How to Spot a Leader

Last week I wrote that leadership is learned by doing. The next question is a fair one: how do you tell whether someone has actually learned it?

It is not a title, a certificate, or even a long list of people someone managed. A manager can have all of those. The best signal I know is how a person handles two qualities that pull against each other: confidence and humility.

Both, calibrated

Good leaders are both confident and humble. What sets them apart is calibration: knowing how much of each the moment calls for, and turning the dial to match. Too much of either, for too long, is a recipe for disaster, and the people on the team feel it first.

Last week I argued that managing and leading are one job, and the leading half is to inspire and enable. Confidence gives people a direction they can trust, and humility gives them room to be honest with you.

Two ways it goes wrong

Too much confidence, for too long. People stop bringing you problems, because they have learned that disagreement costs them. Bad news arrives late. People start to feel like cogs, not contributors, so they wait to be told, and the best of them disengage or leave. The team looks quiet and aligned. It is neither. That is the barking-orders stereotype: confidence with the humility dial stuck at zero.

Too much humility, for too long. People are left without direction. They bring questions and get more questions back. Nobody is sure who is deciding or what the standard is, so effort goes into guessing instead of doing. People cannot commit to a call the leader will not own, and over time they stop looking to the leader at all.

The cost is real in both worlds: safety and the mission in uniform, jobs and livelihoods in business. Either way, other people pay.

Humility takes nerve

Humility asks something uncomfortable of a leader: to be vulnerable. To say I do not have the answer, I got that wrong, or someone on this team sees it better than I do. And people are not comfortable being vulnerable when the environment feels threatening.

Here is the irony. You would expect vulnerability to be hardest where the danger is physical. In my experience, at the team level, it is often the opposite. Where the danger is physical, the honesty that keeps people alive is not optional: your life depends on the person next to you, and an Army Press anthology on mission command says effective leadership needs a learning environment where people can learn from failure “without fear of reprisal for an honest, professional effort.” In a conference room, honesty is optional, and no shared danger forces candor. The world with less at stake can make it harder to be honest.

Neither environment is automatic. The failure mode has a name, a zero-defect mentality, and it shows up in uniform and in business. In both worlds, the climate comes from the leader: their actions, their words, and the trust they build in the team.

Reading the moment

The skill is knowing which one the moment needs. Confidence comes up when the team needs a clear call, speed, or steadiness, like a crisis or a deadline. Humility comes up when you need to learn, when someone on the team knows more than you do, or after you have been wrong. The savvy leaders shift between the two without announcing it.

Learning from being wrong

Many of my best lessons came when I was humbled: when a decision did not get the result I wanted, however much thinking, preparation, and collaboration had gone into it. Those moments give you a choice. You can protect the image of being right, or you can show your team that you are one of them: not perfect, and able to make mistakes.

I lost my closest friend, Todd Beck, two years ago. He was a Soldier and an Army brat, like me. He used to tell the people he led that mistakes were going to happen. The problem started when you made the same one twice. He was not lowering the bar. He was raising it: mistakes were expected, and learning from them was not optional.

How to find it

You will not see it on a résumé, so ask for it. Four questions tell you most of what you need. Tell me about a call you made without enough information. Tell me about a time you changed your mind. Tell me about a mistake you made, and what you changed so it did not happen twice. Then: what would the people who worked for you say it was like to bring you bad news?

Listen for ownership (“I decided,” not “it was decided”), credit given by name, and specifics: what changed their mind, and what they did next. Someone who has never changed their mind has a dial stuck on confidence. Someone who has never made a call without consensus has a dial stuck on humility. The last answer tells you which way the dial leans when it counts.

Why Always Forward VTA

This is what I listen for before I put anyone in front of an employer. When I sit down with a Servicemember or Veteran, I ask about the calls they made, the times they were wrong, and what they did next. I want to know which way their dial tends to lean, and whether they know it. That self-awareness matters for the Veteran too: some cultures reward one end of the dial more than the other.

My job is to make the match good for both sides: a Veteran in a place that appreciates what they have built, and a company that gains a leader who knows when to decide and when to listen.

Always Forward.

Sources

The Army Press, Mission Command in the 21st Century: Empowering to Win in a Complex World, ed. Nathan K. Finney and Jonathan P. Klug (Fort Leavenworth, KS, 2016), Introduction.

Leonard Wong and Stephen J. Gerras, Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession (Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College Press, 2015).