The problem for the military is that while in war leaders are required, in peacetime, managers are rewarded ahead of leaders. No one has yet solved this problem.
TQM, Six Sigma, 360 review... all BS. All fabrications attempting to institutionalize and create natural ability.
Leadership, you have it or you don’t. You can only cultivate what is there.
Ability, attention to detail, pride in work, you have them or you don’t.
Best OJT guidance I ever got is, “See that guy? He is the best hand on the rig. Go out and do what he does.”
From what I have seen the best leaders are respected by their subordinates and reliable to their superiors. The superiors are the same and they still remember what their subordinates have to do.
The attitude of staff is a reflection of the attitude of their management. Like hires and promotes like. You develop a bad culture start correcting it from the top sinc ethat is usually who is responsible for the FU. Letting the top develop another initiative such as TQL, TQM etc. will just get you more of the same crap you had to start with.
it's usually solved in the first 12-18 months of war. Our country is shielded by two large oceans can wait for the darwinian process to occur. The ones that suffer are the troops/sailors on the line.
Bingo. When I was an ROTC cadet, virtually everything we did was a study of leadership with the prevailing philosophy that "management" was but one tool under the broader umbrella of effective leadership. That is, in order to be a good leader, one needed to be able to exercise some management skills. As a new Lieutenant in the active force, that seemed to invert itself with the emphasis on "management", recognizing that a few good leadership qualities were probably necessary for one to be a good manager. It wasn't exactly what I'd signed up for :-)
In any case, over my career I distilled things down to the conclusion that leadership was essentially the ability to get people to do things they generally would not do of their own accord. Even if somebody was passionate about being a soldier and soldiering, that enthusiasm would need to be channeled and directed to make them part of an effective unit.
I observed that there were about as many leadership styles as there were leaders, and the only "wrong" style was the phony style. A quiet, deliberative person can in fact be an effective leader, but not if he puts on a false facade of brashness. Troops will see right through that.
There are a million variations on the stick and carrot approaches, but I always noted those to be external motivations. The very best leaders, and the kind I always aspired to be, were those that sold a vision and made the troops embrace and internalize the higher mission. The leader's goal and the unit's objective became the passion of every soldier.
That's leadership...