Once you have been selected as a leader, it is time to lead. What is the best way to do this? Like many things, starting off on the right foot is simple, but not easy. Here are some fundamental rules to keep in mind as you take command:
These are straightforward rules. They make sense on paper, but they can be hard to remember and implement in a leadership environment. Review them often. Look at them in the morning, before meetings, and when you are about to make things happen. Review them before you go to sleep at night. Soon they will become second nature, but if you find yourself struggling, pause, read these rules again, and ensure that you are following them.
Sometimes, you have to step into positions where you might not have the knowledge or experience. That’s okay. No one expects you to know everything. You just got there. You need time to learn.
That being said, while you might not know everything, you should be as prepared as possible. You should know the terminology. You should understand the fundamental principles of what your team is responsible for. You should know the names and faces of the people on your team. Study any documentation you can that will familiarize you with the mission. Being new is not an excuse for ignorance or lack of preparation.
If you have studied and you are prepared, then the questions you ask will be smart and well received. Ask to be shown how things work. Learn to operate the equipment; you will not be as proficient as the actual operators, but go through the motions so you understand them at a deeper level. Interact with the troops on the front line. Find out their challenges. Ask details about what they do and how they do it. Your interest in their job will increase their respect for you and will help build a relationship with the troops, which is the goal of a leader.
The number one way to give yourself a chance for a promotion and leadership is simple and straightforward: performance. Do your job well. Work hard. Be the first person to show up to work and the last person to leave. Volunteer for the most challenging tasks, projects, and missions that no one else wants to do, including those that are simply mundane and unrewarding.
The next thing to do to be selected as a leader is to not focus on yourself; don’t make being chosen as a leader your goal. Instead, make your goal helping the team win. Don’t feel you need to be the person in charge of everything. When someone else has stepped up and taken the lead, then be a good follower. The more you help the team win, the more people will want you on the team. The more people see you being humble and not clamoring for the spotlight, the more trust and clout you gain.
Of course, you can be too humble. If you constantly defer from accepting leadership opportunities and always let someone else take the lead, you might give the impression that you don’t want to lead, which will result in you not being put into leadership positions. So, as I said, volunteer to lead whenever possible, but don’t make that your primary focus. Make your primary focus helping the team accomplish its goals. This attitude will eventually get noticed, and you will get your chance.
There are times when you will not be selected as a leader. Perhaps they promote someone else from your team; perhaps they bring in someone from outside your team or outside the organization to lead. When that happens, you might feel frustrated or angry because you were not chosen. Keep those feelings to yourself.
Instead of allowing yourself to become angry and frustrated, take the opportunity to do a good, honest assessment of yourself to see why you were not chosen. After you have done that (and after you have given yourself time to calm down), you can even ask your superiors why you were not selected for promotion. Of course, this must be done with tact.
And when you receive that feedback, actually listen to it. After all, you just asked for it! As human beings, we have a strong tendency to get defensive. Don’t. Instead of getting defensive, listen, truly listen, and try to understand the perspective being offered. Then take ownership of those shortfalls and try to make improvements in the areas of critique you have received.
You must also understand that not all leaders are good at giving feedback; giving direct feedback is hard for some people to do. When you ask for honest feedback, you might not get it. You might be told, “Oh, you’re doing great. It just wasn’t your time.” This is not necessarily true. You have to remember that there must be some reason you were not promoted, so do an even harder self-assessment and really dig down and analyze where you can improve.
Finally, do not hold a grudge against the person who got the promotion. As much as it pains your immature ego, support them. Make them look good. Help them win. Undermining them is going to hurt the team, make you look bad, and create an antagonistic relationship with that individual. Instead of moving closer to a leadership position, you will be moving away from it. Be a team player, and help the team and the new leader win.
Some people worry they aren’t ready for a leadership position. Some even feel once in that position that they don’t deserve to be there. These anxieties are often described as imposter syndrome. But while some people worry about this feeling, I actually believe it can be a good thing.
If you are worried that you aren’t ready for a leadership position, that means you are humble. If you are nervous, it means you are going to do your best to prepare for the leadership role, and once in it, you are going to be thoughtful about your words, actions, and decisions. All these things are positive.
When I was an assistant platoon commander, a platoon commander, and a task unit commander in the SEAL Teams, I always felt the same way. I felt like I wasn’t quite ready or wasn’t quite capable of doing the job that was being asked of me. The burdens of command and the responsibility for my men and the mission were heavy and made me nervous about my decisions and actions. Because of that feeling, I doubled down on preparation. I focused on learning as much as I possibly could about strategy, tactics, and leadership. I wanted to do a good job.
This is the opposite of some SEAL leaders I worked with or put through training who thought they were not only ready but eminently qualified to do the job. In their minds, they didn’t need to prepare. They didn’t need to study. They didn’t need to carefully consider their words and actions. And they didn’t feel they needed to listen to anyone up or down the chain of command. That kind of attitude is the opposite of the imposter syndrome; it is just plain arrogance, and it will destroy a leader and a team. Going to the extreme and becoming overconfident is a disaster.
Of course, going too far in the other direction is a problem as well. The lack of confidence a leader shows if they don’t believe they should be in a leadership position is obvious to every member of the team. So a leader has to balance between being too confident and not being confident enough.
If you feel you are getting too confident, simply take a step back. Listen to others. Don’t judge. Let subordinates step up and lead. This problem is relatively simple to solve as long as you have the sense to recognize that you are becoming too cocky and arrogant.
To sense this, you have to be aware of indicators that this is happening. One of the first warning signs is an attitude from the team members. Your big ego will brush up against theirs and cause friction. That is not good. You should not have friction from your troops. This is not to say you won’t get pushback and suggestions and even disagreements; but all of those should lead to productive conversations where both sides learn and eventually agree. If you can’t get them to agree with your ideas, that is a problem. And the problem is likely you. If your team members want to do something a certain way, your goal should be to let them do it that way. As long as their plan or idea has a decent chance of success, try to let them execute it. Of course, you can give guidance that will increase their likelihood of success, but keeping the core plan will give them ownership and appease their egos. This obviously only works if you put your ego in check. If you can’t do that and you force your plan down their throats, they might execute it, but they will do it begrudgingly compared to how they would execute if it were their plan.
Another warning sign to recognize is a complete lack of resistance from the team members. This can occur if you are overconfident and look down on others. Your team members will not propose new ideas or offer suggestions because they know they will be shot down. This phase might come after you have denied their plans and ideas a few times and given no ground. They recognize that they cannot contend with your giant ego, so they shut down. It is up to the leader to recognize when they have gone too far, become overconfident, and allowed their ego to get the best of them.
But the opposite is true with the imposter syndrome when the leader’s ego isn’t strong enough and confidence is low. The team doesn’t respect the leader’s ideas and shuts him down at every corner. The solution is counterintuitive. People with imposter syndrome tend to clam up and recede—become invisible—which only invites more disrespect from the team. A leader with imposter syndrome should open up. Ask questions. Find out why a certain team member did a certain thing at certain time. Ask for input about a plan. Solicit advice on how to best move forward.
This is an important lesson for leaders, especially new leaders stepping into a new role. You don’t know everything. No one expects you to know everything. But if you try to act like you know everything, the troops will see you for what you are: an imposter.
If you act humbly and expose yourself, ask questions, and admit that you don’t know everything, you will start to build trust and confidence from the team.
This is not to say you get a free pass to be stupid and ask dumb questions. For leaders, there is such a thing as a dumb question. If you haven’t taken the time to research as much as you can, if you haven’t looked through manuals, read operating instructions, studied the names and basic qualifications of the team—basically, if you haven’t done your homework, the team will see just that: you didn’t care enough to invest in understanding the mission, the gear and equipment, and, most important, the people. That lack of preparation shows the team you don’t really care.
So stay humble, study, ask questions, learn, and balance the dichotomy between too much humility and too much confidence.
In a similar vein, there are people who hesitate to volunteer or accept a new leadership position, but there is nothing abnormal about feeling you aren’t quite ready for one. Like I said, that is normal; if you are a humble person, which you should be, you will rarely, if ever, feel completely ready to move into a leadership position, so you must have faith in yourself and in the leaders above you who are offering one to you. You have to trust that they see you are ready and that is why they are asking you to step up.
If the imposter syndrome gets in a leader’s head, it can grow very quickly into true insecurity, which is problematic. If it isn’t controlled, it can begin a downward spiral for the leader and then the team.
But the problem comes not from feeling insecure in your leadership ability, experience, and knowledge; that is just humility. The problem comes when you inevitably try to cover it up. You shift conversations, avoid questions, and utilize other means of subterfuge to mask your weaknesses. But you won’t be fooling anyone; everybody sees through you. When the team members see your weaknesses, they start attacking them. The more they attack, the more you cover up, the more obvious it becomes. This is not good.
The way to overcome your insecurities is not by trying to hide them but by being humble enough to admit what they are. Instead of trying to shield them, present them. Ask for some help. Explain your shortfalls and what you want to do to correct them.
You do have to be careful not to go overboard. Being humble does not mean you should present yourself as incompetent. You should prepare and do enough research to understand your areas of weakness. If a new blind spot is uncovered, take notes and figure out the best way to reinforce the area where you are lacking.
This is an important concept to understand; humility and vulnerability can work together to make you better. If you are humble enough to admit when you have a vulnerability, you can then address it, reinforce it, and get it solved. This is contrary to the intuitive idea of hiding or masking your weaknesses. That does not work. The true way to overcome your insecurities is to admit them to yourself, air them to the team, and then work to improve them.
There are times in many organizations when an individual must be elevated from a peer group into a leadership position. This can be a difficult transition. Obviously, there are close relationships among peers that would not normally develop in a leader-to-subordinate situation.
I got to witness this type of transition in two of my SEAL platoons. In each case, one of the “boys”—one of the young enlisted SEALs troopers—was selected to step up and become the LPO, or leading petty officer, of the platoon. The way SEAL platoons were structured at that time, the LPO was the fourth in command. There would be an officer in charge (OIC), an assistant officer in charge (AOIC), a platoon chief (CPO), and finally the LPO.
LPOs would usually have more experience than the rest of the SEALs in the platoon but would not necessarily be senior to them in rank. Nonetheless, it was a position of authority, and the LPO was the individual who transferred much of the commander’s intent from the OIC and CPO to the troops and actually made things happen.
Both of the times one of my peers was elevated to LPO in my SEAL platoons, the circumstances were similar. The platoons had just been formed up, but no LPO had been assigned. Each time, we were wondering who our LPO would be. Often, LPOs would come from another team or a training command (which was done to mitigate preexisting excessive familiarity between the LPO and the troops).
The first time it happened, we junior enlisted SEALs were sitting in our platoon hut talking when the OIC and CPO came in. They called out one of the SEALs who was more experienced than the rest of us, but who was of the same rank and who was still “one of the boys.” I’ll call him Larry. The OIC and the CPO asked Larry to go with them, and they told the rest of us to stand by.
So we stood by and waited.
What we didn’t know was that Larry was taken to see the commanding officer and command master chief of the SEAL Team, where he was told he had been selected to serve as the LPO of our platoon.
About a half hour went by, and then Larry returned with the OIC and CPO.
“Listen up, gents,” the CPO said. “Larry has been selected to be the LPO of this platoon. He will be running you guys from now on. Give him the support he deserves.”
“Roger that, Chief,” we said.
With that, Larry pulled out what we called a wheel book—a simple, navy-issued, four-by-six notebook—and started looking at a checklist of things that needed to get done.
“All right, fellas. As you heard from Chief, I’m the LPO now. It’s an honor. Now, here’s what we still need to get done today. First, we have a full weapons and sensitive items inventory to do, including radios, night vision, and crypto. Once that is done, we need all gear staged by 1000 on the grinder so we can get pallets built for the next trip. Of course, that means hazardous material paperwork needs to get turned so lithium batteries, fuel, and ordnance can be shipped. I want to get those pallets built by lunch so we can do some walk-throughs of our immediate action drills this afternoon. We will start those at 1300. Once we hammer out some of those, I want to wrap up the day by 1430 or 1500 so you all get some time at home before we leave. What do you guys think? Did I miss anything?”
Larry had quickly (in just about thirty minutes!) stepped up into the LPO position and taken charge. He was respectful and appreciative, but at the same time confident. He gave us clear guidance and direction. It was just what we needed. We got busy and got things done, just as we would continue to get things done for Larry and for the platoon. It worked well.
Interestingly, in my very next platoon, about eighteen months later, another one of my peers was elevated to the position of LPO. We had just formed up and were once again sitting around in our platoon space wondering who our LPO was going to be. It was odd to be in a platoon with no LPO assigned, since the LPO is a critical part of the leadership team. But it had happened, and once again, one of the enlisted SEAL shooters was summoned by the OIC and CPO. Once again, he was brought to meet with the commanding officer and command master chief and told he was taking over as the LPO. And once again, this individual, whom I will call Brian, was brought back down and introduced to us as our new LPO.
But this time, when he came back, it was different. Instead of pulling out a wheel book with a checklist and telling us what needed to be done, instead of giving us a schedule with some deadlines, instead of asking us what we thought, he just cracked a joke, saying, “Looks like I’m responsible for all the crap now.” That was it. That was the word he had to put out. That was how he tried to take the reins as LPO. It was completely ineffective.
It should be noted that Brian was a great guy and a great SEAL operator, but he wasn’t quite ready to make the transition to leadership. So as a platoon, we floundered for a few months until he got his leadership bearings and started to run things properly.
But that isn’t necessary; there is no reason to flounder. When you transition from within a group to becoming a leader of that group, you have to step up. This doesn’t mean you have to know everything. This doesn’t mean you need to lay down the law. But it does mean you have to differentiate who you were as one of the troops from who you are now as a leader.
There is one final point to mention. Once you move into a leadership position, you have to step not only up but also out of the weeds. You will have to stop doing some of the old things you are used to doing—things you are comfortable doing—and start doing things that you aren’t so comfortable with.
As a leader, your goal should be to look up and out, not down and in at your team. So when transitioning to a leadership position, the goal is not only to guide the development of the plan but then also to oversee its execution. This means the leader should not be doing much of the actual doing. Let the troops do the doing. If the leader is doing, he or she isn’t leading. The leader who is doing is looking down and in at the team instead of up and out at the future. So let the troops do.
Of course, there is a dichotomy to balance. This does not mean the leader is above hard work. The leader must not become detached to a point where they are aloof from what is happening and what the frontline troops have to contend with.
Don’t be the leader with your hands in your pockets, but don’t be the leader with your hands in everything.
There will be times in your career when you will be the one promoted into a leadership position and placed above your former peers. This can be challenging, but when handled correctly, the challenge can be mitigated. Most of your former peers will accept the situation and get on board. But sometimes there are people who get bitter and resentful that they weren’t promoted, and they show that bitterness.
There are some ways to mitigate a bad attitude from your former peers. First off, don’t try to force your rank down their throats. Tell them you appreciate their experience and you will be looking to them to help lead the team. Let them come up with plans and ideas. Ask for and listen to their input. If they come up with a solid plan, let them run with it.
When the opportunity arises, put them in charge of some tasks, projects, and missions. This shows them that you trust them and truly do appreciate their experience and knowledge, and if they can put their egos in check, the situation can be overcome.
But also be advised that some people will be hypersensitive and see you putting them in charge of something as condescending, or as proof that you don’t know what you are doing and that they should have been promoted, not you. When their pouting and bad attitude become apparent, recognize that the likely reason they were not promoted (assuming they do have the most knowledge and experience) is because they likely lack the humility and maturity to be a leader. If that is the case, continue to be cordial, treat them with respect, and try to build a relationship with them, but don’t expect rapid improvement from them. This will be a long process; you are going to have to be patient and make sure you don’t let them distract you from the mission or the rest of the team.
There is a broad spectrum of approaches to take when implementing change after moving into a leadership position inside a team or organization. One method is to come in hard and immediately start making changes and imposing one’s will on the team. The opposite end of the spectrum is spending a large amount of time observing, then slowly making changes in an incremental manner. In between these two extremes are many other methodologies that can be utilized. Which methodology should a leader use when taking over a team?
The answer depends on the situation the leader is going into. It is a good idea to know as much as possible about the mission and the troops before even taking over. Request to review documents that explain day-to-day operations, describe the nature of the work, and expound on how it gets done. Obviously, a thorough turnover from the previous leader of the team is ideal. Talking through the state of the team, gaining understanding of the challenges it is presented with, and getting feedback on the personalities involved, as well as their various strengths and weaknesses, is beneficial in getting up to speed.
When receiving information from the departing boss, it is important to remember where they are coming from and what is influencing their perspective. Are they being fired? Do they have personal relationships with members of the team? Do they have a big ego that might attempt to undermine the new leader? Whatever the situation, it is important to understand the bias or spin an outgoing leader might be putting on their turnover.
In addition to reading documents pertinent to the team’s mission and discussing the job with the departing boss, a new leader should try to know the people on the team to the best of his or her ability before he or she even meets them. How does a leader do that? A simple way is to review records; find out what training they have been through on an individual and collective level. Request and study in advance a guidebook that has a picture of every member of the team and that explains their positions, skills, experience, some of their personal interests, and their family situations.
The new leader must also consider the status of the team he is taking over. It might be a high-performing organization or a failing team. But organizations seldom fall neatly into these extreme categories. Most will be somewhere in between; therefore, the approach must be modulated and balanced to accommodate the situation the leader is entering.
So be smart. Don’t change things that are working, but don’t accept things that are not working. The better the team is, the less you have to change. The worse it is, the more will need adjusting.
It is easy to see some of the methods used when applied to the extreme examples. If I am taking over a team that is squared away, has a great attitude, and is accomplishing the mission, I am going to go in fairly gently. I am going to introduce myself and make myself available, but I am obviously not going to go in barking orders and imposing my way on the team members. They are already functioning well. They have good relationships. They are succeeding. I am not going to interfere with an organization that is doing well. I will simply observe closely, learn all I can about how they work, and eventually see if there are any areas where some level of improvement is possible. The old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a wise assessment. If a team is working well, I am not going to try to fix it.
Once actually on board with a new team that is performing well, take the opportunity to get to know the team. If time and logistics allow it, schedule a formal meeting with the whole team and then schedule meetings with individual team members. But don’t only interact on an official level; visit with the team members informally as they perform their functions, drop in on some meetings, and walk the grounds getting to know team members and what they do. This is a time to build relationships that will become the basis of trust and camaraderie that are the foundation of any team.
Contrarily, if I am joining a failing team that is having significant problems and I am aware of the cause of those problems, I am going to take a more direct approach and be aggressive. I will research what the problems are, and I will bring a couple of ideas to implement immediately. I will lay out a clear vision and new mission, and I will emphasize some specific things that are going to change. I will set in place some new processes, move personnel to different roles, and perhaps even terminate some people who are causing significant problems. There will be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the status quo is gone.
If I am joining a team that has significant problems, but I don’t have a clear comprehension of what the problems are, I will still make some changes, but the changes will not have an impact on current operations. I will change communication protocol; change, add, or subtract meeting times; and perhaps implement a new dress code or make other fairly benign adjustments that get the attention of the team but don’t interfere with anything. I will try to develop a relationship with some of the senior leadership team, some of the midlevel managers, and the frontline troops, interviewing them all separately as I try to get a feel for the ground truth. I will ask a lot of questions and get to know the personnel as I look for trusted agents at every level. I will be slow to open that trust since a failing team is such a traumatic experience, and those suffering through it can be emotional and make false and misleading statements about the situation and other people in it. In these situations, take everything with a grain of salt.
Once I start isolating the problem areas and deducing what the issues might be, I will incrementally make more impactful changes, slowly but surely, as I get feedback and understand their effects on the situation.
The better the team members, the more I will lean on them to come up with solutions in areas where improvement is needed. Ideally, I simply identify problem areas, and they come up with solutions for them. In doing that, they take ownership and execute. However, if the team is grossly subpar, I will certainly listen to the members’ input, but I will do so more critically, as their track record indicates a lack of ability to identify and solve problems.
I also have to pay close attention to the fact that the leader I am replacing might have been the cause of many of the problems within the team. When the bad leader is replaced, sometimes the subordinates are ready to step up and make things happen. There is a chance that once the team members are unburdened from their bad leader, they will begin to perform exceptionally. I need to make sure I do not hinder that.
So once I have established some relationships and sense of understanding with a high-performing team, I will start to make incremental changes until they reach maximum efficiency. For a low-performing team, I will do the opposite: start off with dramatic changes and back off over time as things begin to function properly. Again, depending on the progress of the team members and their actual performance, I will have to modulate my leadership methods with them, adjusting my level of guidance, interaction, and direction based on what they do.
You want to be a leader. That’s great. But don’t be offensive about it. What does that mean? It means don’t run around saying, “I’m the leader! I am in charge! Listen to me! I’ll make the decisions!” This attitude will offend many people. It is the equivalent of “Look at me! I’m important!” and it doesn’t go over well. Rambo might be a cool movie character, but charging out alone without regard for others doesn’t work in a team environment. Saying, “I am the leader; follow me!” can offend people’s egos. In their minds, perhaps they are thinking you don’t deserve to be in charge. There is a good chance they are even thinking that they are the one who should be in charge. So you barking at them that you are the leader is not a good idea. And when you do make some kind of mistake—which you will—they will be ready to pounce on it.
Leadership, in most cases, should be subtle. Of course, there are situations where bold and overt leadership is needed. If there is an emergency and no one is taking action, it is time to step up and take charge. If morale is down, the troops are stagnating, and movement is needed, it is time to lead from the front. But in everyday situations, overt leadership is not needed. It is better to give subtle direction and let the troops move forward based on their own ideas.
The same thing goes for mentoring and coaching. If you are looking to mentor or coach someone, be subtle about it. Many people might say they want to be coached or mentored but have a hard time when someone actually steps up to do it. Because let’s face it, there is an implicit message when you offer to coach or mentor someone—you are implying not only that the other person is lacking in some areas but also that you are better than they are! That can really bother people, especially if they have big egos. Unfortunately, the people with the biggest egos are usually the ones who need the most coaching.
So instead of outright telling someone you are going to lead, coach, or mentor them, be subtler:
The latter options of these statements are indirect approaches. What they are really doing is starting a conversation, opening the door to discussion, and disarming any defenses that might be activated by a direct approach. Once the discussion is started, you can contribute your thoughts and ideas by embedding them into the conversation. If your methods, techniques, and plans are superior, that should be apparent, and the person you are trying to coach will be more receptive to your ideas. Over time, you can then indirectly sway the individual toward your way of thinking in a way that will be much more acceptable to them than if you shove your mentorship or coaching down their throat.
Occasionally, you may encounter a person who craves your leadership and truly desires to be mentored. When that happens, of course, you can be more direct and straightforward. But even in those situations, be careful. Sometimes when people are asking for criticism, they can still be offended when you give it to them. So use caution and always start with a softer approach.
The people who taught me the most about leadership, strategy, and tactics never explicitly told me they were coaching or mentoring me; they subtly guided me along the path, filling my head with knowledge, while I barely even noticed it. They managed to teach me without teaching me, putting ideas into my brain so delicately that I thought the ideas were my own. That is the most powerful way to teach, coach, and mentor.
When I think back to the best leaders I ever worked for, they were also incredibly subtle. Very rarely did they come right out and give direct orders stating exactly what to do and how to do it. The best leaders usually led not by orders but by suggestion. As often as they could, they put their ideas out there and allowed us, the troops, to identify those ideas as the best and then move toward enacting their ideas through our own volition. This is an incredibly powerful way to lead—perhaps the most powerful. It instills an incredible level of ownership into the troops because they all get the feeling that the ideas they are executing are actually their own. Indirect leadership almost always trumps direct leadership.
But notice that I said almost. There are also times when direct leadership is needed, usually during times of duress, where critical and immediate decisions must be made. During those times, a leader stepping up and making a call is not only preferred, it is required. The same thing can happen during moments of indecision. If a team can’t decide which way to go—if multiple ideas are being batted around and argued about—that is another time when a leader might need to step up and make a decision.
In all these cases, because the leader has been restrained from constantly making decisions for the group, when he or she does step in and make a call, it will be respected. That is a stark contrast to the leader who constantly feels the need to make every decision, to drive every choice, and be at the center of all conversations and conclusions. That leader’s voice loses value because it is heard too often.
So don’t go overboard. Not as a leader, not as a mentor, and not as a coach. Don’t be Rambo. Instead, be as subtle as you can—until you can’t. And then lead.