Zak Kozak on Leadership
G. M. ‘Zak’ Kozak has over 35 years of leadership experience that began during his first career as an enlisted soldier in the Special Forces. Zak retired as an Army officer following assignments with The Joint Staff in the Pentagon and moved on to become an information services director at Purdue University. He is now with the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
A surprisingly short list of things has guided everything I’ve done leading people and managing things throughout all of my very different experiences and roles over the past 35 years:
- Hire the best people possible
- Value their effort
- Give them ownership of their work
- Develop your distance vision
- Set priorities
- Follow through
Let’s go through each item in turn.
Hire the best
As a career soldier I was rarely in the position where I could “hire” talent. I most often found myself in the position of taking the soldiers that were there and working to mold them into a high value team. On first thought most leaders would prefer to hire the best and the brightest. My experience is that the brightest aren’t always the best. More often than I ever thought likely the brightest turned into bigger leadership challenges than those with less raw talent but much more motivation and drive for success.
Once I retired from the Army I was in a position to hire talent. I discovered a hiring decision is the single most important decision a manager routinely makes. Hiring someone who is a good fit and works out well saves loads of time and energy. Conversely, a bad hire becomes a time and energy sinkhole. Trying to motivate the unmotivated serves no useful purpose. Discharging someone who didn’t work out after you have hired them takes too much of a leader’s time. It costs money too in terms of decreased productivity, advertising expense, and interview and training cost. Take the time to hire the best you can.
Value effort
Soldiers do all manner of difficult, dangerous, and courageous things for their fellow soldiers. Recognition comes in the form of a few ounces of cloth and metal. Soldiers are a special breed. Civilians will do similar things but most often the rewards they seek are recognition in the form of money or perks. First rate leaders recognize what it takes to value individual effort and work hard to make it happen.
Ownership
Throughout my working life I wanted my supervisor to give me the latitude to operate. I treated every job regardless of what it was or who I worked for as if it were my business to run and if it failed I would go broke. So giving ownership to those I supervised was an important thing to me. Subordinates quickly developed into more effective managers and workers when they became responsible for the outcome of their effort. Ownership also makes people more proud of what they do.
Develop your vision
Developing a strategic vision is extremely difficult to do. It requires lots of reading, talking, networking, and study to get it right. Many people are woefully inept at strategic thinking. The ability to see where your organization should be in the future is what sets a great leader apart from the rest. Work to develop a professional and personal five year plan. It doesn’t have to be complex. My own personal five year plan is a simple 20 cell table: Year, title, responsibilities, compensation. A professional five year plan could easily be a sentence or two: Build this organization into a coherent workforce of 150 people with an annual operating budget of $50 Million.
Set priorities
Setting priorities is one of the most difficult tasks everyone faces. Leaders must do it and so must their workforce. My operating philosophy is to “shoot the closest gorilla first.” Certainly a simple statement that translates into pick the problem that can be the most critical threat to whatever you are doing and address and resolve it first. Don’t be distracted by the smaller gorillas behind the biggest one. Once the biggest is gone there will always be another of equal or greater size to take its place.
Follow through
Great leaders follow through. In my early soldier days one of my sergeants told me, “Soldiers only do what their sergeants check.” It was true then and is equally true now. It is also true of civilians. Follow through.
Lastly, enjoy what you’re doing. Work shouldn’t always be a chore. It might be hard and trying but it should be fun too. If it isn’t you’re in the wrong line of work.
