Host Intro (Gene Kim)

[00:00:07.200] I cannot overstate just how much I've learned from Admiral John Richardson over the last year, who Dr. Steven Spear introduced me to. He 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. He currently serves on numerous public boards, including Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, and Exelon, a Fortune 100 company, which operates the largest fleet of nuclear plants in America. I got to interview him for four hours on the "Ideal Cast," and he gave a lecture to this community in April, and to the larger DevOps Enterprise community in October. For me, one of the most remarkable moments of that conference was a one-hour workshop that he did on leader development with Captain Emily Bassett. So, among other achievements, Captain Emily Bassett served as the commanding officer of the littoral combat ship, USS Manchester. She was the reactor officer for the USS Gerald Ford, leading 300 nuclear-trained sailors to operate and maintain the US Navy's newest nuclear propulsion plant on a first-in-class aircraft carrier.

[00:01:14.120] And an email from her led to a significant change in Admiral Richardson's Navy Leader Development Framework 2.0 document, which he published as CNO, which shows up prominently in version 3.0. I know that those from this community who attended that workshop last October were as astounded and blown away as I was. In my conversations, three reasons kept on coming up as to why. One, we all thought it was profound, meaning we all felt that we got to experience something important and fundamental. Two, what they were teaching seemed so contrary to status quo. And three, it was so credible given the gravity of the context that these lessons were forged in. So, as amazing as that workshop was, due to a mistake that I made, we didn't record that session. So, I am so grateful that Admiral Richardson and Captain Bassett were willing to record this workshop again to teach us something that is so important to the technology leadership community. You will all have received a one-page worksheet that they will be referring

[00:02:18.740] to. You can find it also below in the slides link, and I highly recommend that you print it out or have it available on a tablet so you can complete these exercises as we go. And as you'll see, I fill out my worksheet both times that I got to attend this. I can personally attest to the startling effectiveness of some of the patterns that Captain Bassett teaches, and I'll share a very specific example at the end of the session. So, here is Admiral Richardson and Captain Bassett.

Admiral John Richardson

[00:02:45.700] Hey, Gene. Thanks for that absolutely fantastic introduction, and it's such a pleasure for Captain Emily Bassett and I to be here to share this time with you. And we're going to spend the next hour in a dynamic and participative exercise to really share with you the distilled lessons that Emily and I have come up with in terms of what is important to deliberately develop leaders in an organization. Teams are just absolutely ravenously hungry for good leadership because they want to be well-led. Leaders should want to lead to make their teams better, to make each of the individuals healthier, to keep them on the team, right? Make them want to come back and continue to work for that team, and be intrinsically motivated. So, good leadership at that level is important now as it always has been, right? But I think there's a couple of things that are new as well today. One is that, hey, the world is getting very complex, right? And some of the leadership approaches in

[00:03:55.200] the past may or may not serve us in this accelerating, increasingly complex world. And so we thought maybe we'd start with just a little bit of time to explain how the two of us come together before you right now. And it started when I was the Chief of the Navy. And I wanted to, as the head of the Navy, promulgate a framework that would describe how we can develop leadership, more effective leaders, across the Navy. I use this framework idea because even within the Navy, while we're all sailors, there are different communities, right? You've got your aviation community, the folks that fly on and off of carriers. You've got your submariners. That's my community. Surface warfare officers, that's Emily's community. And you have SEALs and medical, and a lot of different tribes within the Navy. So, we wanted the framework to provide enough information so that there was a common approach, but not too much information so that we were over-prescribing approaches to these different communities, which come with their own culture, et

[00:04:59.760] cetera. So, we put that out, and I actually labeled the first version of that, version 1.0, right? With the idea that, hey, we're not going to get this all right for all the communities, and so this is version one. It's our first stab at it. And there was sort of this implicit desire to get feedback and take it on to version 1.1 or 2.0 or whatever it might be. But really, little did I know that out in the fleet, in command of a littoral combat ship, Commander Emily Bassett was sitting there, a supernova of creativity and ideas, and she literally sent me an email and said, "Hey, look. This leadership development version 2.0, it's a great start, but I've got some ideas for you." Emily, why don't you let them know what you told me?

Captain Emily Bassett

[00:05:50.472] Thank you, Admiral Richardson. So there I was. I am in command of 70 sailors on littoral combat ship USS Manchester, and this document, version 2.0, Navy Leader Development Framework, had just come out, and it was exactly what I needed because many captains are expected to have what they call a one-pager command philosophy. And I thought, "This is great. I need this." So I made a one-pager command philosophy for how I was going to lead my 70 sailors. Meanwhile, this document was written for hundreds of thousands of people. So I adapted it, as one might, to work for me, and I made an acronym out of it, and I called it D2C3. I called it deliberately develop character, competence, and connections. And, as the Admiral just said, I had added a little bit to it. So I thought character and competence were a really good start, but I wanted to also have a piece in there, a component in there, that was connection. So D2C3 was my command mantra, and

[00:06:55.152] then when I had an opportunity to connect with the Chief of Naval Operations, I thought I'd share. He called it 2.0, which I took that as an invitation for my small group, my small team, to give feedback and to say, "Hey, I think it would work even better if we added a third C."

Admiral John Richardson

[00:07:14.012] Yeah. No, exactly. And so I think that in some instance, a very vivid instance in fact, the fact that the two of us are here together continuing to collaborate on this is indicative of the power of some of the ideas that we're going to lay out for you here in the next hour or so. Because these types of connections, connecting creative minds, is exactly what we're after to unleash the full potential of the organization, particularly a distributed organization, one that is distributed geographically around the world, literally, in the United States Navy's case. And so, just in terms of how we're going to spend the next hour, the Leader Development Framework, as Emily said, was sort of organized around three lines of effort, which is to develop a leader's character, a leader's connections, and a leader's competence. Okay? So three Cs. And we'll actually take them in a little bit different order in terms of connections, character, and competence. Okay?

[00:08:17.072] And so what we'll do is we'll start off with a little bit of explanation about why each of these three Cs was relevant. And then, the next part will be to ask you to participate and really make this discussion pertinent and relevant to your specific situation. So that's the what phase of explaining the three Cs. And then I'll hand off to Emily, and she'll take it away from there.

Captain Emily Bassett

[00:08:49.912] That's right. So my portion of this, for each of these three Cs today, will sort of be your hacks. We call them hacks because they're limited, but they're useful starting points. So it'll give you a place, some deck plate examples, some life examples, and for you to apply to your team as we go through today's workshop. So your handout today is a bunch of pictures, and we'll step through each picture. So we'll explain them, and feel free to doodle all over them. I do ask that you have a sheet of paper separate, because during the audience participation portion, you're just going to be writing some lists. So separate from that, or just use the back of the document that you might have printed out for you. But those are pictures. So the pictures are kind of sketchy by design. So we did not hire a graphic designer. We did not get these pictures off the internet. We hand drew them for the purpose to make a point. And that point is that this is simple. This is simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. And we want an image to really

[00:09:51.652] trigger you to take action. So each one of these images that I will introduce, as we're going to call them, your hacks, are images that are super simple, and you'll be able to apply to your situation.

Admiral John Richardson

[00:10:03.552] Okay. So let's get started. We'll start with one of the three Cs, which is the C that describes connection. And just a little bit of a discussion about why connections are so powerful, and in fact, why we start with connections right up front. Okay? At the end of the day, everything that we do, certainly in the Navy, we do in teams. It's almost never that we find ourselves operating alone. And even, as I said, in a globally distributed environment, you are operating in some kind of a team. And not only that, but you are operating in a system that either gets some kind of a product or guidance from somebody, and you're going to do something with that guidance. And then you're going to also relate downstream, if you will, to somebody else. And so what we're talking about with this idea of connections is getting to an authentic conversation between the people that provide you guidance and the people to which you are going to provide guidance. Okay?

[00:11:08.932] And the idea is that these connections would improve coordination amongst the team by virtue of these conversations. It will allow for better feedback in these conversations, as you go through iterations. The coordination and particularly the feedback are going to allow you to learn faster. And also by virtue of having this network of connections, each of the leaders is going to become more resilient, tougher, and able to respond to unexpected contingencies a little bit more effectively. Okay? Now, these connections transcend what might be depicted on an organizational chart. That's kind of a political diagram. It might show you your reporting senior and those people who are underneath you. We're really looking at sort of the functional or operational connections that allow you to do what you need to do. Right?

[00:12:07.536] Professionally, personally, operationally. Okay. And so at the end, what we hope to emerge from these connections is what Emily and I are calling authentic conversations. Okay? And it's really these authentic conversations that are the real keystone to fast learning, and even more so to establishing the trust and the confidence, and ultimately getting to a state of shared intent. Now, these conversations in the Navy have some tremendous historical examples, right? And I'm going to go to the Royal Navy first to provide an example, which is one of the greatest naval leaders in history, which was Admiral Horatio Nelson. Okay? Here's the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar, the hero of the Battle of the Nile, the hero of the Battle of Copenhagen, some of the most epic naval battles in history. And before each one of those battles, Nelson would convene the captains of his fleet in his cabin on his flagship, the HMS Victory.

[00:13:12.776] And they would review the battle plan that Nelson had put together with his captains. And it was a conversation. There was input, and there was discussion. There was a discussion of contingencies. "Hey, what if the wind shifts and blows this way instead of that way? What if we find the enemy formation in this configuration instead of that configuration?" And by virtue of that and the openness of Nelson to be receptive to these questions, when the meeting broke and those captains went back to their individual ships, which was a big deal. You had to get into a boat and row across the ocean to get to the other ship in those times. They left with a much better understanding of the shared intent of the commander. And this was so legendary, even in its time, it became known as the Nelson touch. Okay? The Nelson touch was his ability to bring his captains together, engage them in this authentic conversation, elicit the best of

[00:14:18.276] them, modify the plan if necessary, and leave with a sense of shared intent. Okay? In the submarine community, in the US Navy, the same thing happened in World War II. And the submarines were deployed very far forward, and in combat, that was a very, very fast learning environment. Right? And so when a captain came back with his submarine and they returned to Pearl Harbor, all the other submariners in town were ravenously hungry to understand what was going on at sea now. Right? Because they were getting ready to deploy into that same combat environment. And they wanted to know the latest, because knowing the latest was often the difference between life and death, between bringing your ship back safely or not. And so there were these, again, legendary conversations started by the commanding officers themselves. There was no top-down type of mandate because there was this urgent question that they all had. They had to get to the bottom line here so that they could

[00:15:24.676] deploy their submarine as fully ready as possible and have the greatest opportunity of survival. And so, again, it's the participation that matters. Right? As General Eisenhower said during the war, "It's not really about the plan, it's about the planning." Right? And that's what provides you the real fullest sense, the coup d'oeil, as Napoleon would say, of the plan going forward. Okay? And so for these connections, as a kind of a memory hook, we are using the object of a feather. Okay? And Emily's got the greatest story about why we chose a feather. Em?

Captain Emily Bassett

[00:16:06.736] Thank you for that. So the image we're using for you to take away when you think about connections and who that applies to in your environment, we're just going to refer to the simple story of Dumbo. It's worked for me throughout my career. I have a few examples, and I'll share one with you for why the feather matters to me. But just to kind of center us all on Disney, or wherever you get your childhood stories of Dumbo from. The image, of course, is of Timothy, who convinces this elephant, Dumbo, that he can fly. And the connection between Timothy, the mouse who's in Dumbo's hat, and the elephant, Dumbo, is the connection by a feather. The feather is what he gives him, what the mouse gives to the elephant to convince him that he can fly. So that's what we want you to think of when you're thinking about the importance of connections. You're thinking about one person offering another person

[00:17:05.716] a feather that makes them confident, that makes them know they're supported, makes them know they have maybe abilities they didn't think they had otherwise. And the story I'll offer you is really early in my career. I'm a classics major, so I'm a Greek and Roman civilization undergrad, Italian minor. The Navy nuclear propulsion program was where I was headed, and so I had a lot of learning to do. So there I was in the courses, learning faster than I think I've ever learned anything in my life. And I wasn't really sure I belonged there, wasn't sure I was doing the right thing. And I remember telling one of my classmates who studied with me endlessly, that I felt like Dumbo. Like, "I feel like Dumbo here. It's like I'm elephant trying to fly." And there he was with me side by side, always making sure that we were studying together, always making sure I understood the topics, helped me with my note cards, and helped me understand in ways that made sense to me. And he remembered that I'd used that image because on the, and I'm getting a little choked up, but on the day of the exam, he put a feather on my desk.

[00:18:06.344] And it was just a reminder to me to say someone else believed in me, and that I could do this. Granted, he also studied with me all throughout the time that I was at school. So there's more to it than just a quick gesture. It's a connection. But we want you to take that image of a feather and to think of it as a reminder to you and to us that we can make a big difference by reaching out to someone and maybe offering them some support like this feather did for me.

Admiral John Richardson

[00:18:32.664] Yeah. And so what we're going to do now is ask you to make this idea relevant and pertinent to your specific situation, okay? And so we're going to take a couple of minutes, and Emily and I'll just move to the background. And during these two minutes, we want you to, on your handout or wherever, we want you to list 10 people in your life who might be in need of a feather, right? Somebody who is in a new job position, confronting something that they haven't had a chance to deal with before. They've got the skills, or maybe you want to find if they have the skills. But there's going to be this exchange, this connection with them. And so list those 10 people that you think in your job or in your personal life that might benefit from you reaching out to them and providing them a connection or a feather that would enhance your mutual confidence in one another, okay? So we'll just take two minutes.

[00:19:33.824] Just ask you to use the back. Don't use the front. We'll get to that part later. So the front part- Yeah ... that has people, we'll deal with that later. So for now, just list as many people in your life, up to 10, that could benefit from a connection. Yeah. And we ask you to stretch here a little bit, too, right? There's a big difference between listing two or three and listing 10, right? And so, think hard. We were giving this workshop one time, and it was actually somebody who had a big history in education, right? A lot of experience in education. And he said, "When I heard that question, it seemed like, okay, this is going to be the easiest question in the world to answer, until I started answering it, and it actually became sort of challenging." So we ask you to kind of stretch yourself and challenge. Get really personal, and make this as meaningful as possible.

[00:20:41.864] I'm sure that some of you can hear the Jeopardy music in the background. Okay. So, as we think about wrapping it up, these are those people with whom you want to have an authentic conversation, right? To build trust and confidence with them, and bring them into this state of shared intent with you, right? Either maybe someone who you report to, maybe someone who you work with, a peer, maybe somebody who you're going to lead. Think about that authentic conversation you want to have. Okay? Okay, so we'll wrap it up here, and Emily's going to actually give you some terrific tools. And again, don't be deceived by their simplicity. They're actually super effective. Emily? Thank you, sir. So just put that list aside. We'll get back to it later. Or if it's on the back of your sheet of paper, just turn your paper back over again. We're going horizontally across. So you see on the top left, there's a picture of Dumbo.

Captain Emily Bassett

[00:22:00.704] Maybe you've written the word "connections" across that feather there. You see the elephant image. And to the right of that, you see two hacks. Okay, so those are the two hacks we're going to share, and later on, we'll connect them. Don't worry about it. But just for a moment, suspend disbelief and listen to what are these two hacks for ways we might find connection in our teams. And examples could be in your personal life as well because a lot of our personal and professional lives certainly overlap. So, the image you have there is of two people, shoulder to shoulder, right? Very simple. Just quick drawing. Remember, we imagine you drawing this. We imagine you going to the whiteboard and bringing this back to your team. So everyone can make two half circles, right? So there you have an image of shoulder to shoulder. And this geometry will set you up for connections, and actually, it becomes very personal to Admiral Richardson and to me because when I first reached out to him, I thought it was going to be an email send, done.

[00:22:56.924] He invited me to meet in person to have this conversation as a way of follow-up, and I was super intimidated. I was a commander, and he's a four-star admiral in charge of the Navy. And my response was, "Yes, sir. Happy to meet with you. Can we go for a walk?" And that was my way of saying I felt too intimidated by the rank difference to meet face to face across a table and be faced with those stars to really have an authentic conversation if what he really wanted to hear was my opinion on another way to lead the Navy. So that was just too much for me. So, to my joy, he said yes. So we went for a walk. We met in Washington, D.C., where I was stationed at the time for school, and we had this shoulder-to-shoulder geometry, right? So the whole time we were walking, I was able to look forward and to explain why I thought this was important to me, how this worked, and I didn't feel at all intimidated by the structure. And

[00:24:01.064] we came to refer to that as the geometry of problem-solving. And then I started to look for it in my command, and I found, gosh, every time I was having an authentic conversation, one of the first things I was doing was putting a whiteboard up. And what that whiteboard would do would, I invite the person in my office, and they would walk in with their problem, with their challenge, and as they were speaking to me, I would get the dry erase marker and just start drawing and writing on the whiteboard what I was hearing. And so what that did was it made us be shoulder to shoulder, because instead of me being the senior person receiving a report and having to react with it with my face and my shock and my confusion, and all the things that my face shows. Instead, we were both able to look at the problem together, and they could correct me. They could tell me I was getting it wrong. As I was writing what they were saying, they could then amend the story. Sometimes we were dealing with some very, very technical issues. I'm speaking now of my tour as the reactor officer on the USS Gerald R. Ford. A lot of new type challenges came in that we hadn't yet seen, and so we had to work through them in a very technical way, and looking at it on the

[00:25:05.048] whiteboard was certainly a way to do that. So that's one thing that worked for setting up that shoulder-to-shoulder geometry that really helped us connect in a way that was authentic. And the last thing I offer you there of those three questions you have for this hack, is office furniture. So, if your office is set up in a place where someone needs to walk in and you're behind a desk or you've got the computer screen between you and the person that you need to connect with, there's probably a better way you could do that, if what you want is connection. So if you want to have a power struggle, by all means, keep that, if you need to show your authority in the conversation. But instead, if you want to have an authentic conversation that really gets at connection, then you might look for ways to meet at a circular table or even look for ways to just remove the table. I used to pull my chair aside from the desk so that we would be knee to knee as, limited space you might have on a ship. So those are some hacks for you to consider for how to have connection, and that's

[00:26:06.988] the image. The second image we'll offer you here for your second hack, your second connection hack, is what we did here for you actually today, when we're trying to connect with you, even in this virtual space. And you heard us mention it at the beginning, but the image is that before you get started, so there's your bare feet. There's your feet. You're getting started. Think about not just what your goal is, like what do you want? That's not to maneuver your way. That's important and has another space of relevancy. What we're talking about here is that you actually imagine how you want the person to feel when you walk out. So my example of this is numerous times when I was the reactor officer on Gerald R. Ford, I had to give complicated, complex, not always popular reports to my commanding officer. So, I had a long

[00:27:05.248] walk from my office to his stateroom and office, up numerous decks and numerous ladders. And I walked- It's a big ship. It's a big ship. Well, it's a big ship. Not a submarine. So on that aircraft carrier, I found myself walking across the flight deck and up a couple ladders where I was preparing to give this report. And I'll tell more about this story later when we talk about the big four. But what I want to share with you here is that I deliberately imagined that instead of practicing what I was going to say or practicing all my notes, instead what I imagined was that when I shut that door and I walked out of his office, I wanted him to think, "The RO,

Admiral John Richardson

[00:27:48.308] she's got this." So that was my title, Reactor Officer, RO. I wanted him to be like, "The RO, she's got this." That's all I want him to think and feel when I left. So that framed how I was going to share my story, how I was going to say what I was going to say, and just kept that in mind that, in beginning that connection, and I think that the connection that he and I had, that he did trust me to lead that department, was due in part to that hack, that I was deliberate about thinking, "How do I want him to feel when this conversation is over?" Yeah. And I can't stress again how effective these things are when they're backed up by authentic intent to connect and really make that authentic conversation happen. These are just techniques. And the whiteboard example is terrific. In fact, this idea of two people facing the same

[00:28:46.308] problem shoulder to shoulder. The physical geometry is there, even the language that we use. Trying to use first person plural pronouns as much as possible. So you get this idea of this geometry of shared intent, really important. The idea of coming out from behind your desk, circular table or whatever it might be, also very, very effective. And then I got to tell you that, as the head of the Navy who received a lot of those reports, and Emily actually worked her magic when we met as well. The idea of, hey, I'm not only going to convey information, but I'm going to convey it in a way that provokes or invokes this emotional response that's going to make it memorable and pleasant. That's also very, very effective. So, that wraps up our conversation about connections. And with that, we'll move to the second C, which is character. Okay? Now, when we put the leader development framework out, I would say that the Navy was very, very focused

[00:29:52.908] on competence, and we'll discuss that next. And our evaluation system and our schools and all of that, we're really focused on building technical competencies, which is very, very important. As I said, we'll spend some time on that. But what I also wanted to make clear is that as you develop as a leaderThe development of your character and understanding the values of the Navy as an organization is also very, very important, right? Our armed services today are manned by an all-volunteer force. Men and women from around the country come to join our ranks, and that only works if we have a strong bond of trust and confidence with the American people, right? If that gets lost, then mothers and fathers are going to stop sending their sons and daughters to join the Navy, right? And it was important to me to be able to look everybody in the country in the eye

[00:30:55.980] with the message that, "Hey, we're ready to receive your brother, your sister, your son, your daughter. We're going to take care of them. And the people that are going to lead your family, those people are going to be people of character. They're going to have integrity. They're going to espouse the values that made our Navy and our nation great." And that's important, so we're going to deliberately develop that in our leadership. It's also important, not only this bond of trust and confidence with the American people, but also the bond between a leader and their follower, and their team, right? That trust and confidence really defines everything, okay? Now, good teams, most good teams, will have some sort of statement of values that are important to them, that they espouse. The great teams actually take the challenge of deliberately developing those values into their leadership and the rest of their team.

[00:32:03.680] And so they do that, not only from an academic standpoint, and there's plenty of material out there to put together a nice course on the importance of ethics and character. But even more powerful is operationalizing that, so that before you start a shift, for instance, at the pre-shift brief, "Hey, these are the goals of this particular shift. And then as we exercise this shift, as we move through this shift to achieve those goals, let's make sure that we hang together and we finish this shift with our integrity intact, with our honesty intact, that we're looking out for one another, that we're working with courage and commitment." Those values that we hold dear, that makes it real, that puts it on the shop floor and not something that just exists in the classroom. And so, again, this development of character, the deliberate development of character in our leadership is fundamental to

[00:33:06.820] establishing the bonds of trust and confidence, which are absolutely necessary because in a distributed or a large organization, in a highly dynamic environment, you may lose communication, direct communication, with another member of the team, an important member. But with this shared sense of values and character, you can always trust that whatever decision that person makes is going to be consistent with those values, okay? And so Emily's come up with a terrific memory hook to help cement this into your mind, and I'll hand it off to her.

Captain Emily Bassett

[00:33:40.820] Thank you, sir. So our image for character is this image of a wand. So right below, you're looking at your handout, on the left side, you see Mickey Mouse's arm holding a wand. And that is a memory from the movie "Fantasia," where Mickey Mouse is choreographing and directing the colors and the animals and the instruments all around him, so you get this magnificent show that you get in "Fantasia." And so that image of a wand is really what helped me in my career when I thought of, how am I going to lead a super complex team according to the values that I want to lead them with? And so I kind of put down the feather at that point and said, "Now I need to start leading with a wand," or like a baton. If you think of yourself as an orchestra conductor, you might call that your baton. So either way, wand or baton. We call it the wand because we like to conjure up Mickey Mouse, keeping with the Disney theme here.

[00:34:48.841] But that's our image, is that you think of the baton being how you would keep pace, how you would keep the rhythm of your team and get them to enact according to the values that your team shares. And we'll share some hacks with you shortly, but that's the image I want you to have in your mind, is that somebody who is deliberately developing character is someone who has a wand or a baton, and they are keeping pace. They're setting the example. Not just setting the example, but they are keeping everyone else aligned with the values of their team.

Admiral John Richardson

[00:35:24.600] Yeah. And so this idea of the baton and the time signature or the key of this musical piece, it provides the foundation for everything else to keep tempo, just like the organization's values do, right? And so what we're going to ask you to do now is we're going to take two minutes again, okay? And we're going to ask you during these two minutes again to list 10 values that either you hold personally dear and that your organization holds dear. So it can be a combination of personal and organizational values. But let's stretch out and see if we can't get to a list of 10 values that are important to you. Okay? We'll start

Captain Emily Bassett

[00:36:09.540] now.And again, this is actually a challenging one, it seems to me, Emily, to find 10 values that are important. But stretch yourself, because it's going to be important as we come back to address those again. And don't be limited by the word value. It could be attributes or characteristics, really words that tell you the kind of person that you want to be and that you want your team to be. Just keep writing. Sure. Okay. Everybody keep on writing, but as you're listing your 10 values or attributes or characteristics, I'm going to offer you two hacks. Two hacks that we came up with, that the admiral and I have shared and discussed and thought were the right ones for this audience here, are right there in the center of your handout. So now you're starting with Mickey's wand. You might have written the word character next to that baton or

[00:38:02.150] wand. And now you see an image to the right of that, that has a ribbon that says, "Just like you." And this is a story from my childhood that I have used over and over again, thanks to my mother, Dr. Henriette Clauser. So she used to use that phrase, and she used to say to me, "Emily, that's just like you." And the curious thing is when she said it. So I remember vividly, in my junior years of elementary school and middle school, not being particularly good at math. And I'd come home with my grades, I was good at other grades, but the math grades, not great. And she looked at me surprised, and her response was, "Emily, that's not like you. You're good at math." And I remember being in the kitchen hearing her say that and being like, "What? What does she mean I'm good at math? Where did she get that from?"

[00:39:00.730] But I just was like, "Oh, my mom says I'm good at math." So I just kept studying math and getting better at it until my grades got better. And then one day, she said, "That's just like you. Look at you. You're A+ in math." And those are the grades that went on the refrigerator. I'm sure there was more to it than that. Parenting, we never quite know how our parents parent. We try to parent ourselves. But that was the image that certainly I left my childhood with. And then when I was in college, I left from Seattle, went to Boston University, so out there on my own. And I noticed in my own head that I was using that language. Like when one of my fellow midshipmen asked me if I would run a marathon with them, and I was like, "I'm not a runner." And they were like, "Well, no, we did the PRT," that's the physical readiness test. It has you run a mile and a half. "We can run a marathon. Let's go." And then all of a sudden, I'm like, "Okay. Well, I guess I'm a runner now." And I made myself a running plan, and I followed it, and I

[00:39:59.710] got a subscription to Runner's World. And I thought, "Well, a runner runs. And now I'm a runner." So it was that I had just sort of decided, no longer at home with my mother telling me what was like me, now I was the voice in my head saying what was just like me. Fast-forward to some more challenging situations in life, when I had to, as many of us find ourselves regrettably in a situation where we need to apologize, where we make mistakes. I use that language again. I reflected on what I had done and went to the person I wanted to apologize to, and I started with, "Hey, I'm sorry I interrupted you while we were talking. That wasn't like me. I'm usually a really good listener, and I care a lot about being a good listener. And I wasn't a good listener that day, and it's not like me, and I'm sorry." And for some reason, just saying that phrase, "not like me," made it easier for me to apologize. And it was developing my own character.

[00:40:59.930] I want to be somebody who's a good listener. I want to be someone who's known as being a good listener. And so I was deciding what my own character was. So then fast-forward to now I'm in command, and I shared with you that D2C3 was my command philosophy. So I had to find ways to give what we call captain's coins, the ways to acknowledge people's attaboys or doing wells. And I did that with character, competence, and connection coins. And so when I gave a character coin, I found a sailor who had done something that was exactly like what the kind of behavior I wanted to see in this command. And the example I'll share is when there's an audit that sailors do daily that has to do with our communication security, and new information comes in every day and depletes the old, puts new information in. And this sailor had made a mistake in that process.

[00:41:58.790] And given the process, the way it falls out, the sailor could have gotten away with that mistake, because the next day, new information would have come in. It would have made the old information old. And instead, he decided to admit his mistake and come to his chain of command and say, "Hey, I made a mistake. I deleted this document that I shouldn't have deleted, and now for this period of time, we have to go to our backups." And it took integrity for him to tell us that, right? It took integrity to say he'd made a mistake. AndI wanted to acknowledge that. So at the next Friday all-hands call, I pulled that sailor forward, gave him a character coin, and said, "That's just like you. We are a command who cares about integrity. We are a command who shares with each other when we learn something and when we make a mistake."

[00:42:52.018] So to that end, I offer you this hack that is this phrase, "Just like you." So when you see behavior that is just like what you want to see in your teams, that you attribute that behavior to a characteristic, to a value, or to a behavior that you want to see and say, "Hey, that's just like us. We're the kind of team who..." And just say that, and there you are acting like our mothers or our leaders. The second hack you see there, it has an eyeball shaking, focus on what's working. That comes from a line of thinking called appreciative inquiry. If you want to read more into it, you can just Google appreciative inquiry. But most recently, where I use this in the surface nuclear program, we do a really, I think, outstanding job of critiquing ourselves. So at very low levels, when we have something that doesn't go perfectly, we stop, and we analyze it. And as is our nature, we find all the problems.

[00:43:55.018] We like to list the problems, put them in bins, have solutions, identify their root causes. We are very, very good at this in this field. One thing I think helps if you want to create character in this process is to also look at what's working and not just what's not working. And this is not a Pollyanna like, "Let's all be positive. Can't we all just get along?" That's not what this is. What this is, when I ask you here in this hack to care and focus on what's working and not just care about what's not working, what we're asking you to do is to keep the good before you throw it out with a fix. So, the example I'll give is when you come to a new team, and you, by your nature, make a list of all the things that are happening wrong that you want to go fix, and you want to go after them. What you might find is if you just go after fixing those problems, you might accidentally

[00:45:00.898] get rid of something that is really important and really good and really helpful. Not meaning to, but you just did because you weren't at all aware of what was good and what was working and what is positive in that team. So, this approach here has you make sure you preserve what is good. An example I'll give is when I was leaving one of my tours, during my outbrief, the senior officer who was signing my report said, "You know, Emily, we all have our mistakes, and during this time, I'm supposed to list to you where you need to get better." He's like, "I'm sure you'll figure those out, and you'll get better. But I think if you were really clear about what your strengths are, and you worked on making those even better, you could be amazing." And he gave me that advice at a very young point in my career when I was thinking about, I was a lieutenant commander. I probably could have stopped there. You can retire as lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, so I probably wouldn't have considered moving on.

[00:45:59.858] And instead, I thought, "Okay. Let me find out what I love. What do I love? What charges me up? What makes me stronger?" And I asked myself that question, what my strengths were and what I enjoyed doing, and then I really focused on making those even better. And what I found was that my weaknesses, I usually managed around them. I didn't get much better at them. I kind of managed around them. I found people on my team who were good at those things to back me up so that I could take what strengthened me and what made me feel like who I was and what I valued and resonated there. That's where my energy went, and then I ended up with a career that I'm super proud of from that point. Emily, that explanation is just like you. It's full of passion, and it brings together so

Admiral John Richardson

[00:46:47.618] much of your personal experience to share with everybody, so thank you so much for doing that. And I can't think of a better way to wrap up the discussion of character than that beautiful summary that you just gave us, a discussion of those hacks. And so we'll move on now to a discussion of the third C, right? So we've come through now the idea of connections, which allows all the information and confidence and trust to flow to get to a state of shared intent. Then we've talked about the importance of character as the underlying rhythm or tempo of your team so that you can have that confidence that people, even if they're disconnected, will make the right decision consistent with the values of the organization. Now we're going to talk about the technical skills or the competencies that everybody needs to do their job, and these are extremely important. All of the sincerity and passion in the world will be lost if you don't know

[00:47:52.238] exactly the difference of right and wrong, good and bad in what you're doing. So these competencies, being good at what you do, being an expert at what you do, those are really important, right? And in fact, they're so important that sometimes leader development discussions, they stop there. They stop with this idea of the competencies, how important they are, and they don't go on to the deeper sense of character and connections. And it's interesting because when you think about it, competencies are often the most fungible or dynamic, agile thing that you can build in your team, right? How many times have we had to move from one job to another that may have required a completely different skill set or a largely different skill set anyway, and you had to kind of learn those things, right? And most of us did pretty well once you sort of applied yourself, and there's generally a great methodology in the organization, whether it's schools, classes, or on-the-job training, or even through self-study. There's ways to get those competencies. They're pretty dynamic, and you can build those relatively quickly.

[00:49:04.238] And so, asAs your team is moving around and you're putting people in new places, a lot of times so that they can grow, please remember that it may require some new competencies. And you can bring in ideas from, not only throughout the organization, but from outside the organization, to help you take new approaches to building those competencies. But also remember, too, that if you've done things sort of consistent with the way we're advocating, you've made a tremendous investment in the character of that person, and you made a tremendous investment in making sure they're properly connected with others in the organization. And you've built that sense of trust and confidence in them, and you've had those authentic conversations that lead to shared intent. And so it's much richer, much deeper than just building new competencies. Those are relatively easy in people who

[00:50:05.614] are used to developing skills. It's those other things that help to define the total person, if you will, in the organization. And we use this idea, a memory idea, of a decoder ring, to help give you a sense of how competencies fit into the larger question and challenge of leader development. I'll turn it over to Emily to explain how the heck do we get to a decoder ring. That's right, Sir. So if you have your handout, you're looking on the left, the third one down. So we have the connection on the top, we've got the character in the middle, and at the bottom you've got this decoder ring, and you've probably written the word "competence" right next to it. And when we get a chance to share the hacks, we'll explain a little bit more about

Captain Emily Bassett

[00:50:54.454] why the decoder ring is right. But the image in your mind might be that you have some code that you need to unleash to understand, and so you need some way to take what you already know and apply it to what your job currently requires of you. How you can decode your knowledge, your experience, your background. How do you apply what you know now to what your job or the problem or the challenge in front of you is currently asking of you? So, a decoder ring is sort of your secret weapon you're wearing on your hand, and we'll share with you ways that you can apply this decoder ring. But it's a way for you to have the right answer, to know the right thing to say, to have the right competency, and there's ways to do that. And the decoder ring is our image for how you would think of yourself knowing the right answer. Yeah. And think about going outside the organization, reading about something that's completely different, and then decoding that, if you will, to translate it

[00:51:55.694] into a skill that you can bring to your specific challenge. Okay, and so what we'd actually ask you to do now is we're going to, surprise, take another two minutes. We're going to ask you to personalize this again to your specific situation and list 10 challenges or 10 problems that are vexing you right now, that you and your team need to overcome. Problems that need addressing, situations that are sort of urgently in front of you, and require perhaps some new skills, some new competencies to get after them. So we'll take a couple of minutes now and enter the classroom phase of the seminar. Probably not hard to come up with 10 on these for most of us. Yeah. Lots of challenges. The world is changing. We probably don't need the full two minutes. Just 30 seconds. That's right.

[00:53:54.554] Okay, so while you're listing your 10, and keep on writing and let my voices continue if you need to, but that's the real trick is to keep on writing your problems, list your challenges, or even things you're having to adapt to. I think that's what we find in many of our careers is that we're all good, but the world around us is changing, right? And so how are we adapting? Two hacks for you. So the first one, you'll see in the bottom center there, it has a picture of an exponential curve. And I'll share the story for where this came about in my career, because I literally drew this picture on a whiteboard. When I found myself in the three months of school, so I was at Naval Reactors. I found myself there having just left command of a littoral combat ship, so not a nuclear-powered ship. Hadn't been on a nuclear-powered ship for over nine years. I had one tour in between that was a training job, but hadn't really been responsible for the technical aspects of running a nuclear reactor.In

[00:54:58.954] some time. And this three months of school was my preparation to then be reminded of what I had learned earlier in my career, and also to be taught the new propulsion plant and system of the Gerald R. Ford brand-new class of aircraft carrier and new propulsion plant. New competencies, maybe? I had some new competencies that I had to develop. Just trying to not make it sound too tough, but it was tough. So, there I was, and they give me... Most of us have classmates, right? But I was the only one there because of the newness of this class. So I did not have classmates. I was the only student in this particular course as I was learning a new class of aircraft carrier. So they hand me my schedule and it's packed. It's like 08:00 in the morning until 16:00, 4:00, I'm going to lectures, I'm learning.

[00:55:56.854] And then every Friday there is a four-hour written exam that they hand you at 16:00, 4:00 on Friday. And then you spend four hours taking this test and it's all no multiple choice. It's all explain, a blank sheet of paper with a question on the top. Draw. Very technical, right? And every week I was going to have another exam for three months. And I knew that I was going to need a little bit more time than that to let all this information soak in for me. So I walked into the director, my local director, his office, and I drew this picture, the one you see there, of a flat line that then becomes exponential. And I labeled it, as you see there. I wrote, "This is my learning." And I saw myself as someone who needed to spend time soaking in all the information, doing my note cards, looking in the book, communicating back and forth, having small group discussions.

[00:56:59.314] I knew I was going to need a lot of soak time to work into this information. And I knew by the end I would get it. I have a track record of doing well in these programs, and I was dedicated. I was all in, so I knew I was going to get there. So I drew that was the line for my learning. And then I drew a dotted line, that is the Y equals X straight line there that you see, that is my assessments, is how I labeled that. I said, "Here's where you will be assessing me." I said, "Every week you're giving me a test. So you're giving me one week of learning and one week of a test, two weeks of learning and then two weeks of a test. And I get it. You want me to track along this line to prove to you that I deserve the job as the reactor officer." And I said, "I would like to delay my first test just one week. Just offset it one week, and then teach me at the same pace. Don't change your course at all, and at the end, I'll take two tests to catch up. I'll be out of here on time. I just need to start with a little bit more soak time of learning." And he said yes. He let me do that. And he looked at the problem with me, so that

[00:58:02.994] shoulder-to-shoulder was happening. He got to hear me out, as he was a good listener. Excellent program there that allows for that kind of thinking. And it served me well. And so what I offer you there is, how does this build competency? And what I offer you is that when the problems are really complex and when they are really new, maybe the result is not linear. Maybe the result is not effort in, result out at some measurable relationship of in versus out. And the quote that we have written there is a quote from Albert Einstein, and we only wrote half of it, so you can kind of think. But he is famous for having said that if he had 60 minutes to solve a problem, he would spend 55 of it studying the problem. So what that means to me is that when we want to be super competent, when we want to take on a new skill set, when we want to be better, we want to be problem solvers.

[00:59:03.094] So our inclination when the team brings us a problem, our inclination is to start solving it because we're problem solvers, right? Well, instead, what this image offers you and what Albert Einstein might offer us is to instead tell us to ask 55 minutes of questions. Fifty-five to the 60, that's your ratio of how much time you should spend really understanding what the problem is and resist the urge to solve it. Resist the urge to come up with your 10 solutions because you might be creating new problems, and you might not be solving the one you actually want to solve. And when you come to understand the problem, the solution might just work itself out. So that hack is an image for you to think about how not only to develop your own competencies, but to develop the competencies in your team. The second hack, Admiral Richardson already referred to it a little bit when he mentioned to you that in order for you to get that decoder ring to

[01:00:04.634] work, you're going to need to read. You're going to need to read, and you're going to need to read some outside influences that maybe you might not initially think have anything to do with your problem. So the image we have there are some one-pagers, and the hack is that... And here's the quote. "If I can't write it down..." That is the beginning of a quote from Admiral Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy. So he is famous for having said, "If you can't write it down, you don't understand it." So if we think we're super competent or a sailor or a member of our team thinks he or she is super competent, maybe you ask them to write it down. Write down what is it that you know about this system. What is it that you know about this problem? What is it that you want your team to know about this problem? And maybe it's all in the manual, but maybe you can put it in just

[01:00:56.954] one page. And so two examples of one-pagers there. One is how to negotiate with hostage takers. So that is a reference to the fact that one of the really toughest challenges in my life I had to overcome came from a book that I read by Chris Voss. It says, "Never split the difference." So I was reading a book about how to negotiate with hostage takers, and it turned out it really helped me in my job as a reactor officer on an aircraft carrier. Why? Well, partly is because at the back of the book, he shares his own list of hacks. They're very simple things you can do to speak the same language of the hostage taker so that you can get compliance. And you'll have to read the book to really get into what we're after here. But the idea is that and many other books, and we just picked one. But there's so many times that when we pick up a book that is not directly related to our problem, that we find a solution to our problem because it got us to think differently or because it gave us a decoder ring, because it gave us a way that we can take

[01:02:07.870] somebody else solving a complex problem in their world, unhinge for you a way that you might think about the complex problem in your own world to decode itself. And so, the way to use this hack is to read and to write. That's this hack, really. Read other books, be voracious in your reading, in articles, in podcasts, in what you're picking up from the outside world, not just in your own community, but in other communities. And then write about it if you can articulate what you think you learned in one page. I call these one-pagers, and I just put my Command philosophy across the top and put my Command logo, which I'm wearing here, on the top. And for example, I wrote a one-pager on how to write an email. I was just super frustrated with how emails were coming through, and some were taskers, some were for my situational awareness, some were for information you didn't know until you read that email a couple of times. So I came up with a one-pager, sent out, that said, "Here is how to write an email," with some pretty specific guidance. Just to keep it simple, I thought, if I am frustrated and this seems simple, it

[01:03:18.370] must be easy to write about. It was not easy to write about. So offer you that hack. If you want to develop competence in your team, not only do you read voraciously, but you write what you've learned and make it simple and put it in a one-pager.

Admiral John Richardson

[01:03:33.670] Yeah. Thanks, Emily. And Emily actually walks the talk. And so if I send her an email that doesn't comply with that one-pager, it's completely rejected. She unsubscribes to me. I end up in the spam folder. And so, yeah, she's serious about that. Okay? All right. So we're coming to the end of our time together here. But we still have one more exercise, okay? And I'd ask you to take a look at your handout and go to the far right. And in the far right, for each of the feather, the wand, and the ring, there is a space, three spaces for each of those, right? Three spaces for people, three spaces for values, and three spaces for problems. And what I'd like you to do is, we've walked through now each of the three Cs, connections, character, and competence. We've then asked you to personalize the discussion to the challenges that you are facing specifically in your

[01:04:36.570] job. Your team is taking a look at these right now. And you had 10 or so. Hopefully, you got to 10. But we'd like you now to neck that down even more and pick the three most important, most urgent, the ones you want to get after right now. The three people that you want to connect with and instill confidence, the three values that you think are most in need of reinforcement or emphasis in your life and in your organization, and then also maybe the three most urgent problems out of all of those problems that you listed that need to be addressed right now. And just write those three into those three spaces, okay? And then what we want you to do is take one more step, is after you've done that, draw a line from each of those three things, those three people. Just draw a line to the specific hack that Emily described that might be most effective in terms of exercising some action to get after connecting with that person or reinforcing that

[01:05:46.330] value. What hacks might apply? And you don't have to stay within the column. Any of those hacks might be useful to any of the people, the values, or the problems. So feel free to move around the page. But what we want is just sort of a line, a physical line that connects each of the specific people, values, and problems on the right to one of the hacks on the page. So we'll take some time to allow you to do that. We call this the bringing it all together phase. Some of these lines will be linear, some will be exponential. This could be a network across your sheet. Yeah. They don't have to be straight lines. They can be curvy lines, twirly lines, meandering.

Captain Emily Bassett

[01:07:26.480] So the last thing we're going to leave you with, and there's more time. I hope you take this back to your offices, take it back to your home, and please continue to draw all over this. We're going to offer you what we call the big four, and I referred to them earlier in this conversation, but want to make sure you walk away with it. So these big four, we teach them to all sailors as they enter the Navy in what's called a boot camp. And I came across them when I was in a learning group with a fellow friend of mine, a Navy SEAL, who had shown me that's what they were learning in the SEAL community to help them with their mental toughness and mental resiliency, and how to fight some of the toughest problems they were challenged with. And so these big four, they're also called the big four of mental resilience or mental toughness. I got a lot of runtime with these in some pretty tough situations, and they're useful here that as you think about how to start. You've got that problem you want to solve, and you've just signed yourself up to

[01:08:25.380] write a one-pager about it, or you've got that person that you want to connect with, and you've just drawn a line that you're going to go for a walk with that person, right? Or you've got that value that you want to espouse, and you're about to tell that person, you're about to tell someone that's just like us, right? So you have just signed yourself up with all these lines that you've connected on your sheet of paper here. And sometimes it looks really good, but we don't want you just to walk away with a pretty picture, right? We want you to actually get started. We want you to actually get going on these things and actually change your life and change the life of those you lead. So we're going to leave you with this final, we'll call it a hack, and it's called the big four of mental toughness. And if you were to write next to those images in the bottom, you would write next to the first image, you would write the word breathe. And then next you would write the word envision, and then mantra, and then begin. So those are those four images at the bottom. You have breathe,

[01:09:23.580] envision, mantra, and begin. And just a quick explanation, you can certainly go online and learn more about these, but the quick summary of them is to breathe. Can be shortened or lengthened, right? If it's a quick problem that you need to get started on right away, literally just count to four and just breathe. Focus on your breathing. Get your perception to be focused only on your breathing. If it's a longer problem, a life issue that really needs some addressing, you might invest in actually taking a yoga class or meditation or reading a book on how to breathe better. Or you might actually get a breathing app and work deliberately on your breath. But this can be tailored, right? So start with breathing. Envision. Imagine the end state. Imagine yourself 10, 20, 30 years from now. If it's a long-term problem, imagine yourself on that trip that you want to take

[01:10:17.540] one day. There you are on that trip that was the hope and goal of your life. Or having that conversation that's a really tough one to have. Imagine how you feel after. We talked about that with the hack for connection, right? The mantra piece is not meant to be, again, not meant to be a Pollyanna feel good, just yes you can, the little engine that could. It's not that. The mantra is really meant to push out negative chatter. So if in your head, and the one I use all the time is one, two, three, good for me. I say that as I'm walking, and I say it over and over again, literally, so I'm not saying something else. So my head's not going, "Oh, you're too this. You're not enough that. They won't think this. How do I belong here?" Just those thoughts that creep into my chatter don't have room, actually, when I'm getting ready to go do something because I am literally saying this mantra instead in my head. One, two, three, good for me, as my feet are moving toward the commencement of my tough challenge. And then you see the footsteps. So begin.

[01:11:20.420] Take that first step and begin.

Admiral John Richardson

[01:11:24.500] Yeah, Emily, that's so powerful. And the thing about that is that while the Special Forces use that to tremendous effect, and Emily described that, this can be scaled up. We scale this up to use it for all of our recruits that come through the Navy boot camp, 40,000 recruits a year that come from all over the world, all over the country and all over the world. And we found that this big four, connected with these other C's of leader development, were almost transformative in terms of allowing these young people to do things that at first were completely scary and new to them, and very quickly became very familiar and almost routine. Okay? So I hope that this discussion has given you all some ideas. And again, we hope to have conveyed it in a way that's super compelling and interesting to you, but also simple enough that you can take your one-pager and maybe review this session, and then go and talk to your teams about it, right?

[01:12:31.120] And so, our audience's audience, right? Your audience. And really go about being a leader that is deliberately developing the connections, the character, and the competence of your leaders. And Emily and I are going to continue to refine this approach, and if you want to be part of that journey as we sharpen our thinking, make it even more relevant, maybe expand in some areas, we're going to let you know how to stay connected with us in the Slack channel and kind of be on the journey with us. So, we'll post that in Slack, and just keep a look out there, and we'd love to have you along. Em, you want to close it out?

Captain Emily Bassett

[01:13:13.900] Thank you. Excellent. Thank you, sir. Thank you for showing up. Okay. Take care.