Developing Leaders

Guided Discovery.

Artist: GP Photography

How much do you work on your own development?

Suggested Reading

• FM 6-22, Developing Leaders

  • Pages 1-1 through 1-7 based on printed document (PDF pages 15-21)

  • An overview of the US Army’s leader development tenets, definitions, and expected evolution over a career

• Link to FM 6-22 on US Army Publishing Directorate

• This week’s Study: Be - Know - Do

• All excerpts below are from FM 6-22

Guided Discovery

Leader development by walking around—the continual face-to-face engagement by leaders during daily duties—is the most effective informal means of developing leaders at the platoon, company, battalion, and brigade level.
FM 6-22

You should view leader development and your own personal development as one.

1-1. There is no more important task for the U.S. Army than developing its people to lead others to defeat any enemy, anywhere. Developing leaders is inherently part of every garrison activity, training event, and real-world operation Army forces conduct around the world. Each leader–subordinate interaction is a development opportunity. They are inseparable from training, enforcing standards, providing feedback, and setting a personal example.

Whether in actual leadership roles or not, we are all working to influence the world around us. The most straightforward and intentional way of doing so is by leading. What leading means is not generic, define it how you like. But it is core to our development journeys.

1-3. Leaders develop through career-long synthesis of the training, education, and experiences acquired through opportunities in the institutional, operational, and self-development domains.

The three domains for development: institutional, operational, and self, are reinforcing. But the driving pillar of the three must be self. Relying wholly on an institution, usually your employer, to drive your development will result in a flatter trajectory and longer timeline, even if you have a wonderful employer and strong internal champions. Self-development is critical, both to structure objectives and goals for institutional and operational development, as well as to serve as the point of synthesis and evaluation for those areas of development.

What are you expectations from each domain in your development journey?
How reliant are you on the institutional domain to define your journey?

And what of those other domains? Is there a hierarchy? I’d interpret the Army as suggesting there is.

1-4. Significant leader development occurs during professional education, unit leader development programs, and counseling sessions. However, Army research shows the most effective developmental experiences occur in the operational domain, during daily interactions with subordinates as they prepare for and execute missions.

How I would propose thinking of the three domains of development: