice for officers to have one or two bat-men (lower-ranked soldiers that acted as personal assistants – ironing clothes, running errands, shining shoes for their officers).

I recruited five bat-men and told them that I did not want them shining my shoes: I trained them to be my elite fighting unit – we trained together, worked on offensive and defensive formations and drills together, taught them how to fire their weapons properly, and developed a trust in each other.

We learned defensive tactics, including trench digging, trench warfare, night fighting, getting behind enemy lines, fields of fire, hand to hand combat, personal hygiene, weapon cleaning, weapon maintenance, weapon assembly and dis-assembly, and a host of other important skills.

We practiced these skills before we got into combat and then later cemented our trust in each other in combat by successfully taking on larger forces, especially at night when numerical advantages are harder to ascertain.

I got to know them personally, took an interest in their lives outside of the military work, took care of their personal, social, family, and professional needs in various ways and they developed a strong allegiance and trust in me and in each other.