The Team Was Never Yours Alone

Most leaders talk about “their team.” The best ones eventually realize it was never really theirs alone.

I have a photograph from a retirement ceremony more than ten years ago that still stops me when I look at it. On paper, there was nothing unusual about the event. It was the kind of ceremony those of us who spent years in the military attended countless times. A change of roles, recognition of service, a few words about what had been accomplished, handshakes, photographs, and then everyone moved on to whatever came next.

But this particular photograph captured something I did not expect.

My Command Sergeant Major, Vincent Lewis, leaned over to me during the ceremony and said, “Sir, you didn’t just command this Brigade. You took care of us. You took care of me. Everything I was able to do as your CSM was because you gave me the space to lead and the trust to do it right.”

I had never heard those words before, and I have never heard them since.

They broke me.

Not outwardly. I managed to keep it together because that is what we tend to do in those moments. But when I look at the photograph now, I can see exactly when the façade slipped. The expression on my face is not the polished expression of the commander standing at a ceremony. It is the face of someone who had just been told something that landed much deeper than expected.

There was a reason it hit me so hard.

People outside of military command sometimes have difficulty understanding the relationship between a commander and a Command Sergeant Major. It is not simply a boss and subordinate relationship, and when it is working properly, it certainly is not a ceremonial pairing of two senior leaders who occupy neighboring offices. The CSM is close enough to the commander to see almost everything that matters.

A good CSM knows what you prioritize when nobody important is watching. He knows how you react when the briefing falls apart, when someone makes a serious mistake, when the mission changes without warning, or when the pressure starts coming from above. He knows whether you genuinely trust subordinate leaders or whether you only use the language of trust. He knows whether standards matter consistently or only when they are convenient. He knows whether you protect your people when doing so costs you something. He knows whether the leadership philosophy you talk about publicly actually survives contact with reality.

You can impress a room. You can deliver a great speech. You can write a polished command philosophy and put all the right words on paper about integrity, accountability, people, standards, and mission.

You cannot fool your CSM.

Not for long.

That is why his words meant more to me than he probably realized at the time. He was not giving me ceremonial praise. He was not saying something because we were standing at a retirement event and it seemed like the appropriate thing to say. He had been close enough to see the real thing, including the parts that were not polished and the decisions nobody outside the command group would ever know about.

His words were an assessment.

And coming from him, that assessment carried more weight than any evaluation report, award, promotion, command metric, or formal recognition I ever received.

What I remember most about the moment, though, is that I was not thinking about myself as the commander. I remember thinking something much simpler: I want to be him.

That may sound strange considering our respective positions, but those who have worked with an exceptional Command Sergeant Major will probably understand it immediately. There is something different about the influence of a truly great senior enlisted leader. Rank is certainly part of the role, but rank is not what gives a CSM real authority inside an organization. Their real authority comes from credibility, and credibility cannot be issued, appointed, or manufactured.

It is accumulated slowly.

It comes from years of knowing the standard and being willing to enforce it even when doing so is inconvenient. It comes from knowing soldiers, understanding the organization, recognizing trouble before it becomes visible to everyone else, and being willing to tell the commander what he needs to hear rather than what he wants to hear. It comes from thousands of ordinary moments that will never make it into an award citation or an evaluation report.

That kind of leadership is often quiet. It is not necessarily found behind a podium. It may happen in a hallway, a motor pool, a field exercise, a hospital, a deployment site, or in a conversation behind a closed door after everyone else has gone home. Much of it is invisible to the organization, but the effects of it are not.

Over the past month, LTG R. Scott Dingle wrote about “your battle” when referring to his CSM. That phrase stayed with me because it captures something I have always felt about that relationship.

Commanders may hold the authority, but CSMs carry much of the fight.

That does not mean they compete for leadership. Quite the opposite. When the relationship is right, they complement one another in ways that make the organization stronger than either leader could make it alone.

The commander and CSM are not supposed to think exactly alike. In fact, I would argue that if they do, the organization may be missing something important. They occupy different vantage points. They hear different conversations. They see different parts of the organization. They understand the mission through overlapping but not identical lenses.

The strength is in the alignment, not the sameness.

A commander who needs his CSM to agree with him all the time probably does not really want a CSM. He wants validation.

Likewise, a CSM who believes his role is simply to reinforce whatever the commander has already decided is leaving a significant part of his responsibility unused.

The relationship works when both people understand their roles, trust one another enough to disagree, and remain completely aligned on what ultimately matters: the mission and the people responsible for accomplishing it.

That sounds simple until you recognize what real trust actually requires.

Leaders talk constantly about empowerment. We say we want people to take ownership. We want initiative. We want leaders who can operate independently and make decisions without constantly waiting for permission.

Then many leaders spend their days controlling every meaningful decision.

That is not empowerment.

Giving someone space to lead means accepting that occasionally they will do something differently than you would have done it. It means they will solve a problem using an approach you would not have chosen. It means they may have conversations you were not part of and make judgments without asking you first.

Most importantly, it means accepting that if you have chosen the right person, your job is not to constantly prove that you are still in charge.

That was one of the things Vincent gave me, although I probably did not fully appreciate it at the time. He understood his role, and I understood mine. I did not need to become the Command Sergeant Major, and he did not need to become the commander.

I needed him to lead.

So I tried to give him enough room to do exactly that.

Years later, when he told me that everything he had been able to do as my CSM was because I had given him the space and trust to do it, I realized how much of what I considered “our” success had actually depended on that relationship.

That lesson applies far beyond the military.

Civilian organizations may not have Command Sergeants Major, but they absolutely have people who fill similar roles. It may be a chief operating officer, a chief nursing officer, a senior director, a deputy, a chief of staff, or simply a highly respected leader who understands the organization at a level the person at the top never fully can.

The titles change. The leadership problem does not.

Senior leaders often recruit incredibly capable people and then gradually reduce them to executors. We tell them we value their experience, then second-guess their decisions. We tell them we want candor, then become defensive when they disagree with us. We tell them they own the mission, then insist on approving every meaningful action.

Eventually, those people stop leading.

They wait.

They ask permission.

They learn where the invisible boundaries are and stay safely inside them.

Then the senior leader complains that nobody takes initiative.

I have come to believe that one of the most important tests of senior leadership is not simply what the leader personally accomplishes. It is what the people around that leader are able to accomplish because of the environment he or she creates.

That is a very different measure.

Did your people become more capable because they worked with you?

Did they become more confident in their judgment?

Did they learn to make hard decisions without constantly looking over their shoulder?

Did they become more willing to tell the truth?

Did they become better prepared for the next responsibility?

Did you create leaders, or did you create people who became increasingly dependent on you?

Those questions are harder to answer than a performance metric because they expose something fundamental about leadership. A leader can produce good short-term results while leaving behind an organization that cannot function without them.

That may look impressive while the leader is there.

It is not a legacy.

When I look back at that photograph now, the part that matters most is not that Vincent told me I had taken care of the Brigade. It is the second part of what he said.

“Everything I was able to do as your CSM was because you gave me the space to lead and the trust to do it right.”

I did not fully understand the significance of those words when he said them.

I do now.

The team was never mine alone. The success was never mine alone. The leadership was never mine alone.

That was the point.

If you have ever had a Command Sergeant Major who told you the truth, carried the standard, protected the formation, challenged you when you needed it, and refused to let you drift, you know exactly what I mean.

And if you are leading an organization today, military or civilian, there is a question worth asking yourself.

Have you truly given the strongest leaders around you the space and trust to lead, or are you still holding the reins tighter than you realize?

Because ultimately, the legacy of your leadership will not be found only in what you accomplished while you were there.

A large part of it will be found in what other people were able to accomplish because you trusted them enough to lead.

To my CSM, Vincent A. Lewis. My brother.

You did not just support the mission.

You made me better than I had any right to be.

And more than a decade later, I understand that more clearly than ever.

Lead Like It Ends: Because It Will