Leaders Shouldn’t Expect Middle Managers to Eat Risk: Top Navy Admiral

A leader’s job is to take responsibility for risks, instead of leaving middle managers to shoulder the question of whether to try new things, a top Navy commander said.

Speaking during a Saturday Q&A at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Adm. Sam Paparo said the US military needs to abandon its work culture of “operating at the speed of committee instead of the speed of combat.”

To do that, he told delegates and reporters, the military needs someone to take innovative risks.

“And if we are putting that risk on middle management and expecting them to take that risk, then, you know: We’re not leading,” said Paparo, who is the commander of US forces in the Indo-Pacific.

The admiral said middle managers are often blamed for a resistance to change.

“This is how the young people and the old people gang up on the middle-aged people, by calling them the frozen middle,” said Paparo.

But leaders need to be the ones to “eat risk,” he added.

“So, if you are in a leadership position and you want your team to innovate faster, to move fast, and to break things, you have to assume their risk. You have to eat it,” Paparo said. “Give them some letter that has your name on the bottom of it that allows them to go break the rules and do this thing.”

The US military has to speed up

The admiral was addressing the topic of how the US military — America’s single largest employer by far — was now taking on new technologies from private venture-backed research and development, instead of the traditional defense acquisition model.

Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, for example, recently announced a joint effort with Meta to create extended reality headsets for the US military. The firms said development would be funded by “private capital, without taxpayer support.”

At the panel, Paparo repeatedly warned that the US military must radically speed up its processes and decision-making to succeed in the next few decades. Washington’s main concern in Paparo’s jurisdiction, the Indo-Pacific, has been China’s rapidly advancing and expanding military.

Paparo didn’t specifically name China as a threat at the panel. But earlier that day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had publicly warned at the same conference that China’s military build-up signaled that it could go to war soon.

“Nobody knows what China will ultimately do, but they are preparing, and therefore we must be ready as well,” Hegseth told military leaders and representatives of 47 countries.

A rear admiral from China later said Hegseth’s statements were “groundless accusations.”