While attending basic training at the Navy’s Officer Candidate School, I received a valuable piece of leadership advice that I carried with me throughout my five years of active duty service. My roommate during this time, Stuart, had been a prior enlisted sailor who had seen multiple deployments in Afghanistan, while I was entirely unaccustomed to military life. Stuart was an unassuming but effective leader who had established a quiet authority among a group of mostly civilians barely in their twenties.
One evening, as we neared the end of our months-long ordeal to become naval officers and reflected on our various successes and failures, I asked Stuart what he thought made a good leader. “When you’re a leader, you can’t just show up and start telling people what to do,” he explained. “You have to build a rapport with them first.” This was where many young officers struggled in the military, Stuart explained, those who expect that their rank will suffice to enforce their will upon their team. But a good leader knows that the Navy’s artificial hierarchy is not enough to instill confidence in sailors. Even officers have to earn their people’s trust.
During my five years as a surface warfare officer in the Navy, I experienced my fair share of good and bad leadership. I made plenty of mistakes myself, in fact, as a leader. Throughout that time, however, I always kept Stuart’s advice at the forefront and endeavored to always build a rapport with my sailors.
Stuart’s point was that sailors can, in crudest terms, smell bullshit. Just because you’re an officer doesn’t mean they will trust you, rather you need to show them that you are trustworthy first. Like in any organization, enlisted men and women in the U.S. Navy expect their leaders to be skilled, fair, and willing to work as hard as them, if not harder. An officer that stays in their stateroom and is unwilling to get their hands dirty won’t get far aboard a warship. Then again, sailors don’t expect their leaders to act like their friend either.
The rapport between officer and enlisted in the Navy is built, most importantly, on mutual respect. Stuart understood that young people fresh out of college do not necessarily make good officers. That takes work, not simply a rank tab on your collar. Stuart’s advice, it turned out, served me well.