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