Personal leadership as a lifelong practice: lessons from a senior Air Force officer

Executive overview

Most leaders assume rank or experience makes them effective. Colonel Michal Holliday, 26-year Air Force veteran, found the opposite — external success masked real gaps in self-awareness and leadership depth.

The shift came through deliberate examination: journaling, solitude, studying leadership thinkers, and applying specific frameworks to real teams. The result was a move from reactive, command-and-control leadership to a coaching style built on vision, feedback, and team trust.

Effective leadership starts with understanding yourself — triggers, defaults, and blind spots — before you can lead others well.

The examined leader: self-awareness as a foundation

• Even high-ranking officers can lack clarity on what makes great leadership — rank doesn't confer insight
• The Viktor Frankl quote (via Marshall Goldsmith) unlocked a key shift: between stimulus and response lies the power to choose
• Journaling became the primary tool for unloading mental load and seeing patterns in behaviour
• A previously short temper only changed once its triggers were examined and understood
• Solitude and slow thinking (drawing on Mike Erwin and Cal Newport) replaced reflexive decision-making
• The unexamined life produces reactive leaders who swing between extremes

From paralysis-avoidance to deliberate pacing

• Early career default: make a fast decision and move — an overcorrection against "paralysis by analysis"
• Fast decisions without reflection cause whiplash across the team — lurching from one extreme to the next
• Better approach: use all available time to analyse, but no more than that
• Slowing down reduced pendulum swings; the team stopped chasing shiny objects
• Reflective pausing now includes asking: does this align with my values and my organisation's vision?

The vivid vision: specificity over slogans

• Traditional vision statements end up in a drawer — too short, too vague, too forgettable
• Cameron Harold's vivid vision framework replaces the two-sentence mission statement with a detailed multi-page document
• Key analogy: you wouldn't hand a builder a one-line description and expect your dream home — yet leaders do this with teams constantly
• Holliday asked each of his five direct reports to develop their own vivid vision for where their organisation should be in three years
• Short-term thinking ("I'll only be here two years") breeds a culture of waiting out new ideas
• A detailed vision creates continuity even when the leader rotates out

Real-time feedback: "when I see something, I do something"

• Military formal feedback cycle: three structured conversations per year — not enough
• The Michael Jordan comparison: elite performers get feedback at the minute level, not annually
• Problems ignored become the new standard; walking past poor behaviour implicitly endorses it
• Holliday's practice: acknowledge good behaviour immediately with specific examples; address problems in the moment, not at the next scheduled review
• Inspired by Kim Scott's Radical Candor — the employee who lost their job without ever receiving corrective feedback is the failure mode to avoid
• Specific, timely, professional conversation elevates individuals and the organisation simultaneously

Team guidelines: the dialogue matters as much as the outcome

• Holliday inherited two previously split organisations with friction between them
• Susan Gerke's team guidelines framework provided a structured way to surface how the group would work together
• Key insight from Gerke: the dialogue that happens while creating guidelines is often more valuable than the guidelines themselves
• Five guidelines emerged and are now posted throughout the office — visible and owned by the team
• Proactive norm-setting prevented conflict from festering rather than hoping to resolve it after the fact

Coaching versus command: a deliberate leadership shift

• Command-and-control works in immediate combat situations; it's the wrong default in a headquarters environment
• Sustained coaching and engagement before any order-giving moment builds the trust that makes orders executable without explanation
• The leader who coaches builds a team that follows orders because they trust the judgment behind them, not because they have no choice
• Being the non-smartest person in the room is an explicit goal, not a vulnerability to manage