Leadership for People Who Just Got Handed It

The military builds leaders on purpose. It takes people who have never been in charge of anything, puts them in charge of something, and expects them to figure it out. There are real problems with that. Sometimes the wrong person gets propped into a seat and the people under them pay for it. But the alternative assumes some people are just born leaders, and I’ve never met one. What I’ve seen is trial and error. I’ve watched people who were rough in their first year turn into the leaders everyone wanted to work for. Nobody starts out good at this.

So picture it. You walk into an office and someone tells you, “You’re in charge of this.” You’ve never been in charge of anything before, and you want to do a good job. So you own it. You decide how it should look, this way, not that way, and your team starts making it happen.

Then a piece doesn’t come out the way you pictured it. You get frustrated. But look closer: the work is getting done. It just doesn’t look like what was in your head.

Surprise. Get used to that. The sooner you accept that nobody can read your mind, the better off you’ll be.

Which brings me to the first thing: get off the pedestal. You’re a regular person who got put in a role. The role doesn’t make you know more than you did yesterday. And the first thing you need to know isn’t how it should look. It’s who the hell is on your team. What do they know? What are they good at? What have they never done before? If you don’t know that, your plan falls apart fast, because you built it for a team that only exists in your head.

And when it falls apart, you get frustrated. That’s when the bad leadership traits you’ve watched your whole career start showing up, on you.

The cycle

The bad leaders you’ve worked for weren’t a different kind of person. Most of them started exactly where you are now: dropped into a seat, wanting to do well, with a picture in their head of how it should look. Then the picture didn’t match, the frustration came, and they reached for whatever they’d seen done to them. Some of them figured out what was happening and grew out of it. The ones you remember as bad leaders are the ones who never did. Same starting point. They just never broke the cycle.

The cycle is easy to spot once you know what it looks like. You start checking everyone’s work because you don’t trust it to match your picture. You take things back and do them yourself because it’s faster. You snap at someone over something small, because the small thing is the fifth thing that didn’t go your way this week. You write a new rule for the whole office because one person made one mistake. Or you go the other way and stop saying anything at all, because every time you correct someone it turns into a thing. None of these feel like bad leadership from the inside. From the inside, they feel like holding the standard.

Mine

The first time I led anyone, I was a young SSgt with a team of six. Small team, and all over the map on experience: a civilian, a brand-new airman, a rockstar SrA, a new TSgt, and a couple of others.

I did some of it right. I learned what each of them was good at and where they were weak. That part was great. Then I fixated on the weak part.

I caught myself redoing almost all of their work. Not because it was wrong. Because “that’s not the way I would have done it.” I was chasing the perfect team when good enough would have done the job. And I didn’t have the heart to micromanage, so I did something worse: I never corrected anything. I just changed it, pressed on, and accomplished the mission. Which meant everybody had to read my mind, and nobody ever found out what I was changing or why.

That didn’t help anyone, least of all me. I became the guy working late. It’s impossible to go home on time when your team finishes its work at the end of the day and you spend the evening redoing it. But we looked beautiful. The outcome was never the problem. We were getting things done. The problem was that it couldn’t last, and nobody on that team was doing anything wrong except me.

There’s a name for that

Almost every piece of what I was doing has been studied, which was oddly comforting to find out later.

Kim Scott, who managed teams at Google and Apple, calls the silent fix “ruinous empathy”: caring about someone personally but never challenging them directly.¹ It feels kind. It isn’t. The person never learns, and they’re the one who pays for it later when nobody’s there to quietly fix it. Scott says it’s the most common mistake managers make, by a wide margin.

Liz Wiseman spent years researching leaders who drain capability out of their teams, and found that most of them don’t mean to. She calls them accidental diminishers.² Two of her types describe me exactly. The Rescuer jumps in so people don’t struggle or fail. The Perfectionist manages every fine detail to help people produce better work. Both come from good intentions. Both teach the team to stop finding answers and wait for the boss to fix it.

And the standard I was enforcing wasn’t really the team’s. It was mine, aimed at myself. Psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett split perfectionism into three kinds: the standards you hold yourself to, the ones you demand of others, and the ones you think others demand of you.³ The first kind, self-oriented, is linked in their research to self-criticism and self-punishment. I wasn’t demanding perfection from my team. I was demanding it from myself and doing their work to get there.

What it cost

I paid for it. Eventually I had the inevitable breakdown. A relationship ended, there was no line between work and life, and the regular stress of the military and deployments stacked on top of all of it.

The weird thing is I didn’t feel stressed. I just kept pushing out unhealthy leadership habits and unhealthy self-care habits until it ended with my first panic attack. Nobody tells you how physical a panic attack is. I called them brain zaps: my fight-or-flight response would kick in for a split second, over and over. Then came the sudden inability to catch my breath.

So I finally went to mental health, and they told me, “It’s stress, dude.” No it wasn’t. I wasn’t stressed. I know what stress is. They sent me to a course anyway.

And holy shit. It was stress.

What I learned in that course is that nobody was judging me the way I was judging myself. I needed to take it easy on me.

Going to mental health didn’t end my career. I’m writing this as a Master Sergeant.

The reframe

Around the same time I read Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.⁴ The title sells it as a book about not caring. It’s really about the opposite: you only have so much care to give, so the real question is where you aim it. That reframed everything for me. I had been aiming all of mine at a perfect product. I should have been aiming it at developing people, and that was the one part of the job I’d been ignoring completely.

Every piece of work I quietly redid was a lesson someone on my team never got. The SrA never found out what I’d have changed. The new airman never learned the thing I fixed at 1900. I thought I was protecting the team. I was keeping them exactly where they were.

This isn’t just me. Linda Hill at Harvard Business School followed nineteen new managers through their entire first year in the role.⁵ What tripped them up usually wasn’t talent. It was a wrong picture of what the job was. They walked in thinking the title gave them authority and that the job was doing the work well, and they found out the job had changed underneath them: it was now getting work done through other people. Hill’s conclusion was that formal authority is a useful tool, but a limited one.

There’s also a trap hiding in the word “ownership.” A lot of us read Extreme Ownership and came away thinking it means controlling how everything looks. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin wrote a whole second book, The Dichotomy of Leadership, partly to fix that.⁶ Owning the outcome means it’s on you if it fails. It doesn’t mean every piece has to come out the way you would have done it. Push ownership too far and you just get a micromanager with a good excuse. I know, because I was one, and I didn’t even have the excuse of yelling at anybody.

Breaking the cycle

So how do you break it? It isn’t a personality trait. It’s mostly information. The frustration almost always comes from the gap between the team in your head and the team you actually have. Know who’s on your team, and most of it goes away.

The rest is deciding what “good enough” actually means. In contracting there’s a real line between wrong and not how I’d write it. A missing clause is wrong. A paragraph structured differently than you’d structure it is a preference. One of those needs a correction. The other one needs you to let it go and go home.

The biggest thing I took out of that course was simple: nobody sits down and thinks, “I’m going to screw this up on purpose.” When someone’s work comes back wrong, they’re almost always missing something. Your guidance. Training. Sometimes motivation. So I stopped staring at what they turned in and started asking what I could give them.

Sometimes that was a sharp “Redo this. It’s not good, and you know it.” That’s the conversation I spent years avoiding, and it turns out it’s part of the job. But more often it was a realization: “Oh, whoa. We’ve never actually taught you this.” So we’d pump the brakes, I’d teach it, and we’d re-attack.

There’s a reason that realization takes so long to show up. Psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error.⁷ When someone else messes up, we blame who they are. When we mess up, we blame the situation. A new supervisor looks at a bad file and thinks “lazy” or “careless” long before thinking “untrained.” Reversing that one habit fixed more on my teams than anything else I did.

In contracting, teaching isn’t always enough, either. There’s rarely one absolute answer. I can teach what an option is and how I exercise one. But someone else might have perfectly good reasons for a different notification period or a different exercise date. The best teams I’ve had challenged each other on that stuff, and I had to be fine with being challenged too.

People also learn differently, and that one was hard for me. Some people want the checklist. Fine. How do you want it? I’ll build it that way. That was difficult, because I never wanted to learn that way myself. Others want to experiment, push the limits of what they know, and do things differently than they’ve been done before. You have to cater to both, and you have to pay attention to how each of them responds to the way you operate.

Then you shift the work to fit. The person who wants the checklist might be the one who exercises every option in the shop and never misses a date. The person who wants to be creative might be the one who runs the source selection. Same team, same workload, a lot less friction.

And even when you get the right person in the right seat, expect mistakes. When they happen, remind yourself of the thing I had to learn the hard way: they didn’t make them on purpose.

What this section is

I still don’t have this figured out. Nobody hands you a formula, and that includes me. Most of the leadership shelf is experienced people compressing what they learned the hard way into something easier to remember. Some of it is real research, some of it is opinion, and every piece in this section will tell you which is which. What’s here is my working theory, subject to revision. Other leaders will put theirs alongside it, and some of them will disagree with me. Good.

So here’s the question I wish someone had asked me as a young staff sergeant: what are you fixing at night that nobody knows you’re fixing?