I came across this article of two different management styles, and found it fascinating……..
Churchill was the model of the inspirational politician, not the charismatic one. No one was overawed by Churchill’s physical presence in the way they were by Hitler’s. The British leader worked from a terraced house in Whitehall – the whole working area of which could fit into Hitler’s study in the Reich Chancellery. (The Chancellery, designed by Albert Speer in 1938, had enormous halls – with a combined length of 900ft – coming off the Wilhelmstrasse, solely in order to emphasise its grandeur to visiting diplomats.)
Of the two men, Hitler was actually kinder to his immediate staff than Churchill was to his. In terms of man-management, Hitler was – astonishingly enough – the more considerate boss. Churchill’s secretaries often became exasperated by his rudeness and lack of indulgence, whereas the Führer was adored by those who worked closest with him. He remembered their names and birthdays, visited them when they were ill, and they repaid him with lifetime devotion, even after his crimes became generally known. Churchill was loved by his staff because he was ’saving civilisation’, not because of his off-hand way of treating them (in 1940 things got so bad, his wife had to remonstrate with him about his manner).
Although Hitler might have been a better people-manager in some ways, his tendency to attempt to micro-manage the Third Reich once the war broke out led directly to his downfall. Whereas in the years leading up to the outbreak of war Hitler took a back seat in terms of administration, after 1939 he insisted on taking decisions that ought to have been left to far more junior officers. At one point during the war in the east he wound up ordering small-scale maps and directing Wehrmacht troop movements all the way down to battalion level.
Churchill did the absolute opposite, although as First Lord of the Admiralty he did get too involved in detail – he enquired into the number of duffel-coats issued to individual ships by their commanders, and gave orders that backgammon rather than cards should be played on Royal Navy vessels. But once the war was underway he managed to concentrate on the bigger picture, concerning himself with the broad strategic sweep of the war rather than the minutiae.
In this, Churchill was greatly helped by the fact that he was not a totalitarian dictator. The British chiefs of staff could stand up to Churchill – and under their chairman Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke they frequently did – in a way that would have been inconceivable with the Führer. As a result of Churchill’s never once overruling the service chiefs, the grand strategy of the war was run in a rational and logical way that was simply impossible in Nazi Germany.
