Get Out of the Way

"Sir, I've known a lot of commanders who have had open door policies, but I ain't never seen one as open as yours."

That was Staff Sergeant Krause. One of my platoon sergeants. He said it with the kind of straight face that told me he wasn't sure if it was a compliment.

At twenty-six years old I was given command of a company of over two hundred soldiers. It was the kind of responsibility that could swallow you whole if you let it, and it almost did. I leaned hard on my NCOs, who had been around far longer than me, and I built what I thought was the kind of command climate every soldier deserved. Approachable leadership. Genuine investment in people. An open door that meant exactly what it said.

And for a while, it felt like it was working. Soldiers came to me with questions. They'd stop me in the hallway, knock on my door, pull me aside after formation. I was engaged, available, and proud of it. I genuinely thought that was the job.

Then one of my lieutenants came to me with a problem. He was sharp, motivated, and full of potential. The kind of young (yes, I was 26 and calling him young!) officer you want coming up through the ranks. But he was frustrated. His soldiers, he told me, didn't bring their questions to him. He'd done the work to build trust. He'd been present, consistent, everything the books tell you to do. But when something came up, they didn't come his way. He couldn't figure out why.

I didn't have an answer for him that day. But the next day I walked into the area where his platoon was working and it didn't take long to see it. Within a few minutes, soldiers started gravitating toward me. Questions came. Small things, mostly, the kind of stuff that has an easy answer if you just ask the right person. And I answered them, the way I always did, because that's what an open door means.

That's when it hit me. I was the person they were asking. That was the problem.

My lieutenant's soldiers weren't skipping him because they didn't trust him. They didn’t skip him because I had better answers or was smarter. No, they were skipping him because they had learned, through no fault of their own, that the commanding officer was accessible and willing. Why work up the chain when the top (relatively speaking) of it is standing right in front of you? I had trained them, without meaning to, to come to me first. And in doing that I had quietly pulled the floor out from under a lieutenant who was trying to build something.

I had to get out of the way.

What that looked like in practice wasn't about being less present or putting up walls. It wasn't about becoming distant or disconnected. It was about being more intentional. Where I showed up. When I showed up. How I showed up. I started asking myself those questions before walking into a space, because it turned out that me walking into a room changed the room, whether I wanted it to or not.

The other piece was the redirect. When soldiers came to me with something that should have gone to their lieutenant first, I stopped answering. Not coldly, but clearly. Have you talked to your LT about that? What did he say? Go ask him and come back if you still need me. It felt uncomfortable at first, like I was being less helpful than I could be. But being helpful in that moment was exactly the thing that was making me unhelpful in the bigger picture.

Over time the dynamic shifted. Soldiers started finding their lieutenant. He started getting the reps he needed, making decisions, building credibility with his own platoon. He made some mistakes along the way, the kind you have to make to actually learn something, and I let him make them. That was part of it too.

By the time I moved on from that command, that lieutenant had become one of the strongest in the entire battalion. Not just in my company. The battalion. I'm not going to claim I was the reason for that. He did the work. But I do believe that until I got out of his way, I was the ceiling on what he could become.

Getting out of the way is not a passive act. It is not indifference dressed up as leadership. It is a deliberate choice to ask yourself whether your presence is serving the people around you or serving your own need to feel useful. Those are not always the same thing.

SSG Krause was right. My door was too open. And the best thing I did for that lieutenant wasn't anything I did at all.

Next up: Follow. The skill nobody talks about, and the one that might matter most.