The Day I Almost Destroyed My Platoon by Being Too Good a Leader
How a Misunderstanding of Servant Leadership Nearly Cost Me Everything
I was 26 years old, sitting across from a two-star general, sweating bullets through my Army Combat Uniform. General Potts was writing a letter of recommendation on my behalf. Between his questions about my goals and aspirations, I kept doing the mental equivalent of double dutch – jumping in and out of wanting to ask him something that had been burning in my mind.
Finally, I mustered the courage. “Sir,” I said, leaning forward in my chair, “do you mind telling me just what it takes to become a general in the Army? What does it take?”
The separation from colonel to general is astronomical. We’re talking about the slimmest margins for promotion, the kind of career leap that transforms a senior leader into a strategic visionary. As a junior enlisted soldier sitting across from this general officer, I felt like a junior varsity player asking a professional athlete for their secret. The rank difference alone was enough to make me question whether I should have asked at all.
General Potts leaned back in his chair, and I could see him perusing through decades of experience, searching for the right words. I sat at the edge of my seat, certain he was about to share some revolutionary strategy or secret knowledge that only generals possessed.
“Matthews,” he said finally, a slight smile crossing his face. “Servant leadership.”
I must have looked like a deer in headlights because he chuckled before continuing. “I got here not on my own volition. The reason I’m here is because of my teams and my organizations. It doesn’t matter what you can do as an individual if you can’t elevate the teams and the organizations that you’re with.”
Those two words – servant leadership – would both nearly destroy my military career and ultimately transform everything I understood about leading others.
The Misinterpretation
Two years later, I was 28 years old and standing in front of my first platoon as a second lieutenant. Sixty soldiers looked to me for direction, and General Potts’ words echoed in my mind. I was determined to be the best servant leader the Army had ever seen.
The irony of that statement didn’t hit me until much later. Here I was, aggressively pursuing servitude, ready to out-serve everyone in the history of military leadership. Young, hungry, and ambitious Lieutenant Matthews was going to revolutionize servant leadership – or so I thought.
In my mind, servant leadership was simple: serving meant doing things for others. If I were going to lead through service, then I needed to do everything for my platoon. Every question they might have? I’d serve them the answer. Every plan that needed to be made? I’d serve it up on a silver platter. Every decision, every detail, every moment of their military experience – I would handle it all.
I became the first one in the office and the last one to leave. While my soldiers were home with their families, I was meticulously building out training calendars, planning every detail of our weekly platoon training exercises. I created comprehensive plans that accounted for the location of each soldier, their tasks, and the methods they would use to accomplish them. I was operating in a vacuum, making every decision in isolation because that’s what I thought servant leadership meant – taking everything off their plates so they could focus solely on the mission.
“This person’s going to be here, you’re going to do this, you’re going to do that,” I would announce at formations, having planned every movement down to the minute. I thought I was serving them by removing the burden of thinking, planning, or deciding. They just had to show up and execute my perfectly crafted plans.
The Perfect Storm
At first, it seemed to be working brilliantly. Our platoon training exercises ran like clockwork. When senior leadership came down to assess our training, they would stand behind me, observing and evaluating. From their perspective, we were one of the best platoons in the battalion.
“Matthews,” they would say, pulling me aside after exercises, “you have one of the best platoons in our battalion. You have some great ideas here.”
“Thank you, sir, I appreciate it,” I would respond, chest swelling with pride. But if they had known what was happening behind the scenes, if they could have seen the late nights, the stress, the growing exhaustion that I was hiding behind a military bearing, they might have seen the cracks beginning to form.
I was constantly fighting for buy-in. Despite my meticulous planning, I could sense resistance in the ranks. My non-commissioned officers, many with 10, 15, even 20 years of experience, would execute my plans, but something was missing. There was a disconnect I couldn’t quite identify.
The thing about leading in a vacuum is that you create an echo chamber of your ideas. I was so focused on serving my soldiers by doing everything for them that I never stopped to ask if this was the kind of service they needed. I was so intent on proving my competence and capability as a leader that I had become entwined in every single decision-making process.
This wasn’t just about ego in the traditional sense – I didn’t have sinister intentions. I simply wanted to show my team how capable I was because I believed that’s how you earn trust. With limited time to build relationships before a potential deployment where lives could be at risk, I believed demonstrating my competence by controlling every detail was the fastest path to earning their confidence.
The Hidden Cost
Six months into this leadership approach, the hidden costs were becoming impossible to ignore. I was burned out, stressed beyond measure, and felt like I couldn’t take a single day of leave. The thought of going on vacation filled me with dread because I was certain everything would fall apart without me.
But the real wake-up call came during a conversation with one of my senior leaders who had noticed my declining demeanor. “Matthews,” he said, pulling me aside one afternoon, “what’s going on? You all right?”
“I’m getting great feedback,” I said, trying to maintain my military bearing, “but something’s missing. I’m trying to be a servant leader, and I just…”
He cut me off with words that would change my entire perspective: “Matthews, the sign of a great leader isn’t when you pull them out of an organization and it crumbles and falls. The sign of a great leader is when you pull them out of an organization, and it doesn’t skip a beat – it keeps going. Because you’re developing leaders.”
Those words hit me like a sledgehammer. I realized that despite all the praise, despite the successful training exercises, despite the appearance of a high-performing platoon, I had created an unsustainable model. I wasn’t practicing servant leadership – I was practicing control. I had created followers who were dependent on my every decision, not leaders who could think and act independently.
If I were injured, if I were called away for another assignment, or if anything happened to me, the entire platoon would struggle to function. I had made myself a single point of failure in an organization that demanded redundancy and resilience. In trying to serve my soldiers, I had failed them most fundamentally.
The realization was crushing but necessary. What I had mistaken for servant leadership was its opposite. True servant leadership isn’t about doing everything for others – it’s about empowering others to lead alongside you, to grow beyond their current capabilities, to become leaders themselves.
The Transformation
The shift from directive leadership to inclusive leadership didn’t happen overnight, but when I finally gathered the courage to change, the transformation was remarkable. I went to my platoon sergeant, my partner in leadership, and laid out my realization.
“We’ve got to change something,” I told him. “We can’t keep doing this.”
Together, we began dismantling the directive leadership model I had built and replacing it with something radically different – inclusive leadership. Instead of planning in isolation, I started bringing my squad leaders into the planning process. Instead of dictating every detail, I would set the vision and let them determine the path.
The first time I stood in front of my platoon and said, “Here’s where we need to get to, but I’m not going to dictate how we get there,” I could see the surprise in their eyes. When a sergeant in the back raised his hand and said, “Sir, have you considered doing it this way?” and I responded with, “I didn’t think about that, but that’s a great idea,” the entire dynamic began to shift.
This required a level of vulnerability I hadn’t anticipated. There’s a burden many leaders place on themselves – the need to have all the answers. But practicing inclusion meant acknowledging that the best ideas might come from anywhere in the organization. It meant trusting the experience and judgment of soldiers who had been serving while I was still in college.
The transformation was remarkable. What had been a platoon that functioned well under my constant control became a platoon that thrived through distributed leadership. Morale improved dramatically. Innovation flourished. And most importantly, when I took leave for the first time in months, the platoon didn’t just survive – it excelled.
Lessons for Today’s Leaders
The lesson I learned in that platoon applies far beyond military service. Whether you’re leading a corporate team, a nonprofit organization, or a startup, the principle remains the same: inclusion will save you what ego will cost you.
Many leaders today fall into the same trap I did. They confuse service with control, support with micromanagement, and leadership with being irreplaceable. They create organizations that look successful on the surface but are dangerously fragile underneath.
Here’s how to recognize if you’re creating dependency rather than developing leaders:
The Sustainability Test: If you disappeared tomorrow, would your organization thrive or merely survive? Would your team know not just what to do, but how to think through new challenges?
The Innovation Indicator: Are new ideas coming only from you, or are they emerging from every level of your organization? Innovation doesn’t discriminate – it doesn’t care about rank, tenure, or title.
The Energy Equation: Are you exhausted while your team seems disengaged? This inverse relationship often signals that you’re carrying burdens that should be distributed.
The Trust Transaction: Are you building trust by proving your competence, or by demonstrating faith in your team’s capabilities?
True servant leadership isn’t about doing everything for your team – it’s about creating an environment where everyone can contribute their best ideas and grow into leaders themselves. It’s about setting the vision while allowing others to help chart the course. It’s about being secure enough in your leadership to celebrate when your team succeeds, even when you’re not there.
Your Leadership Transformation Starts Now
The journey from directive to inclusive leadership transformed not just my platoon, but my entire understanding of what it means to lead. Today, I help organizations and leaders make this same critical shift – from creating followers to developing leaders, from controlling outcomes to enabling innovation, from burning out to building up.
If you’re ready to explore how inclusive servant leadership can transform your organization, let’s start a conversation. Whether through keynote presentations, leadership workshops, or strategic consulting, I share the hard-won lessons from military leadership that directly apply to your current leadership challenges.
Because at the end of the day, the sign of a great leader isn’t about how many followers you have – it’s about how you empower those around you to lead alongside you.
Lavar Matthews is a leadership expert and former United States Army platoon leader who speaks internationally on inclusive servant leadership. His transformative approach helps organizations build sustainable leadership cultures that empower every team member to contribute their best ideas and lead from their position.