There's a few things I like to make leader management a bit easier.
Most important, to me, is that I'd like a log that keeps track of retired/KIA officers. I'm thinking about the Memorial feature in XCOM. I imagine a sheet where you can see names, final ranks, and medals given.
It would be nice if the player could set conditions for a medal to be automatically assigned. Like, if a naval officer is on a ship and the ship destroys a ship, the naval officer gets [MEDAL_NAME_HERE]. Right now, as far as I can tell, Medals all have to be given manually, which is a lot of micro.