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Working Theory of Leadership · Concept

What I’ve learned over the years that you can learn right now

Fourteen years in five minutes.

5 min read

This section is mostly me rambling. I know that. So in a desperate attempt to hold your attention, here’s everything up front: the short version of what fourteen years of leading people taught me, mostly the hard way. Every one of these gets its own piece, where I tell the story behind it and we dig into what the research says. If you only read one page in this section, read this one.

Most of these are car thoughts, things that cross my mind on road trips and the drive into work. When I finally sat down and read the leadership books, I found almost all of them already in there, just with better names. Names are useful, because you can hand a name to a new staff sergeant before they have to learn it the way I did.

1. Nobody can read your mind.

You’ll walk in with a picture of how it should look, and your team will build something else. Before you decide how it should look, find out who’s on your team: what they know, what they’re good at, what they’ve never done. The plan you build for the team in your head falls apart on the team you actually have.1

Full piece: Leadership for People Who Just Got Handed It

2. “I told him twice” means “I didn’t check.”

When something under you fails, the first thing in your mouth will be the excuse. It’s still yours. Telling someone isn’t the same as making sure they understood.2

3. Nobody screws up on purpose.

When work comes back wrong, the person was almost always missing something: your guidance, training, or motivation. Figure out which one before you decide what kind of person they are. Our brains jump to “lazy” long before “untrained.”3

Full piece: Leadership for People Who Just Got Handed It

4. The mistake already taught the lesson.

I made a big mistake as a staff sergeant and nobody punished me for it. The mistake taught me more than any punishment would have. Hammering people for honest mistakes doesn’t stop mistakes. It teaches people to hide the next one, and then you lose the lesson and the information.4

Full piece: Dropping the Hammer

5. Some mistakes still need consequences.

Reckless isn’t the same as honest. When the line gets crossed on purpose, deal with it, and do it without contempt. You’re correcting a behavior, not deciding the person is garbage.5

6. Stop controlling people. Change the culture.

A sergeant major told me this when I sewed on staff. You can’t control people for long, and they can tell when you’re trying. What you can change is the room: what gets celebrated, how failure gets handled, whether the leader goes first when he’s wrong. People follow the room.6

Full piece: Stop Controlling People, Change the Culture

7. Don’t write a new rule because one person made one mistake.

One person screws up, and the reflex is a new policy for everyone. Usually the fix was a five-minute conversation. The rule stays on the books forever and costs everybody every day.4 5

8. Getting protested doesn’t mean you made a mistake.

A tech sergeant told me once that it did. He was wrong. Anyone can protest anything. In fiscal year 2025, GAO sustained 53 protests out of 1,688 cases filed with it.7 And when you do lose one, you just found out where the line actually is. That’s data, not a verdict on you.

9. We’re not curing cancer.

A chief told me this while I was sweating a routine buy. If you’re writing the contract that cures cancer, be stressed. The other 99 percent of the time, breathe. Pressure doesn’t make the work better, and it usually makes it worse.8

10. Wrong and “not how I’d do it” are different things.

A missing clause is wrong. A paragraph structured differently than you’d structure it is a preference. The first one gets a correction, out loud, with the why. The second one gets let go. I spent years quietly redoing work that wasn’t wrong, and it taught my team nothing.9

Full piece: Leadership for People Who Just Got Handed It

11. Staying late proves nothing.

If you have to stay late to take care of someone, stay. But staying late to prove you’re the hardest worker builds the culture you’ll later complain about, and past a certain point the extra hours stop producing anything.10

12. Make rank because of the work. Don’t do work to make rank.

Whatever the next stripe or bar is for you, it should be a side effect of doing things you care about, not the reason you do them. People do their best work when it’s theirs, they’re getting better at it, and it matters to someone.11 Chase the work. If the promotion comes, good.

The short version of the short version

The books are a mirror, not a manual. Most of what’s in them you’ll learn anyway, the slow way, by getting it wrong in front of people you care about. This list is so you can learn some of it the fast way. Pick the one that made you wince, because that’s the one you’re doing right now.

Sources

Most of these books are free through the DoD MWR Libraries collection in Libby. Sign in with your DoD ID number and date of birth; no library card needed. Links marked “Read free in Libby” go straight to the title in that collection. Availability checked November 2026.

  1. Linda A. Hill, Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019 edition; first published 1992). Evidence type: qualitative field research following first-time managers through their first year. Limitations: small sample in corporate settings, not the military. No direct quote used. Not in the DoD Libby collection as of November 2026. Publisher page (fallback). ↩
  2. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). Evidence type: practitioner opinion. Limitations: drawn from the authors’ combat and consulting experience, not research. No direct quote used. Read free in Libby (ebook). ↩
  3. Lee Ross, “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 10 (1977): 173–220. Evidence type: peer-reviewed review; the paper that named the fundamental attribution error. Limitations: later research found the effect varies across cultures and situations. No direct quote used. DOI. ↩
  4. Amy C. Edmondson, “Learning from Mistakes Is Easier Said Than Done: Group and Organizational Influences on the Detection and Correction of Human Error,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 32, no. 1 (1996): 5–28; and The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well (Atria, 2023). Evidence type: peer-reviewed research in eight hospital units, where better-led teams reported more errors, apparently because people felt safe reporting them, plus a research-based book for general readers. Limitations: the 1996 study is a small healthcare sample. No direct quote used. DOI (1996 paper); Read free in Libby (The Right Kind of Wrong, audiobook). ↩ ↩
  5. Amy C. Edmondson, “Strategies for Learning from Failure,” Harvard Business Review, April 2011. Evidence type: practitioner summary of the author’s research; lays out a spectrum of failure from blameworthy to praiseworthy. Limitations: written for managers, not peer-reviewed. No direct quote used. HBR. ↩ ↩
  6. Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups (Bantam, 2018). Evidence type: journalism synthesis of research and case studies. Limitations: case selection favors successful groups. No direct quote used. Read free in Libby (ebook). ↩
  7. U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO Bid Protest Annual Report to Congress for Fiscal Year 2025 (GAO-26-900695, B-158766, December 12, 2025). Evidence type: official statistics. Of 1,688 cases filed (1,617 of them protests), GAO resolved 380 on the merits and sustained 53, a 14 percent sustain rate. Its effectiveness rate, which counts voluntary agency corrective action as relief, was 52 percent. Limitations: GAO protests only, not Court of Federal Claims or agency-level protests; corrective action isn’t always an admission of error. No direct quote used. GAO. ↩
  8. Teresa M. Amabile, Constance N. Hadley, and Steven J. Kramer, “Creativity Under the Gun,” Harvard Business Review 80, no. 8 (August 2002): 52–61. Evidence type: practitioner summary of diary research with 177 employees on 22 project teams. Limitations: knowledge workers in companies, not the military. No direct quote used. HBR. ↩
  9. Liz Wiseman, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, revised and updated edition (Harper Business, 2017). Evidence type: research-based business book. Limitations: not peer-reviewed; corporate settings. Cited for the Perfectionist accidental diminisher. No direct quote used. Read free in Libby (audiobook of the original 2010 edition; the accidental diminisher types come from the 2017 revision, which this collection does not carry). ↩
  10. John Pencavel, “The Productivity of Working Hours,” The Economic Journal 125, no. 589 (2015): 2052–2076. Evidence type: peer-reviewed research on British munitions workers in World War I. Output rose in proportion to hours up to about 50 hours a week, then flattened; seventy-hour weeks produced little more than 56-hour weeks. Limitations: manual factory work a century ago, not office work. No direct quote used. Working paper (free). ↩
  11. Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead, 2009). Evidence type: journalism synthesis of motivation research, mainly Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory. Limitations: popularizes and simplifies the underlying research. No direct quote used. Read free in Libby (ebook). ↩

Written in a personal capacity. These views do not represent the U.S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or any government agency.

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