MCB QUANTICO, Va. (Jan. 31) -- It was 50 years ago when Gen. Anthony Zinni got off a train from Philadelphia at Marine Corps Base Quantico and immediately fell into disfavor with the leadership of his platoon leaders class, he told the students and instructors of The Basic School on the evening of Jan. 31.

“The staff sergeant told me, ‘You’ve only been here one day and I already know your name. You might think that’s good, but it’s not,’” Zinni recalled. He graduated on probation, but he credited the Marine Corps’ “attitude adjustment” program for the turnaround that led to his ascent through the ranks and, by the late 1990s, to the position of commander in chief of U.S. Central Command.

“My life in the Marine Corps was one of constantly learning and developing,” he told the crowd of about 1,100 gathered in the theater at Little Hall for this winter’s installment of The Basic School’s Leftwich Leadership Lecture Series. He said he wanted to talk to the group about how to learn and develop in order to become leaders.

While character and education are essential to strong leadership, he said, so, too, is experience. “It isn’t just the experience. It’s what you get out of it. It’s what you learn from it,” he added, noting that the students should learn from their own successes and failures, as well as those of the people around them.

He recalled his first platoon sergeant, who had taught him the relationship between the officer and staff noncommissioned officer running a platoon. While SNCOs prepare individuals for battle, officers prepare units, he said, adding that he had seen many lieutenants trying to be SNCOs.

“I’ve learned from sergeants and I’ve learned from generals,” Zinni said.

He also learned from a captain who seemed to have absorbed his entire bookcase of field manuals and technical manuals, and understood the technical, tactical and strategic side of any military subject, making him highly respected, even by those who outranked him, he said. “I watched colonels and generals defer to him, and what I learned from that was the power of competence.”

Whether in the military or in business, “If you had to pick the No. 1 trait of a leader, it has to be competence,” Zinni said, noting that character and personal traits become irrelevant “if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

He said the other important aspect of leadership is the ability to relate to subordinates. “Every person is a story, and a good leader really cares about that story,” Zinni said. “Don’t ever talk down to them. Don’t ever be condescending in any way.”

He remembered his surprise when one of his best Marines told him he was the closest thing that Marine had to a father. “You may be the one person in their lives they have the most respect for, who they want to lead them the most,” he said. “The relationship has to be teacher to scholar, father to son.” This dynamic makes troops not only feel valued but also feel like part of a team they are proud of, which results in a high-performing platoon, he said.

As professional problem-solvers, he said, officers should never stop educating themselves, cultivating “a breadth of education and a true sense of curiosity.” When he was carrying out assessments in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years, he said, he was surprised at how many non-military jobs Marines had needed to adapt to, employing skills they had not learned in boot camp or officer candidates school.

Communication skills are also essential to leadership, and involve more than arranging a five-paragraph order, Zinni said. “It’s a matter of confidence and the way you deliver it.”

Finally, every officer has to determine his or her reputation, which is “the only thing you’ll take with you,” he said. “You need to take a moment to yourself and think about what your code is. What do you believe? And do you really mean it and live it?”

The Leftwich lectures, named for legendary Marine Corps Lt. Col. William Leftwich Jr., are held twice a year with the goal of bringing in “a speaker who will focus on company leadership at the lieutenant and captain level,” said Capt. Roberto Scribner, protocol officer at The Basic School. He said the talks are aimed at the second lieutenants and warrant officers who attend the school, as well as the captains who work there as instructors before returning to the field.

Scribner said Zinni was selected as a speaker because he not only spent 39 years in the Marine Corps as everything from a platoon commander in Vietnam to the commander in chief of Central Command, but also because, as a general officer, “he was very outspoken about how things were conducted, and he was very accurate in his predictions” about the war in Iraq and other conflicts. “He’s a leading thought guy across the board,” Scribner said. 
      — Writer: mdicicco@quanticosentryonline.com

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Books by and about General Zinni