To Be Effective, The Corps’ New Toxic Leadership Test Will Have To Be Marine-Proof

Alright.....so this just added some sections to my dissertation.

I like the idea of having objective, repeatable, and enforced metrics on Leadership within the Corps (and the rest of the services). When I got my Masters (in leadership), one of my oft repeated statements as to why I was pursuing that degree was "I wanted to formalize my informal knowledge."

The Marine Corps is outstanding about emphasizing the importance of Leadership. It is also very good at teaching and delegating Leadership down to the lower echelons. Out structure is designed around it.

However, we have lots of "competing systems" which incentivize specific behavior patterns. Some of those patterns parallel with the concept of Toxic Leadership (an often ill-defined term). As an example, statistical promotions (granting junior grades positional Leadership authority) are heavily weighted towards concepts which are not Leadership based (Physical Fitness, Rifle Range). This is not to imply "perceptual" or "example based" leadership does not exist, only that we often make the correlation vs causation logical fallacy.

The proposed "on-line" test (again for junior grades looking to progress to careerist status) suffers the same concerns. If any test (outside of objective regulation) were to be used as a disqualifier, I would have serious concerns about implementation and execution.

If you are not a marine, do an about face and kindly STFU. Enough dirt in your own house to sweep up before you tell another how they should operate.

PO1 Tony Holland thanks for the read/share.