Leadership and Education

My Take on Leadership and Education

What does it take to become a great leader? Many tomes have been written throughout history seeking to uncover the magic in creating great leaders. For the purposes of this newsletter, I will write an abridged essay based on my four decades of experience in uniform.

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) distills the formula for great leadership down to four essential skills, (1) Self Awareness, (2) Communication, (3) Influence, and (4) Learning Agility. They define self-awareness as knowing and leading yourself is key to becoming as effective as possible at leading others. They define communication as “Writing clearly, speaking with clarity, and active listening.” They define influence as working effectively with people over whom you have no authority, and presenting logical and compelling argument to steer, inspire, and motivate people to do what you want. And finally, learning agility is being in a mode of constant learning, valuing, and seeking out experiences to fuel leadership development, and recognizing when new behaviors, leadership skills, or attitudes are required.

My experience is mostly outside of the corporate boardroom, but I know what true leadership entails. In my opinion, leadership in the military is different than leadership in business. In the military, leaders may have to inspire their subordinates to follow them into life-or-death battle. Very few businesses get that intense. But the basics are the same in all environments. And the common thread among those four essential characteristics listed by the CCL is education.? Proper and enriched education puts leaders above their peers. For the military point-of-view, subordinates are always watching. Fresh recruits will initially be impressed and even cowed by rank alone. Seasoned veterans who know what is going on watch more closely, and leaders must earn their respect. From my experience, subordinate troops group their commanders and leaders into three main categories, (1) inspirational, (2) Let’s survive until this commander rotates to a new post, and (3) a complete joke and liability. I am fairly certain similar categories are common in the business world.? As an aspiring leader, one should try to avoid being in the second and third category. In order to earn one’s place in the first category, one must master the four CCL essentials with education.

I am the Chair of two charter school boards of directors in West Virginia. These schools concentrate on classical education to outperform the public schools. Classical education is the tradition of education that has emphasized the seeking after of truth, goodness, and beauty and the study of the liberal arts and the great books. The liberal arts are grammar, logic, rhetoric (the verbal arts of the trivium), arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (the mathematical arts of the quadrivium). The classical approach teaches students how to learn and how to think. Regardless of their learning style, children learn in three phases or stages (grammar, logic or dialectic, and rhetoric), known as the trivium. In the grammar stage (K–6), students are naturally adept at memorizing through songs, chants, and rhymes. If you can get children in this stage to sing or chant something, they will remember it for a lifetime. In the dialectic or logic stage (grades 7–9), teenage students are naturally more argumentative and begin to question authority and facts. They want to know the “why” of something—the logic behind it. During this stage, students learn reasoning, informal and formal logic, and how to argue with wisdom and eloquence. The rhetoric stage (grades 10–12) is naturally when students become independent thinkers and communicators. They study and practice rhetoric, which is the art of persuasive speaking and effective writing that positively influences the listener/reader. This approach to teaching students based on their developmental stage makes this approach very effective.

One can plainly see how this educational method would prepare future leaders for self-awareness, communication, influence, and learning agility. But let me give you examples from real-life in operational war situations.

With self-awareness, military members, especially operational or combat arms service members who have made it high in enlisted or officer ranks, are not shy. They are mostly type-A people who will let you know what they are thinking, no matter what your rank is. They will voice their opinion about other service members in their units (and you as their leader) if that particular service member is not performing. In most of the military services, we have a tradition called the “debrief” or the after-action report, that is a complete critique of any training mission or actual mission. The best leaders learn from these debriefs and learn from their mistakes to become better the next time.

With communication, in the military, leaders are often tasked with giving clear and concise orders focused on the mission that everyone can understand and not have to spend time interpreting. This will help subordinates make decisions and take action even when the commander is not present. Any vague on unclear orders can cause death in the operational environment. Similarly, in the business realm, unclear instructions can cost money. Proper education enables leaders to form easy-to-understand directives and free the leader from micromanagement.

Let’s talk about influence. How many people can talk other humans into charging toward a machine gun nest, or flying a mission with low odds of returning alive? Any leader who has that talent earned it by being among the best in his/her field and demonstrating that he/she would not order anyone to do anything they would not do. Some of that stems from courage, but most of it stems from technical and tactical proficiency. Proficiency comes from the ability to learn.

Finally, when we speak of learning agility, reasoning and logic absolutely help a leader to quickly realize when the plan is going well, and when it is time to change the plan.? Lives depend on this.

For these reasons, I am a staunch advocate of school choice. I have watched major cities in the United States (Chicago, Baltimore, NYC, etc.) fail their children by allowing these children to move on in grade when these same children cannot read or do math at grade level. Currently in New York City, there are more than 50 charter schools operated by the Success Academy. These charter schools have mostly “minority” children, and they vastly outperform other charter schools and the NYC Public Schools.

Public schools already spend more per child than charter schools, and they continue to lag behind.? Continuing with the same formula will only hasten the demise of our children. If our nation truly wants to develop leaders who will keep the United States the most powerful and respected nation on earth, our citizens have to demand school choice. If public schools want to compete, they need to get better.