What makes a good leader in the military, and a bad one?

Travis Jewell, a Marine Corps Veteran, mortarman and comedy creator, loved the Marine Corps and left it in 2019. We asked why.

“It all came down to leadership.”

Hear it at 28:32

Not all of it. One man.

“I had bad leadership. Very bad. I’m not going to say that they all were bad, but I would say that one of my immediate leaderships, my platoon commander in particular, made me realize that I don’t want to be forced to have to work with someone like that guy ever again.”

Hear it at 28:36

One officer, one Marine gone. If that sounds familiar, it should. In 2011 the Army’s own leadership survey asked officers, warrant officers and sergeants what they had seen in the past year. As the Army’s NCO Journal reported, 83 percent said they had directly watched a toxic leader at work. And 97 percent said they had watched an exceptional one.

So nearly everybody had both. We asked around. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, eleven Veterans described the leader they would follow anywhere and the one they would not follow to the chow hall. No bad leader is named here, because no guest named one. They described the type. You will recognize the type.

The one who ain’t got it

Dean Goble Jr., a retired Army Green Beret and Black Rifle Coffee philanthropy director, says the dangerous one is not the lazy one.

“If you have the really high performer but he doesn’t care about anything else than himself, that is in my opinion the definition of that toxic leader that you’ll find in the military.”

Hear it at 24:50

“They’ll crush everything you send them to do but they’ll kill and destroy every other pathway and relationship along the way.”

Hear it at 25:07

The one worth following, he says, is the high performer who also cares about everybody else. Those are the legends.

Jewell got his sorting system after the Corps, from a civilian manager about his own age. Three types, she told him.

“There’s people that are natural-born leaders. There’s people that learn how to lead.”

And the third:

“And there’s people who just ain’t got it.”

Hear it at 16:34

He says he had seen it in the Marine Corps the whole time and never had the words.

Clayton, an Air Force Veteran and founder of Red Tails Racing, noticed it as a change of address.

“Leaders have to lead from the front, right? When I got to the guard, my leaders stopped leading from the front.”

Hear it at 42:32

He was not an easy follower and says so. On his last day, the commander he could not stand pulled him aside to announce his own retirement, and to say that Clayton leaving marked the end of “the single most rebellious part of my career.” Clayton took it as a compliment. His terms had always been simple.

“I’m not just going to follow your order. If you can convince me of the morality of the thing, I’m in.”

Hear it at 41:52

The captain who overslept

Now the other kind. Ross D. Bryant, a U.S. Army Veteran who leads UNLV Military and Veteran Services, was enlisted before he was an officer. As a captain commanding a tank company, he had a soldier who was late all the time, and a first sergeant who wanted stripes for it. The paperwork was ready. Then came a division run, and for the first time in four years the captain overslept. He parked in the woods and slid into the formation as it marched off. The soldier was late that day too.

“Hey, today’s your lucky day. I was late to work today. I actually overslept today.”

Hear it at 14:12

He tore up the Article 15. The first sergeant, a member of a species not known for joy, objected.

“We’re going to lead by example and if I’m late, he gets a freebie.”

Hear it at 14:54

Was the soldier ever late again? “Never.”

Brandon Mills, a U.S. Army Veteran, Abrams tank gunner and print shop founder, learned the same rule in smaller units of measure.

“They eat first. You fuel the tanks, you fuel your troops, and then you can fuel yourself.”

Hear it at 9:41

Nice, or good?

Mike Sumida, a 30-year Air Force Veteran and museum docent, went on to manage engineers. His first rule is older than the Air Force.

“Treat people how you would want to be treated. Period.”

Hear it at 16:13

For him that means asking people what they think, because you would want to be asked. It does not mean a vote.

“You get the input, but the bottom line is you’re the boss.”

Hear it at 16:53

A harder version came up in our interview with SSgt Nicholas Milsap, an active duty Marine Corps recruiter, in a conversation about the letters that arrive years later from people who were not treated gently.

“The best leader isn’t your friend.”

Hear it at 1:22:33

He is the one, the line goes on, who cares what happens to you and will put you in your place.

Edward Haines, a retired Marine Master Sergeant who spent 20 years in signals intelligence, says his own mistake as a leader was neither of those. It was doing everything himself until he nearly burned out.

“Once I had that figured out, my life got a whole lot better right there. So, I learned you’re not shifting off the responsibility, but you’re delegating the tasks at hand.”

Hear it at 36:55

And Jessica Jay Dee, a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant and combat Veteran, describes the test that comes when the Marines you lead know a job you have never done.

“How can you lead people who you need to really humble yourself to understand that you’re in their world now?”

Hear it at 26:13

Does the top care?

Here our guests split. AJ Kehl, a U.S. Air Force Veteran and career firefighter who made chief, was at a reception in Washington in 2019 when the Air Force’s four-star chief of staff walked over and asked him, of all people, how to stop losing airmen to suicide.

“I realized in that moment that our top leadership across the Department of Defense, I think they genuinely care.”

Hear it at 14:46

Kehl also says his career took off when he stopped going along.

“Once I started questioning things, once I started being like that’s stupid, that’s stupid, my career actually took off.”

Hear it at 25:29

He calls the military “a massive bureaucracy” where fixing waste is like fishing with dynamite. He attaches one condition.

“It takes you being in a position where you have leadership that supports you.”

Hear it at 27:05

Which is the catch. Dr. Cornelius Jones, a U.S. Navy recruit division commander and recruiter, and an author, has trained the 18-year-olds and recruited the 30-year-olds, and says the older ones ask why.

“Leadership doesn’t want to be challenged. Even a lot of times when they don’t really have the answer.”

Hear it at 43:33

Jewell’s best leader, a staff sergeant, gave him the enlisted version. You can complain and quit, or you can get high enough to be in charge and fix it yourself.

“Those are the only two options you have when you deal with bad leadership.”

Hear it at 30:46

Jewell has watched people take the second option, pick up the billet and fix nothing. “But they don’t change anything,” he says. He still will not call them villains.

“I don’t even know if there’s such thing as a villain at this point in time. I feel like it’s just a different perspective.”

Hear it at 31:00

That generosity showed up again at our Marine Corps Birthday taping with Tom “Ghost” Martin and Jessica Jay Dee, when the talk turned to the old rule that you did not go to sick call and you did not say you were struggling.

“I’m not saying anybody did it right, anybody did it wrong, that our leadership wasn’t competent, none of that. It was just what we did.”

Hear it at 24:35

The reply from across the table: “I wouldn’t put that on the leadership per se.” The mission came first, and everyone in the room had agreed to that.

Then you get out, and you are the boss

Curtez Riggs, a retired Army First Sergeant and founder of Military Influencer Conference, built a company on the Army’s one-line definition.

“Leadership is the process of influencing others.”

Hear it at 56:49

Nothing in that sentence about rank, which is useful, because out here you have none. Jones has a warning for anyone who expects it to transfer.

“They don’t need your military leadership. They don’t need your military tone.”

Hear it at 1:12:37

What does transfer is smaller. “Cheeks” Aguillon, a U.S. Army Veteran and former chaplain assistant who now serves on the Vegas Veteran Voices board, ran crews of production assistants on film sets. He had worked jobs where people started at 4:30 in the morning and got nothing to eat until lunch. On his sets the gear got squared away first. Then:

“Go get breakfast. Sit down for 15, 20 minutes, have a good meal.”

Hear it at 9:29

That is Mills’s rule in a parking lot. They eat first.

The clown, revisited

Back to Jewell, because he did something most people never do with their worst boss. He went back over his own part.

“Looking back on it now, I think that I could have been a little bit more tactful about it, like my approach with this platoon commander, and I could have made things work, but I didn’t understand it at the time.”

Hear it at 28:55

He does not take back the decision. He says he found the same kind of leader waiting in the civilian world, which is what the survey would predict. What our guests add to the survey is the other half. The captain who tore up the paperwork. The sergeant who learned to hand off the task and keep the blame. Breakfast. None of it took rank. Most of it took noticing.