In this post, I’ll continue to comment on some of the different lessons we covered during the Leadership block of our academia. In case you somehow missed it, here’s a link to Part 1 of this topic.

I already covered the first six items on this list, so this post will round out the last four lessons.

• 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

As stated in the previous post, I feel that most of these lessons could be treated as a series through which the flights answer a series of questions. It’s my view that these last four lessons all answer this question:

What tools might benefit the development and practice of your leadership?

Full-Range Leadership Model/ Meta Leadership

I had a difficult time staying engaged with this lesson, but the intent of the lesson was to provide a pretty wide range of leadership techniques that are used today. There was also a good chunk of reading available regarding the evolution of these leadership models throughout relatively recent (early 1900s, I think) history.

I think the breadth of content in this lesson is what made it a tad dry for me, but I think it is fair to say that the models presented are very good general ideas that allow most individuals to easily be on the same page in a discussion about how they each lead.

What I suspect most people will get out of this lesson is a set of frameworks that they can examine or embrace, or use to explain their own existing framework. There may also be a bit of frustration as a result of this lesson; it can be a lot to ask someone to sit for up to three hours to think about and discuss stuff that may not necessarily be applicable to everyone, even if it can be agreed upon that the content is generally useful.

That is the nature of the beast of widely-provided, generic training I suppose.

Followership

While there may only be a single or some hierarchy of supervisors and managers in an organization, every participant in an organization can be a leader. This lesson dives into that idea, provides discussion as to how followership was viewed historically, and concludes with a discussion on how leadership and followership are obligatory.

Leaders cannot do it alone and depend on their followers. That said, it’s important to recognize  leader-follower relationships and the nuances in them so that either side (but ideally both) can create a most effective relationship. Having a strong understanding of what a leader is trying to do enables a follower to best align with that leader. Having a strong understanding of what a follower can do or is willing to do enables a leader to best align that follower with a leader’s purpose. Having a strong mutual understanding of each other allows a leader and followers to work together to maximize progress on their shared and individual goals.

I think it’s a good reminder that our position hardly matters in the grand scheme of leadership development in the sense that you have to grow wherever you go: particularly as an acquisition officer, I am not likely to be in a position over airmen until senior captain or junior major. Even then, the number of people and the interaction therewith is also not likely to be much. From a follower perspective, I still had roles to play, ideas to articulate, and influence to exude. All of these interactions make a difference, however small they may seem or however small they may even be.

Team Building Considerations

This lesson, as far as I remember it, was literally just a discussion. The prompt for the discussion was the likely-familiar team building steps of Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing.

Rather than the eight weeks provided at Basic Military Training for our enlisted folks or Officer Training School for our commissioned folks (at least in my experiences), Squadron Officer School only offered us five-ish weeks to try to get through these phases. From that same perspective, however, I had zero concept of recognized stages of team building during BMT and merely knew about them during OTS. At SOS, I was equipped with having thought about these phases a bit more.

I won’t exhaustively recap the phases if you are unfamiliar with them, but for a snapshot of the ideas:

Forming: You’re just being introduced to each other.

Storming: You’ve been introduced to each other and conflicts emerge despite (and/or perhaps because of?) your best efforts.

Norming: You have a generalized team approach to tasks.

Performing: You use your team approach in conjunction with a developed team context to function effectively as a team.

Even if you do not think about this much before going, I would like to impress upon you my strong opinion this idea: The Storming phase is important and valuable for the development of your team.

My flight generally felt so strongly that we skipped over the Storming phase, failing to acknowledge (because I believe some of us did recognize) that we simply avoided conflicts. This aversion to conflict meant that genuine concerns or ideas were not shared nor discussed, meaning that we unintentionally but still intensely limited our potential as a team. The sentiment against storming was so strong in our flight that the SOS-intended storming generator did not work on our flight. 

Do not fear Storming. Be genuinely yourself, voice your opinions, be open to constructive discussions (and arguments), and be professional. All of this is logically compatible. I go so far as to say it’s professionally necessary for not only your development as an officer, but for your peers, as well.

I would also say that it’s reasonable to read the room. I think I mentioned before that some people show up to SOS with the idea that they are going to relax. I think it’s fair to disagree but recognize that many of your teammates just might not care, so there is an element of selecting what hills and swords you want to fall upon throughout the course as you interact with your teams. My go-to idea was to at least state that I disagreed, but due to whatever (time, interest, energy, what have you), I would go with the widely selected option. I suppose I could be weirdly explicit at times, but it seems better to me to express than suppress.

Storming is not bad. Storming is very important. Be genuinely you. Be conscious that others are their genuine selves.

Team Problem Solving

Finally, the haunting lesson. During this lesson, you discuss problem solving and conclude by ‘designing’ a team problem solving process for your flight. Your mileage may vary, but our flight commander would consistently remind us of our process throughout the rest of the course, hence the idea that this is a haunting lesson.

Similar to the Clarity of Purpose lesson which concluded with a forgettable vision statement, this lesson’s final product (albeit just merely less forgettable) is meant to be revisited and iterated upon. Unlike the Clarity of Purpose final product, we actually made use of the Problem Solving method we scrambled together.

Sort of.

I won’t spoil the lesson, but I will also make an impression or two, here: 

Actually use the thing. It cuts out a ton of wandering brains when it comes to solving problems, especially when your time constraints are severe and there are at least a dozen brains active. 

Actually revise it with the feedback you develop. Don’t try to build with broken tools. If you find that your method does not work effectively (and you probably will find exactly that), take out the bad, build in the nuances that make sense, and make it work for you. You are not locked into any one way of doing things.

Conclusion

I apologize if a lot of this just feels super vague – again, you can ask me questions with the comment box below; if I don’t think it spoils the SOS experience, I’m very likely to try to give you a satisfactory answer.

Keep in mind that most of the SOS lessons are intended to build into each other in some way. Because of that and the go-to idea that you get out of it what you put into it, I think it is very important that you at least look at the purpose of each lesson before it starts. Even if you do not read all of the pre-work content available for each lesson, having an idea to bring to the discussions makes the experience more enjoyable and educational.

Don’t gaslight yourself into believing that you can avoid storming. If it never happens, you are likely to simply never see good norming or performing.

This concludes my brief thoughts on the Leadership block of SOS. If you have thoughts, questions, comments, criticisms, whatever, feel free to throw them my way via the comment block!

The next post will be about the Strategic Design block, which I honestly found super fascinating and wish this sort of thing was covered in earlier professional military education…

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you found it to provoke reflection, curiosity, or ideas, and I hope you’ll visit my blog again soon!