Legitimacy: Don't be a Rehoboam

What is leadership? According to John Maxwell, leadership is influence… nothing more, nothing less. If we are in a position of leadership, our task is to influence others to action, but that influence doesn’t come easy. Your position as a leader only gets your through the door, it doesn’t guarantee that the people will follow you. Your position will provide you with a short period of free influence, but you can’t lead based on position. You must have legitimacy. Once the honeymoon is over if those you lead don’t see you as legitimate, your ability to influence them will be diminished and eventually lost.

So what is legitimacy? It’s the right and justification to exercise power or authority. There are many historical sources of legitimacy: divine right, power, but in democratic societies, legitimacy is based on the consent of those you lead. Initially, those you lead assume you are legitimate based on your connection to the higher authority who appointed you into the position, but this initial legitimacy doesn’t last long. You have to work to establish your own legitimacy in order to successfully lead and influence others.

Today I’m going to talk about four steps to establishing legitimacy.  These are based on my experience leading soldiers as an officer in the Mississippi Army National Guard, as a teacher at the elementary, secondary, and university level and as a follower in a variety of situations.

First a cautionary story about someone who squandered that short period of free influence and failed to establish legitimacy. How many of you are familiar with King Solomon? You might remember him from Sunday School or stories read to you as a child. He was the son of King David and the second king of Israel. Well during King Solomon’s reign, several men led rebellions against his rule. One of them was Jeroboam. When King Solomon died, Jeroboam was in Egypt. King Solomon’s son Rehoboam became king. When Rehoboam became king he entered that short period of free influence as evidenced by Jeroboam’s return to Israel and offer to follow Rehoboam. Jeroboam and his followers reminded Rehoboam of the heaviness and harshness of Solomon’s reign and offered to follow him if Rehoboam would be less harsh. Rehoboam told Jeroboam to come back in three days and he’d receive an answer. Rehoboam asked his older advisors what he should do and they recommended that he accept those terms and reunite the kingdom under his rule. He rejected that advice and took the advice of his younger advisors (there’s a whole other lesson there about age and wisdom and good advice, but that’s for another day) and when Jeroboam returned, Rehoboam told him that his reign would be even harsher and heavier than his father’s. Consequently, Jeroboam decided to not accept the leadership of Rehoboam as legitimate and his rebellion resulted in the split of the Kingdom of Israel. As you can see, Rehoboam squandered the short period of free influence by listening to the wrong advisors. Jeroboam told him what it would take to follow Rehoboam and Rehoboam choose to rely on his position as legitimate king over all of Israel, rather than establish his own legitimacy and open the door to influence. Don’t be a Rehoboam!

So what are the four keys to establishing legitimacy?

1.       You must connect.

2.       You must establish credibility.

3.       You must cultivate growth

4.       You must position yourself to influence.

We will talk about each of these today.

The first thing we must do is connect. Obviously in the story Jeroboam reached out to Rehoboam in an effort to connect. He wanted to follow Jeroboam. Rehoboam rejected Jeroboam’s attempt to connect. So how do we connect? First we have to know those we want to follow us. We must know their names, their stories, their fears, their triumphs, their abilities- we must know them. Now when we are new, we won’t know them, but we must show that we want to know them and they must see us making efforts to know them. I’ve led Soldiers as an infantry platoon leader, Cavalry Troop Commander, and now as an armored battalion commander. As a leader, I make every effort to get out and know the soldiers I have the honor to lead. I owe it to them. One day I may have to ask them to risk their lives. They are more likely to do that if they know me and I know them. If we’ve connected. I look for opportunities to connect with the soldiers. One way I do this is by training with them. Back in January 2019, I had the opportunity to lead soldiers from my battalion in a partnership exercise with the Royal Army of Oman in Oman. While I was participating in higher level training with the battalion staff on how to plan military operations, one of my companies was participating in tactical training including fire team, squad and platoon live fire exercises. Now a squad is made up of two- five soldier fire teams (about ten soldiers), and a platoon is made up of four squads (about forty soldiers). I made sure that I observed and walked the training lanes during these different training events. It was hot and dusty and the terrain was challenging. They needed to see me out there with them getting hot and dirty and stumbling over the rocky terrain. I also joined a fire team during their live fire training. Imagine the look on the young soldiers when their BN commander laid beside them in the dirt, rushed from covered position to covered position to engage the targets during the training. The old man cared enough to be there with them. This did several things. It broke down barriers. It closed the gap between an old LTC and the young soldiers. It gave me an opportunity to listen and hear them. It gave me an opportunity to be listened to and to be heard. It gave me an opportunity to connect with my soldiers during the short period of free influence.

Now we aren’t all soldiers. But the principle is the same. We’ve got to get out of the office, out from behind our desks and go where those who we want to influence are and connect with them. Now this example is connecting with followers on a large scale, but you also need to connect with individuals. These individuals can help you as you try to influence others. How do we connect with individuals? Be human. My favorite story about connecting is from the original Chicken Soup for the Soul book. Take a few minutes and read the story “The Smile” at this link https://www.bereanpublishers.com/the-smile/. I think the key take away from this story is breaking away the barriers that divide us. How do we do that? St. Exupery did it with a smile. I do it just being me and making fun of myself. You have to find how you break those barriers that divide you from those you want to follow you. So you have a call to action: How will you connect with those you must lead?

The second key to legitimacy is to establish credibility. What does it mean to establish credibility? My job at Mississippi State University is as an Associate Professor of Elementary Education. Every year I teach between 50 and 75 young adults who are learning to be teachers. How do they know that I am qualified to teach them? How do they know that I have anything to tell or show them that will help them became successful teachers? I have to show them that I have the credibility to teach them by my words and deeds. Usually, during the first class at the university I do an activity where I provide my students with “artifacts” and have them develop theories about the person who might have owned those artifacts. Now as you can imagine, these artifacts are mine and they show the length and breadth of my teaching experience as well as other things about me that help to establish my credibility as a teacher. But that’s not enough. You see, I left the K-12 classroom in 2006. That’s 13 years ago. I’m the old fogey who is no longer relevant! So how do I combat that mentality? Every year, I write and teach lessons in elementary classrooms to show others and myself that I can still do it. It also helps me remain relevant and allows me to try out new lessons and units in current classrooms that I can share with my university students and tell them “hey these work!” Again, like my soldier example, this is my way to establish credibility… you have to find what credibility is in your situation and work to establish it.

A second example of establishing credibility. An M240 Bravo is a machine gun used in the U.S. Army. Also a Second Lieutenant generally has the least amount of military experience of the leadership in an infantry platoon, but is in charge. In October 2004, I had just graduated from Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning, GA and had reported to Camp Shelby, MS to lead an infantry platoon that was a part of a unit training to deploy to Iraq in January 2005. As you can imagine, I had to connect with my soldiers but I also had to establish credibility. Of course, there are always the jokes about lieutenants (often referred to as LT). One of them is “you can’t spell lost without LT.” So I was busy connecting and trying to establish my credibility through a series of what I would call tests of my authority and legitimacy to lead. Back to the M24B machine gun. My platoon was about to conduct a platoon live fire defense range. WE would be in static positions and targets would pop up in front of us simulating an attack on our position. Somehow, we were issued about twice the amount of ammunition we needed for the training event. My soldiers were all excited including the non-commissioned officers. They were talking about shooting the ammunition at high rates of fire and how cool that would be to be able to “burn up” all that ammo. I stopped that talk and told them that they would only fire the amount of rounds necessary to engage the targets presented. They were not to “burn up” the ammo. For two reasons, first it is wasteful and second it is unsafe. Deliberately shooting a machine gun at a rate higher than is necessary can lead to a “cook off” meaning a round explodes in the chamber of the gun which can damage the gun and injure a soldier. Well as you can imagine…. They didn’t all listen to me. At least two different M240B gunners, supervised by non-commissioned officers, decided to “burn off” ammunition during the training event. As I was addressing this issue with one of the machine gunners, the other had a cook off when he went to load more ammunition. Luckily, no one was injured. But what had just happened? I had established credibility. I had provided expert knowledge about the machine gun that they had ignored and what I warned would happen happened. As you can imagine, I made sure to point out that if they had listened to me, we would have avoided the potential and unnecessary harm to a soldier. This event was not lost on them. We often discussed it. And from that day on, I had more influence because I had established credibility with them. Now to be honest, there were other events, but I like this one because it wasn’t planned. It was based on my existing knowledge and my efforts to enforce existing standards applied during a training event that simulated combat. You now have a second call to action: How will you establish credibility with those you must lead?

The third key to legitimacy is to cultivate growth. So how do we cultivate growth? By realizing that none of us have arrived and that we all have room to improve.  By realizing that the moment we think we’ve arrived, we are going backwards and losing ground. By realizing those we lead might not be at the level of competence that we need them to be at and it’s our job to get them there. Let me tell you what I tell my undergraduates who often fret that the students in their class won’t be ready. No one is ready. We all need to grow and get better. They are frustrated because students will come to fifth grade math with only third grade math skills. Well guess what? They’re in your classroom now and it’s your job to teach them… where they are with the skills and knowledge they currently possess. The same is true of you and me and those we will lead. They won’t be 100% ready. How do we deal with this? We must be prepared to cultivate growth.

I have a very personal experience to illustrate this third key. On the door of my office I keep a copy of my fifth grade report card. Now I’d like to say that my fifth grade report card was a proud moment in my life, but in reality it was a bit traumatic. You see my mom and dad had five kids (two older girls and three younger boys with my in the middle). Four of the children would come home with all As or mostly As and I would come home with Bs, Cs, Ds, and in fifth grade Fs in math. That is hard on a child. One time, I actually tried to hide my report card and act as if I didn’t get one. As you can imagine that didn’t’ work. To my parent’s credit, they never pressured me and only asked that I do my best, but I put a lot of pressure on myself because I wasn’t doing as well as my siblings. Additionally, I took five years or speech therapy because I couldn’t say Rs or Sh sounds. So I pronounced one of my sisters name as LOWIE and never had to worry about getting in trouble for cursing because no one gets in trouble for saying “oh sit.”

I have the report card on my door as a lesson to my students. As you know, I teach in the elementary education program at Mississippi State University. Many students who go into education are high achievers, who had great success in school and assume everyone else had a similar experience. This story is the reason why I keep that report card on my door.

I had been teaching about four years in Mississippi schools and I took a job teaching 5th and 6th grade gifted education at King Elementary School in Tupelo, MS, which is the very school where I attended 6th grade. Now this was a little bit intimidating, because, I was teaching with the some of the same teachers who were teaching at the school when I was a student. So you can imagine the interactions… I’m calling everyone Mrs. or Mr. so and so…. I still had the student-teacher relationship in mind, even though I was 28 years old with a master’s degree and four years of teaching experience.

There were two other teachers in the gifted education department at King School when I was hired:  Cynthia Colburn and Pam McAlilly. My first week at the new school, Cynthia asked me where I went to elementary school. She knew I was from Tupelo and had attended Tupelo schools from Kindergarten through graduation. I told her Thomas Street Elementary School….. she smiled. She said, she had been asked by a retired teacher who the new gifted education teacher was at King School…. Cynthia replied a guy named Kenny Anthony. The retired teacher said, “that can’t be.” You see, she was my fifth grade math teacher.  She remembered a short, skinny 10 year old boy with unruly hair who couldn’t do math and couldn’t say his R’s and Sh’s. In her mind, maybe I was still struggling with long division. But you see, my education wasn’t complete in 5th grade. I was a work in progress. Now I did make further Fs in math including in 8th grade and 11th grade and I continued to be an average student throughout my middle and high school years.  So why is this important? I’m doing alright now. I’m a college professor and have had success in most areas of my adult life.

It is important because like me, the little boys and girls in the classrooms in which my students will teach are works in progress. When those boys and girls come into the classroom they are little balls of potential and it is our job to develop as much of that potential as we can in the time we have with them. When they leave our classes they aren’t done growing so we have the responsibility to provide them with the tools and knowledge required to keep them on a path of continued progress and growth. Often we see the students who enter our classes as finished products. We label them. We label them as weak math students, poor readers, behavior problems, at risk, and on and on. We should label them as learners. Learners who have infinite potential to grow and realize that who they are when they enter our classrooms when they are 10 years old are not who they will be 18 years later and it is our job to do all we can to help develop that potential.

All these things I just said about students in classrooms are applicable to soldiers in Army units or the people you will have following you. If you expect everyone to have arrived or to have the requisite skills and knowledge when they show up to your organization, you’ll be disappointed. If someone you lead is missing a skill set or lacks knowledge, don’t write them off or consider them dumb or worthless. Take the time to help them grow the skills and knowledge they need. WE aren’t the NFL. We can’t draft a new quarterback. We have to play with the people on our team. Remember, we are all works in progress. We all have skill and knowledge gaps. It’s our job as leaders to assess, identify, and address these gaps. This growth mentality frees those you lead to come to you for help. It frees them to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. When you demonstrate a growth mentality, people will follow you. Now you have a third call to action: How will you cultivate growth in those you lead?

Finally, the fourth key to legitimacy is to position yourself to influence others. Position in this instance might be geographically, emotionally, morally, or intellectually. I’m going to talk about actual physical or geographic position. Much as when you want to connect with those you must lead you have to be in the right places, often just to influence you must be in the right position.

In the infantry we are taught to lead from the front. In 2005, I was 34 years old and  was leading an infantry platoon in Babil Province Iraq. Now I totally bought into the lead from the front mentality. I commanded the first vehicle in our convoys, and would often walk point when conducting dismounted counter IED patrols. But there’s another principle of leadership in the infantry: the leader should position himself in the place where he can most influence the battle. So as a leader in the infantry in combat, I often had to reconcile leading from the front with positioning myself where I could have the most influence during operations. Sometimes it was in the front, sometimes it was in the middle, sometimes it was towards the rear (which was hard to accept). This story is about a time when I got it wrong.

We would often conduct night raids based on intelligence that had identified a bomb maker or other type of insurgent. The intelligence officer would tell us who the insurgent was and where he lived and when we would be able to find him at home in order to conduct our raid to grab him. Our goal was to grab these insurgents and hand them over to the intelligence community so they could find out more information and disrupt the insurgent operations in our area of responsibility. Now often the information was wrong or outdated. But nonetheless, we conducted almost nightly raids to capture insurgents. Once  we got a report that an insurgent lived in a house surrounded by a wall (as many houses were in Iraq). We went through our normal planning procedures including conducting reconnaissance of the house to make sure we conducted the raid on the right house (nothing is more embarrassing than breaking down the door of the wrong house). We identified the house and we planned the raid.

The night of the raid, we had all the right people and equipment. We had a good plan. We had rehearsed the plan. We had a large heavy ram to use to hit the outer gate in order break through the gate and then move to enter the house. We established our outer perimeter. Then we moved to the gate. The soldier with the ram hit the metal gate and the noise woke the entire neighborhood. Dogs barked. Lights came on. But the gate didn’t give. The soldier hit it again and again to no avail. Now the insurgents knew we were there and we hadn’t entered the gate yet. This was not a good thing.

So as leaders we solve problems. What was my solution? I handed my rifle to a soldier, jumped and climbed to the top of the wall and jumped to the other side. Then it occured to me… I’m the only American on this side of the wall and I only have my sidearm. For what seemed like an hour, though it was just seconds I thought: “I’m vulnerable. I’m no longer with my team. I’m no longer leading my team. I’ve positioned myself in a place where I’m isolated and in danger and worse- no one is leading the team.”

 Now, I quickly recovered and looked to see that the reason we couldn’t break the gate down was because there was a heavy latch at the top the gate. I quickly unlocked the latch and was reunited with my team and was back in a position where I could direct the actions of the soldiers in my platoon. That night, my desire to lead from the front jeopardized my safety, my ability to lead my platoon, and the mission.

My proper place was on the other side of the wall and I should have directed a more tactically sound way for one of my fire teams (four people) to secure the other side of the wall and open the gate. The point is there is a tension between leading from the front and the ability to lead effectively. We have to find the balance and make the right decisions. That night I made the wrong decision. I laugh about it now and I laughed about it that night. I was lucky I learned the lesson without paying a price. But one reason I didn’t have to pay the price, was…. The intelligence was wrong…. It was the wrong house.

Another example of positioning. As a professor, I often get calls from former students who need help. Mainly they are first year teachers and they will call or email and ask my advice. The following story actually has happened twice in the past three years. I received an email asking for advice on how to get rid of low-level noise that was constantly disrupting class. The children talked the entire time. My first question had to do with positioning. I asked the teacher where her desk was and where she stood most of the time to teach. I also asked if she regularly moved around and “worked the room.” She said her desk was in the back and she taught from the front and that she moved around the room as we had taught her. I then asked how her students’ desks were organized. She said she had them in sets of four with two students facing two students. I now knew what the problem was. At any given time half her students weren’t looking at her. At any given time, she was looking at the back of half her students heads. This meant that at any given time, half her students could by talking and she wouldn’t necessarily know who was talking. This is highly problematic for a teacher. She had positioned herself in a place where she could only influence half of the class. So we talked about alternative seating arrangements. I think the both came up with a U shaped desk arrangement that allowed them to make eye contact with every student. Now was this a silver bullet? No, but it was the beginning of very positive changes in their classrooms. They could now influence all of the students at once rather than have half of them with their backs turned ignoring or worse defiantly talking. Where these teachers positioned themselves mattered in their efforts to influence and lead their classrooms on a day to day basis. Likewise you must figure out in your situation, how you will best position yourself to influence and lead those you must lead. So the last call to action: How will you position yourself to influence others?

Whether or not you are in a position of authority or official leadership, you can and should exercise influence and be a leader. The question is, when the time comes will you have established the prerequisites to influence others or another way, will you be recognized as a legitimate leader. The reason I ask this question is that if you aren’t currently in a position of leadership, you can practice these keys. You can practice connecting with others. You can do things to make yourself credible, you can cultivate growth in others, and you can practice positioning yourself in everyday life where you can more effectively influence others.

If you are in a position of authority or official leadership, remember you only have a limited time where your position gives you that short time period of free influence. Don’t waste it. Don’t’ be a Rehoboam! Use that short period of free influenceto use the four establish your legitimacy. Remember 1. You must connect, 2. You must establish credibility, 3. You must communicate a growth mindset, and 4. You must position yourself to influence others. If you do these things, those you lead are open to your influence and they will do great things! Now knowing the keys isn’t enough… you have to take action. Everyone in this room has the ability to get these keys and use them. The question is, do you intend to take the steps to get those keys and use them during that short period of free influence! Or do you choose to be a Rehoboam?