Transcription
All right. Thank you, sir. All right. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Uh, who here is currently in the seat for command? [snorts] And how you doing? And waiting. Just about to. Okay. First-time commander. All right. Cool.
Um, so why am I here? Uh, about five months ago, um, I had some inspections done on a squadron that my first squadron, which was the component maintenance squadron down at Mount Home Air Force Base. And when I walked into that squadron, um, things were fairly dire. Morale was very low. To give you an example, uh, I usually had for the first about 60 to 90 days, I had one or two mental health crises a month, not a quarter or a year. We had a training burden on average month-to-month of 800 overdue training tasks. Some of that was your ADLS training. A lot of that was your upgrade training tasks. Um, we had, I think, two EO complaints, three IG complaints that were carryovers, and obviously, uh, something needed to be done.
Now, I'm going to kind of lead ahead from what uh, I'll brief because I want to make a couple of things clear. Um, none of, none of the stuff that you're going to hear about in here is an original thought by John Hoing. A lot of the progress that I'll talk about and the stories that I'll give, uh, I'm the representative of the squadron, but there are lots of other people next to me and behind me that made all this stuff possible. I would say basically all I had to do was unleash them. I didn't really have to lead much. Um, and I kind of thought about that, and I think that's a pretty decent approach. I'm on my second squadron now, munitions squadron. Um, and it seems to be working pretty well. [snorts]
The other thing I want to talk to you about, uh, up front is, uh, I've gotten some questions after this that I want to address is, well, what about for those squadrons that aren't in the tank, that, you know, they're coming in, they're hitting on most of their cylinders. Um, you know, what, what does this apply to them? I said, "Sure." Because that squadron went from one of the worst, if not the worst, definitely at our wing, to competition monthly one to two, one or two at the wing. And so, at some point in there, we got to average, and then we kept going. And what I want you to take from that is these things will work. It's not the only way to do it. It's a way that I found that works. Um, and when I briefed General Holmes on it, he asked me to come up and talk to you guys about it. And again, uh, it's the culmination of a lot of work of a lot of different folks. I just have the opportunity to talk about it.
So, without further ado, first day of my command, my first command at the component maintenance squadron. So, I had done my ceremony. uh, saluted, shook the stick, said, said a couple of words, gave my awkward speech, walked off, and uh, drove in my car to the parking lot, and I was a brand new squadron commander of the component maintenance squadron. I was pretty pumped. Uh, it's actually a fairly new building as Air Force buildings go. Um, there's a nice big kind of uh, atrium porch right as you entryway as you walk in. And I was walking in there with my service dress on, and I hear this. Yep. I got crapped on. First five minutes of command, pretty much, is I had already gotten crapped on. And uh, I said, "Well, okay. Got it. Thanks for the hum, the uh, the reminder to be humble." But uh, it's the first time I've told this story to this cla, uh, to this forum, and I can't believe I have it because I think about it almost every day. And I'm very cautious when I walk under roofs now. So, um, but yeah, so I went in, changed, and I was thinking as I was walking in the door, the first thing I'm going to say to my secretary is, uh, you got, you got a cloth or something. I just got crapped on. So, um, but anyway, I hoped it wasn't indicative of my command, but I did learn a lesson from it, and we're going to talk about this.
All right. So, first day of my command. Now, at Mountain Home, we'd had an experiment. Uh, some of that's propagating throughout the Air Force and ACC, but we started the first kind of test bed for the groupless wing. I had been in units uh with groups and without groups before. I am prefer, I, I prefer the ones without groups. Um, however, I've had some very great group commanders. So, it's not to say anything negative about it. Uh, but what it does is it flattens it out, and you are now responsible for a lot of the stuff the group commander used to be responsible for, which means you have less time to do the stuff that squadron commanders normally did, which was a lot of the admin, HR kind of stuff. Um, and there's, there's positives and and negatives to that. But I walked in there, no group. I'm it. Right. And then I talked to the wing commander if I need help. I was feeling pretty good, even though I had gotten crapped on. This was pretty much in my car before I walked in, actually, as I was thinking, "All right, nobody's going to tell me what to do. I got no group commander. Wing commander's too busy." Uh, so I'm going to go ahead and have fun. Right about noon, I'd had my third, what I call, uh, first shirt encounters. Um, I, I got to dread. I'd see an elbow come by my door. Uh, "Hey, sir, you got it?" Okay. Um, by the end of the day, I'd had seven disciplinary issues, Ls, uh, various other, uh, naughtiness that was going on. And at 5, I shut my door, crawled into my desk, and I said, "Holy crap, nobody is here to tell me what to do."
So, what did I do? Uh, took a lot of lessons from SOS. I actually paid attention uh, ASBC back, uh, when I had it, and uh, a little bit of ACSC that I was working on at the time. And so I did this observation and assessment period. Doesn't mean I didn't do anything, but I really wanted to figure out what was going on. What were the issues? Now, I had the advantage of being the equipment maintenance squadron opso right next door. So, I was kind of aware of some of the issues that were going on. But I wanted to figure out why. So, I used the wing priorities. I said, "Hey, I'm going to line myself up with the wing commander until I figure this out. Probably can't go wrong there." These were his priorities at the time. And then I surveyed the talent and built my leadership coalition right out of uh, Carter's change management. I studied the background and leadership of my senior NCOs. I did a lot of one-on-one interviews to get to know them and also assess. I kind of had a vision for what I wanted, see if they had all the right components that I felt like would support that and also be able to tell me when I'm making a mistake. I like to say the only question I ever got 100% right was 11 years ago when I said "I do." Other than that, it's kind of been touch and go.
All right. I made several unconventional personnel moves. This is probably the thing that I would say was made the easiest without having to fight a group chief. I took uh, a 2P, which is a pale, pale touches bio. Pale touches maintenance. Pale touches pretty much anything that has to be uh, calibrated and very precise on base. Because this uh, individual, Senior Master Sergeant Charles Hullman, had figured out a way to take the worst lab in the Air Force and turned it into the benchmark in about 6 to 8 months. And I said, "All right, Chuck, look, I know you don't have any maintenance experience outside of PMO. Don't worry about it. Chief and I got that. I want you to do this what you did in Pum everywhere. Spread it everywhere." And so together, we kind of came up with the plan that you're about to talk, or the approach I'm going to talk about.
All right. So, what did I find? The good. We had a lot of education. It's intermediate maintenance. Um, their CCF tends them towards STEM degrees, and so they capitalized on that undergrad and graduate uh, uh, level education, many in STEM or STEM-related fields, management. I also had quality assurance inspectors or former and former IG inspectors. So, they knew how to look at stuff and tell you what was wrong. I had a lot of experienced instructors. They had been through the AETC course or they'd been to an FTD, uh, field training detachment, where their job was to train the young three and five levels, uh, to get their initial training to go up to the next proficiency level.
Unfortunately, there was some bad stuff too. The unit was solely focused on compliance, and they weren't doing a very good job. Leadership was in auto cover your butt mode. I'm on. Okay, got it. Um, cover your butt mode. Uh, which meant I wouldn't hear about an issue until it became a crisis. A lot of times, poor communication up, down, and laterally led into this. Had airmen who had issues that they didn't feel they could talk about. They had ideas. You know, we had this push from the Chief to go innovate. Um, unfortunately, you can't say "Ready, start, innovate." Uh, you got to build the trust up that you're going to listen. And of course, the worst part I found: toxic culture. Toxic culture by, by what I mean is creativity, curiosity, ideas were squashed in favor of enforce, uh, strict enforcement of the status quo. "We do it here because that's how we do it here. I don't want to hear anything else." Talent that was grossly underutilized and micromanaged. So, if you see this, right? Undergrad, graduate education, seasoned QA inspectors, and IG inspectors and instructors. These guys were maybe had one or two subordinates, supervisors, or were supervised by one or two people, right? Um, some of them were just on programs. Um, and then a lack of trust in unit cohesion. So, a lot of this, our talent management was terrible. Bottom line, we didn't have the folks with strengths in places where their strengths could really be capitalized upon.
And finally, um, this one. When I say this, picture Oprah when she gives out cars, right? "You get a car, and you get a car." But instead of cars, you get Ls or NJP Article 15s. Like I said, my first day, seven there. [snorts] And I can't honestly give you a number of how many that were brought to me that I said, "Go back and look at the problem again," uh, after that day because I didn't have time. I didn't have time, right? And this wasn't doing anything.
So, here's what we did about it. We called the baby ugly. We said, "Look, this is terrible. We don't like where we're at. We want to move out from where we've been. We're going to press forward. Uh, and if we make some mistakes, we'll learn from it." Created demand for change. You'll see that in a moment. But uh, a lot of the toxic atmosphere that I saw, I said, "You guys like working here?" "No." "Why are you here?" "I'm just surviving, sir, until I can move on." "Okay, got it. That's a call for change." And then I provided a vision. And my vision was, "Look, we're all going to work together. I'm not an expert. I pride myself on never being the smartest man in the room because it's probably impossible. The only time I've ever been was alone in my office." And then I lived the vision. And this is really important for you all, okay? Consistency is what's going to make a vision happen. It takes one time for it to be very public, very visible, for you to go off the rails and be inconsistent with what your vision is, and that will undercut it. Uh, it's recoverable, but it's not easy because they will always have that image of every time you say this good thing that you did this bad thing. So you have to live it. There were a lot of days where I walked down my hall to my other sections, and the last thing I wanted to do was look up and smile at somebody, but I had to because they needed it, right? I think General Miller said in our uh, career day that smiles are free practice.
Okay, so this goes into a little bit specifically for that squadron at the time, for the CMS squadron. Uh, what I did, and here is the brief that I gave them. Uh, this was just after a deox was done, my my mandatory 120-day in the seat, which you guys, some of you may be approaching here soon. Um, and so that's why you have the component maintenance squadron and the horse thing is because our mascot was the Mustang. Okay. And so I wanted to tie the imagery and everything else together to the message. So I start off like this: "Throughout my maintenance career, uh, the predominant culture I've seen, although it's in varying degrees, and I see some other maintainers nodding at me now, the predominant culture I've seen is strict enforcement of compliance through fear, shame, and coercion, and then some awards once in a while. They're taught to keep your head down, right? Don't make waves. We just want to get through this. Just do your job, go home when we let you, and that's it."
So, I told you I did the deox. This was after the deox brief. And if you see here on the right, the reason why I tied those uh, somewhat disturbing images in is because back in the old days, like I'm talking old medieval knights days, right? The horsemen and a knight were a team. They worked together all the time. They were a cohesive unit. One could not do their job without the other, right? These horses were bred. They were a luxury item. Only the nobility usually had them, especially the highly trained ones, but they were valued and they were nurtured. Fast forward to the 1800s, the Wild West. We needed horses to do about three things: stop, go, and then uh, follow my command. What we had to do to do that was we broke them. We basically supplanted their will with fear of what would happen if they didn't do exactly what we said in that one instance. The problem with this, as I did research on it, was they stopped acting like horses. Horses are social animals. So are we. They stopped being social. They started being angry. They started being stressed all the time, right? Hair would fall out. Their manes would fall out. They'd get sick. They'd stop eating. They wouldn't drink. They'd foam at the mouth. They'd bleed from the nostrils because they were so scared of stopping when their body said to stop, because of the guy on their back, that they'd run until their hearts exploded. That's breaking. And I felt, based off these comments in the deox, we were breaking our people.
"Have you ever been told any of these things? 'Shut up and color.' These are paraphrased because some of them I couldn't post for uh, mass consumption, but, uh, 'Dumbest thing I ever heard.' 'Hurry the f up.' 'You don't know. You don't know enough to have an opinion, Airman, right?' 'You're not useful to me yet.' 'You don't have any value because you can't do this yet.' Uh, 'You're too slow, fat, black, weak, stupid,' etc., etc. That is not a healthy culture."
Now, I ask you guys, who here has heard some of that either to them or around them? There you go. It's okay. This is what we're trying to change. You can't change it till you identify it. Here's the gut check. I'm not saying verbatim these words, but who has said this or something like this to somebody? You don't have to raise your hands, but thank you. To my shame, I'm right there. Right. My nickname used to be the hammer. I'm not proud of that, although I was at the time for some reason. I don't know. Well, this is culture, right? This is what we're supposed to do. This is how we do things here.
Here's the cost of this. I have the star up there. If you, these slides are on the SharePoint that you'll get, and the, uh, all of the sources for this page are in the, uh, notes. I haven't sourced everything out yet, but I want to make sure you knew this was credible. So, broken price of a broken culture: lack of retention of first-term Airmen, hemorrhaging technical experts. The ones that we spent millions of dollars and hundreds of man-hours to train and become proficient are getting jobs on the outside because they don't want to be here anymore. Toxic culture that I saw leads to increased incidents of divorce, alcohol, drug dependency, maladaptive coping skills, physical and sexual assault, suicide attempts and completions. That's a tough question. How many of you have lost somebody to suicide, either in your unit, in your life, uh, or in a sister unit? About three-quarters of you. How many of those were in the Air Force? Just about the same number. That's terrible. It's why the Chief called for the resiliency day. Unfortunately, signs of the broken culture. Some people I know have scheduled them to be training days. Just take, just throwing it out there. I said, "Enough. We're not going to do this." I read this. I talked to some of the mental health folks. "Hey, what are some of the things that people are coming into?" And all was disconnection with what they were doing and the lack of ability or self-determination in their workplace. It's kind of what it boiled down to.
Now, I drew this red line and I said, "If I find anybody doing this, I'm going to remove you. I'm going to either rehabilitate you or I'm going to remove you, and you will go somewhere where you can't do any more damage." When I started getting Ls, I said, "You either give me a reason why this happened other than 'guy's an idiot,' or you're going to take it too because you're their leader, right?" If you still don't believe that this broken culture is a matter of life and death, there are many instances, but probably the most famous one of a broken culture leading to a, a, a mommy or a daddy not coming back from work is 2004 Charleston, North Carolina. You guys ever heard of the Charleston C-17 mishap? Pretty much every maintainer has it. It's in a couple of our courses. It's canon. I've been in the mishap safety investigation course, and I actually read the privilege side. So, I'm not going to talk about it. Just let you know I'm versed in it. Um, what I found was in hindsight, looking through this lens. During that event, there were a couple of, there was a Master Sergeant, a Tech Sergeant, and the technician working in the, in the, uh, flight control, the spoiler, uh, that was killed. And there was a young Airman in the front, and her job was to provide positive input on the stick to keep that spoiler up because the way that system's engineered, by default, pilots, you don't want drag if you're struggling, right? It'll close if it loses electrical power. So, it was an always-close, open-up input. What happened there was the maintainer, they were not following procedures, and they didn't put basically a lock that kept that strut from falling if they lost electrical input. He pulled the cannon plug. They squashed him. They had to spray him out.
Now, I tell you that graphic for a reason. If you can get your hands on the audio recording, I don't recommend it. I'm not going to subject you to it. It's not in here. But I'm going to tell you the important part. There's an A1C in there who says, "This isn't how we're supposed to do it." You hear a male voice that says, "It's fine. We got spotters. We're good. It's how we do it. We've done this all the time." A1C says, "Are you sure?" I'm paraphrasing. "Are you sure? I don't think this is right." "Just do it." Okay. She puts the stick input in. Spoiler stays open up until he pulls the cannon plug. Electrical signal goes away. Default position happens. There you go. The problem with this is people say, "Well, it's maintenance malpractice." Right? Okay. Got it. But why? What I say, my argument, um, I'm sure not the only one, but, um, is this was due to a broken culture. You had an A1C. Somebody on that team knew what they were doing wasn't right. Didn't know why, maybe, but they knew it wasn't the way it was supposed to be done, but they defaulted to the way we've done it before. They didn't listen. She didn't have a voice. And then she allowed herself to be coerced into that situation that she knew wasn't right because she depended on, uh, the experience of how it's always done from her senior technicians, and then she shut up. That is a broken culture. That is a culture that doesn't listen to everybody. That is a culture that doesn't incorporate new ideas. That strictly enforces conformity of the status quo. And it leads to, it leads to death. I'm not exaggerating.
So, I talked about a little bit. I had a vision. My vision was, I'm not even going to talk about aircraft, right? I'm going to talk about people. "A squadron built on trust and united in purpose. Committed to each, committed to the success of each other and the mission." Sorry for the typo. And my priorities were right in line with this. I knew what my mission was: fix aircraft, fix components, right? That's pretty easy. That doesn't change. It'll be there, uh, when I leave for my current squadron. Uh, it'll be there when the next person leaves. But what does can change is this vision that comes with me. And that is the environment that you want to accomplish your mission in. Do you want it to be an environment of enforced conformity, even when you know something's wrong, you don't say anything, or you're convinced to shut up and continue on? Where we have suicides, sexual assaults, divorce, or a culture where everybody's worried about the success of other people, and they can be that wingman to get them out of a situation before it happens, right? That was, that was my idea, uh, going into this. Built those priorities off that. They never changed, unfortunately. I never thought we were quite there where I wanted to change. Now, granted, um, this took about six months to get people on board, and then six months later, uh, CMS was disbanded for the news that stood up, and, uh, but within a year, we turned, just to give you a timeline, within a year, my guys turned it from the laughingstock to the one that everybody wanted to be like.
So, compare and contrast broken culture. If you read the book "Drive," uh, and it's in my references at the end, talks about motivation, right? You have external motivators, which kind of have to be done with, dealt with first. It's your food, your shelter. Uh, do I feel safe? Is somebody going to jump out of a corner and attack me? Something like that. Um, and then you have intrinsic motivation. That is the motivation or the satisfaction you get. You may not enjoy it all the time, but it's of a job well done, right? You get fulfillment from doing the task or doing your job. All right. One's uh, externally, uh, enforced compliance, self-preservation, fear, Ls for everybody, right? I'm going to give you, uh, a stern talking to. I'll say it's task-oriented. It lacks clear priorities. Mistakes and malpractice. That's a key one. Mistakes and misconduct are treated the same. You make a mistake, it's an honest mistake due to experience, lack of resources, whatever. You're treated the same as the guy who said, "Look, I know I'm just doing it this way because I want to go home. I don't care." Knee-jerk reactions to problems. General and subjective feedback. So, what is subjective feedback? Right? Subjective feedback attacks the person. "You're stupid. Be less stupid." Right? Versus objective. "Hey, this behavior is incorrect. I'm going to help you. If I don't help you, here are the, if you don't change, here are the consequences. You can choose which way you want to go." Right? That's the difference between mistakes and misconduct is choice. Nobody chooses to make a mistake. You choose to do the wrong thing.
All right. Uh, enforce the status quo, as I talked about. Encourage ideas and innovation. One's risk-tolerant, risk, and one's risk-averse. Bottom line on here is, let me get out of your way. In the broken culture, we accomplish mission using Airmen up, using Airmen. They're disposable resources. In the unbroken culture, we develop Airmen who can accomplish the mission, right? We put our energy as their leader into them, and we teach them how to do the job, and then we trust them to do it. Uh, one of those great group commanders I talked about, um, when I was a young flight commander and I was kind of pinging a little bit, micromanaging, he said, "John, look, I've learned one thing in 25 years." He [snorts] said, "A good manager, a great manager knows everything about what their people are doing. They control everything they're doing at all times. They get the product done on time. It's perfect. A great leader doesn't have to." Okay. Um, hopefully, I can get there, and we can all get there, right? We can trust our folks. We've trained them. We've coached them. They know that they're valuable, and they can go do what they need to do without us necessarily telling them. And if you think about the, uh, the adaptive basing or the agile basing, whichever, uh, however form you've heard it, we have to get to that for a near peer. We aren't going to have somebody on high directing our orders every day. We're going to have to be able to know what we're supposed to do, know the intent, and trust our Airmen to do that. And we're going to have to trust them to do it too, because we're not going to be there all the time, right? So, just for a long view.
So, unbreaking the squadron, here's the, the approach I took, and we took. Started with the basics. Got a little bit of psychology background, so I went with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Take away from this slide: you have to be safe. Your people have to be trusted and feel trusted. And then you got to get connection. You got to get them connected with each other, connected with the squadron as an identity. Remember I said I wanted the vision and the pictures in the brief to everything to kind of glue together to make the point, and, uh, that is all on an individual. It takes time spent to cultivate that individual to get these things met. I would say we probably were here when I got there, if you think about the mental health issues and the disciplinary issues, right? Um, but how did I get out of that hole? Encourage mental health, chaplain use. Chaplain, that's a great service. I invited them to come say, "Look, talk to us. Tell us what you do. Go to by flight, right? Get them involved. Get them aware so it's not a stigma if you go over there, uh, to mental health." Rehabilitate. Remove toxic supervisors. I talked about that. Clear expectations. Write them down. How many of you have ever gotten a sheet from your boss that says, "Here's my expectations. Here are my red lines, my left and right limits." Anybody? How many have given them to their folks? It's awesome, right? Those of you that haven't, which is the majority of you, do that. Why? Because they have a, they have a playbook when you're not there. "Hey, this is what my boss expects," and they'll always be in line with you. And if not, you can say, "Hey, I told you right there in writing anyway." And your boss owes that to you, honestly. [snorts] Different, uh, to trust and be trusted. Differentiate mistakes and misconduct. Talked about that already. An active open-door policy. Half of that open-door policy is you walking out the door. You have to go see your folks. They, they should not only see you when you have a problem or they have a problem, right? Uh, one of the TTPs that I suggest is right next to you, put a parking spot that says "CC Open Door Policy." You'd be surprised how many people have issues when they know that you're receptive to it that really only you can fix, and they're not harboring anymore. Channels for direct CC communication. One of those was a comment box. In my new squadron right now, I got a coding whiz that can, is, uh, coding an app. Um, if it's approved by the Air Force, I'll make it available to all of you. But bottom line, it's got the comment box there. They can just click, talk to you. Recall roster, all that good stuff. But that's an innovation that he came up with.
Connection, belonging. Key spouse program, integrate the families, right? Uh, I think it was General Slokin when I was in your seat said, "We recruit Airmen, we retain families." They have to be a part of your squadron. More squadron social events, you know, getting that connectedness, that familiarity. Get out of your flight tribes. Create engineered successes. This is probably the most important one for getting this to clue you together. Figure out ways to present challenges that are tough enough to where they feel satisfaction out of what they did, but that you know secretly you're not going to let fail. One of those was we built a squadron, uh, heritage room/bar for social events. Took an old rusty storage room, knocked out, knocked down some walls, got rid of some stanky plumbing. Um, I got the 332 done eventually, but, um, and, um, anyway, and we had a really awesome place to go, and that was where we hosted all events. It had a patio, cornhole, horseshoe pits, everything. And the good thing was it was right outside my office. So when people came and ate lunch, I could walk in and talk to them without having to go across the base to to see folks. Sometimes they are going to have their meetings there. That's cool, right? That was an engineered success. I knew it wasn't going to fail. It was at least going to be something there. Um, and man, they, I wish I had a picture of it, but, um, they made it pretty amazing. So, that allowed them to have ownership. Every time they walked in there, they said, "I did this with everybody else."
All right. Leadership development sessions. This is something that I think, uh, you have to do. If it's important to you, you'll schedule time for it. I schedule about one block of one to two hours every week. We sit down, we talk about issues. We talk about this stuff. Uh, how current events I've gotten from the wing are going to trickle down and affect us. U, but mainly I'm trying to connect this connectedness, once these first three are met for the person, with this purpose piece. So right now, in my new squadron, I, I took over, uh, or I stood it up in April. So we're about here. And if you want to talk about the scale, right? I've talked about mission. I've talked about the type of vision that I have, the type of environment I want to complete that mission in, and I've talked about my priorities, which are the same, uh, in munitions as they were in component maintenance squadron, and I've also challenged them to develop their own. Finally, uh, as you move up through your development, I also stood up a squadron Top 3, building leader sessions. So that was once a week or once a month, every tier had a mentor or two that would go through professional skills, how to write a coherent sentence, how to write a bullet, how to write a paper, that kind of, those kind of life skills that may or may not have been very well reinforced in their education growing up. Monthly squadron and Chief breakfast with Airmen and NCOs. And then I schedule 10 to 20% of my week. Still, uh, it's tough sometimes, but 10 to 20% of my week, every week, of my time to be out. I like to visit every shop every week. I'm not saying this is a requirement. I'm saying when people see you and smile, you'll know you're doing a good job versus, you know, "Oh crap, what's he here for?"
All right. As you, as you do these things, as you develop these leadership and as you go through this approach, you're going to get to this empowerment piece, which is that again, a reinforcement of that trust. That I trust that you know your job, right? Uh, I don't like the word empowerment, honestly. Empowerment means I deign to allow you to do this. I like autonomy. I've trained you. I've coached you. I've guided you. Now you're ready to go. Let me know if you need help. Right? It's not disengage. You're still watching and making sure they don't stumble, or you're there to pick them up when they do. But it's, I don't have to look over your shoulder anymore. It's like that group commander told me.
All right. And then finally, at the top, you'll never be satisfied with it, but you can maybe reach it and prove performance beyond compliance. And if I go back, I forgot to talk about this. This I got from that book "Drive," where it talks about meeting the basic needs, internal and external. You know, I'm hungry, or I'm getting rained on, to internal. I love what I do, and I want to figure out a way to do it better. So, purpose. Saw that middle tier. That's that link between the person and the organization, right? For us, we call it the mission. It is that which you must be able to do. That's what your existence is for as a unit. You have your resources, your authority, your training, your guidance, all that stuff to do that. Everybody under you should be aligned to the squadron, and each one of them should understand how their mission and their purpose supports yours, just like I have to understand how it supports my boss, the wing commander, and his boss, the NAF commander, right? Everybody's in line and working towards that. Then we're all pointed in the right direction, and even though we might have divergences and mistakes, in the end, all of our intent is in lockstep. Understand your mission and then be able to explain it in a way that other people understand it. Figure out how to do it. That's what you get paid to do. They'll tell you what when you go down range. Here's your ATO. This is what you're going to do. How you do it. That's why we get paid to do what we do and train our folks, right? We're the "how."
Organizational alignment. Like I just talked about, you get that mission. You get that vision. You get those priorities in line. Everybody's noses are pointing in the same direction. But make them specific, objective, tangible tasks, right? Things that you can measure. Uh, they're achievable. They're not unrealistic. "I want to be the best ever." Well, okay. But what does that mean, right? Uh, relevant to your MVPs. Uh, and timelines. So, this goes back into the goals. I would say priorities. You can have timelines, but if you don't have them by the time you get to the next step down, you're never going to get it done. Here's an example of a, uh, MVP and strap plan from our avionics shop. You see the mission was in line with mine. The vision is not incompatible with mine. Uh, their priority was to establish consistent battle rhythm. So they were having issues with, uh, flight line was putting demands on them. They had other pro-users putting demands, "Hey, you're working 12," or "Hey, I need you back," and they thought everybody could go, all that stuff. So, anyway, uh, that was the context behind that. And then they wanted to make sure that we, they understood why we were at work. And I thought that was okay. So you can look at that. It's in the, uh, the material for the backup material. But, um, and then finally, we move on to the next step. Empowerment. So we've got the purpose. Now I want to tell you to go do your purpose. Right? Empowerment. Uh, part of that is understanding your, in the military, we're very hierarchical, right? We have ranks. We wear them on our chest or on our sleeve if you're still in ABUs. Um, but we also have these expertise, these spheres of knowledge, right, and experience where you are trusted in this area, in your specialty, and that's what I call your left and right limits, right? Because it can butt up to other people's experience and spheres of of, uh, knowledge and experience. All right. And then finally, guide your folks in understanding the relationship between autonomy, or sorry, authority, responsibility. Okay, I'm going to say a four-letter word: sorry, risk. Right? If they understand the levels and lanes, I call them levels and lanes. You can call them whatever you want. Um, they'll be able to take risk that they can either contain within their level and lane, and that's fine, right? Or if they, they can recognize when it's going to affect outside of them, and they can give people at least a heads-up. And our squadron commanders, without group commanders, to coordinate and, uh, synchronize. We have to do that all the time. "Hey, I'm going to try this. It may cause this for you, right?" Right? But that requires an awareness. All right? And that's part of what they, what you're, what I was trying to teach them is everything you do probably affects somebody else. Let them know, either above you, below you, or beside you. The bottom line with this, and you can see this definition, that's why I put a box around it, right? Within your bounds, this is okay because there's supposed to be a benefit to it, right? Um, the other thing I forgot to mention on the mission slide was, uh, it's that thing you must do, right? Where this, they, within their level and lane, that's where their mission is. They have to be able to recognize that. But I will tell you, the mission, your purpose, is the line between where to fail at something becomes failure. As long as you don't cross that line and fail at your mission, you've got all that room underneath to try things intelligently with good judgment. But try those. All right. Anyway, so risk is going to happen. Don't fear it. Accept it. Guide it. One of the things I was actually at a meeting, and, uh, we were talking about risk, right? Innovation and risk, because people recognize you have to have both of them to make it work. And I said, or somebody said, "I don't want my Airmen taking risks. I want them doing their job." Okay. How is that moving us anywhere? Right. And I, I, I talked to him after. I said, "Hey, sir, um, what do you mean by that?" "Well, I don't want my mission to fail." And I, okay, I didn't really have a response, but I thought about it, and I, and I started realizing as I was walking around doing my 10 to 20% of time a week, our Airmen and the levels two down below you in your organization are not thinking about the things that are going to ruin your mission in general, right? I'd say the vast majority of the time, they're not thinking of things that are going to tank you. They're thinking about things at their level because that's what they have experience with. So, yes, it's uncomfortable to say, "Go figure it out, guys. Let me know if you need anything or if you need some ideas. I've got a couple, but I want you to figure it out. You can, you can do this." Um, get, get comfortable with that feeling, that queasy feeling of being uncomfortable. It gets better, and you'll learn, "Hey, they don't understand this. They took a risk that was outside their bounds." Now, I can educate and I can tell, tell them what I'm comfortable with, right? And as, once you get that in there, again, you can be that commander that doesn't have to micromanage everything. I firmly believe that innovation requires autonomy, and autonomy requires risk. If you don't have autonomy, then one or two people are doing all the innovative thinking. And I tell you what, as I said before, I'm rarely the smartest man in the room, except when I'm the only one. I don't have all the ideas. But I, but I guarantee you those millennials who've been working with tech tech systems their whole life and are fluent with it in a way that we're not, the younger millennials. Most of us are millennials, but, um, they have some ideas. They've seen some things that say, "Hey, why can't we do this here?" I've gotten a lot of ideas from those Airmen breakfasts. The app was one of them. All right.
Uh, got a question I want to address. At a previous class, "What's the difference between autonomy and anarchy?" Boundaries. Those left and right limits. Any questions on that? Make sense? All right. Cool.
All right. So, I, I've tried to do some visual management and try to figure out like how do I conceptualize this idea of being able to take risk or provide some easy, like, reference from this is for my folks, hopefully, you get something out of it, um, when they're thinking about taking a risk, how to get their brain, you know, in this constant assessment, judgment, is this a good idea to even take this risk? And so I kind of created one of these things. Um, I thought it's easier to read than one of those risk matrix, you know, likelihood and impact, uh, charts. But anyway, and I say, "Look, is it possible? Is it physically possible?" Okay. Uh, is it a technical process or procedure? Is it something you had to be trained on in your specialty? Right. Or somebody else's specialty. If it's in your specialty, you can probably look there. If it's not in your specialty, don't ask that specialty first. Right? And then finally, policy or preference. This is kind of the golden trove of where I look for things that I either want to stop doing or change how I'm doing or start doing or keep doing. Right? I'll give you a little hint. And sir, back me up on this. Uh, staffs write AFIs in policy. Not every line in there is written by the very experienced GEO at the top. Some of those are written by folks who've never commanded anything. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm not saying they, uh, don't, they don't, um, warrant looking at. I'm telling you that there are a lot of "shall wills" that should be "should" and "may." We've cut roughly, uh, since this Chief's, um, effort to cut AFIs. Well, we've cut almost 390 with another 180 on the on the rack to get cut. We're doing okay. Why have we been following these the whole time? Right? Why have we not even asked a question? I look at MCT as a prime opportunity when I go through those checklists of things I'm going to stop doing because they waste my time and they don't contribute to my mission. Doesn't mean I'm saying I'm not going to do anything, but I'm going to evaluate it. What are my concerns if I stop or start or change this? Is it safe? Is it legal? Is it more unethical? Does it apply to me in my situation, is what I'm trying to say. It may, or a part of it might. Firefighters don't need fire extinguisher training, even though it's mandated. They're firefighters, right? That's just a, just a, just an example, right? So, is it safe? Is it legal? Is it more unethical? This will always win. If it's a safety issue, I'm either going to talk to an engineer or I'm not going to touch it. Safety, a lot of times, falls right in line with physics, right? Don't, don't mess with it. Legal and moral. Always follow the law. There's bylaws that you have to do as a squadron commander. Voting officer is one, right? It's good. Takes time away from my mission, but I have to do it. Same as financial reporting and all that other stuff. Um, but what I say with this is not everything that's legal is moral. So, Ls for everybody, right? That's absolutely legal and within my authority to do. I can put people up for NJP for various reasons, right? That's totally legal. Is it moral? That's why you're in the seat. That's why there's a warm body instead of an orange can in that seat. That's where you have to make those decisions. Conflicts. Who does it conflict with or what does it conflict with? Does it conflict with Newton? You're going to lose every time. I promise. Does it conflict with the law? Again, fought the law. The law won. Does it conflict with my mission success and command intent? So, this is where you go into those AFIs and policy. Does functional compete or take away from mission or commander, uh, commander line command line. Thank you. Right. As a squadron commander who presents forces to a COCOM, worry about this, okay? Ask the staff for help. They're there to support you, train, equip you, right?
But in the end, you're going out the door with your squadron and your resources, and you're going to be doing this, okay? Now, there's a process for all this stuff. I'm not saying just I'm not doing it. I'm the commander. But there's a right way to do it. Let people know. Document it. Make T. Let your command line know at the very least your group or your wing commander, right? Hey, I'm not doing this because I'm good with it. Cool. Right? Eventually, they're going to be like, "Sure, whatever. It's fine. You have the credibility. You've made the decision."
All right. So, what is this? This kind of wraps up visually the last two I've talked about. So, you have your mission and vision and priorities, right? Your mission, your vision should be in sync. That's what your purpose is. That's how you uh that's the environment and culture that you want to set while you do it. Your priorities are a mash mash of these two. And then they roll down. You're organizationally aligned. Everything rolls down from yours and you roll down from the one above you. Right? Each one of these steps you can think of another one right next to it. Flights, right? Squadrons, wings even, right? Each one of them has their own particular mission with their own particular constraints and circumstances. This is that strat plan I talked about, right? So below your priorities, you have your goals, objectives, and tasks. Always have metrics. Measure, keep, score. Um, and then those flow down.
Now, the reason why I have this visually is because uh that micromanagement thing I talked about in a perfect world, you'd only ever have to go here. I'd only have to worry about my tasks or the tasks that I've tked out for people to do support me, right? Sometimes you got to go into this goal area. Look, yeah, training is our both of our priorities, flight, but uh you have a ridiculous number of IMDS or IMDS training overdoses, right? Routine training, repeated training. Um, that is your goal right now is to clear those out. Okay. I try not to do that very often, but sometimes I need to. If I have to go down here for the next level or if my boss has to go down there for me, one of us needs to go. Either I'm not doing a good job or they don't trust me. Either they're not doing a good job or I don't trust them. That's what I mean by guiding them and teaching. Right. Uh what's the other thing? Oh, here.
So, and then the risk, right? So, each one of these lines is a level on the red. You're boxed in with your lane. That's your left right bounds. If you're going to cross this line, get clearance. If you're going to cross this line, get clearance. Here's an example. In maintenance, uh in maintenance, we have things called to uh addage. Uh it's black and white and written in blood, right? As I talked about with the C17 issue, right? The right steps were in the to0. They didn't follow them. What happened? Okay, that is an example of something that is physics. Usually it involves physics, high performance machines that's way up at the DoD and half level and it's executed by the technician on the on the line. Does that mean they can't change it? Absolutely not. There's a process. This is what I talked about. Use your processes that you have available to change these things or tell people you're not doing it anymore or you're going to start doing it. Um, and that is after 22 that is routed through every one of these levels to the right person so they can say, "I'm good with it. Go ahead. It's a good idea. We're going to make a change." Does that make sense? So, there's always a vehicle to properly route these risks and take these risks. Sometimes it might be a little after the fact. I don't recommend it when it comes to aircraft. [snorts]
And finally, we talked about that that goal or that pie in the sky, that performance piece, right? So again, it's it's one of those things that you're going to always strive for. And it's improvement, right? Performance improvement. It's beyond compliance. Compliance is the baseline. Don't be satisfied with it. Compliance gets you to average. Probably makes the makes the average attainable. But to be go beyond that, you've got to get to that improvement piece, that innovation piece, that trusting your folks to think of a better way because you know you're not the smartest guy in the room because you just got crapped on by a pigeon on your way in on your first day of command, right?
Okay. Effective communication. We talk about objective and subjective feedback. One addresses an action or behavior that's wrong or good. Um, it's also here's one of the things I hate seeing uh on a an ACA form or a feedback form to young airmen. It says, uh, you're a four at the whole airman concept. You need to do more. Put yourself out there more. What the heck does that mean? Is that actionable? What do you mean? You want me to You want me to go join an honor guard? You want me to do community service stuff? Like, what are you looking for from me? Right. Versus objective feedback. I'd like you to get involved with the airman's council. You've got a lot of good ideas and I think they'd affect the base in a positive way. Okay, got it. I'll try. I'll do that or I won't. Okay.
Critical thinking. Make it a habit. There's a paper by Fleet Admiral King back in 1941 where he talks about the discipline of thought and judgment. That's critical thinking. It's kind of what was the catalyst of all this when I got a hold of it um as I was figuring out what I wanted to do with the squadron. Uh it's in my my resources. If nothing else, read that. It's really crazy because it's all the stuff I talked about that's happening now that I see and you've probably seen back in 1941. So it's and the same things that I'm telling you here that have worked that turned us squadron around were what he was talking about in 1941. So that cyclic action, right? History repeats. Anyway, root cause analysis is probably the cornerstone of the critical thinking. Uh it's something you can put into practice right away and it's also something that starts getting this to be a habit. Instead of giving me an LR, if you give me an L and I don't see a root cause analysis that points to this person chose to do that or they admit it, right, that's easy. I'm going to send you back. Why did this happen? You're not telling me. He either chose to do it or she incorrectly or there was some extenduating circumstance or external factor driving them to do it wrong.
So, uh, SWAT and gap analysis. I hopefully most of you have heard that. The bottom line with this is different tools, they'll be effective for you just like this approach, right? It's the overall general thinking about it, but there's a lot of tools out there. Um, and there are a lot in my uh references I you can look at. Uh, but I want to talk about metrics for a minute. Okay. So, I I I'll beat metrics a lot because that's the only way to change a good idea or to keep a good idea from being a fairy tale. The good idea fairy, right? You have to keep score. You can make all these changes you want, but if you don't evaluate how they're doing or what effect they're having, there's no reason to do it because you can't point to anything. Make sense? Caution with that. metrics are just measurements, right? If I see somebody saying, "We need a repeat recurr uh sorry, we need parts that break in the aircraft repeatedly, we need that to happen less, uh let's say no more than 4%." Okay, so what else is going to suffer? Metrics only care about the thing they measure, right? So if you sacrifice everything to make those two those measurements fit in line with your goal of a metric, something else is going to suffer. So that's why I say use them to inform decisions, but they don't determine your decisions. A metric is just reporting what a process that's happening. They're essential, but they don't make the decision for you. And anybody who says that's uh incorrect, I challenge him say, "Well, how are you going to make MC80 work? We want to fly less. I'd do it right." That's not really your intent. So that's my uh I guess that's my cautionary tale with metrics. People get wrapped around that. Um, and I say they're uh define a goal, but they are not the goal.
Okay, parking shots. First and foremost, as I learned with the pigeon, it's not about me, right? You are there. You have a mi. Your squadron has a mission, but I don't really focus on it that much other than to see, hey, how we doing all my indicators that I care about, right? I focus on my people. My mission as a commander is to focus on my people and make sure they can do the mission, right? Um, give you context. It takes for a maintenance I know maintenance. So, a maintenance uh three level out of tech school avionics troop back shop about 6 months roughly a million bucks is invested in there. Uh, it takes five to eight years to get a seven level expert that's young, right? if they're super super smart. Um, it takes one two signatures, a handshake, and maybe an awkward speech to replace you, right? So, never think that this place can get along without you. Make it better and stay humble with that. I see people I see other commanders a lot of times forget that they're like that pigeon. They're flying by in two years and going off and doing other things. So while you're doing that, don't crap on everybody. If something happens to me, god forbid, on my plane ride tomorrow, there will be somebody in that seat on Tuesday. Same applies to you guys. It takes me roughly a year to 8 months, 8 months to a year to replace um a five level or a threele airman or a seven level, even longer for a seven-le tech sergeant.
Get to know your people. Uh, I actually had trouble for a long time understanding what this actually meant because there was always that, well, are you friends with them? Are you not friends? How do you keep the professional distance? Blah blah blah. And what sunk it for me was um, you get you got to know your people so that you know how to lead them, not the other way around. They don't conform to you, you conform to what they need. You'll be a lot more effective that way. One example had a young airman from a rough part of LA avionics troop. I don't know why I pick on avionics just in my head today. Um and he uh he was very very smart after some of the stuff I'll tell you about. We found out he was building uh Xboxes and all kinds of things so he could play on his computer hardwiring them all in. He was smart with technology. However, he did not take feedback very well uh at all by normal uh accounts. Right? So you give him an L Here's where you screw it up if you don't change it. Okay. Yes, sir. That was his face. Uh, for me, if I were to do that, absolutely. I mean, flip it. Kick my butt. For somebody where he was from, if you showed weakness to somebody who said something bad to you, you became their [ __ ] That was a [clears throat] self-p protection mechanism that he had learned for roughly 18 19 years of his life. And because uh they didn't know each other, they they treated as everybody else being very disrespectful, right? That's why it's important. We came to little counseling session with everybody, me included. I knew this about the young individual. I said, "Hey, did you realize what I just told you?" No, right now he's allstar because that one little just because somebody knew his background a little bit and could and could adapt to it. Okay.
Uh lean on your former and uh current commander peers. If they have this here or there, they know what you're going through. If they don't, probably not. It's not a leadism thing. It's where you've been where you've been, what you've been through, right? Work life balance is hard and essential. Eventually, I'll pick I'll have a slide hopefully to tell you how to do that. I don't know other than to set boundaries for yourself. If you got something going on with your family and you say I'm going to be home by 1500 or 1700, do that. The rest uh again, you can be replaced. You're not that essential. Your role is very important, but you as a person, you can go take care of your family. You want to have a family at the end of this Air Force train when you get off. That's with you, right?
All right. Um, don't let someone outside your chain of command come between you and your people or your mission. That's where I go right back to staff's infringing upon your command authority. They don't have the right to do that. Somehow, we've accepted it up until recently. Uh, General Holmes, I'm sorry, I'm going to spoil it, but General Holmes says, "Assume you have the authority to do what you need to do and challenge anybody uh who tell who tells you to stop." Okay? That's coming from the four stars mouth.
And finally, above all, remember the golden rule. This is the thing that blows my mind, okay? Uh if you've listened to nothing else, listen to this. Every time that I have a leadership meeting for the first time with people, and I did this as a flight commander, I said, "Hey, you know what? My philosophy is simple. Golden rule. Treat others as you treat yourself." I get feedback that's insane. Uh it's, "Wow, sir, that's really awesome. We're, you know, dignity, respect." I'm like, "Holy crap, this is something we learned in kindergarten. How is this a revolutionary innovative approach? Everything I just talked about is this. How do we how do we get so far from this?" As a commander, you can you can course correct everybody back. You have the power now. You have that influence. Use it well. And for us, I would say take it one step further. Okay? teach your people how to do the golden rule and accomplish the mission. But for us, instead of how we'd want to be treated, how about the person we love most in the world or people? The ones that you'd lay down in traffic for or take a bullet for without question. How would you want them to be treated? And then treat your airmen like that. That's all I have for you all. I appreciate your time and attention. Let me talk to you. Um I'm humbled and very privileged to be in this company. Um, this is honestly it's going to be the best time you've had in the Air Force. I promise.