Why waiting for certainty is its own kind of failure, and what taking charge actually requires.

In 1991, I commanded an Armored Cavalry Squadron of roughly 800 Soldiers and 50 armored vehicles. We were training at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, deep in the Mojave Desert, preparing for a major battle against OPFOR, a dedicated opposing force whose entire mission was to fight us the way a real enemy would.

I had built a tactical plan for the attack, and I was proud of it. As we closed in on the time to execute, my staff started picking up something I did not want to see. The enemy was massing his forces at the exact location where I intended to strike. They urged me to adjust. I refused. I had built this plan, I believed in it, and I was determined to execute it exactly as written.

We attacked his strength instead of his weakness. The fighting turned into a brutal battle of attrition, with the enemy defending from prepared positions while we crossed open desert to reach him. The battle ended in a draw, and given the mistake I had made, we were lucky to get even that.

At the After-Action Review that followed, gathered in a tent with the entire unit, we walked through what we had planned, what happened on the ground, what went well, and what did not. There was no way around the conclusion. I had missed a real opportunity for victory because I refused to adjust a plan that conditions had already overtaken. I stood up in front of those Soldiers and said the only thing that was true: “Guys, you were exceptional out there in the fight. I let you down because I did not adapt.” Nobody in that tent argued with me. They knew I was right.

Why Leaders Wait Too Long

The mistake I made in the Mojave was not a planning mistake. The plan was sound going in. The mistake was believing that more commitment to the plan would somehow compensate for a battlefield that had already changed underneath it. I had information telling me to adjust, and I treated that information as a threat to my authority rather than a gift to my judgment.

This is the trap that catches leaders far more often than a bad plan does. The plan was never the problem. The unwillingness to adapt to new information was the problem, and that unwillingness almost always comes dressed up as confidence, decisiveness, or staying the course. Adaptive Leaders have to be able to tell the difference. Sticking with a plan because the facts still support it is judgment. Sticking with it because changing course feels like losing is ego.

When in Charge, Take Charge, one of my Big 6 Leadership Principles®, does not mean defending your original call once the ground has shifted. It means staying close enough to the situation that you notice when it has shifted, and being secure enough in your own leadership to say so out loud before the cost becomes a lesson learned the hard way.

Command, Not Control

There is a distinction worth sitting with here, one I came to understand more fully the longer I led. Command is leadership through presence, and that presence does not have to be physical to be felt. Control is something narrower: the allocation of resources in time and space. We need some control to command effectively, but when control becomes the dominant instinct, leaders start mistaking activity for leadership.

Taking charge, when you are in charge, means delegating authority without delegating responsibility. When something goes wrong, the leader owns it. When something goes well, the team shares the credit. That asymmetry is not unfair. It is the cost of being the one in charge, and leaders who are not willing to pay it should not be surprised when their people stop bringing them the truth.

I learned something else that day in the desert that mattered more than the battle itself. We won every battle that followed during that rotation. I do not think that was a coincidence. Adaptive Leadership is not built by avoiding mistakes. It is built by the willingness to stand in front of your people, name one without flinching, then lead differently the next time the moment calls for it.

What Taking Charge Requires in Practice

A leader who takes charge confronts facts head-on, even when those facts are inconvenient or arrive at the worst possible time. The temptation in the middle of a hard moment is to wait for more data, wait for the picture to clear, wait until certainty arrives before committing to a direction. That instinct feels responsible. It is usually the opposite. The information you are waiting for rarely arrives clean, and the cost of waiting compounds while you do.

The fundamental building blocks that make fast, sound decisions possible are mission and intent, the foundation of Set the Azimuth. When your team understands the mission and the intent behind it, they instinctively know their true north even when the situation in front of them does not match the plan on paper. They are far more likely to act instead of react, and they stop wasting precious time seeking permission they do not need.

Never shoot the messenger. This is one of the costliest habits a leader in charge can fall into, because the damage rarely shows up right away. The first report from the field is almost always incomplete, sometimes wrong, and more of the picture will emerge as the situation develops. A leader who reacts to bad news with frustration or blame teaches their team exactly one lesson: stop bringing me bad news early. That lesson gets learned fast, and it gets unlearned slowly, if ever.

The leaders who build a real bias for action in their organizations do a few things consistently. They keep mission and intent clear enough that their people can act without waiting for a green light, and they meet bad news with calm, measured curiosity instead of frustration, knowing the first version of any story is rarely the final one. When a decision does not go as planned, they own the outcome publicly, the same way I had to own mine in that tent in the Mojave.

Taking charge is being the calm in the chaos. It is composure when composure is hardest to hold onto, and it is one of the clearest ways a leader builds The Level Five Culture of Commitment, because people commit to leaders who are honest about their own mistakes and steady enough to lead through the next one.

I’d love to hear about a moment when you had to adjust a plan in real time, even after you had committed to it publicly. Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.

 

Enjoy the journey!