Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Thank you, Leanne and Mark.

Over the years, Admiral John Richardson's name has come up over and over again in my conversations with Dr. Steven Spear, and I was so delighted that I was able to finally meet him last year. I had the privilege of interviewing him for four hours on my podcast, the IDEALCast, earlier this year, and I learned so much from him. So much of what he talked about I thought was relevant to not just every technology leader, but every leader.

I'm so delighted that he was willing to give a talk here to teach us about leadership development. I can't think of a better person to teach us this, because Admiral Richardson served as the Chief of Naval Operations for four years, which is the highest-ranking officer in the US Navy, overseeing the efforts of over 600,000 people. In that role, he worked with the chiefs of navies from almost every European country.

Before that, he served as the Director of US Naval Reactors, which is comprehensively responsible for the safe and reliable operation of the US Navy nuclear propulsion program, which Dr. Spear has written about so extensively in his book, "The High Velocity Edge."

Now that he's retired from the US Navy, he serves on the board of directors for numerous companies, including Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, and Exelon, a Fortune 100 company which operates the largest fleet of nuclear plants in America.

Here's Admiral Richardson.

Admiral John Richardson

Well, Gene, thank you very much for that terrific introduction, and thanks for asking me to be here for this unbelievable forum.

As Gene said, I just finished a 37-year career in the Navy. I retired about 18 months ago. During that career, I was a submariner by trade, and when we did the math after I retired, it turned out that I've spent more than 11 years underwater. And so I've got that going for me.

I commanded at pretty much every level in the Navy, including the commander of the US submarine force. I was the director of naval reactors, which was Admiral Rickover's job, if you know about him. And then finished my time in the Navy as the Chief of Naval Operations.

Since retiring, I've been part of a number of different corporate boards, doing some consulting and helping other teams really deal with this quickly accelerating situation. In fact, the couple of questions that I get asked most often are, "How can we achieve objectives or results at speed?" And then, "How, as a leader, might we address both leader and worker fatigue?" Particularly as COVID has gone on much, much longer than any of us anticipated.

My answer to both of those questions is roughly the same, and the answer involves a radical pushing of ownership of the mission out to the farthest capable edge of your organization.

This radical delegation, if you will, is really the essence of effective naval power, where the Navy will send a captain and his or her crew over the horizon with a mission, with very little oversight, give you a big chunk of assigned water, and expect you to come back with that mission accomplished, and also come back with a team that is better in every respect than the team that you left, stronger in every respect.

Maybe to illustrate that, I thought I'd start with a sea story. There was a one-week period in October of 2016 where the United States, at the highest levels of government, had decided to send a destroyer from the East Coast of the United States to the Middle East. Part of that journey was a transit through the Straits of Bab el-Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea. This was an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, a very advanced warship.

As the destroyer went through the Straits of Bab el-Mandeb, on the northern side of that strait was the coast of Yemen, and the destroyer was attacked by coastal cruise missiles fired from the coast of Yemen. In fact, they were attacked not once, but three times.

This involves, really, reaction times in seconds. This ship successfully defended herself, not once, but three times, and in one of those times, put together an effective counterattack.

Now, this combination of defense and counterattack takes tremendous coordination by the crew, the crew on board the ship, and also a coordination of the ship with its task force, and also that task force with the larger command and leadership elements of the nation. It requires, really, a full team approach from the strategic all the way down to the very tactical edge. It eventually, even on board the ship, involves several teams working really in a symphony of coordination.

Another thing that's noteworthy is that even on board the ship, the actions on board that ship were not directed by the ship's commanding officer on a couple of those attacks. The entire response of the ship was coordinated by a much more junior leader, the officer of the deck, who was controlling the ship at that time.

It's just the way that we do 24/7 high-impact operations on board a ship. We've got to be operating all hours of the day while we're underway. So we put junior officers on duty so that the captain can perform the other duties that he or she is responsible for, and also, of course, importantly, get some rest.

Even though we had delegated that mission to a junior officer, we had also given that officer full ownership of the situation. That officer had the expertise and the authority to execute the responsibilities to defend the ship.

You can imagine that if that ship had failed in any regard, and one of those attacks had been successful, how quickly that situation would have escalated from the very tactical situation in that strait all the way up to become a global crisis.

I thought it would be illustrative to think about how our young people navigate their way through these trying circumstances, and what are the conditions that must pertain to allow this successful execution of such an important mission way out on the edge of the organization of the United States Navy and the United States itself.

For a non-military listener, for all of you on this call, I think that this story has relevance. It's really the same question that I get: How can we achieve our objectives at speed, and how can we do so at tempo over time without experiencing chronic fatigue? What are the essential elements, both in and out of the government, that allow you to do this successfully?

For us, it came down to the fundamental matter of leader development. As I've talked to a lot of teams, both in and outside the government, what I have found is that there is a lack of a very deliberate approach to developing the leaders that would be able to act throughout the organization at that level of confidence and responsiveness. So I thought I'd spend today about how we approach developing those leaders.

The United States Navy really is a leadership factory. We bring in about 40,000 sailors every year from all over the country, in fact, all over the world. And as junior as they are and inexperienced as they are when they join, in a very short period of time, they are leading other sailors almost before they know it.

My message in this talk is that if you want to be competitive, if you want to be achieving objectives at speed, if you want to be seizing every fleeting opportunity that comes your way, your organization must think deliberately about how it develops its leaders. This is not something that happens on its own.

The framework for achieving this, as we thought through it, was, first, we wanted to determine what were the attributes that we wanted our leaders to have. That's going to differ for every different organization. The essential qualities of your leader are going to be highly dependent upon the mission of your organization, what you want to do. It's very specific. But that's the goal that your system has to be tuned for.

If that's the objective, we sort of conceived of a road leading to that objective that has three lanes.

The first lane involves competence, and I would think that there'd be very little in terms of arguing that competence is absolutely essential to being an effective leader. You've got to know your job. Otherwise, as sincere and dedicated as you are, you're not going to know right from wrong when you see it. So competence, absolutely necessary.

We also spent a tremendous amount of time understanding and building the character and integrity of our leaders. It was important that as we delegated and pushed this authority out to the edge of the organization, remote from any kind of central command and control, that we knew that those leaders would be acting consistent with the values of the organization. So we spent a lot of time on character development.

Finally, the third lane involves the idea of connections, so that we had a sense of confidence that those leaders, if they ran into a problem, if they ran into a situation that they didn't recognize, that perhaps their training hadn't prepared them for, that they would reach back. They wouldn't hesitate to reach back to get more information, perhaps more guidance, more support, in order to execute their mission effectively.

It was by virtue of this three-lane path towards developing our leaders through competence, through character, and through connections, that really developed this sense of trust and confidence that allowed the superior leaders, the top leaders, to work with the leadership team and push that authority out, to push that ownership of the mission out to the furthest possible edge.

Now, this sharing is also very important. What we try to train our leaders is that, as you walk in as the leader of that team, there is no doubt in any of your team's mind who's the boss. You don't have to worry about stressing and emphasizing your authority. Just to the contrary, you need to think hard about how you're going to provide guidance to your team that would allow them now to go out with full ownership of their mission and execute without having to come back and borrow from your authority.

You want to do that radical delegation. You want to give them full ownership. We thought of ownership in terms of having four components. One goes back to that idea of competence. In order to own that mission, you've got to understand what it's about. Enough said about that.

You've also got to have responsibility, and I think that everybody on this call would agree with that. Certainly, there's going to be an element of accountability in ownership. But the most difficult thing to achieve is actually delegating the authority that's necessary to execute the mission.

How many of us have been in a situation where we've been given a mission, and perhaps that situation didn't go well, it didn't turn out the way that we wanted, and we were held responsible for that result? But when we reviewed it, we never really got delegated the authority to do the mission in the way that we wanted.

That's the toughest thing really to let go as a senior leader, that sense of authority. You've got to have a lot of trust and confidence in order to achieve that, and really delegate ownership of that mission to your leadership team.

By virtue of doing that, by deliberately developing leaders with the attributes that are tuned to your organization, by building their competence, by building their character, and ensuring that they're appropriately connected, that will give you the trust and confidence that will permit you to then push ownership of the mission out to the most capable and furthest edge of your organization.

By doing so, what you'll find, it's been a consistent result of mine, is that by giving them that commander's guidance, if you will, that guidance of what you hope for them to achieve, telling them what you want to achieve but not how they will achieve it, you will find that you'll unleash their creativity, that they will come back to you with ideas that you never would've dreamed of on your own, but that are far more effective than whatever you might have had in mind.

The whole team will just rise up on the shoulders of all these creative leaders, who, with this trust and confidence and full ownership of their mission, will do it in super creative ways.

Now, as I bring to close, I have a question for you, and I'm asking for your help. I'd like to continue to refine and sharpen these ideas, particularly as they might apply to a corporate context. If you're willing, I'd like to invite you to join me in being part of that process.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to build a mailing list. I'm going to start a mailing list. I'll post the details on Slack right now, and if you're interested in coming along with me on this journey, sharpening these things into something that would be even more useful for leaders in corporations in the private sector, please sign up and I'll be happy to have you aboard.

Thank you all very much.