I took a leadership class in college, and I cannot tell you a single meaningful thing I learned about actually being a leader. I learned theories, terminology, and the kinds of things professors put on exams, but none of it convinced me that genuine leadership is something you can manufacture in a classroom. You can teach people how to communicate better, delegate responsibilities, resolve conflict, manage a team, and make strategic decisions. Those are useful skills, but leadership itself feels deeper than that to me. I believe some people naturally possess the qualities that make other people trust them enough to follow them, while other people can collect every credential, title, and position of authority available and still have no business leading anybody.
I have been thinking about that a lot while following reports about the USS Abraham Lincoln. The aircraft carrier left San Diego in November 2025 with thousands of sailors and Marines aboard, and what was initially expected to be a much shorter deployment has now stretched into its ninth month. Reports from military families have described deteriorating morale, problems with basic living conditions, exhaustion, and concerns about the mental health of some sailors. There have also been reports that multiple sailors attempted to go overboard during the extended deployment. The Navy has not publicly confirmed every allegation being made, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has pushed back against descriptions of conditions aboard the ship, saying the situation has been misrepresented. Even with those conflicting accounts, I think the situation raises a larger question that cannot be dismissed just because every detail has not been publicly verified.
What does leadership require when the people carrying out your decisions begin reaching their breaking point?
I think one of our biggest problems is that we have confused leadership with authority. Having the power to give an order does not automatically make someone a good leader. Neither does becoming president, commanding a military unit, running a corporation, managing employees, leading a church, or being placed at the head of any other institution. A title gives a person authority. Leadership is revealed by what that person does with the authority they have been given and how the people under their direction are affected by their decisions.
A good leader has to understand that the people beneath them are human beings and not resources that can be endlessly depleted. They have families, physical limitations, emotional limits, fears, responsibilities, and breaking points. This does not mean leadership is about making everybody comfortable. There are situations where sacrifice is necessary, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the military. People who enlist understand that deployments can be difficult and that military service carries risks that most civilians will never experience. That still does not mean leadership gets an unlimited excuse to ignore deteriorating conditions because hardship is part of the job.
There has to be a point where a leader is capable of asking whether continuing to demand more is actually necessary or whether the people making the decisions have become detached from what those decisions are costing everyone else. That is where I believe accountability becomes one of the most important parts of leadership. A good leader should be able to receive bad news without punishing the person delivering it. They should be able to reconsider a decision without seeing that reconsideration as weakness, and they should be willing to acknowledge when circumstances have changed enough to require a different approach.
That is also why I have such a problem with the leadership we are seeing from the current administration. My criticism is bigger than whether someone likes Donald Trump, voted for him, hates him, or identifies with one political party over another. I am questioning the qualities we should expect from anybody holding that level of power. If we believe leadership requires accountability, judgment, humility, competence, and the ability to protect the people responsible for carrying out your decisions, then we should be willing to evaluate every president by those standards.
One of the most dangerous things that can happen under bad leadership is that people stop telling the person in charge the truth. When loyalty becomes more valuable than competence, everyone around the leader begins learning what can and cannot be said. Criticism starts being treated as betrayal, mistakes are blamed on somebody else, bad news gets softened, and people become more concerned with protecting their position than identifying problems before those problems become disasters. Eventually, the person at the top may genuinely believe everything is going well because they have created an environment where nobody feels comfortable telling them otherwise.
That kind of leadership becomes even more dangerous when we are talking about the United States government because the consequences do not end with the people sitting inside Washington. The United States holds enormous military, economic, and political power, and the rest of the world pays attention to how that power is being managed. Allies are watching to determine whether American commitments can be trusted. Adversaries are watching for instability, inconsistency, and weakness. Other nations are paying attention to whether the United States appears capable of making calculated decisions or whether our leadership looks increasingly chaotic and reactive.
That is why I keep coming back to the question of what real leadership actually is. We have spent years conflating wealth, aggression, popularity, confidence, charisma, and authority with leadership, even though none of those things guarantee that a person knows how to guide others responsibly. Someone can be loud, powerful, wealthy, highly educated, and surrounded by supporters while still being a terrible leader. They can know how to gain power without understanding the responsibility that comes with possessing it.
Real leadership is revealed in the condition of the people who have to live with your decisions. If you are responsible for thousands, millions, or hundreds of millions of people, then their well-being, stability, and ability to function are part of your performance. You cannot continuously demand sacrifice from people while refusing to examine whether your own decisions are contributing to their exhaustion, instability, or loss of faith in the institutions they are supposed to trust.
Maybe leadership classes can teach people useful tools, but I do not believe they can create the character required to use power responsibly. At some point, we need to stop treating every person with authority as though they have automatically earned the title of leader and become much more selective about who we are willing to follow.