Case Application

CASE APPLICATION: LEADERSHIP

Master and Commander

The U.S. military is widely known for its leaders and its leadership training. And rightly so. It’s important in the types of situations faced by military units, teams, and squads that they have strong leaders, leaders who can take command and who can understand the situation in deciding what needs to happen. But how and where does leader style factor in? Is it expected and accepted that by the very nature of those types of situations, military leaders have to be hard-nosed, no-nonsense, and tough? With a father who was a Navy captain, Holly Graf, the first woman to command a Navy cruiser, had long dreamed of doing just that ever since her high school days in Connecticut. Upon graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1985, colleagues sensed that she was on a fast track to leadership. Her assignments were well-rounded— from tours aboard a destroyer tender, a frigate, and a destroyer, to shore assignments at the Pentagon and as a Navy instructor at Villanova University. However, Graf’s “darker side began to emerge when she was assigned to the destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur as the executive officer (XO) or second in command.” One individual (now retired) says his tour on the Curtis Wilbur was “the worst time in my life.” Graf’s constant berating of the crew led him to complain, but nothing was done. A few years later, Graf made U.S. Naval history by becoming the first female commander of a destroyer, the USS Winston Churchill. A Navy chaplain recalls his time aboard the Churchill as “the strangest of more than 200 such visits to ships in his career. Morale was the lowest he had ever encountered on any vessel.” He tried to talk to Graf about what he was hearing from the crew and junior officers, but she cut him off and said she didn’t want to talk to him about it. Then, one eventful night began the unraveling of Graf’s career. On the eve of the Iraq war in 2003, the Churchill was steaming out of a Sicilian port when,...