There was once a Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force who was everything a confident leader must not be.  As Chief of Staff at the time, he was in charge of a force of over six hundred thousand servicemen and women across the globe.  Although they were all “Air Force”, the variety of job skills was in the thousands, and this General surely did not understand the challenges with each of those career fields.  But you could not tell him that.  Consequently, he made too many decisions to count without even consulting the other generals in the force.  He simply dictated, especially when there may have been a dissenting view.  He definitely provided a vision of where he wanted to go, but it was not subject to discussion, and he provided the vision in a way that ensured there was little ownership at the varying levels of his subordinates.  He was the smartest person in the room, was going to make all of the decisions of import, and the teams’ responsibility was simply to ‘salute smartly’ and move out.  There was no trust in his subordinates, no debrief environment, no real use of the real talent his organization contained.  Yes, this general was very smart, had risen through the ranks as a hard-working, talented pilot, but somewhere along the way he started to believe his press releases.  He came to the conclusion that he no longer needed feedback, and the ideas for the Air Force he had developed over the previous thirty-plus years were all right.  Now that he had the power, he was going to use all of his good ideas, his confidence, and the time he had in charge to make the changes only he could make. 

As a vignette of his arrogance, a friend of mine was flying a small jet (C-21) with the general enroute to an official visit to another base.  My friend was the acting aircraft commander and instructor pilot, ultimately responsible for the safe execution of the flight. The general was flying, and from the start made it clear that he was in charge.  Climbing out of the Washington, D.C. area, they were cleared to ten thousand feet.  As they approached that altitude with no signs of slowing their aggressive climb rate, my friend pushed on the controls to level them off, to ‘help’ the general remember his assigned altitude.  About five hundred feet above their assigned altitude, the Air Traffic Controller started to ask them where they were going, reminding them of their assigned altitude of ten thousand feet. At that point the general pushed over on the controls and lowered the plane back down to ten thousand feet.  Once they were level, the general turned to my friend and angrily yelled, “don’t you ever touch the controls of my plane.” His ‘confidence’ was so misplaced, his arrogance so wrong, that he was willing to risk the lives of others in the sky.  He was completely unwilling to take inputs where in puts were sorely needed.  He had ceased being a confident leader of any value and had become a toxic menace to himself and his organization.  THAT is not my definition of a confident leader.  That is a destroyer of organizations, and I bet many of you have seen leaders like that.  I really don’t even like to use the word leader in the same sentence as them.