Best Advice: The Servant Leader

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers share the best advice they've ever received. Read all the posts here.

One evening many years ago, a slightly balding Army lieutenant colonel sat at our dining room table in jeans and a long-sleeved knit shirt. He ate slowly, spoke in his distinctive Alabama drawl, and punctuated key points by stabbing the air with his fork. My mother’s family hailed from Alabama so his accent was familiar. I’d been a soldier for over twelve years at this point, so his advice was coming at a critical juncture in my career. My wife Annie and I listened with respect and interest.

It was October 1988 and Lieutenant Colonel John Vines had come to dinner to offer his thoughts on my next assignment. After tours as a paratrooper, Green Beret, mechanized infantryman, and a Ranger, I was comfortable as a soldier. I knew how to position weapons, maneuver troops, and display the demeanor expected of a leader. I also thought I knew the path I should take going forward, but John was suggesting a different narrative – one I’d never seriously considered.

John’s advice was to depart the Army’s familiar orbit and request an assignment in the world of joint operations – as an operations officer in Joint Special Operations Command. There, I would work with our Nation’s most elite forces from across every service, the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force. I’d have a role helping to coordinate their efforts. The concept was exciting, but it was a very non-traditional road for a young officer to take in those days. Because the idea was so unfamiliar, it was intimidating, and its consequences were unknown. John encouraged me to take a chance by doing something different – dangerous to my career – that would make me grow as an officer, and as a person. I agreed to do it.

John’s assignment advice was, of course, superb. It put me on a path that led to a series of leadership and life experiences that I am incredibly thankful for. That decision would eventually lead me to take command of the entire Joint Special Operations Command during the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – an incredible honor. But that one piece of advice wasn’t the evening’s takeaway. John’s real guidance was hidden in his words – and more valuable than any I’d ever received.

Lieutenant General John Vines, now retired, is one of my closest friends. During his exceptional career he would go on to command the 82 Airborne and the XVIII Airborne Corps, and was the operational commander of all U.S. forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan at different points in those conflicts; but in 1988 he was still years from those positions. Then, he was a charismatic and slightly intimidating figure with a world of opportunity in front of him. I’d graduated from West Point in 1976, coming into an Army that was still reeling from the impacts of the Vietnam War, and role models like John Vines were unique. It was an Army in recovery; one vowed to serve a Nation with which it had a troubled relationship. There was every reason for young leaders to doubt the path they were on and abandon the cause. Leaders like John Vines gave us hope and showed us what right would look like for our generation: lead from the front, know your soldiers, share their conditions, take pride in rebuilding the force, and give the Nation what it deserves – an Army it can love and believe in. That was what John represented to us.

As he sat at our table, eating the chicken casserole that was Annie’s default dinner for guests, John talked about Annie and me. He wanted to hear about our thoughts, our goals, our desires. He had no set agenda for us. He listened closely, talked about options and opportunities with clear-eyed realism, and then helped shape our thinking on what lay before us. To have someone I respected so deeply talking entirely about what was best for Annie and me made me realize the type of leader I wanted to become – regardless of where my career took me.

John’s advice was, in an instant, powerful and relevant: not only what he said, but everything he did. By his example, he implicitly counseled that personal commitment to the welfare and development of those you lead resonates far beyond any single piece of guidance. It wasn’t simply the value of his advice, which I received many times over my career; it was his continuous and genuine commitment to those he mentored that shaped me most as a leader. Over the following decades of service, his connection to Annie and me never wavered. He’d call to check on us, offering in his disarming drawl simple yet profound observations on being a better leader, and a better person. His words were more than a gesture, more than an item on a leader’s checklist – they were a covenant with comrades that has lasted to this day.

No one I knew could be John Vines, and neither could I. No advice could have been as good as the advice he never tried to give explicitly. He exemplified the servant leader for a generation of Army officers, and nothing could have been more valuable.

Photo: Trey Ratcliff/Flikr