By Michael J Padilla-Pagan Payano
Early in my military career, I learned a simple lesson: when you give people a task, you also have to give them room to think.
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As a young “door kicker,” I made a point of telling my teams to ask why. Not because every decision needed a debate, but because the person closest to the work often sees something the person giving the order does not.
During a deployment in Afghanistan, after operating in the same area for three weeks, we received intelligence about a location that did not match what the team had seen on the ground. One of my team members asked, “Why are we accepting this intelligence as current? Where did it come from, how old was it, and who had vetted it?”
His question was valid. We had been moving so quickly from one operation to another that we had not stopped to verify the intelligence, revalidate the source, or revise the plan before moving. It reinforced a lesson I carried into business: rank carries responsibility, but it does not give a leader a monopoly on judgment.
