Bigger Brakes, Better Leaders: High-Performance Leadership with Gen. Chris Inglis

Speaker A: Welcome to the Teamwork Advantage podcast with Greg Gregory. Join us as Greg interviews powerful thought leaders and successful team and leadership experts from across the country on teamwork, leadership and organizational culture. Now, let's check in for this week's episode.

Speaker B: Welcome back to the Teamwork Advantage, a podcast that's dedicated to the development and growth of teamwork, leadership, and culture. I'm Greg Gregory, the host, founder and creator of the podcast, and we're excited to have with us today a gentleman who is no stranger to the leadership and the development of culture around the world, Chris Inglis. The honorable Chris Inglis joined, uh, United States Cybersecurity Director at the White House in 2020 through 2023, as well as he was previously Deputy Director of NSA from 2006 to 2014, with a distinguished career in public service and national security with an emphasis in cybersecurity. Currently, Chris serves on the boards of aig, Mitre, Huntington Bank Shares, and advises Palladian Capital and Ballistic Ventures. A, uh, retired Brigadier General in the United States Air Force, both active and reserve, Chris holds a graduate degree from Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and George Washington Universities. He's been a faculty member at the United States military, Naval, and Air Force Academies over the years and a member of several Defense Intelligence boards. Chris, that's a great resume. We're working off of there.

Speaker A: Well, I'm older, Greg, so thanks very much for your hospitality and your generous remarks.

Speaker B: So, uh, it's exciting to get to a chance to talk with you here because we've talked a few times in the past, and leadership is something that I really watch. And it's like I told people, I never had children, but I was able to watch everybody who did and learned a lot from what they did. And so a lot of the leaders that I've had on the show we've been able to follow and learn from. So I'm really excited to try and learn a lot more from you as we go on this. You know, most of your career has been focused in public service. So let's go all the way back. What prompted you to go to the Air Force Academy?

Speaker A: I was one of six children. Uh, we didn't have the kind of resources that would allow us to send six people to college. So I naturally thought about options outside of a school for pay. Um, I visited the Air Force Academy when I was in the Boy Scouts. I, uh, was born and raised in Maryland, but went out west on this trip to a place called Philmont. And on our way, we dropped into the Air Force Academy. And it Just seemed like all the pieces came together. It was a lovely day. The campus is spectacular. Uh, the notion of public service married with flying airplanes seemed like an idyllic combination. And so I applied. I, um, remember my senior year in high school, the guidance counselor said, I see you've applied to the Air Force Academy. I said, I have. And they said, but where else have you applied? And I said, nowhere else. And she goes, well, what if you don't get in? I said, what do you mean? I mean, I was singularly focused on that and fortunately got in.

Speaker B: One of the things that I've noticed in chatting with different leaders is that ability to be singularly focused. What do you attribute that to?

Speaker A: Uh, there's a question that underlays, I think, all of us, but a question that I've put at the forefront of my thinking, which is, what's the purpose of your power? I apply that to myself every day. I wake up in the morning and I try to imagine what's the purpose of my power today. And that's not meant to say that I have something that's so special that it has to be applied. Uh, but I have a gift that's so special that I have to figure out how to use it. And if you're not singularly focused and making use of that as the day goes by, um, you wind up suffering an opportunity cost. And at the end of the day, you wind up thinking, maybe that's not a day that, um, I can be proud of, a day that I can put in the books and say, I'm really glad I spent it that way. Um, you wind up naturally being singularly focused if you think about time being the precious commodity, about life being a gift and thinking about, what are you going to do with it?

Speaker B: So that brings me with you being so singularly focused. A lot of the people that you have led over the years, I'm assuming, were not necessarily as singularly focused, and how do you bring them into your vision? And then, more importantly, how do you start to motivate people when you've got that singular focus going? Uh, how do you do that?

Speaker A: Uh, you know, typically in. In my professional life, I come up with rules of three because I can remember three things. Four are hard, two, perhaps are not satisfying. So my rule of three on people is three things. One, people are the point. People are what actually helps you deliver the unexpected, um, to deliver above expectations. Technology can make a huge contribution in today's world. But technology in the hands of people is always the better contribution. So that's the first point. People are the point that should be your singular focus in getting the best performance out of any organization. Two, um, people are people. Ah, what does that mean? People want to matter. People have always kind of had this aspiration to do something, um, with their lives. And if you can appeal to that instinct, if you can appeal to I can help you matter, um, then they're off to the races and they will exceed expectations. And the third point is that people are different. People are enormously diverse. So you're quite right. Some people are more motivated than others. Some people come from backgrounds where the work culture and the family culture is different than perhaps kind of others in that workplace. And you need to appeal to all sides. Need to make sure that you help each and every one of them matter. Need to make sure that you understand that if you're not working by, with and through those people, nothing else you do in the workplace matters half as much. Um, that works particularly well in the public sector where, um, you know, the principal issue is, what have you done to use the power given to you for the benefit of those that gave it to you in the first place?

Speaker B: Okay, that's a powerful statement when we stop to think about that. What have you done to benefit the people that gave you that power? That's an incredible thought process when you go through that. A lot of what you talk about with your military background, how did you transfer that? How does that transfer? For the average leader that may have been in the military or is making a drastic change, how do certain things. How can you, uh, take something you have learned in one field and then apply it in another? Because military to public sector, there's some similarities, but there are some differences too.

Speaker A: Well, at the end of the day, uh, both of them are comprised of people. Some may have a greater contribution of technology, maybe some secret sauce in the intellectual property that underpins the company. Think of the Coca Cola formula. Some have kind of access to special markets. But at the end of the day, um, what that organization is going to do is largely determined by the aspiration of the people, um, in it and the people leading it and managing it. And that conveys nicely across the public and the private sectors, because people are at the core of both propositions. Now you have to understand how to keep score in each of those organizations. In the public sector, the score is kept by saying, have you deployed the power given to you in a way that the. The people who gave it to you, the institutions that gave it to you, would be proud or pleased Private sector, it's often profit and loss. But the core issue is how do you motivate the people to deliver the goods? Um, and that then is something that is probably 75, 80%, 90% the same.

Speaker B: So from the Air Force Academy into the Air Force, you did a lot of flying, I understand, there as well.

Speaker A: I did. I was happy once.

Speaker B: Professionally, when you get up there in the air, it's. It's a whole different feeling, isn't is?

Speaker A: Actually, there's this, um. There's this great poem, High Flight, which, uh, talks about slipping the surly bonds of Earth. I didn't quite understand it when I first read it, and I'd never flown before, but once I experienced that, uh, it's like magic. It really is something extraordinary.

Speaker B: I get some of that same feeling when I'm out on the water. It's just me and the water. With you, it's in the air.

Speaker A: So it's a lot, I imagine you do, but add the third dimension and just imagine what that might feel like.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So through the Air Force, you rose through the ranks. What got you into cybersecurity?

Speaker A: Uh, well, at some point I got my first degree was in mechanical engineering. And then I went to graduate school to get a degree, uh, in mechanical engineering at the master's level. Uh, the Air Force always tries to get its officers a master's degree at the earliest possible moment. I wound up winning a fellowship straight out of the Air Force Academy. So I went and did that. But I realized about halfway through that master's program that mechanical engineering didn't make my heart sing. It wasn't the thing that I actually kind of lay awake at night kind of thinking, how can I get my hands around the next mechanical engineering problem? So looking around for another professional discipline that might be a backstop to aviation, which was going to be the central line of my Air Force career. And computers were coming into being at that moment. Um, and it turns out that the world was beckoning for anybody that had any computer science in their background. So I went to night school. I was at that moment stationed at the Naval Academy as an active duty officer. I went to night school up at Johns Hopkins for two years to get a graduate degree in computer science. Loved it. Um, and it turns out when I, um, decided to transfer from the active duty service to the Reserve service, um, the National Security Agency was hiring anybody that had a computer science degree. It turns out I met those qualifications. Um, and so I went to work for nsa, kind of using the computer science background that I had and I never looked back.

Speaker B: And over the years, obviously the cybersecurity aspect of that has become increasingly more important.

Speaker A: I didn't realize when I got to NSA in the early days, that was like in the mid-80s for me, um, that I was working a whole week today would call cyber, um, cyber operations, cyber science, cyber security. It all revolves around the use of digital infrastructure. And so I then spent the majority of my career, um, working by, with and through digital infrastructure. What we might colloquially call the Internet. What then is often called cyber. But they're all the same in terms of the substance of it. And so I've spent my professional life working around that topic, trying to figure out why it matters and how to make it matter to people that actually their hearts don't swell when they hear the word it or cyber. So how do you make it real to them? How do you make it something they

Speaker B: say, well, I care about that, they care about that. And they realize they really need to be careful in what they're doing. Um, because I still think there's so many people, um, in public sector, private sector, personal life that let's just say aren't exactly the savviest and tend to make mistakes and hit things they shouldn't hit. Is that, is that a fair statement?

Speaker A: That's a fair statement. I perhaps, um, generous with them is that, you know, they don't wake up in the morning thinking about it or cyber information technology or cyber. They wake up in the morning thinking, what am I going to do with my day? Right. And so my cyber talks when I give them. I generally start with this question. It's going to be a little bit off putting, but there's a purpose question I start with is, does anyone in the audience know why race cars, high performance cars have bigger brakes and people start checking their watches and their ipod because they thought they were to cyber talk. And all of a sudden we're talking about race cars. And so I answer the question for them. I say, well, race cars have bigger brakes so that they can go faster. It's not about the brakes, it's about the car. And so then I flipped that script and I said, does anybody know why we care about it or cyber not for its own sake, we care about it because of the things that are dependent on it. If you want to follow your grandchildren on social media, if you want to bank online, if you want to reach markets that you can't get to in a physical day, but you're going to the Internet to actually control those Markets to acquire and sell goods and services, then you do care about it. You do care about cyber, not for its own sake, but for the things that are dependent on it. We need to actually have that conversation. And we realize at that moment, 100% of the people kind of alive today do care about it and cyber, just not for its own sake. If I was king or queen for the day, um, and I know that that's a challenged position here in the United States, um, I would outlaw the use of the word cyber or cybersecurity because it's off putting it immediately takes you to the wrong corner of the room.

Speaker B: It's interesting how the correlation with that, and just a common thought can take you down one path or another. If you were to replace cybersecurity, do you have a phrase that you might use?

Speaker A: I use a term. I say digital infrastructure or it, but I never put it kind of on its own. I never have a conversation about it as if it's the main point. Always talk about a dependence on it, a use of it, an abstraction of it. Um, you know, I'll just go a little bit further on that. I know that this isn't intended to be a cyber talk, but. But I say, look, uh, the things that can go wrong in cyberspace or the Internet or in your use of digital infrastructure, your iPad, your computer, classically fall into three buckets, right? Somebody can do something to affect the data that you rely on. Maybe it's the ones and zeros that are your bank account. Um, they can, um, alter your ability to access what you want to access. In time, the network goes down, right? Or, or they perhaps can steal. But those are the foundations, and we actually know how to deal with that. The second thing that can go wrong is that the functions, the critical services that you care about that are dependent on the data and the software and the hardware, uh, they could be missing, or they can be perhaps at risk. Um, your health, your safety, your economic viability, your ability to reach those markets that can be at risk. And the third thing that can go wrong, um, is that your confidence that digital infrastructure will work for you, that cyberspace will work for you, that can be at risk. You can have some doubts that when you flip the light switch, which is dependent on cyber working, right? Most of that is controlled by digital infrastructure. You might have some concern as to whether when you flip that light switch that the lights will go on. Those are related. Those are kind of. They stand on top of one another. And we need to think about all three of Those. But the thing that most humans care about is the critical services and the confidence that goes hand in glove with living in a free and open country that's dependent upon a free and open Internet. And so it's worth making some investments in the underpinning hardware and software and data sets so that you can have confidence you can live the life you want to live. Um, that's how I feel about getting up in the morning and taking care of my IT or my cyber services. Not because I care a whit about those. It's because I care about the things that I want to do that are dependent on that.

Speaker B: And that's a fascinating thing because we do have a lot of listeners here through our podcast that are in the it, uh, help desk arena. So they absolutely need and care about things beyond just the information technology.

Speaker A: There's nobody more popular than an IT specialist at the moment. Your computer doesn't work, but once it does work, those people are out of sight, out of mind. It's an unholy job to have because the only way people care about you is something's gone wrong in their life. And when you make them whole, you very seldom get the kind of reward and gratitude that you should. So my heart goes out to them.

Speaker B: And it's fascinating because you're right. People don't even necessarily know who their help desk is when they get to that point. So here we come to the question, how do you marry the confidence and the learning and the discipline of the information technology and the infrastructure with the human aspect of it? Because they are diametrically different. But how do you pull them together to be able to work so that. And one of the terms I like to use is so that the help desk or the IT and information technology departments are not speaking the geekies to their people that are in the field who don't necessarily understand that. How do you manage m that?

Speaker A: That's an excellent question. And I think you've embedded the answer in IT and all of your podcasts, I think, go to the same place, which is that if you' communicating with that person, you're trying to make something relevant. You need to remember what the fundamentals of communication are. It doesn't matter what the topic is, but you've kind of made that topic IT or cyber First. You need to recognize that as you communicate with them, it's got to be measured kind of in their shoes, communications measured on receipt. So if the communication you're about to have is not about them, if it's about you and it's about it, it's about your side of the business. Then they're immediately going to turn you off. And so you need to say, hey, look, I know what you want to do today using information technology. And so I'm here to actually make it possible for you to do that. That's winning. People will lean into that conversation. Two, you need to make it such that you give them facts kind of information, kind of at the foundations of the conversation that they can deal with. You can't, to your point, talk about geekies or terms that they've never heard before. And three, um, you need to actually come up with some kind of solution or some reconciliation that their receipt sounds fair and reasonable and it's actually going to help, it's going to actually solve the problem. If you do those three things, then it's a great conversation. It's a great communication as measured on receipt, not on send. I'll, uh, just give you an example. I was in a boardroom once when a chief information security officer, that's typically the person in an organization that's responsible for managing and delivering it information technology that works, walked into the board said, hey, I only have a little bit of time. I know it's time is short, so I'll come right to the point. I, that's an interesting way to start a conversation. I, uh, need $5 million to do two factor authentication to prevent cross site scripting. Does anyone have any questions? Well, no one in the room could form a question. No one had any earthly idea what he just said. And of course it was all about him and asking the board to help him solve his problem. Um, he came in the next day after he got some counseling. I'll leave you to guess from who. Um, and he started the conversation way he said, um, I've read the business plan, our business plan, and I understand where we want to do business and what our objectives and aspirations are for the year. And I understand that we want to do business in some places where people pretend to be who they are not. There are some false identities and they pretend to have access to resources that they don't have. For every dollar that you give me, I'll guarantee you $5 of authorized accredited revenue. I'll give you a 1 to 5 proposition. Does anyone have any questions? Well, that person was lifted up onto the shoulders of the board. Kind of rose petals are falling from the ceiling, taken out to a sunny day. I mean, it was a fundamentally different conversation. Why? Because that person started with where the board was used a Language that the board could understand made it about the board saying, I'm here to help you, as opposed to, I need your help to solve my problem. Um, that's never a great place to start a conversation. And having learned that lesson, he got all the money and a little bit more than he needed.

Speaker B: Let's move from individual communication to organizational health. When you come in, there's already a culture that's existing. Uh, or if you're building a team from scratch, you know, how do you get the culture, how do you get the health in the area? That. And it's going to sound bad because now I'm talking about you. How do you do that for the organization itself? What are some of your little magic bullets?

Speaker A: Well, first, it's a great question. First, I think when you come into an organization that you've not been, say, professionally, intimately familiar with, um, you need to take the time to pause and kind of do an assessment without telling people that you're doing an assessment. You don't want to come in and say, I'm immediately suspicious, but you need to get your arms around, is it performing well? And I've always had three questions. Um, my first question is, when you kind of ask everybody in that new organization new to you, uh, what do we do here? Um, if it's a healthy organization, you'll generally get the same answer from everybody. Um, if you have one person tell you that we do math here, and another person says, we do logistics here, and another person says, we do human resources here, and so on and so forth, it's an organization that's not kind of lined up to be coherent and to apply all of those talents down a lane of kind of common aspirations. The second question that I ask is, if you get a yes on the first place, which is, everybody says we do the same thing here. We have a collective shared aspiration. Second question I ask is, um, so what do you do to help make that happen? And if you kind of encounter an individual or a set of individuals who don't know what their contribution is, they don't know how their work actually kind of helps achieve that shared aspiration, that's a problem. And that's typically a problem that's attributable to leadership, not connecting them. And the third question I ask, um, is, um, everyone here merely an employee, or do we all act like owners such that we not simply understand what that shared aspiration is? We kind of know what each of us does to make that happen. But if that's not going well, if there's some difference between kind of our opportunities and our. Kind of our attempt to take advantage of those opportunities. Um, we don't wait for somebody to tell us to fix it. We kind of reach in and we kind of turn that dial in the right way to fix it. Right. So a healthy organization, everyone knows what the shared aspiration is. Everyone knows what contribution they make, and everyone acts like an owner, um, not merely an employee waiting to be told what to do. Now, that third part can sometimes kind of, um, you know, conjure up the idea that you're kind of creating mayhem, that you're going to allow everybody to do what they darn well please. Not if you get the first two parts right. The first part is we have shared aspirations. This is what actually success for us looks like. Um, and they know what their lane is, and you give them some opportunity to actually use that lane for good effect. Then the third part is quite beneficial. And you then equip them with values to say, and here's how you kind of make the choices on our behalf, on the organization's behalf, to get to go. Um, now, I've walked into some organizations where one or more of those questions got a really bad answer. And your job then, as the leader or the manager, is to actually make it such that you can answer those questions in the affirmative. Each of those three questions, it's a mix sometimes of management, which is to kind of assign responsibilities and make that they're synchronized and that they add up to something kind of at least the arithmetic sum of their parts, or leadership, which is fundamentally different. Leadership, in my view, is reframing what's believed to be possible and appropriate to get people to attach themselves to something they thought yesterday or the moment before either wasn't in their job jar or it was not possible. Um, and so a mix of those two is what's required to get that organization in the right place. Um, I've been careful not to say public sector or private sector. I think it works the same in both of those domains because at its core, people are the engine of production. People are kind of what makes the difference between expected or exceptional results.

Speaker B: It's interesting because you're right. Everything at that point comes down to people. And you kind of started to get into. My next question was it's been debated for years, in fact, decades, I guess different people have different philosophies and thoughts on it. And that's the difference between management and leadership. So can you give us a quick synopsis of your view on that? You Kind of alluded to it in the previous answer there, but can you give us your thoughts on that?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'll take it head on. Uh, they often show up in the same person, which is why it's sometimes so confusing. Right. Oftentimes the same person on the top of an org chart is expected to be a manager and a leader. But I think they're, they're profoundly different. Complementary but different. Uh, a manager essentially takes a problem that most people would say, that's a problem and it should be solved, allocates the parts, kind of synchronizes then the results of having allocated responsibilities of all those things that need to get done, and coordinates those so that the problem gets solved. But no one in the room is surprised that that's the problem that we focused on. They might be surprised by the efficiency of the manager, the speed of the manager, the brilliance of the manager. But the manager does the expected work of saying, this is shared work. Let's allocate the parts, synchronize the kind of the various inputs, and let's just get it done. A leader is very different. Uh, a leader essentially walks in and says, here's something that we've not thought about that we need to attach ourselves to, or something that maybe we have thought about and we've kind of thought that we can't do it. They reframe what's believed to be possible and appropriate. And my best example of this is John F. Kennedy when he stepped to the microphone in 1961, and he said to a nation that was suffering kind of, you know, these pangs of kind of doubt and apprehension because of the Sputnik launch a year or two before. He said, I think we should send a man to the moon returning safely to the Earth by the end of this decade. What was most remarkable about that was many of his science advisors said, that's a terrible idea. Do not do that. You will commit us to this road of disaster. We've been blowing up Redstone rockets left and right on the launch pads. So don't do that. Don't commit us to that. Commit us to an incremental approach. Tell us to do what we already know that we can do, and we'll get off and we'll start doing that with kind of an incremental or linear set of progressions. He jumped the shark. He said, no, I actually want to reframe what's believed to be possible and appropriate. He did that literally in a minute. And at that moment, the nation became excited. You know, we were Doing cheetah flips. Our heads exploded with this expectation that we can do something so extraordinary that we can do something that was yesterday believed to be impossible or not appropriate. Uh, I'm, um, serious when I say I took second grade math because of John F. Kennedy. I remember complaining to my dad and my mom that I was taking math in second grade. And so what's the problem with that? I said, well, I took it in first grade and I passed. And my dad said he was very clever. He says, the president, President Kennedy needs you to take math because we're going to put a man on the moon and return safely to the earth. By the end of this decade, I was in. I was hook, line and sinker. I was captured at that moment. That's a leadership kind of prospect as opposed to management. And you need to know when you're kind of like, in a role that does both of those. Um, the difference between those two and when to apply each of those.

Speaker B: Let's just take a little sidebar for a second there. Based on President, uh, Kennedy's quote on that. Where were you in July of 1969 when we actually hit that and landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon?

Speaker A: I was in the backseat of a car in Williamsburg, Virginia, um, with, uh, my parents and a whole bunch of kids were one of six kids. My brother had already gone off to college, so there were five of us. And we had just visited the history of the United States, kind of in a place called Williamsburg. And so that was clear and apparent that that was the backdrop. Um, and then on the radio was this kind of real time dialogue. I can't remember who the moderator was, but I can still remember the words. That's one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind. And just thinking, holy cow, right? That second grade math really worked. I mean, it really panned out, right? I mean, it was just the most extraordinary moment because there was this shared elation of, uh, a nation that we had done this thing. Now, mind you, we all knew that the champions who are out there at the edge of this were the astronauts. But everyone had a role to play. And it was very clear across the years that that's what was going on in the United States against a backdrop that had come so far from Williamsburg and other places kind of in our distant past, and of course, the indigenous kind of foundations of this country before that.

Speaker B: It's fascinating that you bring that part up when we stop to think about the power of the mathematics from m. People like Katherine Johnson and their team of hidden figures from the movie and the story behind that, of them having that knowledge. And what John Glenn said, that he would not go into space until Katherine Johnson verified the computer.

Speaker A: So I've always, it's true, I gave, um, when I was the, uh, chief operating officer of NSA for 2006-14 every year. One of the kind of true pleasures that I had in the fall was to preside over the NSA hall of Honor kind of celebration where you would give out three or four kind of entries into the NSA hall of Honor. Um, people like Joe Rochfort, who solved the kind of Japanese purple machine in World War II and allowed us to win the Battle of Midway. He's in the NSA hall of Honor. And I remember it must have been 2009 or 10, and I think her name was Louise Holmes. I'll, uh, have to go back and check the data. But, but anyway, so this woman who had done remarkable work in the 60s and 70s breaking Soviet ciphers, the old Soviet Union, they were really good at encryption. And she broke those, um, and then allowed us to know something about what the Soviet Union was doing, what threats had constituted to NATO or to the United States, you know, what ill gotten gains did they aspire to kind of acquire. Um, but she broke those. And it wasn't clear to us how she did that. And so I, I asked her after the ceremony, I said, so do you have any secrets? I'm not going to display a secret here on this session, but do you have any secrets for us at NSA about how you did that? She goes, pretty straightforward. I said, well, how'd you do it? She goes, well, I learned to speak Russian. Said, well, clearly. She goes, I then learned to think Russian. I said, well, that's interesting. Yeah, because she said the third thing I needed to do was to think about the hubris, the arrogance that kind of people who manage their systems might exercise so that I could then imagine what mistakes they might make and catch them in it. Maybe not kind of faithfully setting the machine up the right way, or maybe not making a code that would be resilient against the sorts of things that we could do to try to break that code. And I said, so that's what you set yourself up for, right? She goes, and then I just waited for them to make one of those mistakes that I had thought myself through. And I said, how often did they make those mistakes? She goes, every year or two. Imagine that life. Imagine where you're so focused on kind of understanding the foundations of that through the lens of math that you just are, uh, riveted, moment by moment with understanding the totality of that, where you're thinking about trillions of bits going by kind of in the night, and you're looking for that one loose thread, that one anomaly. That's the kind of people that achieve the miracles in the United States that we're so dependent on, who have this singular focus and they understand what the nature of the game is, and they actually apply their time and effort for that. Question, for me, when I was then at nsa, is how do we find people like that? How do we motivate people like that? How do we sustain them across careers when they're never going to make a fortune? Uh, they might some days get free parking, but it's a mile away. Um, they're never going to be celebrated or feeded at the White House or in the New York Times. How do you motivate that kind of, that kind of, uh, a population, a workforce? And the answer at the end of the day is give them an attachment to a mission that matters. Give them something to do that makes them feel like they've spent their power in the most kind of profitable way that they can go to bed at night or kind of go, uh, rest after a long career and say, I did something that matters. I made a difference, um, beyond which, you know, I might have done had I not worked by, with and through that organization.

Speaker B: It is absolutely fascinating because I've heard you use the phrase about, uh, the mission and having some kind of a passion towards that mission several times. Is it possible or is it probable, or should every team within an organization have their own mission that makes it congruent with the overall, and in this case the NSA mission?

Speaker A: I think that's absolutely the case. Uh, that is absolutely the case.

Speaker B: And how would you recommend that a leader today want to start to get people passionate for that mission, develop that mission, develop those core values for their team to move forward?

Speaker A: Well, I'll give you an anecdote and then I'll come back to the main, the main question. Um, so I took over an organization once, was kind of brought in from a distant place, physically distant place, and said, hey, you need to come back and get this organization back on its proper track. It didn't look broken from a distance, and I was familiar with the people in it. So I thought, I'm not sure what you want me to change. And so I said to the person who kind of asked me to do this, I said, so what's broken about it. He goes, you'll figure it out. Um, and that was not helpful. And so I came into that room literally on that first day, um, and at seven o' clock in the morning, we had a meeting of the people that were most closely kind of, um, aligned to me on an org chart. They would have been the next tier, about seven people, meaning in the world that I think of that I most closely supported them. Um, but I asked those three questions that I offered earlier. What do we do here? Right? What's our common aspiration? What do each of you do to make that happen? And what do I do to enable that, to help make that happen? And they all told me, they looked at me like, um, people staring kind of at a distant kind of thing that they couldn't understand. 50 yard stare in the vernacular. And one of them said those, those are not the right questions. We do what you tell us to do. We swear to goodness you will never catch us doing something you've not personally told us to do. Well, I then said, I said, so what do you do when I'm not here? They said, well, we, we wait. We wait for you to come back. I said, well, that'll never work. And one of them said, why not? I said, because I'm not the smartest person in the room. And then somebody else said, well, why did they pick you? I said, I have no idea. I have no idea. If the premise is that I'm the smartest guy in the room, that can't work because I'm not. That a, uh, leader or manager is never the smartest person in the room, at least on all things.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You need to be open to the big ideas, the great ideas, the insights of people that are closer to the edge, closer to where the real work takes place. And so you have to flip that script to say, look, I'm going to help us form the common aspiration, the common challenge. I'm going to give you an assignment, an attachment to that that matters for you, that makes you wake up in the morning and say, I want to run to that. And I'm going to let you, I'm going to expect that you'll be an owner, that you'll actually own that, and that you will exercise initiative and discretion. And if we make mistakes, and we will, I will ask three questions. Were you trying to do the right thing? Um, were you kind of conscientious in the doing of that right thing and can you learn from it? If the answer to that is yes, yes, yes, then your job as A leader manager is to pick that person up, uh, make them whole, hug them if they'll let you, and send them on their way. That's how you get an organization comprised of these enormously different parts because each person is different than the next. That's how you get that organization to achieve something concurrently that exceeds all expectations. Use that diversity, but you channel it through kind of a performance objective as opposed to a scripted objective. You can't tell them precisely how to do it because that robs them of the opportunity to display some degree of initiative. You can and must tell them what the goal is so that they can then apply their initiative, their creativity to that. I remember when I was in my 30s, I was at an NSA meeting. I was a division chief. It's a term of art there probably about 50 to 150 people. And somebody in a town meeting said, Mr. English, what's your definition of empowerment? We were kind of like, perhaps kind of out of real questions. And so he wanted to ask a test question, and I flunked the test. Um, I said something of the form of, um, I allow you to pick the solutions for the problems that I picked. You could hear klaxon going off somewhere in the universe. Um, the person said, well, that's not empowerment, right? That, that's telling us what to do when you. Some days you don't even know what the right questions are because you're not at the edge of the problem space that we work. You're at the center, right? You need to give us the opportunity to figure out what the right questions are according to the shared objectives that you kind of help us frame and form. That was a wonderful kind of lesson for me that I never forgot, you know, which is to kind of focus on the performance objectives, focus on the aspirations, focus on attaching people to that, focus on enabling them to use their discretion, their initiative, and then get out of the way because they will exceed your expectations. I was at the White House for two years as what was called the US National Cyber Director. It was a brand new position. It's created by law in, uh, 2021. And so I did that for two years, and there were about 1,000 people who signed up to join that office of about 150 people. So I needed a discriminating question, not in the negative way that that might sound, but just, you know, how do I actually do the selection? And the question I came up with is I asked everyone, um, what is the purpose of your power right now? Some people gave answers that would scare the Children. Um, I didn't hire them. Um, some people didn't quite understand the question. Um, and some people made your heart swell to two or three times its normal size. I hired all of them. Um, some of the people that I hired couldn't spell or pronounce cibber. They have no idea what it was. But their answers in terms of what they would do with the power that we gave them were so profound, were, um, uh, so inspiring that we hired them. I hired a pediatric dentist, um, who had no prior experience in IT or cyber or the use of digital infrastructure. But she gave the best answer. And so we hired her and she became a rock star in terms of helping the health and human services organization kind of get their house in order with respect to their dependence on digital infrastructure. I think that's true in any organization. Hire people that have bold kind of aspirations that themselves are inspiring about what they would do with whatever authority you give them, and then empower them and get out of their way. Just let them run to daylight. And if you've equipped them properly, they will never disappoint you.

Speaker B: In essence, you have described a lot of what most people would say leadership is, because to be able to empower and lead is. There they go, hand in hand. Am I right?

Speaker A: They do. They do. Uh, most people, as they start their careers, if they're going to kind of take the management track, um, in their early days, most days they're managing. Most days they're kind of doing what has been kind of asked of them and what most people in the organization think is expected of them. And generally you're in meetings where everybody in the room is kind of vertically either ahead of you or below you, but everybody reports to somebody in the room. At some point in your career, you get to a place where most of the people in the room are not in your organization. Uh, they're not upstream of you or downstream of you. Um, they're in parallel organizations. Because you're now in a place where you have to actually, um, contribute what you do to the larger set of organizational functions that achieve something that happens at the corporate level. And at that moment, you have to figure out, how do I get people in the room to collaborate or to achieve a concurrent positive effect effect, not by compelling them to do it, not by demanding that they do it, because none of them have to listen to me, but by essentially using my leadership skills to say, you know, we've got common cause here, we have common aspirations. And so you naturally progress from management to leadership across your career. At the early part of my kind of career at NSA and also in the Air Force, you start off being a follower. You then you kind of move into being a manager. And at some point you have to spend most of your time being a leader. But there's a natural progression there. And those three things complement one another. And if you always kind of try to play them such that you're achieving a one plus one plus one equals 26, um, you won't be disappointed.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's interesting. You said that he begins with the follower. I was going to go down that path. We, uh, had on our guest, uh, Colonel Nicole Malachowski, retired from the Air Force, the first Thunderbird pilot. One of the first things she said was, in order to be a great leader, you have to understand how to be a great follower. She says her days in high school and at the Air Force Academy and her early days in the Air Force as a follower were the most powerful for her to be able to develop that.

Speaker A: That's absolutely true for all the reasons you suggest. And perhaps one more, which is you get to observe what works well and what doesn't.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And you need to actually kind of put those in your book of, you know, note to self, that doesn't work well. Note to self. That was inspiring. Right. And try to then to kind of emulate that each of us is different. We won't be able to perfectly emulate the leader that we found so inspiring. I'll never be John F. Kennedy, but. But I can understand what was his effect on me. Kind of was, um, and, and try to figure out how do I have that same effect or something approaching that same effect on others.

Speaker B: And then I'm also reminded of the quote, uh, from Admiral James B. Stockdale, about empowerment and basically empowering people to be able to do their job so well that they, in effect, do away with the needs of your job.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: Strange as it sounds, that's never going to happen because you're never going to be out of a follower when you do that. And I just. I found that quote from Admiral, uh, Stockdale just fascinating.

Speaker A: I love that quote, and I loved him. I thought he was terrific. And one of the things that I thought was particularly remarkable about him was he read widely. Right. So he might have been in a particular set of disciplines. Aviator, military officer. And so he studied up, and he was expert on those, but he studied broadly in terms of the history, um, of the world, the history of our presumed adversaries, and so on and so forth. Such that he could read the room, he could read kind of the environment that we were in and help attach people who might be on one edge or another of that right to that common cause. Um, and in so doing make them forget about him because they were now focused on the common aspiration.

Speaker B: I could keep going on this for a long time. This has been fascinating and all the little nuggets, uh, that you've been able to share with us as we get ready to close. I have one question, question and that is very simply. If you were to give a new leader coming into a frontier or a secondary level manager's leaders position, what two or three things would you give them and ask them and suggest that they do?

Speaker A: Well, I'd start with something I'd said earlier which is remember if leadership is the question you've asked me, as opposed to management, you can manage things, but you can only lead people, right? So remember that people are the point, the people want to matter, people are people and the people are different. Different from one another and possibly different from you. And you need to meet them where they are and take them where they wouldn't go without you, right? And so if you think of that as your leadership charge and then you have all of the little models in your mind's eye about what, uh, what constitutes an effective organization, you know, how can I reward, incentivize, inspire people to achieve what they must, um, then the rest of it just falls out. But you have to start with that central thesis. Um, and if you don't have models that help you along the path, I've offered some, um, they may not work for everybody, they may not work for anybody except me. But if you don't have models, then you'll stumble around in the dark not knowing what is going to happen with some inject, some kind of stimulus you give to the organization. So think through what the cause and effect is of your power and start with the premise of you have power and understand what is the purpose of that power. You'll change your mind over time. You'll kind of understand that it's kind of more satisfying to you to use it in one fashion or another. But wake up every morning and actually consciously put that thought before you. What is the purpose of your power?

Speaker B: That's a fascinating question because it's a very self reflecting question and most people wouldn't necessarily think to go there.

Speaker A: But they answer that question every day. They may not have asked it, but they answer it every day. Because when somebody meets you, uh, we all know that We've come into contact with somebody who's fresh out of nirvana or has just come from Mordor. We know that you can feel it in the first 10, 15 seconds, that person has answered the question about what the purpose of their power is. They may or may not have thought about it, and therefore it might not be the kind of the reflection that they want the other party to have, but they answer that question every day. So I would offer ask it right, and then kind of deliver the answer that you choose to kind of, um, answer it with, as opposed to just stumbling through life and sending messages to people that are not intended on your part.

Speaker B: Well, Chris, thanks very much for joining us on the, uh, Teamwork Advantage podcast. Your information has been powerful, it's been helpful, and I'm sure folks are going to want to get dive a little bit deeper into a lot of what you said, so I appreciate your time being with us today. Folks, you know that the Teamwork Advantage is a podcast that is dedicated to the development and growth in teamwork, leadership and culture. The ideas that Chris has given us today can certainly help you in those areas. Until next time, remember, make every day excellent and exceptional because you deserve it. Take care. Bye. Bye.

Speaker A: You've been listening to the Teamwork Advantage with Greg Gregory. Be sure to, like, subscribe and activate the Bell icon to be notified of future episodes. To learn more about how Greg can help your organization develop a powerful, winning culture, visit teamsrock.com that's teamsrock.com.