Support | The Right Call S1E10

I was sitting in the wardroom on the USS Blakely when one of the other junior officers came running in, tossed something under the couch, threw himself into a chair and opened a magazine. Five seconds later the door flew open like it had been kicked in. The XO stormed in, screaming. Turns out my shipmate had squirted a water pistol through a hole in the bulkhead while the XO was berating the Weapons Officer (WEPS), and hit him, WEPS, right in the ear canal.

That XO was a screamer. That's how he always dealt with people. His relief was the complete opposite: low-key, and even more demanding. Every assignment came with a deadline. If I missed it, his answer was, "Well, I guess you don't go home until it's done." No yelling. He just expected me to rise to the challenge, so I did. He helped me grow as a leader, because he supported me as he challenged me.

The wrong assumption

Most leadership training gets the mechanics of support right: check-ins, one-on-ones, performance frameworks. What's missing is the purpose. The people we lead are fellow servants, even if they don't know it, and our first job isn't to help them perform better. It's to help them remember who they are.

The leader role pulls, harder the higher we go. Calendars fill, important people know our names, and almost without noticing, "I'm a servant who leads" becomes "I'm a leader who serves." Same person, different identity. So: support the servant first, then support the leader.

Check ourselves first, then work outside in

We're the lead ox. If there's drift, ask whether it began with us. Am I a servant leading, submitted to my boss and devoted to their mission? Am I aligned with the organization, believing in its vision and not just complying? Am I fruitful, or just compliant? Compliance is the floor. Fruitfulness is the point.

For ourselves, we go inside out. For our people, we go outside in, because the observable is our only honest entry point. Asked with care, those questions often open the door to the deeper one: is this a role problem or an identity problem? And the language is "how do we realign," not "how do I fix them."

Drift works like wheel alignment on a car. It pulls a little, we steer against it, and over time we adapt. We hand the work to someone else and let the team take up the slack.

Watch their people

To know whether a fellow servant is leading well, watch their people, not their dashboards. Are they inviting others into responsibility, or doing everything themselves? Are they modeling what it takes to follow? Are they entrusting, or hoarding or abdicating? People tell us what's coming. Numbers tell us what's happened. The metric that matters most is alignment trajectory: are they more aligned today than six months ago?

And we're always broadcasting. Two months into running a troubled division on an aircraft carrier, my department head told me I'd solved a lot of problems. I tried to give the credit to the good people already there. He said, "That's true, but they were all there before you got there."

Even a perfect example doesn't guarantee a perfect result. Jesus modeled servant identity for three years without one inconsistency, and his disciples still argued about who was greatest. We are responsible for what we broadcast. We're not responsible for what others receive.

This week

Before we ask what's wrong with someone we lead, ask what we've been showing them. Then, in the next one-on-one, ask the same questions with a different aim: are we still serving the same mission, the same way, for the same reasons?

A question to sit with

If supporting your people has felt like one more thing draining you, ask: am I doing this the way Jesus did, or the way I was taught? He said, "Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest... For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." Support, for a servant leader, isn't the cause of burnout. It's the antidote.

This is Episode 10 of The Right Call: Wisdom Simply Applied.