There’s a right way and a wrong way to build leadership!

The acronym “LDRSHIP” is a real thing in the Army. I don’t know when it was first coined, but it is relatively recent in my experience. They’re supposed to be a reflection of the “Army Values”: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal courage.

As concepts this has been around for a long time, but in my (admittedly short) research I could only find it codified in this manner as far back as 2003, in a pamphlet about the 1803 Corps of Discovery expedition by Lewis and Clark.

Sometimes you can tell when someone worked hard to make a acronym out of a jumble of words: they took what they wanted and rationalized it in reverse, making a “backronym”. Somewhere, a Sergeant-Major instructed his or her staff to “come up with something that says ‘leadership’ with some buzzwords we can justify” and so the beleaguered staff did that, except they couldn’t find anything (or ran out of time) for the “E” and the “A”.

What ended up was a word that wouldn’t be out of place on an Ikea rack, a sort of do-it-yourself assemblage of “Ldrship” that the little cartoon Ikea Guy could guide you through.