LEADING WITH LOVE: HAVING ONE’S BACK AT THE COST OF YOUR OWN
I wholeheartedly believe that leadership can be taught. If you use the basic principle of familial love as the core of your mission, you can build a legendary culture. I have seen repeated examples of how caring for my team members led to success and extraordinary results.
Of course, love alone isn’t enough. Trust, standards, purpose, and accountability all play a role. Individually, these foundational principles cannot yield success; they need each other to flourish. Building a culture with all of them is in itself an act of love.
Though we all like to focus on stories of success, I believe it’s important to reflect on times of failure and poor examples of leadership as well. I have come to realize my failures happened when I lost sight of the necessary foundation of love. In those moments, I focused on the mission, myself, or avoiding unpleasant consequences. The Bible’s well-known chapter on love says, “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.” I’ve found that when I act on what love is, instead of what love is not, my results are more significant.
During my command of the USS Texas, we thought there was a good chance that we had been counter-detected by an adversary. The decision-making came fast and furious. As I prepared to make a critical decision altering our mission, my Executive Officer (XO) stopped me with a strong suggestion. He didn’t want to flinch without just cause. He knew the decision I was about to make would be irreversible and mean mission failure. My actions would be critiqued by high-ranking officials, and if the subsequent analysis showed that we had not been counter-detected, my decision would be used as a textbook example of what not to do on a mission.
In order to protect me, my XO put his own credibility on the line and openly challenged my authority. Since we had a long-established relationship of trust and respect, there was no part of me that doubted he spoke out of love, loyalty, and concern for me and the crew. So, I listened while he explained his thoughts. I cannot emphasize enough how his action would not have been possible without a culture rooted in love. If my XO hadn’t believed I cared for him, he would have hung me out to dry and allowed me to make a decision he believed could be wrong. If the sailor who supported the XO hadn’t felt safe speaking up and hadn’t known his commanding officer cared for him, he never would have risked the possible backlash.
Prior to me taking command, the USS Texas was the worst-performing ship in the squadron, but in just a year and a half, my team and I turned that record around, making the Texas the top ranked of the squadron’s ten submarines. We also had the highest retention in the Pacific Fleet for two consecutive years and scored the best possible grade on a rigorous nuclear engineering exam. It wasn’t due to my intelligence, tactical prowess, or charisma that USS Texas succeeded; instead, it was my ability to nurture strong connections based on familial love.