News article on new USAFA Leadership Center

Today's USAF AIM Points feature article was:

Academy to transform character development program

The article discusses the development of a new leadership and character development center at the USAF Academy (USAFA) in Colorado. Although the article doesn't describe the new curriculum, which I am very interested in learning more about, it does start me thinking about good questions for the new center director.

Knowing how leadership was taught to me at my commissioning source, in the Air & Space Basic Course, and in my correspondence course for Squadron Officer School, the focus was on the Übermensch of leaders with very specific traits: charismatic, outgoing, and married to their one vision of the future. We know these leaders had the right traits because their visions came true. They were unlike all those other leaders whose visions didn't come true, but were none the less charismatic and outgoing.

My wondering is will USAFA continue trying to develop Übermensch leaders, or will they focus on helping the students discover the students' individual leadership preferences and help them build plans for using their strengths and overcoming areas that... well aren't preferred by that individual?

This idea of developing mitigation to a leader's leadership preferences is central to the journal paper Frank and I wrote a few years ago (and honestly, we need to blog about shortly). Considering that each system is a different mix of challenges, by which different leadership preferences are needed, then leaders can only excel if they are either lucky enough to only encounter problems matching to their preferred way of solving problems or have developed contingency plans for problems that the leader would normally try sub-optimal methods.

Our challenge, as systemic leaders is to understand how to reign in our preferences and develop plans that help us see when our preferred methods may not yield fruit and intentionally choose other methods that are more likely to succeed.

If this type of leadership self-exploration is going to be embraced at USAFA, then my hats off to them. But until they provide something for us to review, we will have to seek other ways of getting our message out and hoping they hear the good word.