Transcript
Hi this is Joe Scherrer with The Leadership Crucible and welcome to this series of leadership lessons. A mini-course called leadership 101. What the course is all about is to give you an introduction of what it takes to start to gain the skills you need to be a great leader. In order to give you a perspective of the mindset I’d like you to have as you go through the course, let me give you some background on me and where I’m coming from in terms of leadership.
During my 24-year Air Force career I was fortunate enough during that time to have commanded five different organizations. In other words, I was the head honcho of these units. In my last assignment, I was the commander of a combat communications wing. Now a wing is the Air Force’s primary war fighting formation. We go to war as an air force in terms of the wings that we deploy. The communications piece of our mission involved setting up an infrastructure anywhere in the world within 72 hours so that we could launch and recover aircraft. So I had a wing of 1500 airmen who were charged to do just that. The combat piece of it mean that sometimes we had to be able to defend ourselves—with force—if necessary. Hence the name combat communications.
As the final assignment in my career, I can honestly say it was the best one I ever had. The combination of the mission, the people, and the types of things that these awesome Americans did on a day to day basis was simply eye-watering. It was a real honor and pleasure for me to serve in that capacity. But at the same time there were challenges. And in fact I went through a couple of significant challenges that I still reflect on to this day.
The first one involves an incident on Christmas Day in 2012. My wife and I had just gotten back from vacation on Christmas Eve and we were getting ready to get up for Christmas and go serve some meals to the airmen on base, attend church services, then open presents spend some quality time together. But before we could do that my second in charge, my vice-commander, Colonel Rick Folks knocked on my door. It was around 3:30 in the morning. We had a saying that nothing good ever happens after midnight and in this case it certainly was true.
Rick told me was that one of the airmen on my staff had committed suicide. When he said that my shoulders slumped and my heart tore in two because that airman was a good airman. The fact that the incident occurred on Christmas day made it even more devastating for everyone, especially his family. It was really a tough blow to take. But the challenges weren’t over.
The next day I went into work, and I pulled up my email where I found a note from headquarters that said my unit was slated for closure. I was dumbstruck. We were doing all kinds of things all over the world to make our air force run. But due to budget cuts, our unit had come up on the losing end. I was in the most rewarding job of my career, I had a lot of passion for the mission, and I just had a really big heart for the men and women that made up the unit. So, naturally, I felt as if the wind had been knocked of me.
Those two events were hard to take and in terms of a leadership crucible—a test that affects all that you are as leader. This crucible was one of the most significant of my entire career. But I had to decide what I wanted to do – what I needed to do—as a leader of that organization. So I decided to muster as much courage as I possibly could to move forward with as much honor and dignity and integrity as I could in order to do proper justice to that airman, his family and in fact all of the airmen and the families in the wing because of the contributions that they had made to the mission. I made it through and emerged changed both as a leader and as a human being.
I became much more reflective about what it meant to be a leader and the types of things that were required of them. Sacrifice for one, suffering for another. Leadership is not a role to be entered into lightly. And if you are going to be a leader you have to understand that there’s a certain amount of accountability and responsibility that come with it. And because of those things, I concluded that actually, being a leader requires selfless courage because of the sacrifice and indeed suffering that’s sometimes involved as well as the accountability and the responsibility that come with it. It’s not easy. You could even say that leadership is heroic, and in those small acts of leadership that occur on a day to day basis there emerges the stuff that heroes are made of…the stuff that leaders are made of.
In this course, I’m going to give you a few things to think about as you move forward on your leadership journey. You know, Joseph Campbell said that leaders move forth on a journey of challenging adventure that refines their character and defines their identity. They return from that journey having been tested in the crucible with gifts that now they are able to bestow on others. And, in a similar way, leaders like you do exactly the same thing.
So the question I want you to think about as you go through this course is this: “Am I ready, am I willing to take my leadership journey?”