Leadership Archives - Page 4 of 11

Decisions at the Lowest Possible Level

Reinhard Mohn took over the Bertelsmann company in Gütersloh from his father in 1947. Under his leadership, it grew into an international media group. In talks collected in 1984, he said that every decision should be made auf einer möglichst niedrigen Ebene in der Führungspyramide, at the lowest possible level of the leadership pyramid.

To keep large companies flexible, he named decentralization, profit centers and delegation. Wir müssen Ziele setzen und erläutern. We must set goals and explain them. Mohn also said that the world of work must offer Freiraum für eigenverantwortliches Handeln, room to act on one’s own responsibility.

“Go Out and Play Football”

Geht’s raus und spielt’s Fußball. Go out and play football. It is one of the best-known sentences of Franz Beckenbauer. Sky Sport lists it among his famous quotes as his tactical instruction as a coach.

FC Bayern records a longer version and places it in the dressing room before the World Cup final of July 1990: Geht’s raus, habt Spaß und spielt’s Fußball. Go out, have fun and play football. Germany won the final against Argentina, 1 to 0. The exact wording differs between the sources.

Jointly Responsible for the Results

In 2007, the Bavarian state government issued guidelines on leadership and cooperation for the state administration. The section on delegation begins: Führung beinhaltet die Delegation von Verantwortung und Zuständigkeiten. Leadership includes delegating responsibility and areas of competence. A separate section on goals says that leaders should develop goals. As a rule, they should agree these goals with their staff.

The section on results says who checks the work. Führungskräfte sind mit ihren Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeitern für die Arbeitsergebnisse gemeinsam verantwortlich. Leaders and their staff are jointly responsible for the results. The checking should be done mainly by the staff themselves, on their own responsibility and as they go. The leader should accompany this self-checking.

Who Chooses the Operating Method

In 2024 the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the journal of the German medical profession, published a legal article on who may instruct whom among hospital doctors. The chief physician may give detailed instructions to junior doctors in training. That right shrinks as they gain expertise. “The more qualified the subordinate doctors are, the smaller the room” for instructions. If a senior physician masters an operating method that meets the medical standard, the chief may not require her to use the method the chief prefers. The author, a lawyer, describes this as the legal position. It is an interpretation, not a statute.

Obedience That Thinks Along

In April 2003, shortly after the start of the Iraq war, a major in the Bundeswehr refused two written orders. Among other things, they required him to continue work on a Bundeswehr software project. He gave reasons of conscience. A military service court demoted him to captain. On 21 June 2005 the Federal Administrative Court acquitted him. The Soldiers’ Act, the court said, does not demand unconditional obedience. It demands mitdenkenden obedience, obedience that thinks along and considers in particular the consequences of carrying out the order. A decision of conscience, the court added, must be visible from outside and must be possible to explain by reason.

Knowledge, Conscience and Responsibility

Ludwig Beck was chief of the general staff of the German army. In his memoranda of 1937 and 1938 he wrote a sentence about the army’s generals that is still quoted: Ihr soldatischer Gehorsam hat dort eine Grenze, wo ihr Wissen, ihr Gewissen und ihre Verantwortung die Ausführung eines Befehles verbietet. Their soldierly obedience has a limit where their knowledge, their conscience and their responsibility forbid carrying out an order. Sources differ on the exact memorandum and date. In the summer of 1938 Beck called on the generals to resign together. They did not. Shortly afterward he gave up his post for reasons of conscience. In 2014 General Klaus Naumann quoted the sentence in a speech published by the Bundeswehr.

No Chair Can Overrule the Board

The members of a German stock corporation’s management board are, as a rule, authorized to manage the company only jointly. The articles of association or the board’s own rules may provide otherwise. They may not, however, provide that one or more board members decide disagreements on the board against the majority of its members. Not even the chair can do that.

In Their Own Responsibility

The school law of North Rhine-Westphalia describes the teacher’s freedom and its frame in one sentence. Teachers teach, educate, advise, assess and supervise their students in eigener Verantwortung, on their own responsibility, im Rahmen, within the framework, of the educational goals, the applicable laws and regulations, the orders of the school authorities and the decisions of the school’s conferences. In Hesse, the principal may intervene in the teaching of a fully trained teacher only when a rule has been broken. After the shock of the first PISA study in 2000, the states committed to applying national educational standards from the 2004–05 school year. The standards fix what students must be able to do at the end. They are meant to give schools and teachers greater freedom in choosing and arranging the content.

What Moltke Actually Wrote

The line “No plan survives contact with the enemy” is usually credited to Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke. He did not write it in that form. In his essay Ueber Strategie of 1871, Moltke wrote: Kein Operationsplan reicht mit einiger Sicherheit über das erste Zusammentreffen mit der feindlichen Hauptmacht hinaus. (No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main force.) The next sentence reads: Nur der Laie glaubt in dem Verlauf eines Feldzuges die konsequente Durchführung eines im voraus gefaßten in allen Einzelheiten überlegten und bis ans Ende festgehaltenen, ursprünglichen Gedankens zu erblicken. (Only the layman believes that in the course of a campaign he sees the consistent execution of an original idea, thought out in advance in every detail and held to the end.) Moltke saw strategy as a system of expedients. He gave his subordinate commanders wide freedom of action in carrying out their mission. The familiar English wording, “no plan survives contact with the enemy”, is found in 1961, attributed to Moltke, in Correlli Barnett’s book The Desert Generals.

Over People’s Heads

Betroffene zu Beteiligten machen — make those affected into participants. It is a familiar rule of German change management. A podcast of the Bundeswehr’s staff college calls it a very frequently quoted sentence.

Jemanden ins Boot holen — to bring someone into the boat.

Mitspracherecht — the right to have a say.

Einen runden Tisch einberufen — to call a round table, so that all sides of a conflict sit down together.

Über die Köpfe hinweg entscheiden — to decide over people’s heads.

Jemanden vor vollendete Tatsachen stellen — to present someone with completed facts. Duden explains it as confronting someone with a situation created on one’s own authority.

Basta-Politik — politics by basta, that’s final. It is never praise.

Wutbürger — the enraged citizen. The Society for the German Language chose it as word of the year 2010, during the protests against the Stuttgart 21 rail project. It explained that the word expressed people’s outrage dass politische Entscheidungen über ihren Kopf hinweg getroffen werden, that political decisions are made over their heads.