Leadership: More Than Mission Accomplishment

There is increasing discussion and concern over the quality of Army leadership. The fact that there is growing disenchantment indicates a problem under the premise that perception is reality. The Army can neither confirm nor deny it has a leadership problem or even claim that good, sound leadership is practiced. This is because the Army does not comprehensively or officially measure the process of leadership or organizational effectiveness. Instead, it concentrates solely on evaluating mission accomplishment. Because the Army chooses to ignore organizational effectiveness and leader development programs, the most predictive outcome of its leadership philosophy training process, and evaluation emphasis is a leadership and trust crisis. This paper compares Army leadership to a leadership competency model and demonstrates that the current leadership crisis was inevitable. It then focuses on possible solutions that build on previous successful Army programs as well as lessons learned from effective, smaller scale military and commercial programs. Without correcting the problem across the entire Army and at every level change will be excruciating slow, if possible at all. The price may very well be the loss of at least one generation of future, effective leaders and possibly a slide back toward a hollow army... again.