Staff Sergeant Cytacki was a stocky young NCO with two very intimidating features. The first was a Drill Sergeant Identification Badge emblazoned with the inscription, "THIS WE'LL DEFEND" precisely positioned on his perfectly pressed right chest BDU pocket. The second, perhaps most intimidating accoutrement in his possession was the World War I campaign hat, affectionately known as the "Brown Round" with its movie star-like positioning atop his head that always seemed to be just low enough to shield the unfortunate soul standing before him from the full rage of his powerful stare. The two distinguishing features accompanying his seemingly calcified uniform unmistakably identified this man as one of the fabled and feared U.S. Army Drill Sergeants.
To this day, those two ornaments continue to instill fear and respect within me every occasion I am fortunate enough to be in their presence. As if that wasn't enough intimidation, he also sported the coveted right shoulder patch denoting his previous combat experience. The patch was nearly the size of the upper half of his BDU sleeve.
The triangle shape with the single black stripe extending from the upper left to the lower right with a lone horse head in the upper right half paying tribute to the historic unit it represented; the 1st Calvary Division.
As would become a reoccurring theme because my last name started with A, I was assigned to 1st Platoon, Delta 35, Engineering Training Battalion, Fort Leonard Wood Missouri, home of the Army Engineer. While my job in the Army had nothing to do with engineering, Fort Leonard Wood was the closest Initial Entry Training (IET) post to me. Having signed papers in March of 1992, it was now time to begin fulfilling my obligation. Once I got off the Greyhound bus at reception, I completed a few of the in-processing tasks, and joined my new friends in the "cattle cars" for a lift to what would be our new home for the next 8 weeks.
There is nothing that can prepare you for the shock of what happens when the doors of those cattle cars open. It's part Full Metal Jacket, part standup comedy show, and all out yelling, top of your lungs, no matter how trivial the communication. Knife hands and clinched teeth that flashed jaw muscles that to this day I'm not quite sure how anyone could develop such defined musculature. It was intentional chaos meant to scare, confuse, and shock and that was just the milder end of the spectrum. At the extreme end, there was catatonic-like responses, crying, and one poor unfortunate lad that wet himself. It was clear even to me at 17 that he wasn't going to make it and indeed, he did not.
Once our gaggle of new, incoherent recruits finally managed to form the closest thing to a company formation we knew how to, we stood there, 300+ strong in all of our glory, and for one, fear and urine. We were in the first hour of our military careers. Behind us lay a yard of luggage, clothes, and personal possessions scattered around much like you see when news stories show the aftermath of families going through their possessions after a tornado. It didn't really matter much what happened to those possessions. We wouldn't be seeing most of that stuff for the next two months anyway.
Standing next to Drill Sergeant Cytacki's 1st platoon was Drill Sergeant Belcher's 2nd platoon. Staff Sergeant Belcher possessed all the same intimidating features as Drill Sergeant Cytacki with the added bonus of cartoon-like forearms that made you think he should have been in the Navy with how much the man truly resembled Popeye. Including the squinty gaze he threw at everything and everyone. For all his resemblance to an often clumsy and meek cartoon character, Drill Sergeant Belcher was anything but. There was definitely something different about him. I would eventually find out the difference was the confidence he had in his craft which came from years of experience. In contrast, I would also very painfully come to find out how inexperienced my platoon sergeant was. We were his first class following his graduation from Drill Instructor school.
And that is the context from which I learned some of the most valuable leadership lessons I carry with me to this day. I saw a much more experienced and perhaps, more confident craftsman use the multiple skills he acquired honing his craft. And, I was on the receiving end of the lessor experienced craftsman using the few tools he was comfortable with, ridicule and yelling. A platoon's accomplishments are often chronicled in the form of streamers that are attached to the platoon's guidon, which is a flag on a pole that units carry to represent their unit designation. When your platoon performs the best at events like marksmanship, physical fitness assessments, barracks inspections, etc., the corresponding streamer is hung on your guidon like a trophy representing your superior performance in the identified event.
At the half-way point, 2nd platoon's guidon looked like a tall skinny blonde with strands of multiple colored hair dangling down her neck. In comparison, ours must have appeared to look like a chemo patient with one or two strands of hair holding on to the
very last. Even for a 17-year-old, I could see that Drill Sergeant Belcher had a totally different way of training his platoon. Sure, every new group goes through what is referred to as the "tear them down to build them back up" approach that has been a perineal mainstay in IET since a gifted Prussian officer named Friedrich Von Steuben volunteered to help General George Washington train troops in a way that would end up establishing the very identity of Washington's army.
The approach is a two-phased approach. You first have to tear the new recruits down to their proverbial studs before building them back up the way you need them to be in order to fit into that well-oiled Army machine. The difference was in that build them back up after the tearing them down phase. Drill Sergeant Belcher was more like a coach. He was firm in establishing the standard and he could smoke his guys with the best of them when they stepped outside of that standard. The difference was how gifted he was in establishing the standard and the multiple tools he used when the need arose to coach his guys back to that clearly defined standard. The difference was in the glaring comparison in the amount of event-winning streamers on our guidon versus theirs.
In an admittedly unfair contrasting example, the brand new Drill Sergeant, Drill Sergeant Cytacki, never really ended the tear them down phase. The yell at them all day and night phase was followed by more yelling. I remember him even telling a young recruit who just missed a question on a key evaluation, "you should have known better." Even at my young age, I remember thinking to myself, "how would he have known better? We're all just beginning our military careers and you have been charged with teaching us things we should know. Shouldn't you have known better?"
Drill Sergeant Cytacki's displeasure hit its pinnacle when the raw, unseasoned new drill instructor stormed into the 1st platoon barracks after losing yet another competition. The stoutly imposing Brown Round sat loyally perched in its usually spot where this time, it was incapable of hiding his red-faced anger. Walking up to the 1st Platoon ready-room, he grabbed our platoon guidon, continued out the back door to the field where we did physical training every morning and launched our guidon like a javelin into the twilight sky where it eventually returned to earth piercing the parade field and metaphorically, the bewildered hearts of the young men watching. A guidon was a sacred representation of one's unit. To see it so callously discarded was the antithesis to everything we were taught by that same man who was now disregarding what he taught us about what that guidon represented.
If that were the end of it, that would have been enough of a leadership lesson in what not to do for a young and sophomoric kid to have permanently tattooed within the mental DVR of leadership lessons.
But it got even more memorable. Breathing heavy with rage and what could have only been a poorly designed Army experiment to purposefully expose young recruits to escalating leadership tantrums, the novice drill instructor looked into the scared, triggered, and trauma-glazed eyes of the aspiring soldiers staring back at him and announced, "from now on, you all will carry around this mop stick as your guidon" while handing a dirty wet mop to our platoon guidon bearer. For all of week four and most of week five, that wet mop served as the colors announcing our presence wherever we went. It was as juvenile as it was humiliating.
I don't know what happened to Drill Sergeant Cytacki, but as I stand gazing out on the horizon of the twilight of my own career, I know now the gut instinct of a young 17-year-old kid was spot on. Because of that day and leadership failings that I witnessed in multiple days after that one, I hardened a core leadership tenet that I share with everyone who I have been blessed enough to have put in my charge, particular my leaders of leaders. I hammer into them that "performance is a leadership issue until it's not." The exception is purposely ill-defined. It should be because that's how rare "until it's not" should actually happen. As a leader, you should be doing everything to assess what it is that you could, should, or will do differently in the future to improve the performance of your troops. When someone on your team misses the mark, the response isn't that they should have known better. The response is what could I have done differently to better prepare them. It's a constant, continuous, reflective and introspective hardwired programming that seeks to find opportunity in oneself first before ever looking to pin responsibility on anyone or anything else.
I know now something about the message that dirty old wet mop conveyed. It's something that I am 100% certain the good leaders who saw us carrying around that dirty old wet mop all those days were thinking the moment they saw it. And, it's something that while I certainly didn't have the courage to say out loud then, I sincerely hope someone did indeed have the guts pull him aside and tell him personally. That dirty old wet mop said more about his leadership ability than it ever could have said about our collective performance.
Leadership is so hard to define because it is something like a dance. Think about it. How would you describe a dance to someone? Sure, you could recount the technical movement, but the feeling? The artistry? The way the people watching left feeling?
That's leadership, the dance. What great dancer ascended to that status by immediately dropping their dance partner the moment he or she made a mistake? Like with dancing, there's technical expertise but then there's this artistry, the nuanced way that technical expertise is applied. The sway, the stare, the lock, the embrace, the glide, the rhythm that comes with your own unique flare.
Leaders, you must learn to dance with your partners! Feel their needs in the moment, adjust your firmness, your softness, your press, your release when need be. Good leaders learn to dance and, they leave their mops in the closet.
Comentarios