The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership

by Sam Walker

After conducting interviews with dozens of soldiers, they formulated a simple equation to explain their findings: Leadership = P × M × D. Gal told me that the first variable—the P—stood for potential, which he defined as a person’s God-given leadership ability. This was a natural gift that couldn’t be taught, he said, and would start to become evident in a person’s behavior as early as kindergarten. But it also wasn’t excessively rare; many members of an army unit might have these skills. To become a leader, however, a person with potential also needed to possess the next variable: M. “The prerequisite to be effective is motivation,” he said. These two variables were something of a twin set. People who had leadership potential often had the motivation to fulfill the role. But it was the third variable in Gal’s equation that caught my attention: D for development. Here, Gal believed, biology played no role. Any leadership candidate, no matter how gifted, had to make an effort to learn the ropes and to prove that they had the right qualities. “You have to earn your leadership over time, to prove that your charisma is used the right way and that it flows in a positive group-oriented direction.” Leaders must learn how to become a “prism” through which the group’s perceptions are filtered and to learn how to manipulate these emotions in a way that lifts others, rather than unsettling them by confirming their fears.