The Weight of the Example We Set

Lead by example.
That phrase gets used a lot in the military and first responder communities. It’s often mistaken to mean leaders must have a high PT score, always look squared away, and be exceptionally proficient at everything they touch. Those things are important, but they’re only a small piece of the “example.”

Going into boot camp, OS A-school, and my first unit, I didn’t understand any of that, and it set me up for failure.

Early in my career, I was impatient and frustrated that I wasn’t one of the “natural leaders” or “hard chargers” you read about in memoirs. I picked bad examples to mimic and failed because of it. I was angry at myself and the world that I didn’t find military life natural or easy, and that I wasn’t advancing faster than I thought I should. When my immediate supervisors didn’t provide the best examples—or at the very least, guidance—I lashed out like a teenager and got myself in trouble.

One of the hidden flaws of the Coast Guard is that we don’t nurture and grow our leaders. If I had to guess, it’s because we’re too short-staffed and too damned busy. Sink or swim, promote the survivors. It leads to a lot of frustration and stagnation early in people’s careers.

It took two units and about six years to figure out that leaders aren’t just the person with more shiny on their collar. Sometimes, they’re a subordinate with a bit more life under their belt. It wasn’t until I was on my way out of active duty that I realized I had become the second kind of leader.

Aboard the cutter, I volunteered for just about every collateral duty I could get away with and still complete my daily tasking. I think it wound up being thirteen in total by the time I left. It was more out of boredom and a strong desire to be seen as something besides a comms geek who hid in the air-conditioned OPCEN.

On a ship, half-assed effort usually means more work down the line—work that always came at the worst time in the worst conditions. It was just less effort to do it right and be done. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the non-rates (E-2 and E-3 crew members fresh out of boot camp) were watching me. They saw me volunteer often and noted my “get it right the first time” work ethic.

When I made E-5 (Second Class Petty Officer), the newly arrived E-4 and O-1 (ensign) crew members started asking me for guidance. I really enjoyed helping the new guys with signoffs and training. It felt good to pass on the working knowledge without all the associated bull.

The longer I was aboard, the more phrases and little habits I thought were mine alone started showing up in my shipmates. Small procedures and methods I’d put in place began getting taken care of without me having to do them. On sleepless nights, I’d wander through the cutter to check on my damage control station and find a team member already there doing the same. I’d do an off schedule classified safe or document spot-check to find another signature already there from less than twelve hours prior.

For about a year after I left the cutter, I had old shipmates reach out to let me know they were still doing things the way I’d taught them, or to tell me the command had finally fixed something I’d been advocating for—like putting dehumidifiers and air filters in the berthing areas.

I’m not so arrogant as to think that I was the sole influence on the crew. A small crew is a stew of people, cultures, and behaviors. You might go into the pot a raw potato, but you’ll come out tasting like a bit of everything else that was in there with you. I know I picked up a hundred little things from the people I lived and worked so closely with. It wasn’t until I saw their habits in my civilian life that I started thinking about the ones they picked up from me.

Years later, after I moved to Texas and started working in emergency management, I started seeing it happen again. My coworkers have picked up my way of speaking. Short responses to requests like “will do,” “understood,” and “on it” have bled into our communication, especially during emergency events. As far as I can tell, the team didn’t speak that way before I joined them.

They didn’t keep active logs during serious weather responses; now we use the ICS-214 standard form for larger flood events. The clipped radio language and penchant for logging things were both carried over from my active-duty tours as a comms geek. More recently, the calm, blunt, and “lean into the problem” attitude of my law enforcement training on the reserve side has helped drive projects through the bureaucratic swamp of city government. I’ve seen that permeate into the team, and it’s strange to watch it happen.

Several articles by Dave Chamberlin, a U.S. Air Force vet with 38 years of experience, go into detail about setting the example and leading by it. One that sticks out is How to Go from Basic Training to Instructor… in One Step. In it, he talks about being an E-1 (the lowest enlisted rank possible) and teaching a class of E-5 and E-6 Air Force personnel who were close to halfway through their careers. He was obviously nervous about it, but then one of the students stood up and told him his knowledge and expertise were more important than his rank—and that they respected that. That student set an example Dave still talks about 40 years later.

The Editor-in-Chief of The Havok Journal, Mike Warnock, recently shared some very personal details about his battle with cancer. The article hit home on a dozen different levels, but one of the points that stood out to me on the second read-through was how his former staff and colleagues were going to be working on him. He mentions that one of the nurses thanked him for the effort he put in to make sure he was taken care of. Yet another seemingly small thing that helped set the tone in another person’s career.

Lately, my three-going-on-thirteen-year-old son has started testing boundaries. This is about the time a child starts getting the big hormone dumps, so his tantrums can ramp up to full-blown rageful meltdowns in a heartbeat. He looks like his mom until he frowns—then I’m staring down a smaller version of me. I’m constantly reminded that he is watching us. If you think your chain of command has you under a microscope, try living with a toddler.

I constantly remind myself that he is experiencing emotions at one hundred percent without a lifetime of discipline to process them, and he is watching how I respond to him in his moments of rage and pain. I repeatedly tell myself that I am setting the example that I want him to follow—that “I have to be the adult I want him to become.”

I said those words out loud for the first time yesterday, and it was like a gut punch. Every major—and a lot of the minor—missteps I’d taken through life hit like a forty-foot wave over the bow.

Another phrase you hear a lot is: “One ‘oh shit’ undoes a thousand ‘attaboys.’”

All I could remember was forty years of “oh shit.” It made me wonder how many folks I might have been the wrong kind of leader to, and how often I hampered my own career by setting the wrong example.

The point I’m driving at here is that whether you like it or not, you are leading someone. Be the example you needed to see. Be worthy of following. Make sure the influence you have on others is the right one. It can change a life. It is hard as hell to do—but it is worth it.

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K.C. Aud has made a career of being lucky and has managed to find something positive in nearly every poor decision he’s ever made, even if it was only a new perspective on how not to do something.

Enlisting in the U.S. Coast Guard in 2010 he became an Operations Specialist (radio and navigation) and did his first tour in Georgia guarding submarines from drunk fishermen. In 2014, tired of the heat and the bugs he transferred to a 210-foot medium endurance cutter in Washington state. The cutter then regularly deployed to the hot and buggy west coast of Central America to hunt down drug runners. Aboard USCGC Active he traveled 94,194 miles and personally handled enough cocaine to keep a small country high for a decade. Somewhere in there, he learned to write, if not spell.  

Three years later, daunted by the prospect of spending the rest of his career in a windowless command center, he separated from active duty. After 13 different jobs ranging from beer brewer to dairy farmhand, to machinist, to Navy civilian contractor, he reenlisted in 2020 as a Coast Guard reservist, changing rates to Maritime Law Enforcement Specialist. When not helping the Navy assets in the Puget Sound troubleshoot radios, he’s on drill in Seattle doing water cop stuff and or flailing away at his keyboard. Though married and now a father, he misses the mission. 

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.