Trust-Building through Assertive Leadership

Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov

In today's global business environment, it is essential that effective leaders and managers learn to be more assertive to succeed. Leaders who fail to speak up receive fewer resources. A leader's job is to ensure the team has what it needs to succeed, such as new members, training, and supplies.

Marshal Chuikov understood that building trust with his leadership team and his soldiers meant fighting alongside them in the trenches as well as advocating for them in the requisitioning of more supplies. It was necessary for Vasily Ivanovich to approach his superiors with the dire situation of the battlefront as well as the acute need for ammunition. In mid-October 1942 during a crucial phase of the Battle for Stalingrad, Chuikov demonstrated his tenacity and insisted on increased supplies. This scenario is described in his memoirs:

"The same night (16 October 1942), I was warned that the Commander of the Front, Colonel-General Yeremenko, and his deputy, Lieutenant-General Popov, were coming to see us. Gurov, the Member of the Military Council, and I went to the landing-stage to meet them. Everything round us was exploding, the noise was deafening; German six-barrelled mortars were keeping the Volga under incessant attack. Hundreds of wounded were crawling towards the landing stage and the ferry. We often had to step over bodies. Not knowing where the boat with the Front Commander would land, we walked up and down the bank, then returned to the dugout... To our surprise, Generals Yeremenko and Popov were already at the command post.

It was a wretched picture that they had found. The command post dugouts had been turned into craters with logs sticking out of the ground. Everything on the bank was covered in ash and dust. When we said goodbye at dawn I asked the Front Commander to let us have more men, not divisions, but small draft units, and more ammunition. ‘You will have what you want,' he said, and, as he left, recommended that with the arrival of the 138th Division, we should move our Army command post further south along the bank of the Volga.

A day later we received the plan, confirmed by the Front Commander, for deliveries of ammunition to the Army. We were scheduled to be sent as much ammunition for the month as we could use in one day of fierce fighting. We could not but protest, and we managed to obtain a little more than the amount set out in the plan." (The Battle for Stalingrad, 203-204)