What Patches Teach Us About Leadership

Leadership is an art, not a formula. The same action can be exactly right in one context and catastrophically wrong in another. Understanding the difference is what separates good leaders from great ones. Two stories about unauthorized patches illustrate this better than any doctrine I’ve read. So, when is a standard worth spending leadership capital to enforce? Before correcting, counseling, or escalating, ask what the behavior is telling you about the formation. Is it indiscipline? Exhaustion? Grief? Identity? Confusion? A quiet warning that something deeper is happening?

Unity, Loyalty, and a Fired Company Commander

During my deployment to Iraq in 2008-2009, my Brigade Commander fired a Company Commander for allowing his soldiers to wear their previous unit’s combat patch instead of the current one. Before you decide whether that was the right call, you need some context.

According to Army Regulation 670-1, soldiers authorized to wear more than one combat patch (Shoulder Sleeve Insignia-Former Wartime Service) have the option of choosing which one they wear. The Company Commander wasn’t violating regulations. He was exercising them.

What the regulation doesn’t capture is what that patch meant to the soldiers wearing it. Most of the Brigade deployed together in 2006 for a brutal 15-month Iraq surge deployment. One infantry battalion earned the grim distinction of being the hardest-hit unit in Iraq that year, including a Medal of Honor recipient. A platoon collectively refused patrol orders after a mental health crisis. A First Sergeant took his own life. Soldiers and NCOs in another battalion became war criminals. The psychological weight of that experience is impossible to fully understand from the outside.

After the deployment, the Brigade re-flagged; same people, new unit name, new patch. The Brigade Commander pushed hard for soldiers to wear the new patch after 30 days in-country, stopping just short of ordering it while making his preference unmistakably clear. The Company Commander on a combat outpost an hour from Brigade headquarters made a different call. He allowed, possibly encouraged, his Soldiers to wear their old patch, with the current one in their pocket to switch out if the Brigade Commander visited.

When the Brigade Commander found out, he fired the Company Commander for loss of trust and confidence, but everyone knew the real reason.

I don’t know if the Brigade Commander ever asked why. That previous patch wasn’t a preference — it was a memorial. It was a daily reminder of the men they’d lost and the things they’d survived together. Banning it without question wasn’t building a new unit identity. It was asking soldiers to set aside the most significant experience of their lives on an administrative timeline.

Was the Company Commander right? That’s genuinely debatable. He put himself in an impossible position by essentially running two sets of books on the patch policy, and there’s a legitimate argument that unified standards matter for cohesion, especially in combat. But the Brigade Commander’s response — firing a commander without, as far as anyone knew, trying to understand the human reality underneath the uniform violation — is the kind of leadership that breeds resentment and silence in formations. Soldiers notice when their leaders don’t ask why.

Discipline, Morale, and Judgment

Jocko Willink tells a different patch story. As a Navy SEAL commander in Iraq, he ordered his team not to wear non-standard patches during missions with Army and Marine units — a professionalism call that made sense given the joint environment. He later found out his team was ignoring the order when he wasn’t around.

Willink is not known for letting things slide. He’s physically imposing, deeply committed to discipline, and has built an entire post-military career on the philosophy of extreme ownership. The easy prediction is that he would address the insubordination hard and fast.

Instead, he let it go. He never brought it up.

His reasoning was specific to the context: his team was deployed, living on sparse combat outposts, running patrols for days on end, under sustained operational pressure. The unauthorized patches were a small act of controlled rebellion that helped maintain morale and unit identity under conditions designed to grind both down. He understood that and made a deliberate choice.

Here’s how he put it: “I didn’t invest my leadership capital in something that didn’t matter. Instead, I invested my leadership capital in the things that did matter… I told the guys, you have to know how to program the radios or else you can’t go on missions. And I checked them. No slack whatsoever. I invested leadership capital in that.”

The patches didn’t matter. The radios did. Willink knew the difference and acted accordingly. He also had enough emotional intelligence to recognize that his team needed something to feel like they were bending in order to stay sharp on the things that actually counted.

He didn’t tell his team he knew until after they redeployed.

The Real Lesson

These two stories aren’t really about patches. They’re about a question every leader faces: what is actually worth spending your capital on?

Leadership isn’t a fixed style you apply uniformly regardless of context. The same action can build cohesion in one situation and destroy it in another. The variables that matter include who your people are, what they’ve been through, what they need right now, and what the cost of enforcing this particular standard actually is versus what you gain. A regulation tells you what’s permitted. It doesn’t tell you what’s wise.

The Brigade Commander had authority on his side. He also had a formation full of soldiers carrying invisible weight from a deployment that broke some of them. Whether his call was right is something reasonable leaders can disagree about. What’s harder to defend is the absence of curiosity; the decision made without asking why.

Willink had a team that needed to feel some ownership over something in a situation designed to strip everything away. He read that correctly and made a deliberate choice to preserve his capital for the moment it would actually matter.

Before you react to the next moment in your formation when someone pushes back against a standard, before your rank and your authority tell you exactly what to do, ask yourself one question: do I actually understand why this is happening? The answer might not change your decision. Sometimes the answer will still be correction. Sometimes it will be restraint. But the act of asking will change how your soldiers see you, and what they’re willing to tell you the next time something matters.

Note: Situational leadership frameworks, including the relationship between leadership style and context, are developed extensively in Daniel Goleman’s “Leadership That Gets Results,” Harvard Business Review, 2000.

Author Bio:  LTC Alex Willard is a FA58 Marketing and Behavioral Economics Officer serving at Army Enterprise Marketing Office. He previously deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Liberia and is a former Infantry Officer and Strategist. He holds a Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania and writes on organizational behavior, leadership, and the profession of arms.

Photo: Courtesy of DVIDS by MAJ Shane Sandretto. 16 February 2013. Afghanistan.