The Battle of Trafalgar was really the zenith of the fascinating age of fighting sail. Admiral Viscount Lord Horatio Nelson completed one of his most astonishing annihilations of his French and Spanish adversaries, and was killed in the process.
What Orrin Woodward and I wrote in Launching a Leadership Revolution about Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile a few years prior was also true of his conduct at Trafalgar. Nelson spent considerable time developing his ship’s captains. He met with them every chance he got to impart his fighting philosophy unto them. He held special dinners to get them acquainted with each other to foster better team work. And most importantly, when the battle had commenced, he turned them loose to fight on their own. Since battle was confusing and communication was nearly impossible across the smoky water, with the loud cannons roaring almost non-stop, trying to coordinate fleet movements was nearly impossible, anyway. Nelson’s preference was to rely on the ability of his fighting captains to make their own decisions in the heat of battle and to act on the philosophy he had so painstakingly taught them beforehand. As his fleet sailed into battle, Nelson’s flag ship made a few signals to coordinate the fleet’s movements as it came into battle. But once the fighting began, Nelson’s signals changed to those of encouragement to “engage the enemy more closely,” and famously, “England expects every man will do his duty.”
This style of fighting, a significant departure from the standard method of engagement at that time in the Royal Navy, was what Nelson called the “Nelson touch.” Uniquely, Nelson was the only fleet commander in British history that purposely brought on a “pell-mell” battle and succeeded at it time and again. The reasons were many. But primary among them was the fighting initiative of his individual captains. They clearly knew what Nelson expected of them and they performed accordingly. Nelson h
ad the master touch of decentralizing his leadership style at the right moment to wreak the most possible destruction on his enemy.
Perhaps no one summed up the results of the “Nelson touch” quite as well as Vice-Admiral Villeneuve, the French fleet commander that was defeated at Trafalgar. He was said to have made the following comment after learning of Lord Nelson’s death at the battle:
“To any other Nation the loss of a Nelson would have been irreparable, but in the British Fleet off Cadiz, every Captain was a Nelson.” The Battle of Trafalgar is a prime example of the power of the Fourth Level of Influence.
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