A Leadership Lesson Hiding in Plain Sight

Leadership lessons come in many guises. One is that your life and the lives of the people you relate to can change radically in an instant. ?

It is a change that happens not so much in the world but in the mind. ?

Here is a leadership lesson from decades ago: The world our leadership interacts with is not what we want it to be or what we think it is, it simply IS. ?

This change that I experienced was having the other shoe drop. When it did, I realized that you often don’t know you’re in a war until you are really in it, and that’s the leadership lesson.?

Here’s the deal.?After 9/11, our nation’s leaders said we were in a war. Most people could agree with that.??We saw war on television, in Afghanistan, in Iraq.?We read about it in the papers.?But for me on the civilian side of things, it didn’t seem like war.?Life went on as before.?We saw people on the streets, at their jobs, at airports, on the highways.?They were all supposed to be at war.?Don’t you make sacrifices in war??Nobody but the troops were making sacrifices.?Life on the home front seemed pretty much like the peace before 9/11.??

?Then one shoe dropped: My son, a Marine who had been a raider company commander in the Far East, a peaceful Far East, was sent to Afghanistan.?Still, I didn’t think this nation was truly at war.?After all, my son had been to a lot of danger areas in peace time.?

Then a few months later, just last week in fact, the other shoe dropped.?A Marine general said, “Everybody in this room will be in combat in a year.?I can assure you of that.”

He was speaking to 60 graduates of the Infantry Officers Course in a mess hall at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia.?These second lieutenants had just completed a tough three-month course, learning about the weapons, the logistics, the tactics, and of being Marine small-unit leaders.?They had gone through a lot of training to be eligible to enter IOC, some at the Naval Academy, others at Officers Candidate School, and all of them a six-month program called the Marine Corps Basic School.?But the training they received these last three months added the important edge to their leadership.?Now they were headed out to the real world, to what the Marines called “the fleet,” the Fleet Marine Force.?And this general was providing the sendoff.?

My youngest son was one of these young lions. Within three days, he would pick up a rifle platoon at a Marine base in North Carolina. After six months training, they would deploy eastward.?He and I were sitting together having just eaten a breakfast of steak and eggs, traditional for that graduation, which always takes place early in the morning so the lieutenants can get a quick start traveling to their far-flung duty stations.

The tablecloths were Marine Corps camouflage. The Marines were in their camouflage field uniforms.?The ceremony was stripped down to essentials: simply, each officer getting his graduation packet and a handshake from the general, standing before the assembly, reciting a quote that usually had to do with leadership and war, then returning to his seat.?

The general went on to talk what about he’s learned about leadership over the years, primarily that there is a spiritual component to all leadership, and about his visiting the wounded Marines in the Naval hospital in Maryland and meeting the flag-draped coffins coming off the planes at Dover Air Force Base, and that there will be many more wounded and many more flag-draped coffins in this time of war and finally that there was no more hallowed pursuit than leading soldiers into combat.

The next time I would see the general would be in the Naval hospital where he came to visit my son who was recovering from his combat wounds received leading a platoon of Marines along the Euphrates river.

So, now I know.?We lead in realities we often fail not only to connect with but to even understand. “Everybody in this room will be in combat in a year.?I can assure you of that.”

As a leader, you often don’t know you are in a reality until somebody or something wakes you up to that reality.

Leadership reality isn’t what we want it to be. Instead, it is what is difficult for many of us to grasp.?It is simply and profoundly what is.

Copyright ? The Filson Leadership Group, Inc.

The author of some 40 published books, Brent Filson’s latest two leadership books are: “The Leadership Talk: 7 Days to Motivating People to Achieve Exceptional Results” and “107 Ways to Achieve Great Leadership Talks.” A former Marine infantry platoon and company commander, he is the founder of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc., which for 40 years has helped thousands of leaders of all ranks and functions in top companies worldwide achieve sustained increases in hard, measured results. He has published some 150 articles on leadership and been a guest on scores of radio/tv shows. His mission is to have leaders replace their traditional presentations with his specially developed, motivating process, The Leadership Talk. www.brentfilson.com and theleadershiptalk.com.

Besides having lectured about the Leadership Talk at MIT Sloan School of Management, Columbia University, Wake Forest, Villanova, Williams, Middlebury, Filson brought the Leadership Talk to leaders in these organizations: Abbott, Ameritech, Anheuser-Busch, Armstrong World Industries, AT&T, BASF, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Bose, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Campbell Sales, Canadian Government, CNA, DuPont, Eaton Corporation, Exelon, First Energy, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, GTE, Hartford Steam Boiler, Hershey Foods, Honeywell, Houghton Mifflin, IBM, Meals-on-Wheels, Merck, Miller Brewing Company, NASA, PaineWebber, Polaroid, Price Waterhouse, Roadway Express, Sears Roebuck, Spalding International, Southern Company, The United Nations, Unilever, UPS, Union Carbide, United Dominion Industries, U.S. Steel, Vermont State Police, Warner Lambert — and more