In this post, I’ll comment on some of the different lessons we covered during the Leadership block of our academia.

Anyone can pull up the syllabus and see the lesson list for my class, but what I’d like to try to do in this post is include a bit of my thoughts on a few lessons and the block as a whole.

The list of lessons is pretty generic, overall:

• Know Yourself
• Know Your Team
• Culture & Climate
• Clarity of Purpose
• Understanding Thinking
• Ethical Reasoning
• Full-Range Leadership Model/ Meta Leadership
• Followership
• Team Building Considerations
• Team Problem Solving

If I were to summarize the idea behind this list, it’s this series of questions being answered over the course of the academic block:

Who are you? How do you fit into your organization? What’s your organization’s environment like? What does your organization do? How does your organization do what it does and why does it do it that way? Is the purpose of your organization and the How that your organization follows ethically conducted (and are you sure?)? What tools might benefit the development and practice of your leadership?

Know Yourself / Who are you?

While this is a simple question to ask, it’s rather loaded, isn’t it?

I don’t know about you, but I could provide dozens of answers to this question.

From taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, I have an ENTJ-A, or “Commander,” personality type.

I’m a 30-year old, mixed black and Filipino male.

I’m an electrical engineering graduate from Georgia Southern University and an MBA post-graduate from the University of Central Oklahoma.

I am married to a female nurse/ fitness instructor.

I am friends with a variety of people, including a wide range of Who They Are. Those relationships have had large and small impacts on Who I Am.

I’m an Air Force Acquisition Captain with 12 years of federal service, the bulk of which was time in the Reserves as an Avionics Technician on C-17s at Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina.

I’m a lot more things than that, too, and every little bit of that matters in some way.

This lesson asks us to identify, recognize, and share answers to this question not only to benefit the flight in understanding who you are, but also to promote self-awareness. If you don’t recognize your own perspective and where it came from, it can be difficult to make valuable changes and develop into a better leader.

Know Your Team / How do you fit into your organization?

The natural succession from Knowing Yourself, this lesson goes a bit beyond what is primarily self-identification into effectively taking that input from others and beginning to facilitate a cohesive team environment where everyone is valued within that diversity.

Said another way, I can tell you who I am, but that’s not the same as you hearing who I am and making good decisions about how to use that information for us to become (more) effective teammates.

Culture & Climate / What is your organization’s environment like?

While you may have tools to better understand yourself and your team members, this lesson looks at the organizational environment in which you and your team exist. Then, it promotes examining that environment and whether it is conducive to the balance between getting the job done effectively while taking care of your team. I would say the lesson does not necessarily provide ways to improve the environment, instead emphasizing awareness of causes. You’ll still have to do some work when you leave SOS.

Taking care of your team is not just ensuring that they maintain their pillars of health, but also ensuring that they also develop into better versions of themselves. Regardless of whether you take this lesson or not, failing to grasp its points can leave a young leader confused about the ‘mood’ of their organization.

Clarity of Purpose / What does your organization do?

I struggled with this lesson. The intent behind it was essentially for our flight to come up with a purpose statement. I do not recall how early this lesson was in the class, but we were thirteen different people with a varied perspective on why we were attending Squadron Officer School that just happened to be thrown into the same flight. Some of us were honestly just enjoying a sort of break away from high operational tempo jobs. Some of us were truly interested in learning how to be better leaders, enthusiastic about developing from company grade officers to field grade officers. Some of us knew we had to attend and just wanted to have as low stress an experience as possible.

The one defining interest in our flight at that time was wanting to finish the class, but we were not permitted to write out such a purpose statement. Ultimately, we came up with a purpose statement that I frankly don’t remember seeing again after that lesson was completed. We might have produced something more useful later in the course after we had gotten to know each other a lot better.

Maybe SOS should examine the placement of this lesson in the syllabus; maybe the hope is that the flights would revisit this purpose statement over the brief stint at Maxwell. At the very least, perhaps SOS should toss this at the class in the last week, as an opportunity for focused reflection.

I dunno. It felt like a good idea poorly executed.

Understanding Thinking / How and Why are things done?

This was a fun lesson and I won’t spoil it with my thoughts beyond this: If nothing else in this entire course makes you think twice (and I’m pretty sure most of them will), this one is guaranteed to do so. That’s literally the point of this one.

Ethical Reasoning / Is this ethical? Are we sure?

This was another very fun lesson albeit with necessarily interrupted discussion. There was never enough time to discuss things in class, and unfortunately, most of these discussions never extended beyond the classroom.

This lesson seeks to encourage us to recognize different ethical frameworks and perspectives on morality. It does not go so far as to encourage us to try to understand viewpoints that we may not necessarily agree with as well as really understand our own viewpoints, nor does it go so far as to ask us to critically evaluate these myriad viewpoints, even if our flight commander definitely encouraged exactly that.

I think it is very unfortunate that I do not remember anyone in the room demonstrating any prior investigation into ethical frameworks, but to be fair, none of us are professional philosophers. Perhaps the likes of General Mattis would posit that we should be, but that’s besides the point. It would have helped if more of us had even a beginner concept of consequentialism, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics. Exploring these concepts should not be unique to SOS, especially in the context of leadership development. Hint, hint.

Before I end up on a completely unrelated train of thought, I’ll just cut my thoughts on this lesson with a reminder that each of these lessons is supposed to build into the next. Explicitly, knowing yourself includes knowing why you believe what you believe and why, questioning why you believe what you believe and why, and being continuously open to changing what you believe and why based on your interactions with others, the shared environments you experience, and the goals among all parties you interact with.

Part 1 Conclusion

This is the first bit of my thoughts on the Leadership block from my time at Squadron Officer School. In the next post, I’ll cover my thoughts on the last four lessons of the block.

Thank you for checking out this post – if you’re heading to SOS soon, I hope you find it useful. If you’ve already been to SOS, I hope you find this as a good source of additional reflection or worth discussing!

Please feel free to hit me with thoughts, questions, criticisms, or other comments you may have!