The answer from the old professor: "Getting those to do what you want them to do even if they don't have to is real leadership!" Maybe it is all part of the plan, e.g. getting the Cadre to use inspirational leadership to inspire the New Cadets. A bit more challenging than yelling and punishing!
There is some truth to this. Before I came to West Point I worked at a comprehensive law enforcement academy and had the opportunity of leading approximately 25-30 people in my platoon within a class of approximately 150 kids. On the one hand, all of the instructors were somewhat experienced and knowledgeable in the field for which the academy existed. On the other hand, the students we were training were usually around our age (sometimes older) and were completely free to leave at any point (which meant they really didn't
have to listen to us). My first class as an instructor, like most new instructors, I took the intense and harsh route of screaming and physically correcting recruits (new instructors were expected to be "kill-hats"). However, over time I cooled down (as all instructors did after a class or so).
While I am far from an expert on leading people, I learned a great deal from the six classes I spent there, one as a recruit and five as a staff instructor.
1. To this day no experience (and certainly not anything I've experienced at West Point) has been more impactful on me than the experience of having several instructors shouting at me at the top of their lungs while I was in the pushup position on my second day as a recruit for having forgotten my nametag. No experience has taught me discipline more than 3-hour long drill sessions going over one single motion like "to-the-rear" where the slightest mistakes were punished with intense physical correction. These kinds of experiences teach discipline and attention to detail. They shake you up enough to make you think about why you're really there and make it a true fight to get through to the end. It is because of that struggle that on the day we first got to wear our uniforms with patches and badges we were all filled with an intense sense of pride at the experience we had been through and at our accomplishment. This alone, however, is not what led to our success.
2. Toward the end of each class the recruits are made to do anonymous one-page evaluations of the entire staff (there were about 15 staff members for 150 recruits so all the staff members were well-known enough that the recruits would have had enough to write a meaningful evaluation). The evaluations were read by our supervisor (a sergeant with about 30 years of experience in law enforcement) and were used to judge our performance (among other things). The week before graduation the staff instructors received their evaluations. After my first class, the majority of recruits said, in some way or another, that they were scared of me. There was positive mixed in there too, but what stuck out was their fear. Their comments ranged from "I don't feel comfortable approaching him with a problem" to "All I wanted was for him to go away." That experience taught me that you cannot rely on intensity and physical correction alone to train someone. In subsequent classes, under the guidance of our leadership and those more experienced than me (as well as multiple ass-chewing sessions), I was able to refine my approach to being less about telling a recruit that they were messed up and "thrashing the hell out of them" (as we called it), but to being about:
1.) becoming the image that drew them to want to do what we did and
2.) reminding them that becoming that image was why they were there. Sure, I would still yell and scream when necessary, but the majority of the time my approach was to speak at a normal tone of voice. At the end of my fifth and final class I got my evaluations and what the recruits observed was similar across all of their evaluations. The recruits saw me as a quiet (as in I didn't yell and scream) yet professional example of what they wanted to be, and their desire to do and be right was not in fear of the physical correction I would administer, but in the fact that they felt like they were letting me and the department down if they performed below the standard. To this day I still have all of my 500 or so evaluations from the five classes.
To make a long story short, what you say is right: leadership is about getting others to do what
you want them to do because
they want to do it. And getting there requires many different factors.There has to be a balance. On the one hand, I got ripped a new one constantly, as a recruit and even more as a staff member. Along with that and just as, if not more, importantly we had to inspire our recruits. But there had to be both. We could not survive on counseling, paperwork, and inspiration alone. Sometimes you had to yell and make someone do pushups. Sometimes going out into the 90 degree heat and getting sweaty was the best answer. But there has to be a balance of both.That said, Beast should be the most terrifying part of West Point. It should encompass physical correction and it should encompass yelling. It shouldn't be like a wildfire raging in the wilderness but like a refining fire for the purpose of refining gold (I still believe that West Point takes in some of the best "un-refined gold" there is out there). It has to have a purpose, direction,counseling, and inspiration. Those, combined with leading by example, are all a part of making that purpose a reality to the New Cadets.
The point is that West Point and the Army
stands for (or should anyways) something. There has to be a consistent image of what we are and who we will be. As an organization we have to stand for that image at all levels, from CSA to brand new E-1. This isn't the way things currently are, and thus the problem. People stand for themselves nowadays. People do what makes them happy and what keeps them comfortable. Individual responsibility is dead in the wake of political correctness and an overwhelming desire to appease those we disagree with. We talk a big talk on paper about what we should be and what we think we are, but very few live it. The Army is full of people who are in the Army because it's beneficial, it pays for college, it's a respected career, etc. That's all fine too. Such things are excellent starting points to get people to do the difficult when the difficult is increasingly growing in complexity and unattractiveness. But as new generations come in with high expectations only to be let down by those who came before them and those who lead them, we drive ourselves towards our own self-destruction. Higher ranking people yell at lower ranking people because lower ranking screw-ups make them look bad, not because they genuinely care about making them better. We are an Army of people looking to use the Army as a stepping stone, hoping that we don't die along the way, and expecting "someone else" to handle what we see as "someone else's" problems. I, too, am guilty of this. Meanwhile, upper leadership and elected officials pander to their own pockets and political reputations leading the Army and America to a life of apathetic depravity.
What it takes to make us great is for people to have a sense of individual responsibility and a sense of living for
something. Whatever that something may be. For the Army, it has to be about genuinely loving our country, loving the land on which it is built, loving the Constitution that is its cornerstone and loving the stubborn, freedom-loving, tenacious and lazy-living people who make up its parts, misguided though they may be. We need to have pride in what it means to be Americans first, and an even greater pride in what it means to stand as the violent soldier-guardians of that American dream. When we can do that, then uniform standards aren't about sergeants correcting privates for the sake of pretending to be a military, but are about maintaining the image that we stand for the defense of freedom and heroism. When we have that, then being physically fit isn't about doing PT because it's traditional and being fit is good for you, but about being afraid that should the time come that we must violently engage our enemies we would be not fit enough to protect all that we love and all that for which we stand. All of that is predicated on living for and standing by principles. America has lost that, its leaders have lost that, its people have lost that, and not surprisingly so has its Army. To regain it requires, on all accounts, that we make an effort towards that ideal. It starts with the individual.
In late 2007 at the young age of 15 years old, I sat at the seated position of attention in a room with 200 other recruits while our supervisor recited the following:
"When I was young, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my city. I couldn’t change the city and so I tried to change my family. Now that I’m older, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our city. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world. It only takes one person to change the world, start with yourself and the world will follow." He then began to describe the journey we were about to undertake, the image for which we would have to stand if we were going to stay in the organization, and how the image is propagated is not by seeking to make others fit the image, but by becoming the image ourselves. That first day began with that quote and was followed by four and a half months of intense, physical grueling, and mentally challenging activity that ultimately resulted in the person I am today. I see it as a defined turning point in my life (although I am by no means perfect--either then as a recruit, or now as a Cadet).
I realize that there are exceptions to all that I have said. I have met many great men and women within the Army who live for something and stand for noble ideals. Similarly, I have met men and women outside the Army who are the same way. I, too, live for something. However, a large group of individuals living for things does not a nation make. There has to be a sense of group identity and of shared group values.
[/soapbox]
My brother is a zoomie (Class of '10) and was disappointed at what he found to be a very weak BCT experience. Maybe they've raised their game a little on the physical front. That'd be good, since it'll be the last physical challenge most of them undertake in their USAF careers.
