Tag: Leadership

Sample Army Company Command Philosophy

MEMORANDUM FOR COMPANY LEADERS
SUBJECT: Command Philosophy

1. The purpose of this command philosophy is to identify the attitudes and ideals that I want to establish in this company, as well as the practices I intend to use to promote those ideals. A company can achieve the mission, follow all regulations, and still be a rotten unit. We want a great unit, and to achieve that, I think we should pursue three things:

2. Happy Soldiers. We need people who work hard because they like what they do. To achieve this, we must work to eliminate unnecessary frustrations from the environment. Interruptions and delays come from the enemy, not from leadership. Unscheduled late hours will be considered a leadership failure. Additionally, we should work to recognize extraordinary efforts by our Soldiers in ways that are public and personally meaningful to them.

3. Ethical Soldiers. We need people who do what is right because they believe it is right. To achieve this, we must encourage conversations about ethical reasoning and right and wrong. Formal training events, such as SHARP and suicide prevention training are urgent, but they are not sufficient. Moral values are formed in a network of daily decisions, and I am convinced that keeping an eye out for little things mitigates against bigger ethical failures. Additionally, we need to lead by example. We guide and correct our subordinates across a spectrum of ethical decisions, but in doing so, we must be ready to accept respectful criticism from them as well.

4. Professional Soldiers. We need people who are committed to the long-term improvement of the unit and the Army as a whole. To achieve this, we must train Soldiers to think beyond their current scope of work. Thinkers find ways to improve everything. As the mission permits, we will actively promote professional development opportunities that increase the scope of Soldiers’ understanding, and we will make room for individual specialized training. Additionally, we will encourage and actively consider Soldiers’ recommendations for improving our methods within the unit.

5. A command philosophy is only as good as the team that builds on it. I expect each of you to take ownership of this unit, find what’s broken, and take the initiative fix it. Communicate with each other, communicate with me, and let’s all be humble enough to accept criticism and move forward. It’s an honor to serve with each of you.

Kyle B. French
CPT, TC
Commanding

Outside Opinions

Ugh. This sort of thing irritates me.

I’m not saying Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill as a whole haven’t blown it. Frankly, I haven’t been at a church yet where the leadership, in some sense, hasn’t blown it. I have personally been a member at a church with an international name for itself, and gotten squashed – squashed no less by people who were trying very hard to do the right thing. Ultimately, I got to the point where I concluded I couldn’t make the changes I thought should be made, and I couldn’t get any benefit to anybody by my staying there, unhappy. So I left.

But here’s the thing. I left in part because I determined that there was nothing I could do to make a difference in what I thought was a bad set-up. Now that I’ve been gone for a number of years, how much less can I make that change? I can’t. I can take a few notes and share them for people’s future reference. I can say, “this kind of behavior has this kind of effect. We should build churches this way and not that way.”

But there is no benefit to anybody in my saying, “thus and so church is a nasty place. It was nasty when I was there, and from what I hear it hasn’t gotten any better.” Who would be my audience? Current members of the church, who know more than I do? Potential fans? The governing body of the church? What am I, the Protestant police?

I get the irony of my criticizing somebody for talking about the root of bitterness. She’s obviously much closer to the situation she’s talking about than I am. But it isn’t working for me. There obviously ought to be people outside of a situation, who have the capital to address that situation without capitalizing on it. I just think that, if your biggest source of fame or notoriety is your negative opinion of somebody else, you might do well to find something else to talk about for a while.

Convictions vs. Caricature

I just came across this post by Chris Goforth, about how he’s “pushed away” by a certain kind of Christianity, “mostly people who practice religion and call it Christianity.”  It was a little bit surreal for me, because he sounds like he’s mad at me.  He lashes out at some things that are wrong, kind of obviously wrong, but also quite a bit like the things that I actually believe, like a bad caricature. Except that bit about trying to get people to say the sinner’s prayer.  That’s just dumb.

So:

  • I believe that if someone isn’t saved, they are wicked, and going to hell.  I don’t believe that every unsaved person is necessarily grossly immoral, in a noticeably public way, but I also doubt that they are living up to their own standards, let alone God’s.  I believe they think they can justify themselves.  I believe that if a person is saved, they are probably still wicked, but that their disposition toward God has changed, and that He doesn’t count their sins against them.  They probably aren’t living up to even their own standards, but by the grace of God, their standards are being corrected, and they are seeing long-term improvement.
  • I believe that men have a responsibility to lead in a way that women don’t have, particularly in regards to marriage and church government.  I believe that churches should have government.  I don’t understand 1 Timothy 2:12 very well, but it’s in my Bible and I want to obey God’s word.
  • I believe that homeschooling is a pretty good idea, and that every parent should take responsibility for their child’s education, no matter where they go to school.  I think that public schools are a good option for people who can’t afford other options, but that there’s a danger that the school will waste their child’s time, and teach values that might undermine Christian faith.
  • I believe that girls should dress modestly, but that no level of modesty can constrain another person’s heart, particularly in a world as saturated as we are with pornography.  I can’t imagine boys today being “comfortable in their bodies” enough to wear some of the things that they sell to 10 year old girls.
  • I believe that it’s important to watch what media comes into your home for a myriad of reasons.  There are some pretty insulting songs and TV shows out there, and we have a responsibility to think on things that are worthy, true, etc.
  • I believe that I can’t save anyone, not even my children.  I don’t think that people are my personal salvation projects, but I do believe that God has selected a number from every people group in the world to be drawn to him, and that they only means he’s established to do that is other people who believe the good news of Jesus Christ.
  • I believe that, in regards to my children, I have two distinct,but related duties: to civilize them and to evangelize them.  Sometimes people want to keep one and drop the other, but really, nobody wants their children to run around dirty, hunting their food with their bare hands, and nobody wants their children to go to hell.  The gospel gradually results civilization, but civilization doesn’t result in evangelism.  Making up new rules is the stuff of civilization.  Honestly, those rules can be helpful, unless they aren’t.
  • I believe that clip at the end of his post is pretty darn funny.

Like I said – these are not the convictions that Chris Goforth has a problem with.  At least, I don’t think they are.  But they’re pretty close.  And that makes me want to ask a lot of questions.

  • Which is more common, my convictions, or the caricature?
  • Can anyone tell the difference?
  • Was he taught the caricature from the pulpit, or was it just something he picked up off the street?
  • If he hears someone spouting a foolish bit of pharisaism, does he rebuff them, or cringe and turn away?
  • Is Mr. Goforth a member of a church?  What does his church leadership teach about these issues?
  • Would his church leadership be quick to correct the caricatures from the pulpit?
  • Do they set themselves up as something new and fresh and different, compared to people with my convictions?
  • Does anybody dialogue in the church anymore?  Or do we just should past each other while making church signs?

A Key to Spiritual Growth

I count three experiences that had the biggest impact on my understanding of revival and spiritual growth.

The first one was a revival (or maybe a series of revivals) that came through my church and school when I was in high school and into college. If you’re familiar with the Toronto Blessing, there was a connection to that. But it was a tradition of revival that can be traced back at least as far as the Azusa Street and Welsh revivals at the beginning of the 20th century: The Holy Spirit moves on a people, and people respond with extra church services and prayer meetings. These meetings are characterized by profound spiritual experiences and a huge emotional impact. These experiences result in changed lives. People pray for this kind of revival. We acknowledge the value of quiet seasons in our spiritual lives. But the ideal state for the church is revival, and if it’s been too long since the last revival, that’s a sign that something may be seriously wrong – which again is a cause for prayer for revival.

Under this mindset, the most unaccountable thing is when people in the leadership decide to stop the meetings, curtail emotional outbursts, and turn people’s attention back to daily life. Every time that happened, we were perplexed, and sought answers why anybody would ever want to do that. Is the pastor afraid of people who don’t want the revival? Doesn’t he understand God’s work?

Just as often, we took the revival underground. Nobody can stop private prayer meetings, can they? So my friends and I – high school students – held meetings in each others homes, where we prayed for revival and prayed for each other. We crashed youth group prayer meetings of other churches. And eventually, our church would have another set of extra meetings.

When I went to college, I took the revival with me. My roommate and I hosted meetings around the Prayer Tower at ORU. We prophesied over each other. We expected our little revival to overwhelm the chapel schedule and even take precidence over classes. And to a certain extent, it did. Meetings, ours and others’, grew and multiplied. Meetings of 50-100 students around the prayer tower were common. Worship services broke out in the dining hall.

And then it waned. People went back to classes, went apostate as they gave priority to study over prayer. Mandatory chapel services were not allowed to lapse into a free-for-all. And we, the local revivalists, were scandalized. Why would anybody ever want to do that? Don’t they understand God’s work?

I have to confess that there was a personal advantage to these revivalistic meetings: they made me normal, maybe even cool. It would take a long pile of introspection to analyse why that was, but it should suffice to say that, the more revivals there are, the more friends I have, and the more impressive I appear. So not only did my worldview push me toward these kinds of meetings, so did the part of me that likes to be flattered.

The second experience came right on the heels of the first: I dropped out of school and moved across the country to go to a school at a church where the revival never stops. Okay, there were other factors involved. But for the purposes of this essay, I went there, and one of the deciding factors was to learn about ministry at a place where they do it right, with “right” being defined as “the revival never stops.” A place where the leadership doesn’t get distracted from what really matters.

There was a lot of other stuff going on in my life, but eventually one thing started to really stand out was that the revival didn’t accomplish anything. We had the music and the meetings and the powerful spiritual experiences. We had conferences and guest speakers. We had numerical church growth. But we didn’t have much in the way of conversions, or discernable spiritual growth. We had kids who became teenagers and then adults, but life was life. Even with all the meetings, everything was fundamentally the same.

Around my second year at MorningStar School of Ministry, I overheard a conversation. A lady was telling her friend that she had dropped out of the school because she was seeing negative spiritual development in her life. The implication was that, somehow, pursuing the things of the Spirit in this way had caused her to decline spiritually. I was scandalized. And I think I was scandalized because I could see similar effects in my own life.

Another conversation that stands out to me was a phone call I made to my old roommate back at ORU. He was still eagerly expecting the coming revival that was going to sweep through the town. They had had many false starts, but it was coming soon. My gut reaction was: so what? What will you do then? Because my church is pretty much vived, and it doesn’t seem to make any difference. It was exciting, but so is Six Flags. Some people, however, have to live there, and it doesn’t mean so much for them.

There were other things at that church that weren’t working out for me, indirectly related to revivalism as well. Many, many assumptions I had about who God is and how he works were either undermined there, or obstructed, until ultimately I fell flat. All I had left was “Jesus died on the cross for my sins” and “the Bible is true.” It was a long process putting everything back together again. Probably that was a good thing, but the experience itself was awful. I couldn’t hardly walk straight for fear that I was inconsistent with my own philosophy. Give me fear, famine, plague, and sword; take away every comfort from me; but Father, please don’t ever leave me without a cohesive worldview again.

The last experience comes much later in my life. I’d been married, had a child, gone to grad school, dropped out, been unemployed, and we were living with my in-laws. And this church we joined ! It was nothing. It was everything. In all respects, it was a normal contemporary church, slightly on the larger side. There were nice people. We made friends with them.

The best way I can put it is this: I have a short list o things I’m actually good at. Church is one of them. I can sing, and I can talk. I’m “inclined to teach,” as the scriptures say. I’m used to jumping into a church feet first. They’re always short on leaders, and I usually have something I can contribute. It wasn’t that way at Cornerstone Church of Knoxville. Within a few weeks, I knew that my place would be to sit down and keep silent. There were new converts at that church with more spiritual maturity than me. I wasn’t qualified to be an assistant home group leader. I may not be yet. Over the year and a half that I was there before joining the Army, and through my wife’s experience, longer still. I saw significant spiritual growth all around me, and an impressive array of simple maturity.

I would say that I’ve never seen anything like it, but that’s not entirely true. I’ve seen hints at this church and that, but without being a member it would be hard to say. But at this church, I was a member.

I was the slightest in the House—
I took the smallest Room—
At night, my little Lamp, and Book—
And one Geranium—

So stationed I could catch the Mint
That never ceased to fall—
And just my Basket—
Let me think—I’m sure—
That this was all—

I sat and watched, and caught the mint, and it was very subtle, but this is what I think made the difference: expositional preaching. Every Sunday, a pastor would preach a sermon from a preselected text, methodically working our way thorugh the entirety of a larger passage. Every Sunday, that pastor preached the gospel. I don’t mean that he found a way to slip in the fact that Jesus died for our sins, nor do I mean that he managed to end every sermon with a rousing appeal for conversion, though those elements were present here and there. I mean that the gospel was intrensic to the topic of the text. Somehow, every Sunday, the pastor made it plain what this psalm, or that paragraph in I Corinthians had to do with Jesus. Every Sunday it became a little clearer that everything, everything, everything was summed up in Jesus: hardship and happiness, education and healing, roles of men and women, providing for your family – everything. Every passage in scripture, either tacit or explicit, is talking about Jesus. He is the one through whom the world was made, and he is the one in whom all things will be compiled, so how could it be otherwise?

And by this thorough, detailed, explication of this gospel, like running a powerful microscope over every cell in the body, we grew. I saw my wife mature, endure hardship, and change the focus of her life, in accordance with the gospel. I saw it in my friends. I trust they saw similar growth in me.

Everything I had been hoping for in the powerful experiences of revivalism were being accrued quietly through by means of the regular expositional preaching of the gospel.

Now, I want to keep my charismatic credentials clear: I still believe in the Holy Spirit. I still believe He does things from time to time that are… less that subtle. Miracles, prophecy, all of that. But still more powerful is the regular preaching of God’s word. People have to be carefully, carefully taught. And things that you think are too obvious to mention are the things that must be eplicitly stated, or they will be abandoned shortly. Most importantly, we cannot hope to skip steps. The window into the spiritual world, against the expectations of so many, is usually through the mind. We must take down every vain imagination, one at a time.

Initial Counseling

MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD

SUBJECT: Initial Counseling/Philosophy

The purpose of this counseling is to provide you with a basic understanding about my philosophy of leadership, my standards, and my expectations for you as platoon sergeant. The platoon sergeant’s position may be one of the most complicated jobs in the army. You have direct, personal contact with more soldiers than anyone else in the army, so you have more fires to put out, more people to motivate, and more people train. I’ve seen taffy being pulled in a candy shop that could take a lesson or two from a platoon sergeant. But I have complete confidence in your ability to adapt and overcome, so long as we work together and keep our objectives in sight.

Leadership.

Here’s my best definition for leadership: Initiative plus planning. Initiative means you picture what needs to be done, and then decide that you are the one to make it happen. Planning involves thinking far enough ahead that issues can be addressed before they become emergencies. A good leader will get the maximum out of his team with the minimum amount of effort. Initiative without planning is poor leadership because it maximizes the results by maximizing the effort. Over time, that wears people out. Planning without initiative isn’t leadership at all. It’s procrastination. It minimizes effort and minimizes results.

Every leader mixes these two qualities in different ways, and as closely as we have to work together, those differences are going to cause tension. I trust you, and I have absolute faith in your ability to carry this platoon to success. But as platoon leader, I carry full responsibility for everything that happens in my platoon. The commander will not accept, “My platoon sergeant…” as an excuse. So I must be informed about everything that happens in my platoon. I will sometimes want you to take a different course of action than you think is best. When that happens, I expect you to argue with me, and argue hard. If there is merit in what you have to say, I will probably bend. But the final decision must rest with me.

Taking Care of Soldiers.

In the Army, the mission is always the highest priority. But in a high OPTEMPO environment, we have to keep the next mission in mind, and the mission after that. One of the things that make me proud of my platoon is our ability to push longer and harder than anybody else in order to make the mission happen. But there’s a balance between pushing as hard as possible to complete the mission at hand, and pushing hard enough to hurt our readiness for the next mission. We have to take special care to take care of soldiers. I consider this a planning issue.

  • Delegation. As the OPTEMPO goes up and the number present goes down, the need for delegation gets stronger, even though it gets harder to do. It’s the nature of the battlefield to give more responsibility to younger soldiers. The only other option is to do all the work yourself, and that is unacceptable. We must coordinate and divide the labor.
  • Recognition. I’m a firm believer that the carrot works better than the stick. Sometimes corrective action is necessary, but most people, most of the time, already want to perform well. It’s part of a platoon sergeant’s job to help Soldiers recognize what excellence looks like, and to encourage excellence by pointing it out privately and publicly.
  • Safety. Allowing an unsafe act is fundamental to what it means to not take care of soldiers. Accidents can happen, but violations of safety standards must not be tolerated. Unsafe acts usually occur when soldier’s sense of urgency extends to the point that they use it to justify lowering standards in order to achieve a goal. Our challenge is to help Soldiers see that lowering the standard is not placing the mission first.

Conclusion.

The Army has standards for everything. I have only one standard that I apply to everything: Do what’s right. “There is one thing… which a [person] can always do, if he chooses, and that is, his duty; not by maneuvering and finessing, but by vigor and resolution.” I will always put every effort I can into making sure I am doing the right thing. Or you can put it in the negative: the one thing I can’t stand is to be wrong. And if I find out that I am wrong, I will do everything in my power to fix it. I will actively seek out correction, and I will take every comment seriously. I expect you to do the same.

In contrast to yesterday’s post, the 2006 New Attitude conference was very good. Especially beneficial has been the breakout sessions. Dave Harvey’s session on The Summons was very good. I found this poem he recited about an hour into the talk to be very… moving.

When God wants to drill a man
And thrill a man
And skill a man,
When God wants to mold a man
To play the noblest part;
When He yearns with all His heart
To create so great and bold a man
That all the world shall be amazed,
Watch His methods, watch His ways!

How He ruthlessly perfects
Whom He royally elects!
How He hammers him and hurts him,
And with mighty blows converts him
Into trial shapes of clay which
Only God understands;
While his tortured heart is crying
And he lifts beseeching hands!

How He bends but never breaks
When his good He undertakes;
How He uses whom He chooses
And with every purpose fuses him;
By every act induces him
To try His splendour out —
God knows what He’s about!

Author Unknown

I contacted his church and was told that the poem came from the book, Spiritual Leadership by J. Oswald Sanders, p. 184