Why are you in charge?
Suggested Reading
MCTP 6-10A, Sustaining the Transformation
Pages 7-1 through 8-13 based on printed document (PDF pages 99-121)
Description of general responsibilities and expectations of company- and field-grade Marine officers and the evolution of leadership requirements
Link to MCTP 6-10A on the US Marine Corps Publications Electronic Library
This week’s Study: The Mishap Library
All excerpts below are from MCTP 6-10A
Guided Discovery
Every single day a leader should be able to answer the question “why am I in charge?” Not just in charge generally, but why are they in charge today, now, in this situation?
Being in charge is not a permanent state of being. A title does not automatically confer the right to lead.
You get to be in charge when you are relevant to those you are expected to lead.
Sustaining relevance as a leader is effort. The point is not to be viewed as cool, popular, or liked. Relevance is making the answer to the question “why am I in charge” self-evident to everyone else.
“It is not enough that you merely know a leader’s qualities and not enough that you proclaim them; you must exhibit them. To exact discipline, you must first possess self-discipline, and to demand unsparing attention to duty, you must spare none yourself.”
The Marine Officer’s Guide
Relevance is demonstrated.
Relevance is earned.
7-3. There are no easy shortcuts to becoming a good officer. It takes a nose-to-the-grindstone dedication every day.
Realize that Marine officers and non-commissioned officers who dedicate their careers to the Corps will continue to age, accumulate expertise, and gather power and responsibility, even as the the bottom of the organizational pyramid is refreshed every year with new 18 year olds. Rank makes the leaders important, but to inspire confidence and trust in decision making, leaders must stay relevant.
Our teams need leaders who are no less relevant. Otherwise, trust erodes as team members look elsewhere for relevant leadership.
How then do we stay relevant?
Stay Humble
Stay Grounded
Stay Hungry
Stay Curious
Stay Visible
These are mentalities, actions, and mantras. Combined, they will keep us relevant as we grow and expand our responsibilities.
Why are you in charge?
Are you relevant?
How do you assess relevancy of leaders above you? Who do you gravitate toward?
Stay Humble
Sustaining the Transformation includes two chapters on officers, one related to company-grade officers (Lieutenants through Captains) and the other for field-grade officers (Majors and Lieutenant Colonels). The very first topic addressed? Humility.
7-2. Marine officers must have the courage to lead in combat, the empathy to counsel a distressed Marine, the integrity to enforce unpopular decisions, and the humility to accept correction from more experienced enlisted Marines.
Humility is required to not become irrelevant. No greater self-sabotage exists for a leader than ego or pride.
7-2. Without humility, young officers may become caught up in their own authority and lose touch with their moral obligation to their Marines.
Everyone has experienced working for or around a leader lacking in humility. They eventually lose respect and relevance as those they deign to lead grow frustrated with the arrogance. This behavior fallacy is so quickly obvious to everyone else, but is it always obvious to the leader?
Ego and pride become problematic when its existence and/or negative impact are masked. Rarely is this an individual failing; it takes a village to prop up prideful leaders. Sycophants abound, reinforcing disconnections for their own selfish ends. Even when sycophancy is not nefarious it is still poisonous. Staying humble requires constant examination of self, but also of the feedback mechanisms in your life.
Pride also is evident when leaders are unwilling to (or afraid to) accept help.
7-2. There may be an assumption that when a junior officer asks for advice they are looking for the answer to the problem, thereby taking the perceived “easy” path. This is a fallacy, where the belief is that wisdom is only gained through one’s own mistakes. By demonstrating humility and an open-minded willingness to learn, the Marine officer shows respect for their fellow Marines, and respect for the responsibilities they bear.
Asking for, accepting, and incorporating help is a skill that needs to be trained early and often. Junior leaders may, for some number of years, be able to get by on instinct, hustle, and learning from their own mistakes. Scaling responsibility will eventually preclude this. The ego that could develop from self-reliance is in direct opposition to the expectations for more senior leaders who are capable of both delegation and humbly accepting input.
Who is your model for leadership humility and how do you work to emulate that person?
What aspects of yourself do you only show to family and not your professional colleagues?
What aspects of your pre-leadership life do you miss most in terms of authenticity?
Stay Grounded
7-1. The role of a junior officer lies between the reality of inexperience and the expectation of leadership.
In fact, the role of any leader lies between the reality of inexperience and the expectation of leadership. If a leader is being properly stretched and challenged as they move up and increase responsibility, there will always be a disconnect between existing experience and expectations. It is not a reason for doubt.
7-4. Young officers who find their confidence waning due to a perceived lack of experience should not discount their own knowledge, experience, and skills; they can draw on times in the classroom, playing field, or conference room that required courage, discernment, or discipline.
Staying relevant requires staying grounded, clear on what you know, do not know, are capable of, and what you still need to learn. Grounded = stability and clarity. For junior Marine officers, SNCOs help with the grounding process.
7-6. It is among a SNCO’s duties to mentor and train young officers. This mentorship is not just for the sake of the officer, but for the sake of the junior Marines whose lives the officer’s decisions ultimately effect.
7-6. The SNCO provides guidance from experience where the junior officer has none. The junior officer looks to the SNCO to help them make the right decision and to build their confidence through experience.
A well-grounded leader can appreciate that what gives them stability and clarity is a support structure, not only their own fortitude and abilities. Staying grounded starts with communication.
7-7. There is no easy answer and there are no magic words to create the perfect relationship, but it is most easily started with open communication.
It’s okay to dwell in the tension that is the gap between what we’ve experienced and what is expected of us. The tension is what grounds us. The tension is what helps us maintain focus and commitment.
7-9. A Marine officer can never cease to exercise critical thought, sound judgment, and a deep-rooted commitment to leading Marines. The lives and welfare of enlisted Marines are at stake, and anything less than complete and total commitment to serving as a military officer within the profession of arms is a disservice to oneself, the Corps, and ultimately, the Marines under one’s charge.
What experiences have you neglected to leverage that are actually very relevant to your role?
How do you react to the tension between inexperience and expectation?
Stay Hungry
8-4. Over time, developing confidence in themselves and their abilities can lure individuals into a false sense of security. They are not bound by a date on a calendar or a renewed oath of commitment. The threat of apathy and complacency is always just around the corner.
Stay hungry. Or, if you’d rather, do not become complacent.
8-4. Complacency comes from the comfort zone. During the early years of service, the comfort zone is nowhere to be found because tasks and activities are new, exciting, daunting, and challenging.
8-5. Once they’ve settled into a new position and become adjusted to the day-to-day operations of their role, the comfort zone returns. Rote familiarity with standing operating procedures, mastered skills and abilities, and reduced performance competition can signal the start of leniency in training and mission accomplishment.
Leadership capabilities only have two directions of travel: improving along the uphill climb and diminishing on the downhill decline. There are no plateaus upon which to set up camp and find comfort.
The risk of complacency is high. The Marine’s Mishap Library, referenced in this week’s study, includes numerous examples of tragedy due to complacency.
If only it were easy to guard against. Complacency is sneaky, often feeling like success.
“One definition of complacency is a feeling of quiet pleasure or security, while unaware of some potential danger, defect or the like; self-satisfaction with an existing situation, condition, etc. Another less lofty definition is failure to pay attention to details; failure to conduct an adequate risk assessment resulting in negligence, bodily harm and destruction to property.”
General Mark A. Milley
Complacency is not success, it is blinders. The only real solution is action.
8-6. Apathy dulls the senses to subtle opportunities for growth and justifies self-absolution of the responsibility of leadership. Sustaining the transformation as a Marine staves off complacency by requiring the pursuit of excellence and advancement at every level and every stage of their careers.
Staying hungry and continually seeking change, discomfort, and new challenge is how we maintain our uphill climb.
What comfort zones are you in that prevent you from staying relevant?
What fears do you have about your own complacency that you've never voiced to anyone?
Stay Curious
One of the first signs of professional irrelevancy is when we think “that’s too new and different, let someone else learn that”.
8-7. Neither the individual nor the organization can afford to have ignorant leaders. The continual pursuit of higher education, and the application of the knowledge gained, will help Marines stay engaged, relevant, and effective, thereby sustaining their transformation.
A relevant leader is a curious leader.
“When people are confident that they have the answers they become blithely incurious about alternatives.”
Ian Leslie, from the book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It
Staying curious means being open to possibility, but also responding to the sting of realization when you are behind the learning curve and need to accelerate.
A lack of curiosity is how you age yourself out of future leadership responsibilities, regardless of age.
Curiosity also means purposefully exposing ourselves to different, challenging ideas, to expand our knowledge base.
8-8. Refusing to continue one’s education results in a narrow scope of knowledge and understanding. Engaging in intellectual debate, hearing the insights of others, and being exposed to new ideas all help the Marine officer relate to others.
Curiosity should be a point of pride and inspiration to your teams. It is what will keep all of you relevant.
8-8. Marine officers are never satisfied with being average, and education continues to set them apart from their peers in and out of the Marine Corps.
Where are you choosing ignorance over the discomfort of new perspectives?
What pattens might you change to improve your curiosity?
What are three new things to research and learn about this week?
Stay Visible
Separation, in all its forms, between senior leaders and junior team members is inevitable. The nature of a pyramid is, after all, characterized by a diminishing ratio. We cannot be everywhere at once. But we cannot be nowhere to be seen.
8-10. …as officers progress higher in rank, they also become more removed from enlisted Marines. Focusing on the operational and strategic levels of war has many positives when it comes to broadening one’s scope and military prowess; however, losing touch with the troops on the ground can have a negative effect on a unit’s readiness and mission.
Staying visible keeps us in touch and keeps us relevant.
8-11. Marines from the most junior private to the most senior general must be able to trust in the judgment and integrity of those making life and death decisions. Accountability is key as others look to senior officers to be paragons of morality and virtue and uphold the standards they prescribe.
Staying visible, as we progress in seniority, does not mean over-stretching ourselves to be everywhere at once. Small actions have greater impact, owing to the significance of senior roles.
“If something small that I do helps or makes a difference, tell me what it is and I’ll do more of it.”
Brigadier General Lorna Mahlock
Sustaining the Transformation uses the visual of rocks into water to describe how to think about sustaining visibility, and therefore relevance and impact, as a more senior leader.
8-12. …a large boulder when dropped into a pond creates one large circle of ripples, but a handful of small pebbles create a multitude of them. … So it is with the leadership of field-grade officers: they have the opportunity and access to direct consequential “large boulders,” but also carry a “handful of pebbles” each day that may have a greater affect on their Marines.
8-12. One of these “pebbles” that can affect myriad others is mentoring junior officers.
8-12. A second “pebble” is taking the lead on upholding the core values and leadership traits and principles. Even though times of close and personal interaction with lower-ranking enlisted Marines becomes less and less frequent as the officer rises in rank, this only raises the importance of those interactions.
Staying visible implies a secondary, no less critical responsibility: leaders must only be seen doing the right things. Integrity and adherence to standards is an expectation at all times, but when the opportunities for visibility become more limited, it become imperative to make sure we are visibly good influences.
8-13. Seeing the integrity of their leaders inspires other Marines to do the right thing. By contrast, hypocrisy in leaders creates the space for misconduct to seem excusable. It is the small ripples of momentary interactions that influence scores of Marines for years to come, ultimately shaping the future of the entire Marine Corps.
Invisible people are not relevant. Stay visible.
Why are you in charge?
In what ways can you be more visible to your teams or your family?
What are your pebbles?
Questions for Individual Reflection
When was the last time you actively sought input from someone with less formal authority but more operational experience?
What decisions are you making today that you haven't validated with anyone who would be directly impacted?
At what point does your expertise become a liability to fresh thinking?
How often do your strategic decisions account for the lived experience of those who execute them?
If you had to start over with your current knowledge but none of your current authority, how would you lead differently?
Professional Discussion Prompts
Does corporate hierarchy enable or constrain the kind of humble leadership described?
What's the corporate equivalent of the Marine Corps' six-month infantry training for all officers, and do any organizations do this?
What systems could prevent executive complacency without reliance on external market crises to force change?
Should boards want appropriately humble senior executives or does that make an organization look weak? Why or why not?
Should, and if so, how corporate leadership development prioritize character assessment over competency demonstration?
Personal Discussion Prompts
How has your relationship with being wrong evolved as you've gained more authority and wealth?
How do you maintain genuine humility when your lifestyle and achievements naturally create distance from others' experiences?
What family or personal relationships have suffered because you've confused positional authority with personal wisdom?
How do you teach your children about leadership and character when they've primarily seen you in positions of power?
How has wealth and success affected your ability to receive honest feedback about your character and behavior?
Exercises
Comfort Zone Mapping
Exercise:
Participants map their current responsibilities into "comfort," "stretch," and "panic" zones
Teams identify which business functions fall entirely within comfort zones
Groups brainstorm what transformative challenges they're actively avoiding
Debrief:
What capabilities might your organization lack because leadership stays comfortable?
How do you create productive panic zones for yourself and your teams?
Institutional Impact Assessment
Exercise:
Each participant maps the ripple effects of their leadership decisions over the past year
Teams identify which decisions had unintended consequences on organizational culture
Groups design metrics for measuring long-term institutional health beyond financial performance
Debrief:
What unintended cultural consequences have resulted from your leadership decisions?
How do you balance individual performance with institutional stewardship?
What responsibility do you have for the leaders your organization produces after you leave?
Feel free to borrow this with pride and use with your teams, professionally or personally. If you do, please let me know how it went and tips for improvement: matt @ borrowingwithpride.com