Leadership: Polishing boots

Note: Each April the CG-133 (Coast Guard Leadership and Professional Development)  sponsors a Leadership Campaign to focus attention on the topic of leadership. Over the course of the month we'll have a number of posts focused on leadership as part of this year's "Spotlight on Leadership".

Shipmates,

The Coast Guard's twenty-eight leadership competencies (HTML/PDF) are organized into four broad categories:

• Leading Self 
• Leading Others 
• Leading Performance and Change 
• Leading the Coast Guard 

I had cause at this week after the Flotilla Crew/Coxswain Academy to consider two points related to the first of these categories, Leading Self.

We wear boots with our ODUs. The Auxiliary Manual does not say much about care of these boots and the CG Uniform Manual only notes that they should be well blackened. The Coast Guard cultural standard is that boots should be polished. Over the years since I bought the boots I currently wear I'd regularly taken the black Kiwi and shoe brush to my boots. Recently this boot first-aid has had less and less effect. At the Academy SN Elisabeth Hanna, FL76 member and one of our Coxswain candidates, shared her active duty perspective on the wearing of the ODU. Listening to Elisabeth I looked down at my boots I realized that I'd drifted more than a bit and my boots no longer reflected the standard to which I hold myself. The next day I decided it was time to learn how to polish my boots and it turns out to be a great metaphor for leading self. A good polish requires simple tools, lots of work and time, putting on thick layers of polish and working each of these down followed thiner and thiner layers, getting a little better at the process with each step and seeing slightly better results. While perfection isn't possible, knowing excellence is out there somewhere makes one keep working.  My boots are not yet where I'd like to be but, like my journey to leading self, I am on the path.

The second "leading self" moment came after reflecting on my contributions during Elisabeth's presentation on the ODU. As is my habit I offered a few clarifications. While correct these additions were not appropriate to my role at the time. I was there as a mentor to the candidates not to teach - if each of us were to offer our POV from the back of the room the instructors would never get to the points of their lessons. The class time belongs to the students first, those of us observing should do just that, observe. There will always be times to offer those clarifications, additions and comments it may just not be right then. Too often those of us in leadership use our role to talk when we should be listening. We've got plenty of time in the bully pulpit -- part of leading self is knowing when to let others speak. To paraphrase Epictetus, "I was given two ears and one mouth… you should use them in that proportion".


This isn't to tell you to polish those boots or listen more, the point is to lead ourselves. I invite you to join me on the journey.

Daren