4 Military Leadership Lessons That Actually Work at Work

Shaun (00:00): I’m 18, maybe 19 at this point. I needed to be in the trenches, doing the hardest job. And I feel a tug at my pant leg. I look down, and it’s black shoes and khaki pants. That means we’re either a chief or an officer, someone of higher rank. I pop out, and it’s our chief. His name’s Chief Jones. And he says, “Airman Dyke, come over here with me.” We walk a ways, and he looks directly at me and says, “Would you like me to remove a stripe?”

Shaun (00:30): Welcome to In the Arena. My name is Shaun Dyke, managing partner here. Joining me today, the ever-amazing Chris Stemp. And Chris, you came to me the other day with an observation that we thought would be a fun and intriguing conversation to have here.

Chris (00:45): Yeah. One of the benefits of working here, amongst many, is that we’re around your wisdom and the wisdom of those who work here. But in truth, one of the things I noticed is that a lot of times the stories, the anecdotes, the lessons you’ve learned have some military component to them, due to your time in the military. You don’t talk about your military time too much, but it seems like you learned a lot in those years. And as many listening know, the military is often considered a height of leadership, so there’s a lot that transitions into what we do. I wanted to sit down and talk to you about what you learned there that has carried over to the senior leaders you work with today.

Shaun (01:27): Love it, and I appreciate the chance to chat through it, because it’s true, I don’t necessarily speak to it that often. Can I set a frame for a bit?

Chris (01:38): Please do.

Shaun (01:39): A little latitude to set a frame for anybody listening. I also think there are various different levels of affinity toward the military. Some love it, some are anti it. It’s a complicated space, and for me, my head space leans into extracting the experiences I had from it. So that’s the goal.

You know these, but I’ll give a little detail in case somebody’s listening. I grew up in rural, small-town Idaho, a little place called Kuna. At the time there were about a thousand people. We had a yellow flashing light outside of town, a stop sign in town. It was very, very small. You had a hardware store, a grocery store, six churches, and six bars. I think that was the balance. So, small little place. Nobody in my family had gone to college before, and I really wanted to go, but I wasn’t in a spot where funding it was going to happen. My dad was a Marine, and a buddy of mine from high school told me he’d gone down to the recruiting station and was going to do the military as an experience. It helped pay for college.

My favorite part of this story is that at the time, he was looking at joining the Navy. They had what was called a buddy program, which, yes, has all the flak associated with it as you can imagine. But basically it meant you went to boot camp together and you were deployed together, so you could hang with your buddy. And I was like, “Let’s go.”

Chris (03:05): Talk about brilliant marketing, too. Come on.

Shaun (03:07): Oh yes. Reduce some of the fear. Come and join, right? So I went down, went through the processing, did all the testing, and I got in. And then my buddy didn’t graduate high school.

Chris (03:21): So you’re without a buddy.

Shaun (03:23): That didn’t work out. So I just went. That was the first, “Ah, gee, that was a bummer.” But I went to boot camp, and then I ended up with what’s called Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-94. It’s an F/A-18 Hornet squadron, fighter attack jets, out of Lemoore Naval Air Station, California. I was ground crew and support for them. I was an enlisted guy, not an officer, for those listening. Incredible experience, massively foundational. When we briefly talked about this, I tried to think more discreetly about what things I pulled out of it, so I’ve got a few I can chase, if you will.

Chris (04:03): Before you do, a question. If you go back to 20-year-old Shaun on a boat doing whatever you did, was there any leadership bend in your future? Were you actively going, “I’m going to use my time for this”?

Shaun (04:22): At 20, a little more. At 18 when I went in, no. I joined when I was 17, because I graduated at 17. I was in a delayed-entry program. As soon as I turned 18 in July, a month later I was in.

Chris (04:37): Let’s just clarify for those listening: you do now have multiple degrees.

Shaun (04:41): Yes, this is true. An undergraduate and an MBA now.

Chris (04:49): An MBA. Just wanted to make sure.

Shaun (04:49): So that was the goal. The goal was to fund the formal academic experience. But in truth, that’s a perfect example of where we’ll tee into this. I went in a pretty shy kid. I didn’t have a strong sense of self early on, and my goal going into boot camp was to fly under the radar as much as I could. I wanted to be quiet. I wanted to do the right things. Because I had a belief that I was going to join and there would be all these adults there. In my mind, I was still a kid.

Chris (05:30): Right.

Shaun (05:30): I thought there’d be a series of people going through boot camp with me, and these were adults. As a youth you have this belief that once you hit 18 or 19 or 20, it just magically occurs, and you have all the things figured out. So I thought, gosh, these people are going to be studied and competent and capable and ready and revered. So much of those early formations for me existed then, but I didn’t know them. I was going into it turtling, in a posture of insecurity, uncertainty, a bit of distress around, “How do I not get in trouble, and how do I go in quietly?”

Lesson 1: Adults Aren’t Magically Adults

Shaun (06:21): So the first thing I realized is that that’s not true. There is no version where you hit a magical age and competency, care, capability, reasoning, perspective, and insight just materialize based on age. I found that I had a range around me, and this isn’t disparaging to my colleagues, my shipmates. We were all still kids in ways. There was a range, probably 18 to 30 year olds in the room, with varying abilities to regulate emotion, to support one another, to be direct, to navigate complexity and ambiguity. It wasn’t as if this competency just descended on everybody at 18. As an adult looking back, it almost seems foolish that I would have thought that way.

So the parallel I’ve extracted from this over time is that people, in this day and age, when we encounter them at any age you pick, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, still may not have amassed all of these capability sets that we think and project on them, that we want them to have. There’s a quote on my laptop. It says, “It is a hard thing, realizing people aren’t who you want them to be.” That experience was foundational for me in recognizing the extent to which we project expectations onto others that they never agreed to, that they’ve not bought into, and then we hold them accountable to it and feel disappointment if they aren’t the people we thought they were going to be.

Chris (08:23): What you’re capturing is recognizing that in your early days, but not necessarily noticing the lesson you’d carry forward from it. It’s only in hindsight that the lesson is learned. How do you then leverage that in the work we do, both for yourself and for those you work with?

Shaun (08:48): Are we willing to allow people to learn? One of the challenges we navigate across the board these days is that we expect people to already be formed and capable in all of their spaces. They’re going to stumble. They’re going to mess up. They’re going to make mistakes. And the world is pretty critical of people these days, so we have a hard time allowing people to go through the learning process of becoming.

Chris (09:13): I could imagine where that comes into play a lot in the professional sphere. We have somebody on our team, and it’s like, okay, they should know how to do this. And then when they don’t, we put a judgment around it instead of saying, “Well, maybe they just learn it,” and moving on.

Shaun (09:35): Or let’s take it to something even more egregious. It’s not that there’s just a skill underdeveloped, they do something wrong. They’re aggressive in their tone with someone. Their listening skills are underdeveloped, so they look aloof or disengaged or dismissive. And what we do is create formations about that individual based on this observed experience, which is likely a pattern they acquired somewhere that hasn’t been guided or corrected.

I often use an example of a gentleman who was the head of a business for a long time. He was promoted up through the ranks, and he’d been in role for 17 years. He was not an easy recipient of feedback, so he rarely got it. I was asked to coach him. When I interviewed him, I was a little anti it, because sometimes if it feels like success is improbable, I don’t want to tell the client system we can make it work when we can’t. I literally told the group I was working with, “I have about a 20% success anticipation. If we lean really hard and we work, then maybe.” And they said, “Let’s try.”

Chris (10:50): Yeah.

Shaun (10:51): And then, the phrase we use often, with kindness and care we dropped an anvil on him. We made him very aware, with a mirror. And his comment, through sadness, was, “Why has no one ever told me this?” So that’s one of the pieces we do frequently. We project onto people a skill we hope and expect they possess and can do. When they don’t do it, we have disappointment and dissatisfaction around their underdeveloped skill, and often they’ve never been given the feedback, guided, or the opportunity to even demonstrate it. And if they do screw it up, we don’t approach it with kindness and grace. We approach it with condemnation around their fail state.

Chris (11:35): You know what’s so crazy? Actively learning this on the spot, my initial head space went to something tactical, executional, knowledge-based. Now that you say it, it’s actually much rarer that we fault somebody for that. We’re far more tolerant if it’s, “Well, I just don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to use this new AI technology.” That’s okay, you can learn. But when somebody doesn’t speak up the right way, provides feedback incorrectly, doesn’t have that tough conversation, it’s about the person, not the skill.

Shaun (12:13): Correct. You’ve got this series of attributes that we associate and assign to the person and the personality of who the individual is, versus a discrete capability set. So that was one of them for me early on. I didn’t know it at the time, of course. I started becoming aware that I’d thought the people in the room, because there were times I remember standing in ranks in boot camp with a 25-year-old who was so much older than me, just making some foolish calls and decisions that didn’t make sense, and I’d think, how are they making these calls? They’re an adult. So take that construct of “an adult” when we think about cascading expectations onto individuals in your organization, and juxtapose it with the word “leader.”

Chris (13:05): I was just about to say. And even, get crazy, “executive.” C-suite level. They must have it all figured out. If they do something a certain way, it’s because that’s who they are, as opposed to maybe they’ve got to learn it.

Shaun (13:19): Yeah. And are we willing to extend grace to go through it?

Lesson 2: Rank Isn’t Leadership

Shaun (13:24): This was a comical one for me to learn. So I teed up early that I really wanted to fly under the radar. But I felt it was important to prep for things. Going in, you get a little information, not a lot. You get things like, you’re going to need to know your general orders, which are a set of orders all the different branches have that are core and fundamental to how you operate, and the chain of command, from the president all the way down through the various names and rankings. So I studied those, because I thought that’s what you should do going in. I found that not that many people did that, so I had a little preparation.

They also create a rank structure in boot camp. They have collar insignia they give to different people. Now, once you’re out of boot camp, those are earned through time and what you’re doing, but in boot camp you’re learning to create a structure. When they initially hand out these collar insignia, the company commanders, when I was in Navy boot camp, give them out early, and they don’t know yet. They try to observe behavior and start to give them to people. I was given a collar insignia for what’s called assistant master-at-arms, which basically meant I was responsible any time we weren’t marching. So if we were in class or eating or wherever, I was helping lead and guide the group.

I had no idea how to do this. Petty Officer Menabucan tossed me this collar insignia, and I was like, “Oh, no.” I didn’t want to lead. I wanted to fly under the radar. Now I had to be center stage. And I had only one way of knowing how to connect and relate with people, and it was through the harmonizer doorway. Through friend. Through kindness.

Chris (15:28): I want to be liked. If you like me, we’re good, I’m doing my job.

Shaun (15:31): So I tried to lead that way. In boot camp, with a lot of people older than me and at various head spaces. I started applying my natural instinct on how I felt comfortable leading. Now, 30 years later, if I were to describe it aggressively, I’d call it lazy leadership. It’s defaulting to the style you’re comfortable with versus leading in the way the people need to be led. I remember at one point there was a group of the team being really loud, and I was like, “We’re going to get in trouble.” And I was pleading, “Hey, guys, come on. For me, let’s quiet down.” And it’s not what was needed. In that spot, there was a level of clarity, command, expectation, certainty, and confidence that people were looking to listen to. So I had to learn on the fly to shift. I was clearly inadequate at it, but I got better through the process. Going through this, I realized leadership is not about expressing my preferred style. It’s understanding what the people I lead actually need. How do I adjust in real time to lead them in a way that invites them to where they need to be? I didn’t know Ken Blanchard’s situational leadership at the time.

Chris (16:59): Yeah, yeah.

Shaun (16:59): I knew the early-stage formation of it, that people were not responding to the way I was leading, and I had to learn how to shift my style, and how uncomfortable it was for me to lean into a different style than the one I wanted to demonstrate.

Chris (17:16): A couple of things there. One, you highlighted how uncomfortable it was. I think very few leaders today, maybe I’m giving too much credit, haven’t heard this idea of “lead the way they want to be led.” The challenge is that it only works until it gets too uncomfortable for you, and then you revert. When it’s all good and everything’s going well, fine, I can focus on them. But it’s the moment things get tough, or you feel that discomfort, that you’re most likely to revert to the pattern of leadership that makes you feel okay, because it’s also the pattern you use most often in your life.

Shaun (18:03): Yeah, and that’s a you problem. That goes back to that being you serving you, not them. You’re dead on. My capability to be more refined, variable, and elastic stylistically is higher when I’m good, out of distress, as we call it. But when tension gets high, when stress spikes, when pressure or time constraints elevate, I literally have an internal physiological response, and you can feel yourself lock into the style you want to revert to. And oftentimes that’s a pretty suboptimal style.

Chris (18:41): This is a slight aside, but I think valuable, because it was valuable for me when it happened. Not too long ago I got a team and did what you’re talking about, started to lead the way I naturally am, which is this harmonizer-rebel. Let’s be friends, let’s have fun, and as long as we do that, you’ll do what I need you to do. And it’s easy for me, and it feels comfortable. We avoid a little conflict. And it works at first. But then I needed to influence, and I’d built a foundation of friendship, of joviality, of ease, “Don’t worry about it, we can do this, not a big deal.” And I didn’t know how to get out of it. This was six months in. So for one day to come up and show up sharp, or disappointed, or whatever I needed in that moment, I just didn’t know how to get there. What do you recommend if you’re hearing this for the first time and recognizing, “Maybe I’ve been leading the easy way, the way I want to be led, but not the way they want to be led, and now I don’t know how to get out of it because they know me this way”?

Shaun (19:53): We’ve got to have the self-awareness to even get there, which is why we’re doing this. So you start to recognize that the approach I’m actively employing isn’t serving me. Option one is, I know how to do it differently, I just don’t want to, because it’s uncomfortable and awkward. And the solutions for that are different from, I don’t have an installed behavior pattern that I even know how to access or use. If I don’t know how to do the thing, it’s literally a skill-building space. I have to create capability in it.

One of the guys I coached forever, excellent, brilliant, super capable man, was not having the effect he needed to have. He was smart enough to know it, but he had no idea what he needed to do differently. So he reached out, and we started walking through, what are you doing, what do you want done? This is that two-question set. Do you know what you want? Most people say yes. Do you know how to get it? Most people say no. Okay, great, so let’s work on how you get it.

We said this a couple of episodes ago, which I think is fundamentally true about everything in life, that the solution is never as big as the problem. Simple example with this individual: he was having a hard time creating connection and relatability with people. He’s the CFO of a company. And I said, “To what extent do you put yourself in the population to do that?” “I don’t.” “Okay, and when you put yourself in that population, what’s your demeanor?” “Well, CFO serious. That’s my demeanor.” “Okay, well, stop. I want you in the break room at least three times a day with a smile.”

Chris (21:27): That’s so funny. First of all, “CFO serious.” And second, quick aside. I was at a social event recently, and I was kind of grumpy and didn’t feel well. I could feel I didn’t want to be there, and it was causing me anxiety, because usually I want to be there. And I genuinely thought, “Well, then just be different.” This is 100% true. I was like, “You’re here for 30 minutes. Just be the guy you wish you could be in this moment. I’m going to smile. It might be ridiculous. I’m going to go joke, I’m going to tap someone on the shoulder.” And next thing you know, it’s all good, and we leave, and I was glad I did it that way. The reason I articulate that, one, it’s fresh, but two, in this instance the solution is not as big as the problem. Go put yourself in that population and try to be a little more jovial or connected.

Shaun (22:31): Literally just smile and say hey. And he says to me, “Will that matter?” And I said, “Bud, you’re the CFO of the organization. When you’re in the break room getting a cup of coffee and you turn to the individual next to you with a smile and say, ‘How’s the day going?’ they’re going to respond. They’re going to go home and tell their significant other that that happened.” It does matter. You forget that. Caitlin, our colleague, oftentimes says leaders forget that. Those executives at the senior levels, she always described them as being like Santa Claus. You don’t get to interact with them a lot. You believe they’re executing at incredibly high levels. They’ve got a lot of wisdom, command, and responsibility. It’s not a pedestal placement, but a reverence and respect that’s appreciated. So I’d encourage leaning into that.

And then, what you just said reminds me of the phrase, sometimes you think your way into behaving, and sometimes you behave your way into thinking. You chose to behave your way into thinking in those spots.

Chris (23:35): I think that’s important. I know we’re wandering, but I’ll bring us back, because that’s what I do here. Many listening come through the doorway of being cerebral, having to think through something, to understand the logic behind it. And it’s funny, as I think about my moment or yours, how many times you can go, “This doesn’t have to be authentic. This doesn’t have to feel real or logical. I can just say, I want to be this person in this moment because I think it’s what’s needed for the outcome, and then go do that.”

Shaun (24:01): Interestingly, I’d argue that that is authentic. It may not correlate to the internal feeling state, but it’s still an authentic expression with intention.

Chris (24:11): That’s not inauthenticity. It’s intentional behavior modification, almost.

Shaun (24:16): Oh, 100%. Brad Spencer, one time, I’m working here for about a year, had one of the best lines ever. We’re walking through the parking lot, and we bumped into somebody who seemed like these incredible folks. We walked away and I said, “They seem like a really authentic person.” And he says, “Authenticity is incredibly important. You’ve got to learn to fake that.” And I was like, “Brad, come on.” It was a comical statement of hilarious truth. Sometimes you’re in those spots where it’s not that you’re being incongruent, or in dissonance with who you are. It’s finding a way in that moment to authentically be present for the individual even though they don’t match.

Chris (25:04): Or to be who you want to be. I authentically want to be the CFO people like in this moment. Naturally I haven’t been, but trying that on doesn’t make me inauthentic. It makes me strive. It’s learning.

Shaun (25:17): You know how we sometimes say confidence is a behavior and an emotion, and they don’t always ride shotgun with one another? Sometimes you demonstrate confidence through your behavior even when you don’t feel it. And sometimes you feel it and the external demonstration may not align. I think those are related and parallel.

Chris (25:41): So we’ve strayed slightly. But recap the first two for us.

Shaun (25:44): Sure. So, adults aren’t magically adults. People don’t magically become who you want them to be, and you’ll oftentimes project expectation and wish onto somebody to demonstrate something you want in them that isn’t them.

Chris (25:57): Allow them to learn both the skills and the softer skills, the communication skills.

Shaun (26:04): And then the other was that rank doesn’t mean leadership in so many ways, and when you’re in that spot of leading, do not simply default to the style you like. Lead in the manner the people who need to be led need to be led. The times I ask folks, “Are you leading people the way they currently need to be led, at this stage in their career, at this stage in the organization, at this stage of the business?” the frequency with which people say, “No, probably not.” Okay, cool. Shift from a known point. We now know it. Now we need to evolve it. That sounds easy on paper. It’s harder, of course, in real life.

Lesson 3: The Halo Effect and the Horn Effect

Shaun (26:39): Third one. This was fun. On Naval Air Station Lemoore, there’s the operations side, where all the jets are, and then the living side, where housing, the commissary, and living spaces are. They’re about seven miles apart. So the deal was you get up in the morning, get ready, usually hop on the shuttle, and take it across to the operations side. I was what’s known as the leading airman in this line division, a low-ranking enlisted position, but I was the most senior of the other airmen in that group. I always got to work early, made sure the jets were ready, made sure the team was ready, that the watch was relieved. I’d established a good relationship with my boss there, a guy named Steve Nadolny, incredible guy.

On this particular morning, I wake up in my bed, and it’s like 9:00 AM. Normally I’m there at 7:00, and people get there at 8:00 at least. I’m flooded with panic, not only because I’m not there, but it’s a shuttle ride and seven miles away. I can’t get there right now. So I’m like, “Oh my gosh. I have totally screwed up.” I get dressed as fast as I can, run to the shuttle stop, and I have to wait for the shuttle, panicking and stressing. I hop on the bus, we get across, and I go walking into the line division, tail tucked. My desk and Steve’s desk, Petty Officer Nadolny’s desk, butt up against one another. He’s sitting at his desk. I’m expecting to get kind of a look. And nobody had called or anything, but there was really no way to call. This is 1994.

Chris (28:37): This is 1935.

Shaun (28:37): Yeah, exactly. They had to send a carrier pigeon.

Chris (28:48): It’s in black and white now, in my head.

Shaun (28:51): So I go walking in and sit down at my desk, and he just hands me a couple things and says, “Hey, man, can you follow up on these pieces or check on this?” And I was like, “Yeah, you bet.” And I’m waiting, and he’s not saying anything. I couldn’t let it happen anymore, so I said, “Hey, man, I’m so sorry I was late.” And he goes, “From what?” And I said, “Getting here.” And he goes, “What do you mean?” And I said, “I just got here.” And he goes, “I know.” And I said, “No, I just got to work.” And he goes, “Oh,” and he didn’t seem upset. And I said, “I’ve got to ask. Where did you think I was?” And he said, “I don’t know. I just assumed you were doing all of the things you would be doing.”

Halo effect and horn effect. Let me talk to both. There was a predictable, repeatable pattern of behavior he’d experienced from me, so he was extending a degree of grace onto me. He completely believed there was no version where I would be late. If I wasn’t there, it was because I was actively doing something value-added. His positive confirmation bias of me was informed by a series of credits I’d made in our relationship and experience, so his extension of latitude wasn’t even conscious. He just assumed, you’re doing good things. There’s no way you were doing something wrong.

While that part is important, it’s almost the other side of the equation that I realized. The halo effect is a thing people talk about all the time, this radiance we give somebody. There’s another one I call the horn effect, the opposite. It’s when the lived experience you’ve had with people leads you to color the individual completely with that brush and lens, and then all associated behavior that follows, you see through that lens. Now, there are times that’s probably earned. Someone’s behavior pattern is consistently doing something not aligned with what you want. But the biggest piece I learned is that people will not change until you allow them to. If I lens an individual through a negative doorway, I’ll repeatedly find affirmations to see it that way, no matter what their behavior is, no matter how many times they do a nice job. And sometimes we extend the halo effect to people and are unwilling to acknowledge the things they’re doing that are suboptimal. We don’t walk at it. We don’t address it. We don’t deal with it. And sometimes the horn effect is in play, where we’re overly biasing a few vantage points and not willing to consider the breadth of their capabilities.

Chris (31:51): I imagine it’s interesting from your perspective when you’re the coach or the third party. You don’t have the built-in biases the person does. So you hear them talk about somebody and you’re like, “Man, I really don’t feel like this evaluation is fair,” one way or the other. And now you have to do your best to steer them to recognize that.

Shaun (32:12): It’s a perspective and vantage point they have based on their lived experience. In all honesty, I tend to encourage people to go by that. Don’t use the lived experience of someone else to inform your relationship with the person. If somebody tells you, “Yeah, that individual usually is X, Y, Z,” well, that’s their experience of them. Don’t overly interpret that through your lens. So that reality for me in the military at that time was that I benefited from the credits I’d deposited in that relationship. That’s a positive thing. It’s probably also that somebody who’d been a little more chronically late and showed up like that would have been lit up. I wasn’t, at all. So are we appropriately applying grace and judgment proportionately based on our relationship with the individual?

Chris (33:06): Exactly. So, halo and horn effect, number three. We’ve got one more, I think.

Shaun (33:12): One more.

Lesson 4: “Remove a Stripe” and a Leader’s Real Job

Shaun (33:12): Probably the most powerful lived experience in the military for me. I’m the leading airman in this group, so I’m responsible for this group of men. Every 14 days, at the time, the jets we were around had to be washed. It’s a few-hour job. You pull a jet over and wash it like you wash a big car. They have a tactical paint scheme, so the paint is rough and sticky, and stuff sticks to it. It’s harder. And the absolute grossest place to clean is the nose landing gear, because when a jet takes off from a ship, the catapult grease and debris blow into that space, so it’s just yucky.

So I’m the leading airman on this wash job for the first time, and my head space as a leader, I’m 18, maybe 19 at this point, was that I needed to be in the trenches, doing the hardest job. So I said, “I’ll take the nose landing gear.” I put on my chemical protective equipment. You get this chemical called Turco, it’s like slime. And to get into the nose landing gear, the bottom of the jet sits at about four and a half feet, so you duck down and step up into it. When you’re standing in this landing gear, it’s like being in a box, two feet wide by three feet deep, coming up to the middle of my chest. All I can see around me is the interior of this thing. I’m in there applying this chemical, scrubbing away, and I feel a tug at my pant leg. I look down, and it’s black shoes and khaki pants. That means we’re either a chief or an officer, someone of higher rank. I pop out, and it’s our chief, Senior Chief Jones. And he says, “Airman Dyke, come over here with me.” We walk a ways, and he directly looks at me and says, “Would you like me to remove a stripe? Demote me.”

Shaun (35:02): And I said, “Chief?” And he goes, “Would you like me to remove a stripe?” And I said, “No.” And he goes, “I’m happy to. If you would like to have your head in the landing gear cleaning that, I’ll remove a stripe, and you can do it. But if you’re going to keep the stripe, then your job is not to have your head in the landing gear. Your job is the observation of resources. You have 10 individuals trying to safely, effectively, efficiently clean this multimillion-dollar aircraft. And if you want to bury your head in the landing gear, then let’s drop you back down in rank. Let’s not have you lead this group.”

That has come up for me hundreds of times. I just spoke to a gentleman about this two days ago, because he’s a very senior leader who is so myopically focused, based on his achievement drive, that he leans into wanting to do a singular thing. He’s not pulling back far enough to look at and leverage the collective space of all your people, their assets, their strengths, their weakness areas. How do you manage the full chessboard rather than become just a pawn inside it?

Chris (36:23): What I love about that isn’t just the message or the story, which is incredible. It’s the meaning behind it. Oftentimes leaders will say, “No, I know I should lead.” In your example, there’s a belief that by taking the toughest job, you’re sacrificing, and that’s what a leader should do. They should be the one to do the dirty work, take the hard work.

Shaun (36:49): In the trenches with your team.

Chris (36:49): Yes, ease the burden of the team. When in reality, as noble as that may seem and how good it might feel, it is not the best allocation of your time.

Shaun (36:57): Highest and best use. You’re not operating at your highest point of contribution. That was really the first time someone leaned into me on it. “I thought I was going to do the pleasing thing, the capable thing. I thought I was going to do the thing my team would respect and what they needed,” and it was not what was needed in that moment. They needed me to do the thing they probably didn’t want. I had to stand back. I had to put the brush down. I had to not do the task. I had to observe, give feedback, and guide the population I was dealing with.

Chris (37:32): You had to lead.

Shaun (37:34): So those were a few of the incredible early-stage formations for me. No frameworks yet. But formations of understanding what it looked like to lead in complex and ambiguous situations early in my years. They became foundational to me recognizing that you can try to lead through compliance, and in the military you actually can. You have the collar insignia and the rank to do it. But if you create commitment, and you demonstrate care, and you support your people, you’re going to get way more than just their hands. You get their heart involved as well. And it was the first time that truth started landing on me, what it looked like to be a leader.

Chris (38:23): I love that. Thanks for bringing those stories, those narratives, to bring these lessons to life. They stick with us as we go on to lead, so I appreciate you doing it.

Shaun (38:31): You bet, man. Thanks for hanging out, always.

Chris (38:32): Thanks, Shaun.