Semper Fidelis: Marine Corps Leadership in a Corporate Setting—Part II
By Dan Delany
The Stepping Stone, July 2023
Part I of this series[1] showed how the Marine Corps’ 14 leadership traits (recall: JJ DID TIE BUCKLE) could be applied to developing your leadership capabilities in a corporate setting. This second installment shifts focus to the Marine Corps’ 11 leadership principles, which outline actions and behaviors good leaders can employ to effectively manage a team and achieve the team’s objectives. Like the leadership traits, these principles are not exclusive to the military and can easily be employed within a corporate environment.
Know Yourself and Seek Self-Improvement
This principle relies heavily on the leadership traits described in Part I of this series. It can be developed in several ways including self-evaluation or feedback from managers, peers, and direct reports to determine strengths and weaknesses. Reflecting on the behaviors and actions of past or current leaders and assessing what made them successful or unsuccessful can hone your own skills.
Be Technically and Tactically Proficient
Proficiency in one’s “craft” or field builds credibility and instills trust in subordinates. Direct reports need guidance in their work, and if a leader cannot provide solid advice, it increases the likelihood of failure. Knowledge in one’s field often comes with experience, but can also be improved through formal training, self-learning, or informal interactions with subject matter experts. It should also be recognized that gaining technical proficiency should be continuous throughout a career to support further advancement.
Know Your Marines and Look out for Their Welfare
This is one of the most important leadership principles.
The Marine Corps emphasizes troop welfare so much that it is considered the second objective of leadership because without an effective team, a leader is powerless. Having professional knowledge of direct reports will not only give a leader better insight into how to effectively leverage their skills but can also identify training and learning needs to further their development. Through personal knowledge of the individuals, a leader will gain understanding of what makes each employee “tick” or factors that may be causing additional stress that could impact their work. Through these insights, an effective leader can improve welfare by removing obstacles and providing support specific to everyone on their team.
The rewards from knowing your personnel and ensuring their professional and personal needs are met can be invaluable. It’s through these actions that mutual trust and understanding can be achieved, thereby leading to stronger loyalty and desire for team success. Ultimately, if an employee feels their manager cares about them, it is more likely to be reciprocated.
To execute this principle successfully, the Marine Corps recommends:
- Put your Marine’s welfare before your own
- Be approachable
- Encourage individual development
- Know your team’s mental attitude; keep in touch with their thoughts
- Ensure fair and equal distribution of rewards
- Allow for and insist that employees take sufficient time off to take breaks from work to “recharge”
Keep Your Marines Informed
With clear insight into a situation, personnel can operate more effectively. Even understanding why certain tasks need to be accomplished, employees can feel more connected to the larger needs of an organization, and less like a “cog in a wheel.” Leaders should also be aware of rumors circulating in an organization and work to replace any false information with accuracy. Lastly, managers should be aware of and communicate any new or changing policies that could impact direct reports’ pay, benefits, or working conditions.
By keeping a team well informed, they will have a deeper understanding of the needs of an organization and execute more effectively and with a higher degree of initiative. The transparency provided by a manager can also continue the building of trust and loyalty.
Set the Example
A manager’s actions, behavior, and attitude will almost always be reflected in their team because that is the model presented day-in and day-out. A leader who is not knowledgeable, transparent, or enthusiastic with their team cannot, in good faith, expect their team to act as such. It’s simply unfair to demand of a team anything a leader is unwilling to do themselves.
It's important to always maintain an optimistic outlook and participate with your team, especially in times of adversity, to maintain morale. A frequent saying in the military during tough times is to “embrace the suck.” Acknowledge that conditions are less than ideal, but it’s temporary, that you are in it with them (and actually be present), and success is possible as a team.
The more a team leader can exemplify these leadership traits, the more successful the team will be.
Ensure That the Task is Understood, Supervised, and Accomplished
As previously mentioned, the primary goal of leadership is to use a team to accomplish an objective or task. To effectively meet that goal, ensure that each team member understands their responsibility, progress is supervised or checked, and the objective is ultimately met. Ensure the task is understood by encouraging team members to ask clarifying questions and confirm their interpretation by asking them questions. When supervising, a leader needs to avoid micro-managing, which can stifle initiative, creativeness, and innovation, and lead to resentment and low morale.
Train Your Marines as a Team
The ultimate task of any leader is to motivate a group of individuals to work together to achieve a common goal, and this is normally accomplished through some amount of teamwork, or interactions between the members of the team. The objective of this principle is to foster that sense of “team” and develop connections between team members so that they support each other without direction. By “training” as a team, rather than in silos, the members learn each other’s roles as well as strengths and weaknesses. The more they interact together, the more they know and understand each other and build comradery.
There are several ways to put this principle in practice within the business space. Perhaps not surprising, this is the benefit of holding off-site team outings. While not work-related, this type of “training” facilitates the creation of deeper bonds between team members. It’s also important to not publicize a failure or success of the team attributed to one individual, but to present it as the team’s outcome.
Make Sound and Timely Decisions
When a leader wavers or second-guesses decisions, it can have significant detrimental impact on a team. Lack of decisiveness can lead direct reports to lose confidence in a leader’s abilities, which can deteriorate morale, cause confusion, and potentially even create within the team reluctance to follow or execute.
There are several ways managers can make sound and timely decisions, including:
- Assessing how potential situations will be handled, should they arise;
- Considering insights and suggestions from your team; and
- Weighing the impact the decision will have on your team.
Develop a Sense of Responsibility Among Your Subordinates
This principle reinforces the principle of “troop” welfare and can have additional long-lasting impacts on an organization. By delegating assignments or responsibilities normally performed by a manager or more senior or experienced individual, a leader can demonstrate interest in the development of the individual’s skills while also signaling trust in their abilities. Through this principle, direct reports are given the opportunity to develop several leadership traits such as initiative, knowledge, and dependability. It’s through this principle that the development of future leaders is accomplished.
There are several keys to successfully executing this principle:
- First, ensure that the task is within the employee’s capabilities (challenging, but with a high probability of completion) and be prepared to support and mentor them in a way that does not discourage them from future assignments.
- Resist the urge to micro-manage the assignment; provide the opportunity for creativity and initiative.
- Lastly, to maintain trust within the team, the leader needs to accept responsibility for any shortcomings resulting from the delegation to a more junior team member.
Employ Your Command Within its Capabilities
While this principle sounds very specific to a military environment, it has a lot of applicability within a company. Any team has a finite set of capabilities and capacity, and it’s important for the leader to recognize those limitations. While a “stretch” task can be rewarding and further develop a team, pushing the team well beyond its capabilities will likely result in failure. This failure can be detrimental to morale and can call the leader’s judgment and concern for team welfare into question.
Seek Responsibilities and Take Responsibility
The last leadership principle really drives the behaviors necessary to be promoted into higher positions. By seeking out more responsibilities or challenging projects and being successful in their execution, an individual can demonstrate to an organization that they are prepared for advancement. This is especially true for individual contributors who do not manage a team but would like to advance into a management position!
This is an attitude of acting and performing your job in a manner that would be expected of one in the position you are seeking. This can be accomplished by acting as a mentor for junior or new team members or by taking on certain aspects of your manager’s responsibilities (with permission, of course).
Taking responsibility is a necessity of good leadership and demonstrates dedication and integrity. The most effective leaders will take responsibility for their team’s short-comings, but attribute successes to the team. Individual contributors looking to advance can also demonstrate this principle by not only taking responsibility for their own actions, but by performing every task, regardless of how trivial it may seem, to the best of their ability.
A Few Final Observations
First, these traits and principles don’t turn people into drill instructors barking orders and berating subordinates (cue the Gunnery Sergeant Hartman imagery), but instead help individuals develop the skills necessary to build trust, comradery, and team cohesiveness to achieve common goals in any setting.
Next, the lists of leadership traits and principles should not only be studied by those in management roles, but also by individual contributors to help develop and promote their own leadership abilities. As mentioned in part I of this series, the Marine Corps starts teaching fundamentals of leadership on day one and they consistently reinforce it throughout a Marine’s career. By continuously honing these traits and skills, junior personnel can separate themselves from the pack and be identified for special projects or promotions.
Lastly, becoming and being a leader isn’t easy, but it isn’t an impossible task.
“Leadership is intangible, hard to measure, and difficult to describe. Its quality would seem to stem from many factors. But certainly they must include a measure of inherent ability to control and direct, self-confidence based on expert knowledge, initiative, loyalty, pride and sense of responsibility. Inherent ability cannot be instilled, but that which is latent or dormant can be developed. Other ingredients can be acquired. They are not easily learned. But leaders can be and are made.”[2]
–General C. B. Cates, 19th Commandant of the Marine Corps
Semper Fidelis!
Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the editors, or the respective authors’ employers.
Dan Delany, FSA, MAAA, is an assistant vice president at SCOR Global Life and an 8-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He can be reached at DDelany@scor.com or via LinkedIn.