Despite the complexity of the leadership role, people can develop and learn leadership skills just as lawyers, writers, test pilots, or engineers learn their skills, but leading and learning to lead require not only intensive study and application but superior inner strength, character, and personal commitment as well. The all-volunteer force underscores the need for leadership skills that ensure creativity, efficiency, productivity, and vitality in a military environment constantly faced with the challenge of doing more with less. To meet this challenge, effective Air Force leaders must know their people, their problems, interests, and needs. And today's leader must understand that young recruits are better educated, more sophisticated, more politically aware, and more conscious of the limits of military discipline than their predecessors. The obvious responsibility of the leader is to instill in these people a sense of purpose, duty, loyalty, and emotional linkage to the Air Force as an honored profession.
Good leaders demand much of themselves and their subordinates.
Their style is a careful blend of caring, dignity, discipline, and self-confidence rooted in unshakable dedication to their people, their organization, and the Air Force mission. The word caring has special meaning for effective leaders, for, with caring, they must comprehend and negotiate a special mixture of frustration and difficulty. All too often, people in leadership positions concern themselves with the quantity of work performed by subordinates rather than the quality of their products. True leaders recognize no substitutes for hard, productive work, intense concentration, and willingness to assume total responsibility, but they also recognize that they cannot achieve their goals alone. They must develop and recognize their subordinates if they expect to excel over an extended period, and they must require their people to make their own decisions.