Teaching Leadership To Undergraduates: Lessons From U.S. Military Colleges

Abstract

Military colleges and service academies are a small and unique subset of the U.S. schools offering undergraduate degrees. With missions of preparing young men and women for serving and leading in perilous circumstances, what lessons, regarding developing leadership skills in young people, can be transferred to traditional schools? This paper argues that undergraduate institutions can strive to build a leadership foundation for their students by combining academic pursuits and leader experience in a comprehensive manner, similar to the “whole person” (i.e., mind, body, character) approach of military higher education. While military-specific topics and grueling training regimens are inappropriate in most cases, certain aspects common to military schools, like rigorous academic standards and honor codes, are relevant and recommended. Similarly, each student should have the opportunity to practice leadership in the relatively safe environment of a college campus, where mistakes do not lead to lost profits or derailed careers. Leadership can be in NCAA or intramural sports, student government or clubs, or in community outreach projects. The crucial element is that participants must be encouraged to reflect on their successes and failures and accurately attribute causality, acknowledging others’ contributions and their own deficiencies. Finally, the results of a preliminary study at a well-known U.S. military college, comparing undergraduate leadership experience and perceptions of leader effectiveness, will be presented and discussed. Interestingly, those students with the most experience were the most self-critical, thus arguing that self-awareness is a crucial pre-determinant for effective leadership at any level.