EJ Halton is a helicopter pilot and a naval officer, which means he had been through leadership training before. Plenty of it. When Julie Campbell described Severn Leadership Group to his cohort, he signed up expecting roughly what he had always got: someone brought in to talk, a spiel, a conclusion.
He says his initial read was completely wrong.
His own estimate is that in the whole program, someone talked at the room about twenty percent of the time. The rest was conversation, with a cohort that included FBI agents, teachers, entrepreneurs, and doctors, none of whom thought about leadership quite the way a naval officer does.
The part he credits most is his mentor, Jim McNeal. Not because the military is short of mentors, it is not, but because of what was different about this one. Going to a senior officer for guidance always carries a distance with it. What he and Jim built transcended rank and age, and got to a simpler question: how do I get better as a leader, as a person, and as a husband.
He also says something worth sitting with. People put leaders on a pedestal, and part of leading well is humanizing yourself, letting the people around you see that you are not perfect while still working toward excellence.
The virtues were words he had heard before. What changed was arriving at them through discussion rather than instruction: not being told what integrity means, but working out what it actually looks like, and how to be truthful in a way that makes other people want to be truthful too.
How much of the last leadership training you attended was someone talking at you?
