Leadership Expectations

1. My evaluation of you won't be a perfunctory task. Instead, I'll work very hard to know you, observe you as military and civilian, managers, officers, leaders, trainers, and give you the fairest evaluation possible. I fully realize the importance of my words on your performance reports in regards to your professional future. Thus, I want to provide you some guidance, some parameters, some sense of azimuth that you can hook into to help guide your actions, development, and thoughts.

2. Here are some of my thoughts and some expectations I have for officers and senior civilians in the J2.

• Officership. This concept applies to all people in a leadership position. Take responsibility for actions of subordinates. Share hardships. Be visible, particularly during difficult times. Allow no dual standards. Work harder than anybody else. Accept only the highest standards. Listen to subordinates. Make the hard choices and stand by them.

• Moral Courage. Stand up for your convictions. Take a stand on hard issues. Be anti-pusillanimous. Encourage candor. Take the bad news and deal with it. Allow no equivocation or delay on bad news.

• Intellectual Development. Be a self-directed learner. Be intellectually curious. Put theory into practice. Seek knowledge and understanding. Know and understand what wisdom is. Always be on the prowl for new and better ways of doing things. Seek new information and new technology.

• Problem Solving. Correctly identify the real problem(s), not the ancillary problems(s). Fragment problems, analyze pieces, identify links. Synthesize well-understood problems back into a whole. Identify turf issues. Identify "lane" issues. Gather information, think about it. Judge the veracity of information. Understand relationships. Understand causes and effects (short- and long-term. Frame problems. Seek to find and understand heart of the matter. Think through courses of action. Think through costs and benefits. Think about risk -- deal with it. Structure environment for success. Plan branches and sequels.

• Decision Making. Have a process. Seek information. Seek advice. Involve people as much as possible. Make the hard calls. Accept responsibility for the hard calls. Take the heat for contentious calls. Understand ramifications, to include disparate relationships for decisions. Use judgment. Apply logic to intuitive calls. Act, communicate, assess.

• Taking Care Of Subordinates. Keep subordinates informed. Keep subordinates at the forefront of your existing and conscious being. Provide and enforce standards. Instill discipline. Inspect and offer suggestions for improvement. Correct as necessary. Provide guidance. Set the example at all times. Visit living and work spaces. Teach and coach. Be concerned for welfare of subordinates. Know something about subordinates. Counsel subordinates regularly.

• Training. Know METL and battle tasks. Know individual and collective tasks that relate to METL and battle tasks. Know how to assess and retrain. Demonstrate knowledge of and belief in human intellectual development. Know difference between training and education. Plan training. Assess training and design repetitive training. Envision what the future battlefield will be and design training to prepare soldiers to operate and survive in that environment.

• Standard Setter and Checker. Define standards for NCOs, soldiers, and junior officers. Check standards and correct as necessary. Have well-understood standards for many things. Understand how standards relate to discipline -- personal and organization. Know and understand tasks, conditions, and standards and how standards change with conditions. Involve soldiers of all ranks in setting and enforcing standards.

• Initiative. Have your own projects and activities. Strive for new and creative ways to improve the organization, your subordinates, and yourself. Think, design, act. Start things on your own. Accept the ideas of others and help those ideas come into fruition. Encourage the initiative of subordinates. Give mission type orders and guidance when appropriate -- subordinates design how they will accomplish their tasks. Encourage deviation from the norm as long as goals are accomplished, the law isn't broken, and subordinates make progress toward the end-state. Reward initiative and innovation. Seek information on; how others accomplish tasks. Seek changes in technology to improve our directorate.

• Subordinate Development. Help subordinates become technically and tactically proficient. Counsel. Develop leadership. Allow subordinates the chance to

fail (except in matters of morals, integrity violations, safety, and embarrassment to the organization). Help subordinates learn about warfighting, information, technology, theory, history, etc. Prepare subordinates for the future.

• Planner. Understand and help others learn about centers of gravity, friction, branches and sequels. Understand end-states and states of continuity. Know how to set conditions so we can satisfy states of continuity. Know and understand the notion of wholes and holistic Planning. Search for relationships among things, even when you believe relationships don't exist. Pay attention to detail. Defeat your own plan. Wargame and hedge against disaster. Rehearse your plan. Backbrief plan to others -- have them criticize. Understand some of the theory behind military planning -- Sun Tzu, Clausewitz.