Rear Admiral David F. Baucom Shares His Thoughts on Leadership

Leaders are responsible for making far-reaching decisions. They need to sort through complex issues, determine which information has merit, and make tough decisions. People want leaders who are fair, trustworthy, respectful, and ethical. In other words, they want leaders with integrity, such as Rear Admiral David F. Baucom.

Retiring from the United States Navy after 34 years of leading men and women from many ships’ deck plates to corporate boardrooms, packed Pentagon auditoriums, and even the White House, David Folk Baucom offers leadership lessons worthy of consideration and study. While recently speaking to a group of junior executives, he initially captures his attentive audience with a quote Napoleon is reputed to have said: “Genius in leadership is the ability to do an average thing when everybody around you is going crazy.

David Folk Baucom offers the following thoughts on leadership:

1. Determination: A desire to achieve something observable and striking drives individual leaders and their companies to struggle to reach their potential. Leaders require a healthy amount of it to drive themselves and others. Over ambition, united with a lack of honesty, can lead to unwanted performance and even exploitation.
2. Drive and Persistence: Some leaders have an internal motor that drives them to get to the core of an issue and find resolutions. They drill for precise answers and do not give up until they get them. Their high energy is transmittable. They reliably drive their significances through the association. They search persistently for missing data and keep tuning their mental mockups until they reach a positioning that works. But initiative and persistence can cause a leader to stick to a proposal that remains occupied, outmoded norms, or an asset that is no longer capable.
3. Confidence: You have to be able to listen to your internal voice and tolerate the lonely instants when an imperative conclusion falls on your shoulders. You have to express your mind and act conclusively, knowing that you can survive the moments. It is not a matter of acting tough. The situation is having a rigid internal core, or what some denote as emotional resilience.
4. Psychological Sincerity: The readiness to be influenced by other people and share your ideas flexibly enhances the knowledge while being emotionally closed can cause difficulties. Expressively open leaders seek diverse opinions, so they see and hear more and influence a broader range of statistics into their conclusions.
5. Realism: Realism is the mid-point between confidence and distrust, and the level to which you tend toward each other has a predominantly powerful effect on your use of the competencies. Optimism can lead, for instance, to ambitious goals that outshine the company’s ability to achieve them or can council your judgments of individuals.

6. Craving for Learning: Pieces of knowledge progress with revelation to diverse circumstances with swelling levels of intricacy, so enthusiasm for new challenges is crucial. Leaders who search out new skills and learn from them will shape their experiences faster than those who do not.