10 Pieces of Advice for the Junior Officer

Maj Ryan Martinez

The Author and his first Platoon Sergeant (courtesy of Maj Martinez).

“…your experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.” – General Mattis, USMC

I’ve been fortunate to spend the past few years stationed at the Naval Academy, working alongside an incredible team of faculty and staff. Inspired by Gen. Mattis’ belief that we should learn as much as we can from the experiences of others, I dedicated the first 20 minutes of every Friday class to open Q&A—giving students a chance to ask anything about leadership or life after graduation.

Following advice from my mentors, I kept notes over the years—both from my own career and from the thoughtful questions asked by these future Naval officers. I consolidated my thoughts into the following ten pieces of advice, which I share with the midshipmen the week they commission. My hope is that it will help them steer clear of the mistakes I made in addition to providing them with the opportunity to be better than those of us who came before them. By writing this article, I hope to share these lessons with a broader audience—and perhaps even inspire readers to pass them along to an aspiring officer candidate or Midshipman in their life.

1. “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care” – Teddy Roosevelt

“Remember: As an officer, you need to win only one battle – for the hearts of your troops. Win their hearts and they will win the fights.” – General Mattis, USMC

“As officers, you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you will do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world. And if you do not, I will break you.” – Field Marshal William Slim, British Army

“I have seen competent leaders who stood in front of a platoon and all they saw was a platoon. But great leaders stand in front of a platoon and see it as 44 individuals, each of whom has aspirations, each of whom wants to live, each of whom wants to do good.” – General Schwarzkopf, USA

You are leading people – not cogs in a machine. Understand everything you can about the individual person: what makes them tick, what motivates them, where they grew up, how many siblings they have, what they do on the weekends, what are their life goals, what are their biggest failures, what do they dream of… Show them that you genuinely care for them and they will do anything for you.

2. Being a good officer is as simple as two things:

• Respected as a leader

• Competent as a professional

Both are equally important. Many junior officers spend four years in college and then months at basic training learning how to be respected as a leader. You need to be able to turn a unit into a team and enable that team to reach its maximum potential to accomplish a goal. They will not follow you if they do not respect you as a leader.

While the leadership aspect is the main focus of being an officer, I believe the competence of your profession is often overlooked. Let me offer a simple example in the context of Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD). One of the primary jobs of EOD is obviously to diffuse bombs. If a patrol encounters an improvised explosive device (IED), they will likely establish a cordon and then call EOD. Let’s say the EOD unit dispatches Smith. And let’s assume Smith is a great leader and is spoken highly of by his team. Once he gets there, the patrol explains the possibility of a pressure activated IED. What if Smith responds “I have no idea how to handle that” even if it was covered extensively in his training? Does it really help me at all that Smith is a “good guy?” At the end of the day, I need him to be good at his job. If you are a pilot, I need you to be able to successfully fly your aircraft and drop bombs accurately on target and on time…not just be a good leader.

Conversely, if you are a technical expert but your unit has no faith or trust in your leadership ability, you will also fail as an officer. You need to be both competent as a professional and respected as a leader to be a successful officer.

3. Be Humbly Confident.

This stems from a question you get weekly in Annapolis: “how do you lead a chief or platoon sergeant that has been in the fleet longer than you have been in school?” For context, I took over my first platoon after a year of “experience.” I went to Marine Officer basic training in Quantico for 6 months and then Infantry Officer Course for 3 months. My very first platoon sergeant was a 12-year Staff Sergeant with four combat deployments, and I was his direct superior.

If you are reading this and you have wondered the exact same thing, I believe you have the exact right mindset for a junior officer. Read any of the modern classics and it is clear these leaders had the same reservations (One Bullet Away, Joker One, The Unforgiving Minute, It Happened on the Way to War, etc.) You are appropriately wondering what you could possibly offer to a platoon or a division where your senior enlisted has a decade of experience. I am writing to tell you that you have a lot to offer. The junior officers who quickly form bad reputations are the ones who think they know everything and think that your training gives you a certain level of credibility.

You need to find the right balance, and that is best summed up as humble confidence. You don’t realize before you start how much you have learned from four years of school and basic training. You are in charge for a reason. You and your senior enlisted are a team, and their fleet experience combined with your training as an officer will make your team unstoppable. You need to be humble enough to realize you have an infinite number of things to learn, but confident enough to realize you are in charge for a reason and you have a lot to bring to the table.

4. Start firm, then ease up – not the other way around.

Once you become an officer, you are responsible for every aspect of your unit — their appearance, discipline, performance, and overall effectiveness. What I learned the hard way is that it is far easier to start strict and gradually ease up than to try tightening the reins later on. If your unit senses that you didn’t care about a certain standard at first, they’ll be reluctant to buy in when you suddenly do.

It is balance, because you also want to avoid being the stereotypical junior officer who comes in too high and to the right. However, it is very important to set high expectations early and stay consistent. Once your team demonstrates they can handle the basics, and as you build trust and familiarity, you can focus on higher level tasks.

5. Once a junior officer, always a junior officer.

For those who do ROTC or attend a service academy, you probably spent your senior year in an important leadership position with a lot of influence on the freshmen. Once you commission, however, you are right back to the bottom of the totem pole. I would encourage you to approach your career with the mindset of always being junior.

Show up on time, be overly respectful, look out for your peers, don’t leave anyone behind who is struggling, accept responsibility for a mistake, take the verbal reprimand and move on, actually find out and report back, always make sure your uniform looks good. You have no idea how much you stand out once you start wearing those shiny bars on your collar.

If you believe at any point in your career that you have finally “made it” I think that is a recipe for disaster. With rank comes responsibility, and you should approach all your interactions with the mindset that you are junior to someone and have a lot to learn, but that you will always put your best foot forward.

6. Five and dive … or 20?

At USNA, I remember everyone having the binary mindset that you had to decide right away whether you were going to only do your 5-year obligation or stay in for a 20-year career. In hindsight, this is an extremely foolish way of thinking. I believe both answers are wrong. If you commission with the sole intention of only doing your minimum obligation, you will likely struggle. Military life is hard, and if it is always a temporary path and you are just waiting out the clock, why would you put in the effort to go above and beyond for those you lead? On the other hand, if your sole purpose is to stay in for 20 years and make a career, then why would you not be unhealthily competitive with your peers and focused on “CYA" since it is hard to be promoted to O-5?

Think about how much your perspective has changed when comparing day one of freshman year to commissioning day. You have learned and changed a tremendous amount over four short years. That level of maturing will continue exponentially. You similarly will have no idea what it will be like as an O-3 when you are an O-1. Some of you will get married, some of you will have kids, some of you will be stationed in amazing places, some of you will lose Sailors or Marines, some of you will be stationed abroad, etc.

The best pieces of advice I ever heard from any officers were from two who talked at USNA, General Mattis and Admiral McRaven. They came a few years apart but delivered the same message. Both served for over 35 years but said they had absolutely no intention of doing so. They always told themselves that they would stay in as long as it made sense and as long as they enjoyed the job. They both took it one tour at a time. If you love your job and get orders offered in a role that is similarly exciting and meaningful, why wouldn’t you take it? On the other hand, if you plan to take the next tour, but you feel like you have to decide between your marriage being successful or your career, then similarly why would you take it? Follow the McRaven & Mattis advice.

7. One of your main jobs as an officer should be to get out of the way.

“Only secure leaders give power to others.” – 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

“Great leaders gain authority by giving it away.” – VADM James Bond Stockdale

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” – Teddy Roosevelt

Easier said than done. Do not micromanage your unit, they will loathe you and you will regret it. Give them the latitude to make mistakes and learn from them as long as nobody gets hurt. Allow your unit to fail. Give them a task and get out of the way and let them do it the way they want. The combination of their 40 brains is smarter than your one brain. They may come up with a solution you would never have thought of. You should always inspect what you expect, however, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

8. Your job does not define you. Be a well-rounded person.

In ROTC, at a service academy, or at officer candidate school, you lived and breathed military service. You should pursue your job as an officer with an all-encompassing determination…the nation depends on it. It is important for commissioning sources to stress this because of how difficult a transition it is from civilian to military officer. The military is inherently different than your standard nine to five job, and it is important to drive that home.

Although that difference is important to highlight, the mistake is to allow the military to define who you are. Each of you should be well-rounded individuals. Being a military officer should be a large part of your identity but should not be your entire identity. This seems out of context, but I truly believe this is an important distinction.

I think people who base their entire identity on the fact that they are a military officer struggle in many facets. Professionally, I think they struggle because many members of your unit will not agree with that mindset. It is hard to relate to an officer who has no other personality traits or hobbies other than the military. Privately, I think those people struggle because it should not be a surprise to hear that the military forces you to make tough decisions. You will be assigned to units or duty stations you do not want to go to; you will have leave denied due to training requirements; you will miss Christmases with family because your deployment was extended. If your entire identity is tied to an institution that will routinely demand more from you, you will spiral and feel lost. I have seen that individuals who have a means of being well rounded thrive both personally and professionally in their career.

9. Sympathy vs. Empathy.

I will be the first to admit that I struggled with this as a junior officer. Both words sound similar, and it took longer than it should have to understand that they mean different things. Sympathy is feeling bad for someone. Empathy is being able to understand what they might be feeling. You need to understand both words to effectively lead.

As a junior officer, you will have a lot of say in determining how and when to train your unit. If you need to keep them at 0200 on a Friday for nighttime training because it will make them more effective, then that is exactly what you should do. Even with the knowledge that you are deliberately keeping mothers/fathers/husbands/wives away from their families. Never forget, your role is to make the unit combat effective.

However, my mistake was assuming I could effectively empathize because I was right there at 0200 with them. This was not the case. I was single at the time. I did not understand what it is like to take care of a newborn, and the burden it places on your partner every night you are gone. If you do not have the ability to understand the full gravity of what you are asking your units to do, then you will suffer from the second and third level consequences of those decisions. This does not mean you should go easy on them. This means you need to make an effort to understand and find the proper balance.

Another short story is from a junior enlisted who struggled in the platoon. Generally, a bottom performer who meant well, but just did not have the same skillsets as many others. After a particularly rough week where he struggled with physical workouts and field training, the platoon leadership had hit a breaking point. It culminated with a routine dress uniform inspection prior to a change of command ceremony. This Marine came out with a generally disheveled uniform. As he was being corrected by the NCOs, one of them said “didn’t your dad teach you how to tie a tie” to which he replied, “I never met my dad.” This is a very benign story but one I will never forget.

10. You cannot change the world. But you can make a difference in the world.

Think about all the officers, instructors, coaches, teachers etc. you worked with before commissioning. If someone asked, “What did you think of _____ (insert name)?” – sometimes the honest answer is “Oh yeah, I forgot about them.” That person likely did not have a negative impact, but frankly didn’t have a life-changing impact either. That will undoubtedly be the answer that a few members of your unit will give when asked about you – and that is absolutely fine.

You will not be the mentor of all mentors to every single person you lead. All of us are human beings, and your personality, leadership style, or general demeanor will not be life changing to all of the people you lead. Do not let your ego rest upon the assumption that everyone will look up to you the way you look up to your heroes. You will likely not change the world in your five-year obligation.

On the other hand, if you care for the 20-40 individuals in your unit, give them everything you have, push them to succeed, and actually lead them according to the best of your ability, you will have such a profound impact that it simply cannot be quantified.

Instead, think about the leaders that you have interacted with up to this point who simply shaped you into who you are now. The ones that you would follow anywhere. I always think of the quote from one of the enlisted Marines in Maj Doug Zembiec’s company that said he would have followed Maj Zembiec into the Battle of Fallujah with a spoon. You might be someone’s Major Zembiec. If you have that profound impact on just five people… and those people have a profound impact on five more people… then in very short order, you have made a substantial difference in the world.

In Closing

As I tell the midshipmen at the Naval Academy, I would trade places with them in a heartbeat. Nothing compares to the euphoric feeling of driving cross-country from Quantico, Virginia to Southern California with my car packed to the brim. It felt like I had the entire world ahead of me with adventure being the only guarantee. Nothing beats stepping in front of your unit for the first time. You never drive to work wondering if you have a purpose. Enjoy it while you can because it will go by faster than you think.

Maj Ryan Martinez is an Infantry Officer and currently serves a Rotational Military Instructor at the United States Naval Academy. He can be reached at ryanmartinez022@gmail.com.

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The opinions expressed above are those of the author and The Connecting File. They do not reflect the views of the Department of Defense, the United States Marine Corps, or any other government entity.