By Jim Garamone
DoD News Features, Defense Media Activity
About a thousand airmen at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, received a
master class in leadership from three proven leaders Thursday.
Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
Duke Basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski; and USA Basketball Chair and Managing
Director Jerry Colangelo shared their experiences and philosophies as part of
the Hoops for Troops partnership between USA Basketball and DoD.
ESPN’s Jay Bilas served as the facilitator of the discussion.
Dempsey is the highest-ranking service member in DoD and has commanded at
every level of the military. Coach Krzyzewski’s Duke teams have won five NCAA
Championships, and he coached USA Basketball to two Olympic gold medals.
Colangelo, a sports mogul, revived USA Basketball after some disappointing
international competitions, and he fashioned the teams that have gone 75-1
during his tenure.
Expertise, Humility, Courage
Krzyzewski and Colangelo agreed with Dempsey’s listing of the attributes
of a good leader – expertise, humility and courage. Expertise is important
because people need to be able to do their jobs, Dempsey said.
“I’m not going anywhere near that airplane unless I have confidence that
somebody in this hangar knows how to maintain it or, if you’re the pilot, you
want to know for sure that your maintenance chief has the expertise necessary
to allow you to take that platform into combat,” he said. The military is not a
world that accepts mediocrity.
The second attribute is humility, which Dempsey called the foundation of
trust. “If we have a relationship based on humility, and it leads to trust,
trust becomes relationships, and relationships then allow you to actually
understand the leader-to-led aspect of our business,” he said.
The third attribute is courage, the chairman said. While physical courage
is important, just as important is moral courage, he said. “Do the right thing when
nobody’s looking,” he said.
Leadership: A Team Sport
All three men stressed that leadership is a team sport – meaning everyone
needs to cultivate leadership traits.
“In the United States military, we consider ourselves to be the
preeminent leader development institution … in the world, really,” Dempsey
said. “Every one of those young men and women out there has the potential to
become the chief of staff of the Army or the senior enlisted adviser to the
chairman or … the chief of staff of the Air Force.”
Dempsey said the military’s motivation is to protect the nation, but
military members are inspired by each other. He noted that the youngest Marine
killed in the attack on a recruiting post in Chattanooga, Tennessee – Lance
Cpl. Squire Wells – was not running out of the building, but running into it to
protect his fellow Marines.
“That’s what inspiration looks like in the military,” he said.
Leadership is about getting everyone on a team to contribute, Krzyzewski
said. He asks his teams if two is better than one? “And the guys say, ‘Yes, two
is better than one,” he said. “Not necessarily. Two is only better than one if
two can act as one.”
Everybody Can Be A Leader
That’s leadership in a nutshell for Krzyzewski. What leadership does is
get the unit or team to act as one. “I understand that you all are different
ranks, but everybody can be a leader,” he said.
Krzyzewski, who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1969, said
the best leadership stories are not from the generals, but “from that private,
from that sergeant, from that lieutenant. Your leadership is not about your
rank. Every one of you can be leaders, and that’s when a unit is really good,
when everyone … contributes.”
Colangelo said leadership can sometimes be the willingness to fail while
taking a calculated risk. “When I think about the three of us who are sitting
up here from different backgrounds but very similar – an Irish background of
immigrants, Italian, Polish – it just illustrates that in this country it
doesn’t matter where you are, who you are, what your beginnings are; the sky is
the limit, if you shoot for that star, if you’re willing to take some risks,”
he said.
“To me, leadership in that framework is the willingness to fail, knowing
that in order to get to your objective, you may have to fall first,” he
continued. “Most of us would say that we learned more from our defeats than we
did our victories. That’s certainly been the case in my life.”
Need for Balance
Dempsey spoke about the need for balance between personal ambition and
humility. “I want you to be ambitious inside … the left and right limits … of
what’s best for your unit and your country,” he said.
Humility does not mean meek and does not preclude competition. But there
must be a balance, the general said. “I want you to be both ambitious and
competitive,” he said.
In motivating people and units it’s best to be yourself, Dempsey said.
“There’s nothing worse than someone who’s incapable of being George Patton
trying to be George Patton,” he said. “You’ve seen it – normally you end up
with a bunch of four-letter words strung together that end with a hoo-ah or
something. And it doesn’t make it right.”
Personal Example
The chairman gave a personal example from when he commanded the 1st
Armored Division in Iraq in 2004. Many units in the division had already
redeployed back to Germany when Baghdad exploded. The only solution was to
bring those units back and extend those still in country.
“I started going around from unit to unit and explaining … why it was
important for us to do this, that we wouldn’t do it, if it wasn’t important,”
he said. “At one point I remember this one guy in the front row, kind of
fidgeting. I said have I said something that upsets you in some way? And he
said, ‘no, sir.’ But he said, ‘Look, I’ll tell you, we trust you. If you tell
us it’s important enough to stay, we’re with you.’
“I’ll tell you, I was so moved by that, you know, that we had the kind of
trust,” he continued. “And that – by the way, that’s about as much motivation
as anyone could possibly build.”
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