Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Applied to Naval Leadership

Introduction: Reading Covey at a Moment of Personal Loss

The irony is unavoidable. I began reading Seven Habits of Highly Effective People when I was feeling at my least effective — personally, as a human being, and as a child. I suppose I am not alone in saying this. The death of a parent makes every child feel ineffective, unable to cope with family grief and stress, and forced to face one's own mortality and "principles of personal vision."¹ The loss of a father makes it easy to lose one's sense of future perspective, and the vision one has of oneself in a family and societal context.

I was also, when I began the book, feeling quite ineffective as a leader. Because of my father's death in mid-August, I had to leave my ship and came home to tend to family matters. Thus, I began Stephen R. Covey's text not at sea, but at home, far away from military examples of leadership and much closer to the civilian audience that was the book's original focus. However, much of what I read in Covey's work would later become quite resonant with what I experienced at sea when I returned to my ship.

I was initially quite surprised by my reaction to this seminal text on leadership, because I had only a dim awareness of Covey's book beforehand. I had tended to assume, erroneously, that it was a kind of self-help, New Age-style book — the sort one might compare to Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. My initial presuppositions, however, were quite wrong. Unlike most self-help books that stress airy notions of self-actualization, Covey stresses the need for "interdependence" with others and the need for leaders to cultivate an effective structure of interdependence among the individuals they command.² The need for interdependent leaders — rather than independent or dependent leaders — is the most hopeful and practically useful philosophy that emerges from Covey's text for an individual in military service at sea.

Covey's life and leadership philosophy is, I found, quite commensurate with military life. First, the author argues, an individual begins his or her young life in a state of dependence. Like many young people before entering service, individuals turn to their parents for guidance. They feel vulnerable and look to others to define their values — ideally their mother and father, or, in the absence of clear guidance, to the less certain structure of their immediate peer group. But then, life and the demands of their country's service test and mold them anew, giving them a sense of independence away from family and civilian peers.

Covey's Framework: Dependence, Independence, and Interdependence

Yet this is only one critical step toward maturity. Ultimately, the individual must formulate a sense of interdependence with others in their societal context. The individual must realize, in keeping with these "principles of interdependence," that he or she is responsible for others, and that to be truly functional one must perform according to the rules, expectations, and demands of a particular world — to do good for others.³

After reading the book at home, in the civilian context of my childhood, I understood that I had moved beyond a state of dependence upon my father through my work in the service. I had become a more functional adult and was therefore able to honor his memory and still move forward emotionally. I now existed in a state of interdependence with my family — I loved them and felt a sense of responsibility toward them, and I held leadership responsibilities within the changed family dynamic following my father's death. "Seek first to understand, then to be understood."⁴ I sought to understand the needs of others in my family rather than simply focus on my own. I was no longer a dependent burden, nor did I need to assert myself like an adolescent so fiercely independent that I had nothing to offer others. I was full — not only of sorrow, but also of a sense of "balanced self-renewal."⁵

In reading the book and feeling its motivational energy, I was also struck by Covey's emphasis on the need for habits in leadership — that leadership does not simply happen; it is a willed, learned act that one must condition oneself for, much like passing a physical training test.⁶ I took this valorization of protocol, discipline, and interdependence with me as a motivating factor, renewing my sense of service to my fellow sailors and to any leadership role I might be called to exercise upon returning to sea.

Returning to Sea with a New Leadership Perspective

I recognized that I no longer needed to remain standoffish in my grief but instead needed to "renew" my family relationships.⁷ I was autonomous, yet part of an interdependent family community in which I held a leadership role as an adult child. After this realization, I returned to my life in service — another community in which I was honing skillful habits in pursuit of a leadership role, habits that would take me to "the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire,"⁸ the intersection of what I had learned and the discipline I had gained, together with my love of country and my desire to exercise leadership in service.

Time and again, I reminded myself that Covey stresses the harm of remaining in a constant state of flux — fashionable as that may be in popular psychology. Rather, discipline through habituation is the key, an idea underscored by the nature of military life and even, I learned while reading the text at home, the ultimately cathartic structure of a funeral service.

The fact that Covey's analysis of leadership addresses both civilian and military needs was illustrated by several formative experiences I have since had at sea, as I examined my immediate leaders through Covey's sevenfold framework. On one occasion, I was particularly struck by the leadership behavior of a captain who consistently offered both public and private recognition for the quality of his subordinates' work. He never dwelt on losses; his thinking was always "win-win," emphasizing the lessons learned even when an individual made an accidental error.⁹ He was never afraid that offering genuine compliments for a job well done would make him appear weak, in keeping with Covey's "paradigm" of "interdependent" leadership.¹⁰

Positive Leadership Examples Observed at Sea

This captain did not strive to appear independent of others' efforts, nor was he dependent on others for their approval. Rather, through respect, he provided those under his command with the motivation to demonstrate excellence in all required endeavors. Another officer, who consistently completed his own work to the highest possible standard, also displayed excellence in leadership — not only through his command decisions, but through his constant, quiet, personal example of excellence. By never expecting more of others than he gave of himself, he embodied true interdependent leadership.

Covey's analysis of leadership was unfortunately also evidenced in some of the negative qualities I observed in others. For instance, one first assistant engineer was in the habit of holding team meetings after breakfast to assign tasks for the day. This might, in principle, be an attempt to "put first things first," in Covey's words.¹¹

What was put "first," however, was really the officer's own personal need to demonstrate his authority, rather than to exercise genuine leadership.¹² Rather than using these meetings to check in with those under his command and assess their progress, this individual appeared more interested in dominating the proceedings with his own voice. Rather than encouraging others to exercise self-discipline and take ownership within their own sense of duty, he was interested only in asserting his control over a group of individuals whom he treated as interchangeable and faceless.

Conclusion: Covey's Relevance to Military Command

Covey's emphasis on listening and responding to the needs of others may seem overly "soft" for the military's requirements. However, although Covey addresses his leadership philosophy primarily to a civilian audience, he could not have written a more effective text for a military leader. A military leader must constantly respond to new stimuli and situations and must therefore always have an ear for the words and needs of others. Yet there must also be a firm sense of habituation and adherence to protocol. Covey's framework, far from being at odds with military culture, provides a coherent and practical foundation for command at sea.

Covey, Stephen R. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.