Leadership

If you're a service academy graduate, I invite you to reassess your identity with two critical observations.

First, you may not be a leader. Second, this may be a good thing.

The academy declared you a leader and trained you to be one – per its definition.  For success, perceived survival, and/or the avoidance of (perceived) failure, you had to play the role of a leader. But the authentic you may be someone else. 

Knowing how this impacts you is vital.  Your intense psychological immersion into the academy culture left a deep and permanent stamp on your identity that sticks around until you challenge it.  So let’s chip away at some assumptions by exploring the academy’s brand of leadership, comparing it to a proven generic model, and seeing what we can wring out of the analysis.

The academies’ brand of leadership culminates in winning in warfare.  From its military focus, we intuit that it may be less than optimized for our broader lives.  The model I use for broad, 'generic leadership' comes from The Leadership Challenge, 4th Edition written by Kouzes and Posner. Let's peek at their generic model and then backtrack into military examples.

Kouzes and Posner spent decades analyzing leadership and concluded that a leader does the following things.  He or she:

1      exhibits personal integrity and honesty and earns the trust of people in his/her care

2      sees and articulates a vision of a future state that is different from the present state

3      is competent at reaching that state and getting results

4      inspires people to see personal benefit in reaching the future state

5      is intelligent and credible in his or her field

I’ll skip over the proof of why this model works and instead ask you to reflect on times when someone inspired you to follow him or her.  You’ll probably recognize those five behaviors whether you saw it in a large-scale corporate environment or in personal or community projects.  Note that it has nothing to do with formal position, such as in a military hierarchy.

Comparing the generic model to the academy model reveals gaps. The academy can fall short of the generic model at steps 2 and 4, seeking a changed future state and inspiring people to reach it. 

For example, my military experience involved supervising a nuclear reactor.  The Navy and corporate military recruiters called this leadership, but after reading Kouzes and Posner and reviewing it with my career coach, I realized that it was not leadership but operational management.

Every metric placed on me centered on maintaining a status quo – keep the reactor running, keep the people safe, and hand the equipment off to the next guy intact as I found it. I wasn’t taking anyone into a new, better state of existence. Forget challenging a present state in order to envision a better one.  My job was to prevent deviations from norms, follow rules and processes, and keep a machine running. I was not leading but managing an operational status quo.

Nuclear power provides an extreme example, but there are plenty of similar scenarios service academy graduates face.  Steaming a warship on patrol, training a platoon to march or shoot straight, and keeping aircraft ready for flight are exercises in operational readiness.  Based upon the generic model above, I propose that optimizing machines or teams to do what they were intended to do is not leadership but is instead management, and this covers 99% of what most of us did while in uniform.

In contrast, soldiers or marines taking a hostile city block from an enemy covers all the facets of generic leadership. A leader is seeing a future, less-dangerous state and is demonstrating the courage, competence, and credibility to a team to make it happen.  Additionally, spending five hours to repair the broken keel from an exploded mine on the Samuel B Roberts in 1988 involved all the traits of generic leadership. The ship was doomed, but at least one leader saw a way to save it and rallied the team.

In these cases, the generic leadership model omits traits we learned in the academy brand of leadership, such as courage, valor, and the willingness to risk self-sacrifice. That’s why the academies exist - to train its leaders for the extreme cases. 

But the extreme cases are rare, and most of us never experience them.  Having graduated from a service academy means that you spent four formative years becoming a leader who can handle a military crisis, but if you're out of the service, it's time to rethink this training. This takes us back to the original observations. 

You were trained to be an extreme, special form of leader, but you may not be a leader.

Maybe you were at one time but outgrew it.  Maybe you never were.  Remember that the general model is behavior-based and suggests that you're not born as a leader.  It's a choice. 

I earned my way into the academy with good grades and athletic performance.  I applied to the academy because I liked nuclear power, and I went through its programming, resisting every step of it, knowing down deep that I didn’t fit. I survived as a submarine officer and had a few good moments, but it was just a detour to finding my identity.

It took me 20 years to realize that I’m an engineer who likes designing electronic products.  I’ve never led a team of more than 8 people outside the Navy, and I feel more comfortable leading very few people or nobody at all. I dislike managing the status quo, I’m ambivalent to leading, and I enjoy creating new things.

I can call upon my academy training in times of crisis, but I’ve abandoned the academy’s brand of leadership to be myself.  Many of us have.  Among our ranks are attorneys, sales reps, accountants, computer developers, insurance agents, real estate agents and many other successful and/or personally fulfilled people who earn their livings and base their identities upon having zero direct reports and leading no teams. For these colleagues who have realized their callings, shedding the academy's demand to be a professional leader is a good thing.

Are you subconsciously carrying out the academy’s programming to be a leader against your nature? Are you a leader stuck in the military-centric, extreme, hierarchical academy model who would benefit exploring the generic model?  Are you misplaced in a leadership/management role struggling to be something you are not? 

Enjoy, reflect, and share your thoughts (comment please).

Thank you,

John H. USNA '91

Welcome, Service Academy Philosophers

If you're a service academy graduate, I urge you to dedicate some time right now to philosophy because, like it or not, you're probably in conflict.

You're both gifted and cursed.

Your gift is the sum of character qualities that earned you a coveted spot in the academy plus your experiences that built upon and added to these qualities. Your gift helped you graduate and perform as an officer. You know about your gift in your conscious mind and in the deepest recesses of your subconscious because the academy transmuted it into something called leadership and pounded your awareness of it into you for four years. Every authority figure, every lecture, every monument, every classmate, and even the young, eager, and ambitious reflection in the mirror oozed military leadership. This, I propose, is your curse.

Leadership is a curse? Perhaps.

Let's explore this by examining the missions of the three largest academies. USNA is the only one that claims to prepare graduates for a life outside the military.  It claims to prepare its midshipmen for 'citizenship', but only as a 'future' state to achieve after being 'dedicated to a career of naval service'. USMA and USAFA make no pretense about it. Graduates are being prepared for service as officers in the Army or Air Force.

By mission statement and real world execution, the service academies build a special brand of leadership that enables victory in warfare. This is necessary since America needs people who can lead warriors. But since the vast majority of us leave the service prior to completing military careers, all but a select few of us are living outside the academy mission. Therefore, something within the hearts of our alumni ranks cries out for us to evolve into something counter-cultural to the environment that shaped us as young adults. This leads to a revealing observation.

By choosing to leave the service, you took action that implies that your deep and enduring military leadership programming conflicts with your true nature.

Of course, this statement warrants an examination of the relationship between military leadership programming, other possible programming you could have undergone or may yet undergo, and your true self.  Such an examination is complex and the subjects of different posts. For this post, let's assume that there is at least some degree of difference between the expected result of academy-grade military leadership programming and the average service academy graduate.

Therefore, from the psychological perspective, I believe that our subconscious minds accepted the conditioning of the academies, which creates, on average, some degree of internal conflict. Worse, since repeated programming over years embeds itself in the subconscious mind, most of us are unaware of this conflict's full depth and breadth.

Self-awareness is vital and separates humans from all animals except elephants, apes, and dolphins, (http://www.livescience.com/animals/061030_elephant_mirror.html). Imagine the horror of being hidden from your nature by programming that says you're something that you're not. Imagine the sadness, the anxiety, the anger, and the emptiness of trying to live up to the mission of the academy when your DNA and innate strengths have set your gifted character traits, drives, and desires in different direction.

I call that a curse.

This, of course, excludes those who feel or felt that they were in their destined place while leading warriors. If this describes you, I invite you to keep reading this blog because the insights will apply to the broad population of service academy graduates in your charge, and you may gain a better understanding of how embodying the academy's mission is part of your identity.

For the rest of us, the majority, there is a good chance that self-awareness eludes us. Unless you take the action to reprogram yourself, this blindness and its resultant internal struggle are your fate, even if you've been out of the academy for decades. Subconscious drives don't change until you invest in a repeated conscious effort to change them.

The intent of this blog is to help each other change, rediscover our gifts from an enlightened perspective, and become what we were individually destined to become.

Enjoy, reflect, and share your thoughts through comments.

Thank you,

John H. USNA '91

Future posts

• Military leadership versus generalized leadership. Limits and challenges of transition and ongoing lifetime development.
• How to succeed and develop a powerful sense of self-esteem outside a leadership role.
• Why did we sign up in the first place? Were we already trapped in someone else's vision for us? Were we trying to prove something because we felt a need to prove?
• Self-awareness – the academy restricted this discovery during our formative early adulthood. How can we achieve it now, and why it's never too late.
• Lessons learned - case studies in those who have successfully reprogrammed themselves.
• Accepting your limits and celebrating mistakes as learning experiences.
• Asking for help. A lot of us have been through serious issues, life threating or not. If you're processing your traumas and grief alone, stop!
• Sticking together. Whether or not the academy churned out the authentic version of you, you shared incredible experiences with people you may not have even met.
• Updating or even throwing out score cards. Grades, class rank, net worth? Which indicators apply in the past, which count today, and where should we set the bars?
• Spirituality, emotions, and being human – the stuff that was tangential back then deserves more attention now.