Category Archives: Leadership

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Achieving Effects with Your Boss, pt. 3: Decision Time

So far in the Achieving Effects with Your Boss series, we’ve covered how to make the right first impression and how to engage your boss with intention. Now that you’re comfortable with the leadership environment your boss has established, it’s time to discuss how to influence their decision making to achieve effects for you, your team, and the greater organization.

Boss

Secretary of the Army John McHugh listens as Commander of the Combined Arms Center Lt. Gen. David G. Perkins briefs during a visit at the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, April 20, 2012 at Joint Base Langley–Eustis, Va. U.S. Army Photo by Staff Sgt. Bernardo Fuller.
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Professional Development, One Paragraph at a Time (ProDev2Go)

A New Blog by Ross Coffman

What does an Army Colonel do after he finishes killing it in brigade command? …Start a professional development blog, of course! Today, let me highlight a new blog that you’ll definitely want to make part of your professional development plan.

ProDev2Go just fired up last month, but is the continuation of a groundbreaking leader development approach by one of the most successful brigade commanders in the Army today.

ProDev2Go

Breaking Barriers

While in command down at Fort Bliss, Colonel Ross Coffman sought a new way to connect his Troops with his leader development vision, something better than the usual death by PowerPoint. So, he got a Twitter account, then created a YouTube and podcast channel called Ready First. He and his Command Sergeant Major used this novel approach to communicate with the command, relay their leader development and tactical experience, and show that Army leaders are capable of getting out of their comfort zone to reach their people.

Rapid Fire Mentorship

Now, as a testament that the best leaders never stop looking for ways to have positive influence, Colonel Coffman dove head first into the blogging world and created ProDev2Go as a way to provide high quality leader development in short bursts. The concept is simple:

As a “Leader on the Go” we understand that you desire a succinct learning opportunity that provides a written glide path for success.  This leader development site is a single paragraph of lessons learned that you can use in a practical role in your workplace, job, business, or employment. We are changing Leaders one Paragraph at a time!!!

Plugging into ProDev2Go is like being mentored by a brigade commander, something we all could benefit from. You’ll find insight on trust, mission command, leader development, warfighting doctrine, and many other useful topics.

Head on over there now and check it out!

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The Leadership Bottleneck

What happens when managers and leaders cross lines (by Philip Gift)

As editor of The Military Leader, I want to introduce this post. Philip Gift is a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot, studied engineering at the Naval Academy, and has offered this thorough analysis of leadership through a lens of Operations Research. It is so far the longest post on this site, but you will find that his insights apply to a wide range of leadership, management, and operations topic areas. You can find his expanded byline at the end of the post.

Many people view Operations Research, if they view it at all, as dealing solely with numbers. Operations Research is more than just numbers; it is primarily about the thought process to get those numbers. An example of this would be increasing the throughput of an assembly line. Adding more resources at the beginning of the line does not necessarily mean there will be an increase to the quantity of the product at the end of the line within the same timeframe. No matter how much is put into the assembly line, it will not be able to produce any more if the slowest point in the assembly line is not quickened.

Leadership Bottleneck

ABOARD USS IWO JIMA (LHD 7) — An MH-53 helicopter prepares to depart the flight deck of USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7) September 25 for assesments along the Louisana/Texas coast following Hurricane Rita’s landfall. U. S. Navy Photo by Photographer’s Mate Second Class (AW/SW) Robert Jay Stratchko

By viewing a problem through an Operations Research lens and breaking down the assembly line into its key components, the slowest point can be discovered. Once this point is discovered, a fix can be put in place that would eliminate this bottleneck and allow the assembly line to increase productivity.

The same Operations Research lens used to view the assembly line and break down the key components can be used in non-number related situations, such as leadership. An organization can have better leadership once the bottleneck is discovered and fixed. The leadership bottleneck is non-leadership roles, such as managers, encroaching on the leader’s responsibility.

Just like in the assembly line, no matter how good the leader is, he will not be able to succeed and thus the organization will not flourish without fixing this bottleneck. Managers create this issue because they feel they have all the needed information. When this information is not routinely gathered with face-to-face interactions, though, it is only partial and will lead to poor decisions and create a disconnection with the rest of the work force.

We have ‘Stone Age minds in a space-age universe’.
– An evolutionary psychologist caricature of humans. (Dunbar, 161)

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Leadership in Action: Colonel Charles A. Beckwith

by Phil Walter

In 1977, after many years of advocating for the U.S. Army to develop a capability similar to the British 22nd Special Air Service (SAS) and in response to multiple terrorist incidents worldwide, Colonel Charles A. Beckwith established the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-DELTA.

DELTA’s mission set included hostage rescue and specialized reconnaissance. [1]  On November 4, 1979, Islamic fundamentalists seized the United States Embassy in Tehran, Iran and took 53 U.S. diplomatic personnel hostage there. [2]  DELTA’s first mission would be to rescue these hostages.

Beckwith

Phil Walter has served in the military, the intelligence community, and the inter-agency. The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not contain information of an official nature. He tweets @philwalter1058 and blogs at www.philwalter1058.com.
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Making Destructive Comments (Habit Series #4)

Think back on your recent interactions. If I asked you how many times you made destructive comments towards the people you work with, how would you answer? “Destructive? No way. I’m a nice person. And when I do give feedback, it’s never destructive.” What about if I asked you how many times you talked negatively about someone when he or she wasn’t present? “Well sure, but everyone does that. It’s part of our culture.”

The topic we are approaching here is a silent leadership killer. Whose leadership, you ask? Yours, your boss’s, your subordinates’. Destructive comments slip into an organization, infect the culture, manifest as other problems, and kill the trust that leaders worked so hard to build.

Today, you’ll be guilty of making comments that can destroy your organization, and you likely don’t even know it.

destructive

Command Sgt. Maj. Alan D. Bjerke, command sergeant major of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, speaks to Canadian Soldiers during practice for a live fire event during Cooperative Spirit 2008 at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center near Hohenfels, Germany. Link to photo.
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14 Simple Ways to Connect with Your People

Leaders who find ways to connect with their people are the ones who build great teams, inspire the best performance, and rise to positions of influence when others wane. If you look back on your career, you’ll likely observe that the most impactful leaders were the ones who made a personal connection with you.

Maybe it was keen professional mentorship, or timely advice during adversity, or a personality trait that invited trust. Sometimes there’s no pinpointing it…just an intangible feeling that makes it easy to follow a person.

In the culture of busyness that we face today, it’s distressingly easy to ignore the personal side of leadership. But trust will never develop without a personal connection between leader and follower. And without trust, an organization will be confined to a transactional environment of mediocre results and melancholy people.

Connect

Sgt. Donald M. Khun, San Gabriel Valley Recruiting Company, right, presents Brooke Willis, spouse of the new company commander Capt. William G. Willis, with yellow roses to signify a bright new beginning at the change of command ceremony Mar. 15. Capt. William G. Willis, the new company commander is sitting to the left of Mrs. Willis, and their son Blake is sitting to her right.
Photo by Mr. Fernando Sanjurjo, U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion Los Angeles.
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I Admit It…I Forgot How to Workout

If you look at the picture below and can’t remember the last time you felt like that…this post is for you. The picture is a scene of pure exhaustion, of being tested well beyond your comfort zone, of giving more than you thought was possible. It’s discipline, passion, commitment, and courage, all in one moment.

(I hope) we have all been there before, maybe in Basic Training, or on a unit obstacle course, or during a short-lived flirt with CrossFit ten years ago. Combat arms schools test their students with exhaustive rites of passage to see if, somewhere down inside, they will have what it takes to survive the battlefield.

Leaders go through these trials, then as we become more senior we have the flexibility to avoid them. There are fewer and fewer people in a position to challenge us. The responsibility for pushing the limits shifts to the individual and what happens?…capability typically diminishes. We don’t continue the test and we get soft.

This is what happened to me.

workout

CORONADO, Calif. (April 11, 2011) – Students from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/s) Class 288 participate in log physical training (log PT) during the First Phase of training at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. Log PT is one of many physically demanding evolutions and has remained a part of BUD/s throughout the history of SEAL training.
(U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kyle D. Gahlau/Released)
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The Post-Active Duty Leadership Environment – Part 3 (Developing Leaders)

My goal is to contrast leadership development in my current environment with my experience on active duty in the U.S. Air Force’s Air Mobility Command (AMC). The thing is, I didn’t really experience much formal leadership development during those 12 years on active duty. So what do I want to share?

I’ve settled on this: The active duty Air Force is purging leaders that were developed the hard way over a decade of constant war and other contingency operations, while nearly exclusively retaining candidates who developed their careers and resumes according to official timelines and benchmarks. There is a need for both types of leaders and I want to close this series by advocating for a compromise. Strong leaders, in any stage of their careers, should be considered for positions that have come to be reserved for career development.

leaders

U.S. Air Force Capt. Chance Hansen, a C-130 Hercules aircraft pilot with the 36th Airlift Squadron, visually locates another C-130 over Japan Oct. 22, 2013, during a large-formation flight. (DoD photo by Yasuo Osakabe, U.S. Air Force/Released)