Posted on May 7, 2016
Lt Col Commander
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Think in 4 dimensions: How will your decisions impact your superiors, peers, subordinates, and successor.

If you cannot change the people, change the people.

Own failure and share success. (Teams succeed, leaders lose)

Demand best effort, not maximum effort. (Maximum effort cannot be sustained without trade offs)

Hold true to your own values and the organizations values. (they may differ but as a leader you must deal with both)
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Responses: 16
Sgt Ammunition Technician
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You have to be trustworthy, fair, genuinley care for those below you, empower them and show them you will do what you are asking of them. Lower enlisted get some real shitty jobs. It comes with the rank, but if they think they are doing it bc you are avoiding it yourself, you'll never get their respect which means you'll never get the most out of them. If you dont empower them, you cant teach them how to be a leader and they wont ever feel like they matter
I needed a ditch cleaned the other day. Its about a foot deep, barely shoulder width and covered by a steel grate thats a real pain to move. So the best bet is to low crawl with a broom head and push the dust and trash ahead to the next open grate as you crawl. I explained the process then did the first 20 or 30 feet (of about 200 feet) myself while my lcpl watched. Then i put him in charge of the project and told him he could use all the help he could get as long as it got done in a week
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COL Strategic Plans Chief
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This is too narrow of a forum to discuss this topic in the necessary detail. A leadership philosophy must enable leader development. Leader development requires a detailed plan. What are your requirements for leaders, what do you expect them to become and how are you going to enable that process? Step one is defining what you expect from yourself and other leaders. A good place to start is your service requirements or definitions. The Army has a Leader Development Strategy which defines multiple required characteristics. From there, you have to take "bumper stickers," like the ones you have above and turn them into something a little more concrete. "Hold true to your own values and the organizations values." That can be contradictory. Did you mean it to be? Have you identified your own values and made your subordinated identify theirs? If you have not, you have immediately set your organization up for failure. You have set a goal that cannot be achieved and if it can, may result in someone doing the wrong thing for the right reasons...every time. The Army says it's values are "LDRSHIP:" Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage. As a Squadron Commander, every Friday I held a new-comers' orientation. I asked them what the most valuable thing in their life was. Invariably, everyone said Family. There is no "F" in LDRSHIP. Thus, you immediately have a conflict. Everyone says that the most important thing in their life is Family. Not Loyalty. Not Selfless Service. My argument was that an organization can't have values. An organization has ethics. If you violate those ethics, you get punished. Reconcile your values with the ethics and understand the differences and where you will chose to slide the scale between them. Without this knowledge, you are acting on impulse...which is dangerous. Expand the bumper stickers with concrete examples of how these things present themselves on a daily basis to provide someone with the ability to understand them better. I asked that my leaders be comfortable in ambiguous situations. That's a requirement. I didn't leave it at that though. I gave concrete examples of how you see that characteristic play out in military business. I then set up training which would provide ambiguous situations, leaving gaps in information and training and then assessing how the leaders performed during these actions. Identify, define, design, train, assess. I created my entire training plan for 2 years based around leader development using my philosophy. Nested it with the Army, FORSCOM, Corps and Division leader development and training plans. We wrote entire orders about how this would happen. Once again, too narrow here for anything but bumper stickers and platitudes.
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1LT Chaplain Candidate
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Thank you very much for this insight sir! Is there any chance at all that I could possibly get my hands on any of your training resources? I would love to learn from your experiences and share it with others.
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SSG(P) Software Developer
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Give subordinates a chance to succeed. Teach them how to accomplish the task at hand and make the call to give them a chance to do it themselves. If their ability comes under scrutiny, own it by affirming you believe in their ability to accomplish the task (and therefore your ability to lead them). Recognise their success through praise, and their shortcomings through Motivation.
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1LT Chaplain Candidate
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In maintaining this, how does one balance the positive attitude of encouragement with the somewhat negative enforcement of criticizing failures to meet Army standards. By this I mean, I tend to get upset with soldiers who constantly show a lack of motivation. My instincts, from how I was brought up in the Army, can often be to get angry and hot and start lighting them up. I understand how this is an immature style of leadership. What's the disconnect that I might be missing?
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SSG(P) Software Developer
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Instead of criticizing give them goals they can accomplish and then move the bar higher until they are making the standard. Sometimes explaining why the standard is in place helps understand it, some people need to know why the standard exists or why it is important.
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