‘Hands, Head, and Heart’ vital to effective leadership

Dr. Ted Thomas, the director of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College’s (CGSC) Department of Command and Leadership, led the tenth and final presentation for academic year 2018 of the InterAgency Brown-Bag Lecture Series on June 6.

Dr. Ted Thomas explains his “Hands, Head, and Heart” model of leadership at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College on June 6.

Dr. Thomas, discussed how leading in an interagency-dominated contemporary environment requires a more nuanced approach than “because I said so.” Using leadership examples from his own experience and clips from a popular D-Day movie, Dr. Thomas explained how we might traverse various leadership obstacles by aligning our approach with the situation at hand (…head or heart). He amplified his hands, head, and heart model of leadership by applying other leadership concepts such as the Army’s old “Be, Know, Do” and an understanding that leaders must consider whether “the led” perceive their role to be a calling, a career, or just a job. (Watch the complete lecture in the video below.)

Dr. Thomas graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1978 and served 20 years in various command and staff positions before retiring as a lieutenant colonel with his last assignment as battalion commander of the 554th Engineer Battalion. He received a master’s in Civil Engineering (1986) from the University of Illinois, and a doctorate in Engineering Management (1998) from Missouri University of Science and Technology. He joined the CGSC faculty in 2005 and has served as the director of the department since 2007.

The InterAgency Brown-Bag Lecture Series is co-hosted by the CGSC Foundation’s Simons Center with the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School (CGSS). The lecture series is an extracurricular, interagency topic-focused series that is intended to help enrich the CGSS curriculum. The CGSC Foundation and the Simons Center have received support for all brown-bag lectures in academic year 2018 from First Command Financial Services in Leavenworth, Kansas. The presentations are scheduled each month, and a schedule for InterAgency Brown-Bag Lectures for academic year 2019 will be available in the near future.

All lectures in the InterAgency Brown-Bag Lecture Series are free and open to the public. As the series moniker states, the lecture series is conducted in the traditional “brown-bag lunch” format. – Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches into the conference room. Members of the public coming to the lectures from off-post will need to add extra time to check-in at the Fort Leavenworth visitor center. – For gate information, see the Fort Leavenworth homepage.

For more photos from the lecture, please follow the links below.
Interagency Leadership, InterAgency Brown-Bag Lecture, Facebook
IABBLS-IA Ldrship (6JUN18), Flickr