Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Welcome back for the amazing afternoon sessions.

Up next will be Admiral John Richardson. Over the years, his name came up over and over again in my conversations with Dr. Steven Spear, and I was so delighted last year when I was finally able to meet him.

I had the privilege of interviewing him for four hours on 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 was delighted that he was willing to give a talk here to teach us about leadership development.

I cannot think of a better person to teach us this. Admiral Richardson served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years, which is the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Navy, overseeing the efforts of over 600,000 people.

Before that, he served as the Director of U.S. Naval Reactors, which is comprehensively responsible for the safe and reliable operation of the U.S. Nuclear Propulsion Program, which Dr. Spear has written so extensively about in his book The High Velocity Edge.

Now that he is retired from the U.S. Navy, he serves on the board of directors of 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 is Admiral Richardson in two parts. The first is a lecture that he gave earlier this year at the Europe Conference, and the second is an interview that I did with him last week to learn more about what leadership development looks like in the military, and how it can be applied to help any leader, especially in times like now.

Admiral John Richardson

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 have spent more than 11 years underwater. I commanded at pretty much every level in the Navy, including the commander of the U.S. submarine force. I was the Director of Naval Reactors, which was Admiral Rickover's job, if you know about him. Then I finished my time in the Navy as the Chief of Naval Operations.

Since retiring, I have been part of a number of different corporate boards, doing some consulting and helping other teams deal with this quickly accelerating situation. A couple of questions I get asked most often are: how can we achieve objectives or results at speed? And how, as a leader, might we address both leader and worker fatigue, particularly as COVID has gone on much longer than any of us anticipated?

My answer to both questions is roughly the same. 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.

To illustrate that, I will start with a sea story. In one week in October 2016, 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, on the northern side was the coast of Yemen, and the destroyer was attacked by coastal cruise missiles fired from Yemen. They were attacked not once, but three times.

This involves reaction times in seconds. The ship successfully defended herself not once, but three times, and in one of those times put together an effective counterattack. That combination of defense and counterattack takes tremendous coordination by the crew on board the ship, by the ship with its task force, and by that task force with the larger command and leadership elements of the nation. It requires a full team approach from the strategic all the way down to the very tactical edge. Even on board the ship, it involves several teams working in a symphony of coordination.

Another thing that is noteworthy is that on a couple of those attacks, the actions on board the ship were not directed by the ship's commanding officer. 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. That is the way we do 24/7 high-impact operations on board a ship. We put junior officers on duty so the captain can perform other duties and 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. If that ship had failed, and one of those attacks had been successful, that situation would have escalated from the tactical situation in that strait all the way up to become a global crisis.

For a non-military listener, I think that story has relevance. It is the same question: how can we achieve objectives at speed, and how can we do so at tempo over time without experiencing chronic fatigue? For us, it came down to the fundamental matter of leader development.

As I have talked to teams both in and outside the government, I have found a lack of a very deliberate approach to developing leaders who would be able to act throughout the organization at that level of confidence and responsiveness. The United States Navy really is a leadership factory. We bring in about 40,000 sailors every year from all over the country and all over the world. As junior 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 is that if you want to be competitive, if you want to achieve objectives at speed, if you want to seize 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 starts by determining the attributes you want your leaders to have. That will differ for every organization. The essential qualities of your leader are highly dependent on the mission of your organization. That is the goal your system has to be tuned for. We conceived of a road leading to that objective with three lanes.

The first lane is competence. Competence is essential to being an effective leader. You have to know your job. Otherwise, as sincere and dedicated as you are, you will not know right from wrong when you see it.

We also spent a tremendous amount of time understanding and building the character and integrity of our leaders. As we delegated and pushed authority out to the edge of the organization, remote from any kind of central command and control, it was important that we knew those leaders would act consistent with the values of the organization.

The third lane is connections, so we had confidence that those leaders, if they ran into a problem or a situation that perhaps their training had not prepared them for, would reach back. They would not hesitate to reach back to get more information, more guidance, or more support in order to execute the mission effectively.

Through competence, character, and connections, we developed the trust and confidence that allowed top leaders to work with the leadership team and push authority and ownership of the mission to the furthest possible edge.

This sharing is very important. As you walk in as the leader of a team, there is no doubt in anybody's mind who is the boss. You do not have to stress and emphasize your authority. Just the contrary: you need to think hard about how to provide guidance to your team that allows them to go out with full ownership of their mission and execute without having to come back and borrow from your authority.

We thought of ownership in four components. One is competence: to own a mission, you have to understand what it is about. You also have to have responsibility. There will be an element of accountability. But the most difficult thing to achieve is delegating the authority necessary to execute the mission. How many of us have been given a mission, been held responsible when it did not go well, and then realized we never really got delegated the authority to do the mission the way we wanted?

That is the toughest thing to let go as a senior leader: that sense of authority. You need a lot of trust and confidence to really delegate ownership of the mission to your leadership team. By deliberately developing leaders with attributes tuned to your organization, by building competence, character, and connections, you gain the trust and confidence to push ownership of the mission to the most capable and furthest edge of the organization.

By doing so, and by giving commander's guidance, telling people what you want to achieve but not how they will achieve it, you will unleash their creativity. They will come back with ideas you never would have dreamed of on your own, but that are far more effective than whatever you might have had in mind. The whole team rises up on the shoulders of these creative leaders who, with trust, confidence, and full ownership of their mission, do it in super creative ways.

Thank you all very much.

Q&A

01Gene Kim

Thank you so much for that lecture, John. I have watched it numerous times, and I always get something out of it. I am delighted that you were willing to answer even more questions about leadership development.

I have heard many military leaders talk about how much they have invested in and benefited from leadership development, and their observation that corporate leaders have comparatively little. I have noticed that most admirals and generals seem to have a graduate degree on top of their university degree, as well as multiple years of leadership training. Is that observation correct? What are leaders taught from mid-grade leaders to flag officers, and what do you think is important for them to learn as they advance?

02Admiral John Richardson

You are exactly accurate. Just about every officer, particularly by the time they reach mid-grade or senior grade, is going to have some kind of graduate degree. The Navy was very kind to me. They sent me to graduate school twice: to get an electrical engineering degree from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and then to get a degree in national security strategy, which was appropriate for the jobs I would be doing as a more senior officer.

That is another indication of the commitment the services have to continuous learning and leader development. As I think about leader development, these things come in cycles, and you lock into different parts of the arc that a leader takes during their career. I describe it in terms of progressions from one job to another.

In a typical 35-year service career, most jumps are just a bigger version of the job before. If you were running a division, your next job might be to run a department. But there are some jobs that are discontinuous, nonlinear jumps. In a 35-year career, there may be five.

The first is when you first join the service. Many officers and enlisted people come in from military education, whether ROTC, one of the service academies, or Junior ROTC, but by and large their performance has depended on themselves: grades, athletic performance, individual development. The nonlinear jump is that, as they move into service, they are immediately put in charge of a small team. Now you have to change your habits of thinking and behavior. You have to put your team first. If you are hungry, you now think about getting your team something to eat first. If you are tired, you can count on the team being more tired, so you find them an opportunity to rest. If you are frustrated because of missing information, the team is even more frustrated, so you bring them together and share what you know. The nonlinear aspect is thinking of somebody else, a team, before yourself. You start to be assessed on the performance of your team more than on individual performance.

After maybe ten years, the next nonlinear jump is when you take command. Up to that point, if you had a question or challenge, you could usually turn to someone senior and ask what to do. As a submariner, we operated pretty much alone. When I first took command, I felt that difference in nature of the assignment. Somebody would turn to me and ask what to do, and the impulse to turn to someone else was gone. The buck stopped with me. In the control room, if something unexpected or urgent happened, every eye turned to me. That is a real change in nature.

The next nonlinear jump is major command, when you are commanding a squadron of ships or submarines and you are now commanding commanders. How do you preserve and enhance their ability to command effectively? You draw them out rather than reaching down in. There is a temptation to reach down in and do what you know needs to be done, but that will not build your commanders or make them more effective. Information technology has increased that temptation exponentially because it is so much easier to reach down in.

If commanders never feel the sense that the decision is theirs, that they have to wrestle the pros and cons, risks, opportunities, and course of action to the ground on their own, they will be underdeveloped. You have to look for opportunities to let them do that, recognizing that it likely will not be the way you would do it. There are many ways to success. If you see it going sideways, you ask leading questions that make it their solution rather than yours.

Major command is also command at a distance. Up to that point, you have usually been physically close to the team you are commanding. Now there is physical separation. How do you communicate your intent and get meaningful feedback that the intent is being manifested? Many major commanders who think they can succeed by being a super version of a commanding officer end up having trouble.

The next nonlinear jump is at the three-star level. You are responsible for a tremendously big part of the Navy's success, whether a fleet or a major region. The Navy counts on you to manage your resources, manage your mission, and square those two off. At the three-star level, there may be a relief valve to the four-star. At the four-star level, there is no relief valve. You have to manage it all.

The leader development program is attuned to those jumps: junior officers learn to lead a team, basic leadership and tactical teams with lots of competency development; more senior leaders lead bigger teams; command means responsibility for the whole thing, often with nobody to turn to; major command means commanding commanders; very senior levels mean balancing resources and solving very complex problems.

03Gene Kim

You were talking about the need for leaders to exercise appetite suppression. You had told me previously an amazing story about radar operators on a submarine who, because they do not get a lot of practice, would often require multiple levels of supervision and approval.

04Admiral John Richardson

That is a band-aid fix: fixing the symptom rather than the problem. Radar operators need practice on a submarine because most of the time we are submerged and not using the radar. I saw too many times when the submarine was on the surface using the radar, and the radar operator might not remember an aspect of it or might still be inexperienced.

The response was to put a supervisor behind the radar operator to look over his shoulder. Then, if something did not go right, the response would be to put maybe another supervisor. You get a daisy chain. The radar operator thinks, if I mess up, the supervisor will catch it. The supervisor thinks, I hope the radar operator knows what he is doing, and if it messes up, the supervisor of supervisors will catch it. Shared responsibility starts to emerge, which is never good.

Rather than saying, take a timeout, train the radar operators to do their job properly, and then provide the appropriate amount of supervision, it is always a temptation.

05Gene Kim

That will resonate deeply with the technology community, where people need approval from distant authorities or committees to get done what needs to get done.

You mentioned important times in history where there is an inflection point due to a confluence of major changes in strategy and technology. Dr. Steven Spear taught us about the learning war last year. Around 150 years ago, ships moved from wind power and cannons on the side of the hull to oil power and modern artillery, and there was a strategic change as well. That required a massive distributed learning dynamic to figure out how to use these technologies to compete in the new strategic goals. It seems similar to what is happening now around digital disruption and software as a critical capability. Does that resonate with you? It seems like we need leaders more than ever.

06Admiral John Richardson

I could not agree more. We are at a dual inflection point with very few precedents in history. The global strategic situation is changing in a major way; the power balance is realigning. Simultaneously, there is a tremendous technological revolution.

At the turn of the 1900s, the Industrial Revolution was manifesting itself at sea, and the United States reached a point where, if it was going to continue to prosper, it had to go offshore and reach overseas markets in a dynamic and vigorous way. It moved into the position of a world-leading country, assuming that from the United Kingdom. The Navy responded vigorously. We stood up the Naval War College and the Naval Postgraduate School so we could better address the strategic challenge of being a global navy rather than a coastal navy that does excursions.

The team that got that most right set the terms of the debate until the mid-21st century. This digital revolution is as significant as the Industrial Revolution or the Atomic Revolution. The consequence for leadership is that we have a new situation on our hands. The skills, competencies, connections, and character that made us successful up to now may or may not apply going forward. They may or may not survive this major inflection. The most successful leaders recognize that they need to pause and study the new situation in detail to make sure they understand it, and that their structure and approach going forward will continue to be relevant.

07Gene Kim

One pattern we have seen at DevOps Enterprise is the magic that happens when a revolution is energetically driven by the bottom and middle up, and recognized and supported from the top down. One case study was Target, where Brett Craig provided the mandate and air cover that allowed Luke Reddig to lead a small cross-functional team in fresh foods. It was high stakes, with doubters, and success created skills that helped them navigate COVID. It reminded me of Team of Teams, where General Stanley McChrystal asked whether his forces were achieving the mission of dismantling the terrorist network in Iraq in 2004 and concluded no, which led to sweeping changes. It seems that in both cases you need courageous leaders at mid-level and senior levels. Does that resonate, and how could better leadership development increase the likelihood of these right things happening?

08Admiral John Richardson

It does resonate. General McChrystal did exactly that, and the team at Target is inspirational: to say, what we are doing right now is not as effective as I need it to be. McChrystal said it takes a network to defeat a network, and that drove him to reorganize and change how he organizes, trains, and equips his force. That was a major change.

That is the leader's responsibility. Einstein said that if given an hour, he would take 55 minutes and study the problem. During that time it feels like nothing is happening and the curve feels flat. But once you start addressing the problem with a much deeper understanding, you get nonlinear, exponential takeoff and become effective very fast.

In addition to senior leadership leading the effort of examining the problem, I have found that the junior members of the team are ready to be led here. You need to provide a connection between senior leadership and lower levels of the team, adopting the same ideas, thinking, approach, and even language. Once junior leaders say they adopt it, are all in, and will make it part of their leadership approach, it meets in the middle. Middle management sees it almost as inevitable: I can see the writing on the wall, let's all get in this. Both top-down and bottom-up are keys to success.

09Gene Kim

Thank you so much, John. I cannot overstate how much I learn in every interaction. I am excited by what you are working on now. Can you talk about what that is and the opportunity you are making available tomorrow?

10Admiral John Richardson

I hope everybody gets a chance to join in. I will be joined by my colleague, Navy Captain Emily Bassett, and we will try to do a live workshop online that takes part of the leader development framework and focuses on it. In the areas of connections, competence, and character, the three major muscle movements of the framework, we will provide discussion on why we centered on each of them. Then we will ask the audience to participate and make it specific to them. We will have questions they can address, which will make it personal and relevant.

On the back end, we will talk about techniques for improving your connections, your competence, and your character as a leader with your team. We want to continue this discussion even after tomorrow's session. To continue participating, send an email to brainydeep@sendyourslides.com with the subject Leaders. You will get an automated response, and that will get you in the group. We will continue providing material for you to comment on, and we value your participation.

Gene, thank you so much for this opportunity. I cannot tell you the extent of my gratitude for you including me in this. It is a thrill to be part of this.

11Gene Kim

Right back at you. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and wisdom with all of us. To be continued. Thank you, John.

12Admiral John Richardson

All right. Bye.