I fear that if I stress the importance of leadership too often in my writing, its impact will wear out. However, leadership is the most important quality for each midshipman at Maine Maritime to develop, besides our actual training as sailors and engineers or businessmen and scientists.
Last year, our freshman regiment class was assigned a project to interview and write about one particular adult leader on campus—be it an officer, a faculty member, the manager of foodservice or the dean. This project brought to light the wealth of experience that works on our campus, from sailors to soldiers to people who have just been around. There are many things to share that these people have taught us.
First lesson from Gunnery Sgt. George Oshana: always be bigger, better and stronger. It’s important as a leader to be out in front—which sounds as though it goes without saying, but it’s often easier said than done.
Being “bigger, better and stronger” doesn’t necessarily mean physical strength. A leader ought to be the smartest and the sharpest and the most considerate. In fact, it might be better to say that the smartest, sharpest people should be made leaders.
A leader is someone who strives for overachievement, and by that policy he ought to never allow a challenge to go unmet, nor should he allow his subordinates to pass him. Oshana also told us that “leadership is inconvenience.” Leaders must go out of their way to be better than the best and constantly self-improving.
Capt. Michael Hegarty, my unit commander, has a set of six leadership principles on which he builds his leadership teachings. Several of them are not applicable in a general sense, being militaristic in nature, but several deserve the attention of all leaders, including the concept of continuous self-improvement.
It is important for a leader to always be thinking of new ways to improve his leadership. After all, if he runs out of things to improve on, it’s time to retire. It can be little things, such as physical strength (as discussed before), better ways to communicate with subordinates, or even the simple mechanics of how a unit or group does its job. It can even be a simple tweak in mentality, which I find to be necessary on a day-to-day basis. Self-improvement is extremely important to good leadership.
Capt. Nate Gandy, our commandant of midshipmen, discusses delegation. This is a very important aspect of leadership as far as we training officers are concerned, because while we must delegate to our underlings, we have to remember that we are training them to be officers one day. They will take up leadership positions as well, and so our leadership to them must nurture that.
Delegation, says Capt. Gandy, needs to be broad and unspecific. It’s in a leader’s best interest to not give specific orders about a task; “the insight and working style of a subordinate or junior sailor is immensely valuable, so encourage it, and learn from them,” he advises.
Taking this lesson to Regimental Preparatory Training and MUG month with next year’s freshmen will be an important step in each of our own leadership skills—for instance, it is in everyone’s best interest to order the MUGs to “clean the decks on the ship; this is the result we’re looking for,” and then let them at it. It is remarkable the ways in which some of them will step up and become the leaders of the next generation of officers.
There are hundreds of lessons, both broad and specific, to be learned from those who have been leaders for a long time. These people are still learning from each other and from us—which is the true beauty of leadership.
It is an art that is always growing, always changing, but at its core it is bound by a few things which make all leaders the same. These are the core character values: honor, courage, integrity, among others. Even these can be learned from those very experienced men and women who have gone before us.
Benjamin Stevens of Islesford is a student at Maine Maritime Academy in Castine.