Compliance with Army regulations: An indication of good leadership, or not?

Sir, I am sure there is a place somewhere where everything that is on paper makes sense...on paper.

From a "NCOs make it happen" point of view, I can tell you that good leadership is that which understands that the mission is important but the people accomplishing is even more so.
Being the 'yes sir' company commander will invariably result in low morale because well...the CO doesn't know when to say no we cant, or we will but we'll need these adjustments made, etc.

So with that said, most of the time, in order to accomplish every single mission that is placed in front of us, regulations are bent, or ignored, or "tweaked". I understand your point of view, by the book everything will work out, but real life is not quite that simple sir.

Take this for instance: Our TMC is roughly 8 miles away from our hangar, so whenever our soldiers do go, they barely have time to make it because by regs they have to be present at first formation in order to get the slip...so they can go (our TMC had only a 30 minute window where they see soldiers for sick call). So, regulation is playing against us, so, sometimes we bend, tweak and adjust.

Or if we did everything by the book, aviation maintenance would take 4 times longer than it currently does. Mind you, we still do it by the book, it's just that as you get experience, you know what tasks can be combined with others to get to the same end result. By the book. But then QC wants you to do it step by step as outlined in the book...yet PC expects you do it in 1/4 of the time that it would take you if you do it the way QC wants, and so on and so forth. Mission would not be accomplished.

Regulations always make sense when they are written and developed, but sometimes months and years have passed since they were created and they do not reflect the advances we, doing things by regulation, encounter in the field.

I'm sure that getting all greens in the DSR is an accomplishment in the daily staff meetings but it comes at a price that more often than not is never recognized or quantified.

Throughout my 40 career, both in the Marines and in civilian life, the worst bosses were those whose primary leadership principle was "The rules are the rules!" On the other hand, I remember what I had to do to get a couple of state airport grants. I had to break a couple of procedural rules to get it done. I always admitted publicly what I did. I was always reminded that I had broken the rules, to which I always asked do you want me to give the money back? They would simply smile and walk away.
Leadership is much more than following rules. It is a balancing act to fulfill the first mission of any leader - getting the job that you were hired to get done. I was recently reminded of how the Navy fired almost every submarine commander they had in the six months following Pearl Harbor. Why? Because they were following all of the rules but not sinking any Japenese ships. So the Navy replaced them with commanders who could sink ship but didn't give a damn about rules. After the war they replaced these commanders with those who follow rules. The lesson? When a job absolutely has to be done the rules become secondary to accomplishing the mission. It is true that "It is better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission" if you hope to accomplish anything difficult in life.

A great deal of harm has been done by "leaders" who live and die by blanket compliance with the rules. There is always the possibility for an exception to a rule or regulation, you just need to go high enough in the chain of command for the decision to be made. A good leader knows when to seek out that exception and when not to.

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The best leaders are not measured by how well they follow the rules, rather they are measured by how well they accomplish the assigned mission. Often accomplishing a tough mission will necessitate breaking some rules.