Use effective leadership in your organization

  • Published
  • By Chief Master Sgt. Chris Barnard
  • 90th Medical Group Superintendant
F.E. WARREN AIR FORCE BASE, WYO. --  What does it means to be an effective leader in your organization? How do individual ethics, values and interpersonal relationships contribute to, as well as impact a leader's effectiveness?

To be an effective leader, one must first possess good ethics. Ethics is the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation. What this means to me when I'm considering someone as a leader is that the individual can look at both the good and bad in a given situation and have the moral duty to do the right thing for the organization, regardless of personal interests, gains or simply trying to make the members of the organization happy. It is doing the right thing all of the time, and yes, especially when people are not looking. A leader's ethics work hand in hand with their values.

Values are principles or quality, intrinsically valuable or desirable. It is imperative that leaders display strong values or principles in our decision making processes as well as in daily performance. I can think of an example of when leadership didn't quite reflect good ethics and values, it was part of Col. Jack Jacobs' story. If you're not aware of whom Colonel Jacobs is, he is a Congressional Medal of Honor award recipient from the Vietnam era.

In his book, If Not Now, When? Duty and Sacrifice in America's Time of Need, he tells the story of a captain that is sent in to take over his position as the senior lead advisor to the Vietnamese during the early stages of the conflict in Vietnam. The captain showed up and was a bit overweight and out of shape for the jungle situation he was to face. On his first day out as the senior leader and with about a half a day of trudging through the water and mud of the rice patties, a small battle broke out with the Vietcong.

Once the battle was over, a helicopter was sent in to evacuate the dead and injured. But as then lieutenant Jacobs looked around for his boss, he was informed that the captain had got on the helicopter and left. When asked if the captain was injured, a Vietnamese private responded "no, lieutenant, he wasn't wounded. He said he was tired and needed to go home."

He clearly missed his opportunity of moral duty to stay with his unit on the battle field - not an effective leader in my eyes. This is a lesson for us all reflect on, especially here at Warren. It goes hand in hand with our drive to meet our wing's mission to "provide preeminent combat capabilities across the spectrum of conflict." Don't be the guy catching the easy ride home. Be the guy living our wing's vision of "ready to fight, anytime, anywhere!" An effective leader holds true to ethics and values and uses them to steer the organization to success. Are you steering your organization to success?

When it comes to interpersonal relationships, a leader needs to be able to work with and communicate with all the members of the organization. Interpersonal relationships are built from our interpersonal experiences which are the descriptions of important one-on-one organizational relationships such as supervisors and subordinates and peer to peer.

In order to relate to our employees, we must be able to understand where they are coming from and what experiences they bring to the table. Our leadership effectiveness in interpersonal relationships relates to our awareness of differences and similarities in groups and our willingness to test the accuracy of our understanding. So, in order to be an effective leader, one must be ethically sound, value driven and open to creating interpersonal relationships with the employees within their organization.

So I ask, are you being an effective leader in your organization? Are you using all the tools available to you? Are you pushing your organization to the next level? If nothing else, I hope this article gets you thinking about your leadership effectiveness and the impact you're having on your organization. Our leadership will develop and mature over time, it just takes a little care and nurturing along the way.