G. Damon Wells
The same person kept receiving different verdicts.
Thirty-one years in the Army gave me one personality and roughly a dozen judgments about it. I stood out when the work demanded invention or rebuilding. Place me inside a stable system with a settled mission, and the same habits could become restlessness.
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Army Colonel · Former Brigade Commander · West Point FacultyBasehor, Kansas
The question behind the work
The pattern became impossible to blame on age, rank, or burnout.
I entered the Army as an enlisted field artilleryman in 1995 and earned a commission three years later. The career that followed included command at battery, battalion, and brigade level; deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan; teaching at West Point; and senior work across large, complex headquarters.
Hand me an organization that needed rebuilding and I usually did my best work. Put me into a stable headquarters with a settled mission and a manual that already supplied the answer, and I became merely competent. One flat posting sat between two of the strongest assignments of my career. The size of that swing pointed back to the job.
Leadership books kept looking inside the leader for the cause. That was only half the equation. Summary Leadership grew from the other half: measure the person, describe the operating conditions separately, and study what their interaction produces.
The record behind the method
Three decades of leadership across jobs that demanded very different people.
“Before deciding that a leader has failed, ask whether the job changed what success requires.”
That question still leaves poor leadership exposed. Its purpose is to prevent a category error. Sometimes the executive needs to change. In other cases, the organization has designed the role badly or kept a capable person in the wrong arena.