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The National Board of the ROCKS, Inc. welcomes Hon. Carrie F. Ricci to their Board. Hon. Ricci was appointed as General Counsel by the Chair, LTG(R) Donna Martin.

Junior officers enter the Army with energy, drive, and a desire to lead well. Experience teaches that leaders are forged through crucibles, habits, and deliberate development. Your commission gives you authority, but yourcharacter and competence earn you the title of leader. Mastering both the science and art of leadership requires you to balance operational excellence, property accountability, and genuine care for Soldiers.

Watch two people meet at a professional event, and you can usually predict what happens next. Cards or contacts are exchanged. A connection request follows, maybe a coffee. Then the relationship sits dormant until one party needs something from the other. That is networking, and there is nothing wrong with it as far as it goes. But be honest about what it is: a transaction waiting for a trigger. Community is something else entirely. Community is people committing to each other's success before there is anything to gain from it. Networking exchanges business cards. Community exchanges commitments. Only one of those changes a career.

Ask an accomplished leader who mentored them and you will rarely heara single name. You will hear a roster. the platoon sergeant or first manager who taught them standards, the professor who taught them to write, the boss who told them a truth nobody else would, the friend two years ahead who talked them through a bad month, Behind nearly every strong career sits a network of trusted advisors, not a lone guru.

Every organization says it manages talent. Most of them manage assignments. They move names across spreadsheets, fill vacancies, and call the result a talent strategy. But a requisition filled is not a person developed, and the difference between the two is where mission readiness actually lives. The Army has learned this lesson the hard way and so has every company that watched its best people walk out the door with their potential untapped.

Every leader develops. Ranger School develops you. A rough rating period develops you. A toxic boss, unfortunately, develops you too. The question is never whether a leader will develop but whether they will develop by design or by accident, and the difference between the two is usually one relationship.

Across four annual Department of the Army Career Engagement Surveys, the story has not changed: work/life balance, unstable career progression, and family strain remain the top reasons junior officers leave the service. Dig one layer deeper and a common thread emerges. Those who stay cite service, purpose, and leadership opportunities. Those who leave describe feeling unseen and undervalued by their leaders.

There is a rule every soldier learns early: the enemy gets a vote, and so does the environment. Organizations live under the same rule. The world around them changes, how people work, learn, and connect. No charter, however noble, exempts an organization from the consequences. The only real choice any institution gets is whether to change deliberately or reactively. With ROCKS 2.0, we are choosing to change deliberately.

Leadership has never been more demanding. Today’s Army and civilian workforce operate in an increasingly complex environment that requires adaptability, technical expertise, resilience, and the ability to lead across complex teams. While education and experience remain essential, one factor consistently separates good leaders from exceptional ones: mentorship.