Developing Leaders for the 21st Century

Much discussion about Leader Development is flying around.... How can we ensure we develop leaders for the future? The Pentathlete? Intellectually Agile? and the list goes on. Within this context there is another issue that will plague our Army in the coming years - Toxic Leaders. Within our Leader Development Program there is a high potential to perpetuate toxicity throughout our Army. I will submit that the probability is moderate; however, it still holds the potential to cripple our force.

Dr. Reed used the term toxic leader, COL Williams has written on the topic while at the War College and we students at CGSC throw this topic around quite a bit. I feel that our leader development program does not provide for the identification of toxicity, nor does it provide a way to report and administratively deal with this problem.

There are two paradigms that are at play here.

1. The Army can make anyone a leader.
2. Toxicity exists within the Army and it is destructive.

If these paradigms are true then the Army absolutely has the responsibility to develop leaders who can identify toxicity and provide an administrative way to deal with toxicity. Well, not so easy to do in a hierarchical organization who is extremely oriented on quick results.

I'll provide one possible scenario that defines the difficulties of this issue:

CPT TANGO works for MAJOR XRAY and MAJOR XRAY is a toxic leader. LTC FOXTROT is their boss (for the sake of this example he is not a toxic leader). CPT TANGO cannot approach MAJOR XRAY, by virtue of his toxicity, this approach would be useless. Option two, report it to LTC FOXTROT. This option is also frought with peril, because LTC FOXTROT will approach MAJOR XRAY and confront him - at which point things get even worse at the office. Third and last option as I see it is go to the Inspector General. This option, although potentially yielding some results, leads to CPT TANGO being labeled a "whistleblower" and things continue to spiral out of control. Thereby, no real way to report or administratively deal with this problem. One last note, this scenario assumes that CPT TANGO has the skills to identify toxicity, although these skills (which are relationship and emotionally based intellectual skills circa -Daniel Goleman) are not fully addressed by our leader development program.

What would you do? Are there other issues at play here? Is CPT TANGO just a whiner?

WHat do you think?