Leadership in Relationship: Applying Vertical Leadership Development through Love to the US Navy

Leadership in Relationship: Applying Vertical Leadership Development through Love to the US Navy’s Leadership Development Framework

The combat information team works together onboard the USS Decatur. (MC2 David Negron/U.S. Navy)

The Leadership Problem We Don’t Name

Military leadership is often framed in terms of competence, decisiveness, and mission execution. Yet, in increasingly complex and diverse operational environments, these traits alone are insufficient. Recent leadership removals and stalled promotions across the military have introduced ambiguity into how accountability and loyalty are interpreted within the chain of command. For some leaders, this creates a tension between institutional values and perceived expectations. In an organization that prides itself on impartiality, leaders are now navigating shifting expectations, competing values, and real-time uncertainty about what leadership requires. This raises a critical question: what kind of leadership development prepares leaders for this reality?

The Navy’s Leadership Development Framework (LDF), a pipeline of leadership development practices and experiences by paygrade, creates the conditions for vertical development, but without a clearly articulated relational purpose, it risks developing more complex thinkers without more connected leaders.

The Navy’s Investment in Leadership Development

The Navy’s LDF is founded in the trust pentagon: leadership, character, bias awareness, profession of arms, and ethics all point inward to the core of trust to round out the priorities for how we train our entire cadre of Naval leaders E3-O6. Tens of thousands of Sailors (E5-E7, O3-O6) are now required to take these courses, which cover the same priorities at different levels. The Navy invests millions of dollars to fund, develop, and train Sailors to be better leaders, focusing on character and competence.

The facilitation in the Navy’s LDF courses is not delivered in the same way as traditional Navy training. Instead of focusing on enabling and training objectives, which require structured instruction, it centers on student-focused reflection, dialogue, and meaning-making, allowing Sailors to come to their own leadership solutions. There are no right answers in the course. Leadership is treated as a spectrum of theories and implementation techniques, all of which can work (or not) depending on context. This framing allows students to examine their assumptions openly and share their perspectives without fear of judgment. Students share their thoughts, popular or not, on what leadership, ethics, and character are. The vertical model of leadership development is clear from the outset: train leaders on similar character competencies, increasing the level of complexity as they increase their pay grades. However, without an explicit relational and ethical grounding, its full developmental potential remains unrealized. Integrating bell hooks’ concept of love as a leadership practice provides the missing lens that transforms development from cognitive growth into relational and systemic change.

From Competence to Complexity

What the Navy is doing through its LDF aligns closely with what Petrie describes as the conditions for vertical leadership development. Rather than focusing only on technical competence or “horizontal” skill-building, the LDF creates space for Sailors to examine how they think, not just what they know (Petrie, 2014). Horizontal development focuses on building skills, competencies, and knowledge. Vertical development, in contrast, focuses on transforming how leaders think and make meaning. This distinction is critical, as complex environments require not just more knowledge, but more sophisticated ways of interpreting and responding to challenges. To support this shift, LDF incorporates personality assessments such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), BIG 5 OCEAN, DiSC, and Immunity to Change. These tools increase self-awareness and deepen understanding of leadership behaviors. Petrie argues that leadership development occurs when individuals are placed in situations that disrupt their existing mental models, expose them to different perspectives, and require them to make sense of those experiences at a deeper level (Petrie, 2014). The Navy’s emphasis on facilitation, reflection, and shared dialogue suggests that it is already operating within this vertical development paradigm, even if it is not explicitly named as such.

When Policy Creates Pressure

The Navy is visibly committed to deep leadership development across ranks and paygrades, even as the political tide changes. In early 2025, a slew of executive orders from President Trump and, later, orders from Secretary Hegseth came out, which fundamentally limited certain aspects of LDF. Through the Executive Order “Restoring America’s Fighting Force,” the Department of Defense was directed to shutter Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) offices and positions, remove references to race, gender, and ethnicity, and have all curriculum at any military learning institution reviewed and sanitized of these subjects and references (The White House, 2025). The Navy’s LDF curriculum managers had to remove several previous references to DEI; however, the core of the curriculum remained in place, and the messaging did not change. Instead, leaders are now required to navigate conversations about difference, trust, and cohesion without relying on now-forbidden institutional terminology. This shift increases ambiguity and developmental pressure, requiring leaders to interpret values rather than simply apply them.

Heat Experiences: Leading Without a Script

Petrie argues that leaders develop most when they are placed in heat experiences: situations that disrupt their existing way of thinking and force them to adapt (Petrie, 2015). The Navy’s current policy environment, particularly the removal of explicit DEI language, creates precisely this kind of developmental heat. Leaders must navigate the competing values of mission effectiveness, cohesion, and inclusion without clear institutional language to rely on. This moves leaders beyond compliance-based leadership toward self-authored meaning-making, creating a gap between institutional language and lived leadership practice. This shift reveals that leadership development is not about transferring institutional values, but about cultivating the capacity to interpret and embody them in context.

Colliding Perspectives: Learning Through Tension

The LDF’s emphasis on open dialogue and psychological safety enables what Petrie calls “colliding perspectives,” where leaders are exposed to fundamentally different worldviews (Petrie, 2015). In LDF classrooms, this often emerges when Sailors share conflicting leadership experiences shaped by rank, background, or operational context. These moments can create discomfort, but they also create the conditions for growth. For example, an E-5 Sailor telling an E-7 (Chief Petty Officer) facilitator that she has never trusted a Chief before because, in her experience, they lack integrity. This could have escalated to defensiveness and shutdown. Instead, there was a conversation about what Chief leadership should look like, and how trust can be built or rebuilt. The classroom can expand a leader’s capacity to hold multiple perspectives, which is essential in complex organizational environments like the military. This is where bell hooks’ conception of love as a practice rooted in care, accountability, and mutual recognition deepens this process (hooks, 2000). It frames these interactions not simply as intellectual exchanges, but as relational commitments.

Elevated Sensemaking: From Reflection to Transformation

Petrie identifies “elevated sensemaking” as the process through which leaders integrate challenging experiences and competing perspectives into more complex ways of thinking (Petrie, 2015). However, this process requires more than reflection — it requires a guiding framework. bell hooks’ work stands out as a deepening framework for complexity leaders; her definition of love as an intentional act of care, responsibility, and growth provides a moral and relational lens through which leaders can interpret their experiences (hooks, 2000). Without such a framework, sensemaking risks remaining purely cognitive rather than transformative.

Petrie’s framework explains how leaders develop through disruption, exposure to difference, and reflection. What it does not fully address is what leaders should orient toward as they develop. In this way, leadership development risks reinforcing performance without connection, authority without trust, and competence without care. hooks reframes leadership as a practice rooted in care, accountability, and mutual recognition. When combined, these frameworks move leadership development beyond skill-building and toward relational transformation. Love is not an abstract ideal but a leadership discipline that shapes how power is exercised and how people are developed. In high-stakes environments like the military, this relational grounding is not a soft skill. It is what enables trust, accountability, and effective leadership under pressure.

What This Means for the Navy

The Navy has already built the conditions for vertical development through its LDF. The opportunity now is to clarify what that development is in service of. If the goal is to develop leaders capable of navigating complexity, building trust, and leading diverse teams, then leadership must be grounded not only in competence but in care. For the Navy, this is not a radical shift, but a natural next step. The structures for development are already in place. The opportunity now is to explicitly align leadership development with relational and ethical grounding. Doing so would not only enhance individual leader effectiveness but also strengthen trust, cohesion, and adaptability across the force. Without this shift, the Navy risks developing leaders who can think more complexly but still lead in ways that fail to build trust or cohesion, a dangerous course to chart in an organization that prides itself on being high trust.

Conclusion

The next step is not more training, but deeper development. The Navy is unintentionally doing vertical development, but without naming its relational purpose, it risks producing more complex thinkers without more connected leaders.

Development changes how leaders think. Love determines how they lead.

References

hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. William Morrow.

Petrie, N. (2014). Vertical leadership development — Part 1: Developing leaders for a complex world. Center for Creative Leadership.

Petrie, N. (2015). The how-to of vertical leadership development — Part 2: 30 experts, 3 conditions, and 15 approaches. Center for Creative Leadership.

The White House. (2025). Restoring America’s fighting force. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-americas-fighting-force/