There is a very strong and steadfast rule in the United States Marine Corps:  Officers go to the end of the chow line.  No self-respecting Marine officer would ever think about getting in the chow line ahead of his troops.  He’ll make sure that every single guy, from the lowest Private up to his own Lieutenants get fed before he takes a bite.  It’s only right – rank hath its privileges, but rank also ensures that the men are taken care of before he is.

This is a tradition as old as the Marines.  One of the primary responsibilities of a leader is to see to the “health and welfare” of those under him.  The needs of the leader should be secondary to the needs of the troops.  Troops that see you at the end of the chow line know that you are placing them above yourself.  They’ll follow you. They know that if you are wise enough to let them eat first, you are wise enough to take care of them in other areas. Officers that “pull rank” and barge to the front are saying “I’m more important and I don’t care about you.”.  People don’t want to follow that kind of “leader”.

This same attitude can – and should – translate over to the “regular” world.  Do you have a better, more powerful computer than your guys?  Did you take the first widescreen monitor for yourself?  Do you order in sandwiches for the executive team when they meet over lunch, but don’t do the same for your team who work evenings and weekends?

A leader should ensure that his team has the best equipment.  As a manager, you are mainly doing email and web surfing, with maybe the occasional spreadsheet.  For those of you in the software development business, your developers are doing builds, running complex IDE’s and debuggers, etc.  That is, they are doing the things that require processing horsepower.  If you are taking the hot new machines and the big monitors because “I’m the boss”, well, you are jumping the chow line.  The productivity of your team, not to mention the morale boost from seeing that you put their needs above yours, are well worth you working with an adequate machine. 

So you want to be a good leader and have people follow you and be part of the team?  Get at the end of the chow line.

When I was in the Navy, a large part of my job was to provide daily briefings to a senior officer.  Very often that senior officer was of flag rank (an Admiral or a General).  It is the job of intelligence guys to keep an eye on things and make sure that the decision makers had the latest information.  That usually took the form of a daily briefing.  Intelligence is a 24/7 business, and so I would have a team working overnight to prepare a briefing every morning at, say 0700.  I usually ended up giving the briefings, because the average enlisted guy doesn’t want to stand up in front of the “big brass”. 

Now, this is a leadership “two-fer”.   First, you get to take credit with your team for “taking the bullet” and being the one to stand up in front of the man, give the briefing and fielding the hard questions.  Second, you can use this as an opportunity for giving credit where credit is due.

Few things can be more frustrating for a team than when the boss takes all the credit for the team’s work.  This has happened to you, I’ll bet.  You come up with an idea.  The idea is shot down.  And then two weeks later, your boss repeats that idea right back to you as if he thought it up.  Or you find out later that he told his boss your idea as if it were his own.  Good leaders have strong egos and don’t need to steal ideas. Instead, if they pass the idea up the chain, they go out of their way to give you credit for it.

Thus when giving those morning briefings, I never passed up an opportunity to give credit where credit was due.  I often tried to work in phrases like “As a result of the excellent analysis done by Petty Officer Johnstone….” or “I don’t know, General, but I know that Chief Lyle has the answer.”    This went a long way.  My team (who was sitting in the back of the room) could see clearly that I knew they were doing good work and that I didn’t want to take credit for what they had done. 

Some people might hesitate to do this because they think that they look bad if they don’t know everything themselves.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The most effective leaders are the ones that nurture and develop effective people.  By giving credit where credit is due, you show that your entire team (led by you, remember) is up to the task.  Your team sees that their work is appreciated and recognized.  They see their boss standing up for them and promoting them. This engenders loyalty, trust, and more hard work.

That’s a win for everyone.

One of the things that I want to do on this blog is to talk about leadership.

I’ve had a lot of experience with leadership.  I was an officer in the US Navy for twelve years, and as such I had many opportunities to both lead and be led.  I’ve also been both an observer and an actual leader and manager in the software business. In both worlds, I’ve seen how critical good leadership is, and how easy it is to be terrible at it.

I’ve been led by some great leaders and by some really bad leaders. Since I knew that I would some day be leading people, I spent a lot of time thinking on and contemplating leadership – you can hardly be an officer in the Navy without doing so.  Paradoxically, it is the bad leaders that taught me the most about leadership and what it means to be an effective leader.  By seeing (and suffering under) the actions of a poor leader – these things generally fell into the category of caring more about themselves than their people – gave me a strong sense of “I’m never going to do that!”, which then, in turn, helped me to figure out what the right thing to do is.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve served under some fine leaders and emulating them is something I try to do, but it is the leaders that weren’t good at leading that really taught me the most. 

Now I’m not claiming to be a great leader – I don’t think that’s the case. But I do think that I’ve had a modicum of success as one, and I think that I have a few nuggets of wisdom to pass on to you fine people.  I’ll be drawing on a lot of my military experiences as well as those in the software industry to share my thoughts.

So pursuant to that,  I’ve created a “Leadership” category here in the blog, and you can follow that tag here if you want.  I won’t be blogging exclusively about Leadership – you might be surprised to find out that I have a lot to say about a lot of things (shocking, I know) --  but I do have a lot of thoughts on the matter that I feel compelled to share.