Episode 114 – Rear Admiral Paul Becker, Retired – Leaders on Leadership
What does leadership in uniform look like? What kind of price do these leaders have to pay for leadership? Former Rear Admiral Paul Becker joins Dr. Tracey Jones to share with us what he has to say about that. Paul is a leadership expert and motivational speaker who has been working to help teams in crisis combat management. He tells us the things he learned from being a Naval Intelligence Rear Admiral and how he overcame loneliness, weariness, and abandonment that comes with the job. Paul then shares with us the tenets of leadership learned in uniform—Teamwork, Tone, and Tenacity—and how they improve performance, productivity, and profit in the private sector.
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Rear Admiral Paul Becker, Retired – Leaders on Leadership
Our guest is former Rear Admiral Paul Becker. Paul is a leadership expert and motivational speaker. He has led incredible teams in crisis combat management and now, he is in the private sector, sharing what he learned about paying the price of leadership with corporations all over the world. You are going to love reading what retired Admiral Becker has to say about paying the price of leadership.
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I am excited because our guest is a success expert and a motivational speaker. His name is retired Rear Admiral Paul Becker. He is the former Naval Intelligence Rear Admiral who built and led large, diverse teams in peace, crisis and combat. He is a Stage IV bone cancer survivor. He started a service-disabled veteran-owned small business consultancy in 2016 called The Becker T3 Group. T3 stands for Teamwork, Tone, and Tenacity. These are all tenets of leadership learned in uniform that improve performance, productivity and profit in the private sector. Admiral Becker, welcome to the show.
It's a pleasure to be with you, Tracey. Thank you for the invitation.
You're welcome. Sir, do you mind if I call you Paul throughout the remainder of this? Is that acceptable?
Paul is better and more comfortable there now.
Thank you so much. For our readers out there, because everybody loves to hear the story about how tremendous people get connected. I met Paul on the C-Suite Network and he was in the group. We do these Friday get-togethers. I’ve been a member since 2020. How long have you been a member, Paul?
I’ve been a member since 2018.
I saw his website and credentials. I thought you guys know my prior history. He can tell you where he went to school. We were chatting about the Navy/Air Force game a little bit before we came online. Our readers know how the military affected my leadership development so I love talking with formal leadership experts, especially a retired former Rear Admiral with the experiences that he has. Thank you again, Paul.
It’s my pleasure.
Paul, I had sent you a speech that my father gave called The Price of Leadership. My father was quite passionate about leadership, but he was pragmatic about it. He talked about that there's a certain price that you're going to have to pay if you consider yourself a true authentic leader. I know somebody in your role being in crisis and combat, you understand leadership isn't always easy. One of the things that he talked about, the first price was loneliness. Would you unpack for us times in your career where you felt loneliness as a leader and what that means to you as a leader? Maybe some if our readers are going through a season of that might get some insights.
Thanks. Yes, I like your dad's paradigm. I've not put those four words together as a framework for leadership, but they're worth talking about. This is a learning experience for me and all leaders are learners and listeners so there will be experiential learning and listening along the way. There's loneliness, weariness, abandonment and vision. When it comes to loneliness, there's physical loneliness that I've experienced as a leader and there's an emotional detachment that’s sometimes necessary as a leader as well.
We'll start with physical loneliness. I'm a gregarious person by nature. I like to network and be with others. Whenever possible, I tried not to become physically isolated from the teams that I worked with so I never accepted that leaders are lonely because they have an office by themselves. They have to make decisions rubbing their chin with no one else around. I was more of a collaborative spirit. I liked talking with people, absorbing their ideas and getting a chance for them to be included. I found it improved the quality of our thoughts and our outcomes. If it wasn't possible to get together closer to me, the Yiddish word I'm going to use here is called shpilkes, which means ants in your pants, and you feel like you have to walk around and do something all the time. It’s a little edgy. I've always felt like that.
As a school-aged child, as a military leader, I liked walking around and seeing what was happening, listening to what others were doing, sharing with what I was doing that they may not get to hear otherwise, and having the visual interaction, sometimes the physical interaction. That eliminated an area of loneliness and I never completely bought into the small group theory that I find a lot of more senior officers accepted, “This information needs to be closely held.” I was of the opposite opinion. I liked the large group theory. Not everything should be widely disseminated as it's evolving, and it's half-baked but when the decision-making process started moving in earnest, I liked involving all facets of the organization. There were transparency and understanding. Even if you were in Division S, T, U, and V, you understood, at least you heard what Divisions B, C, D and F were doing at the same time. That's an area of physical loneliness.
Leaders should expect that work will require them to be physically separated from their families for longer periods of time. In the military, in particular, there are a lot of choice assignments, that sometimes you have to go on unaccompanied. Geographic Bachelor's, as we call them. It may be six months. It may be 2.5 years as I once had in the Middle East before I came home for good. How do you make the most of your time if you're physically separated from your family? You have people at work so I never bought into the theory of leaders dying alone. I liked getting out for the social activity of an organization. It didn't mean I had to do the same thing as the petty officers or the lieutenants at the activity.
It didn't mean I had to be there until the ending hours but to be there, as a member of the team, by title you may have been the leader of the team. Your dad's four corners of loneliness, weariness, abandonment, and vision prove that leadership is a process. It's not a title. I may have been the commanding officer, or I may have been the N2 or J2, the intel officer but that's not leadership. That's the title. Leadership is the process of combining those four factors and others into influencing others and achieving a positive outcome. I found that better done when you had more physical interaction and you were less physically lonely than the other. That’s probably enough on the physical aspect of loneliness.
Leadership In Uniform: Leaders should expect that work will require them to be physically separated from their families for longer periods of time.
I mentioned there's an emotional professional loneliness that comes with a leader. I talked about my style as one of inclusivity. I like to listen, learn, collaborate and communicate frequently, but not everyone at the table picked their decision and we couldn't execute seven things at once. That's a leader’s job on occasion to pick the one solution, but I liked doing it with others. Even if not everyone agreed I wanted them to understand the process, the inputs, and the decision along the way. Sometimes you don't have to be in command or a senior officer at all to make a decision of leadership and influence. It could be a junior noncommissioned officer. It could be a junior commissioned officer, where you take a courageous stand if you think something is immoral, illegal and unethical.
I can remember, as a fairly junior officer, our squadron, I was in a Navy Squadron, we were preparing to conduct a strike mission against a target ashore. The latest imagery arrived and the aircrews and our ship were ready to enter combat. I saw some things that were wrong in that latest satellite image. I felt duty-bound to go to my chain of command and say, “There will be unacceptable collateral damage if we strike this target.” “Yeah, Becker, but we've been waiting for this mission for several weeks. The opportunity is here.” There was a long discussion that ensued and ultimately, the Strike Group commander decided we're not going to strike. There's too much downside here.
I felt emotionally lonely. I didn't feel like I was a leader, but I tried to influence a process, the definition of leadership. Some of my shipmates wouldn't talk to me for a while. It’s like, “He screwed up our opportunity to go into combat. Do you know how valued that is in our profession of arms?” There was plenty more combat to come. That instance wasn't right. How to bide your time if you're physically or emotionally distant and lonely? I found refuge in books.
I don't consider myself a geek or an academic by trade. When you are by yourself and lonely, I find books are great friends that not only can you learn about and you can go back deep. You can read Marcus Aurelius and what he thought about life as a stoic during the Roman Empire or you could go more contemporary to General Colin Powell who has a unique perspective from a lot of senior positions. You could pick a contemporary nonmilitary type of person. I think about Peter Drucker, Robert Maxwell, or Sheryl Sandberg as recommended reading.
They're all here in my office. They're all earmarked. I referenced them frequently. To help augment that, I try and become less emotionally and physically lonely by keeping current with pop culture, which connects me to a new generation of military service members. For example, during my 2.5 years in Bahrain, I was the intel officer for naval forces of our central command. This is during the peak of the Iraqi Freedoms Surge and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan still underway. Iran was up to malign activity. There was piracy and maritime terrorism so it was a full plate, but I still found time to see movies, Superbad, or every time I get a TDY, a trip to read a Harry Potter book or something like that to keep current with what I knew was a new generation of service members joining. I had something to talk about on the margins, besides analyzing the thread every day. Plenty of thoughts on loneliness there.
It is. I hadn't ever thought and I'm not sure if I had anybody prior military on this before but you talked about the unaccompanied tours. For our readers out there, I know it's tough when you travel. Maybe it's tough that you're not traveling right now. We’re like the opposite.
That's why I joined the Navy.
We would go away. A short tour was six months. A long tour was 1 to 3 years. I remember getting called up for Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm. You went and you said goodbye. I was married at the time and we went away for nine months and came back together at the end. I also love that you talked about doing the right thing. I'm glad you brought that up. The military is a phenomenal institution, but it's all about the people. You're always going to have people that get focused on what they think is the right thing and you're going to have to sometimes stand up and that takes a great deal of courage.
I appreciate you sharing that because there's this assumption with leadership that if you do the right thing, if you bring out the obvious, if you call out the elephant in the room, or if you go, “Do we not all see this?” You get the whole group to think, conformity thinks, false consensus, and all the weird things that our mind starts doing. I appreciate you saying that because we assume when we call something out that everybody's going to go, “Yes.” That's not often the case. There have been people that have lost their careers because they stood on principle. Thank you for sharing that conviction because sometimes conviction makes you lonely. I'd rather be lonely with my own conviction than lonely knowing that I let something go on. That's the worst. Not said something that I knew. That kills your soul.
A broad stroke about all those points that we discussed. Leaders have to generate their own morale. No one gives it to you but at the same time, as a leader, you need to be mindful that others may be going through the same scenario. When you ask, “How are you doing?” you need to mean it and you need to get to the bottom line. You need to have a trusted confidant and friend even if you are senior in rank, but it's okay to have a special relationship with a colleague, a protégé-mentor relationship, and it's okay to be reverse mentored by someone junior to you. It could be your deputy or someone who you've served with in the past that'll knock on your door or talk to you during your daily exercises and say, “Do you know what everyone's thinking that I don't think you're clued in on?” That will help bring you to others and others to you. Exercise that option as well.
Paul, in the military, we've talked about fraternization so there's more of a separation, not that we still don't collaborate. You're there as a member, but you don't do the things that other people do. There are reasons for it. I know your colleagues or your senior-level enlisted that are supporting you. Did you reach out outside your career field to have people that you would use as a sounding board or if you were in a season of loneliness to get counsel?
Absolutely. Probably more so than in the community. I had sources in both. We're well off of loneliness at this point but it's a good conversation with your permission, I'll keep going.
Yes, please.
Not long after that tour, another tour as a Navy Captain, at this point, I commanded the Joint Intelligence Center for Central Command in Tampa. It was a large organization with a lot of missions. It was 800 people and we were engaged throughout the Central Command area of responsibility with officer enlisted active reserve civilians. One of my mentors told me, “Paul, the more senior you become, the more mentoring you're going to need.” At first, I thought he must have misspoken because he's got it backward. Here I am, I've got a commander in my title and a parking space for the first time ever.
People salute you.
Leadership In Uniform: Sometimes, you don't have to be in command or a senior officer at all to make a decision of leadership and influence.
It dawned on me that I had not commanded before. There was so much I had to learn. I sought out mentoring, not from within my community but external, and I maintain that practice. Come to think of it up to that point, I probably didn't go deep or wide for that type of mentoring until someone shared a simple thought. There's a lot of value in simplicity and elegance there and it made all the difference that I reached out more instead of less.
I love that the more senior you become, the more mentorship you'll need. That takes us to what you're sharing, sharing the burden of leadership because it is a burden. It's joyful, but it's tough. If it were easy, everybody would do it. My father talked about weariness. You talked about books, that's beautiful, and you talked about mentorship. Is there anything else you want to talk about for weariness on how you stay replenished? In the military, if the leader isn't on their game, there are a lot of things that can happen as a result of that. Can you share with us how you combat and handle weariness?
A couple of facets like loneliness and I'll start with the physical but there's also a professional and emotional weariness that comes along with command as well. There's a famous citation and I've heard it attributed to both Patton and football coach Lombardi, “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” Leadership isn't an around-the-clock activity. You may get calls around the clock. You may be working extra late to make sure a series of evaluations or submission of a key product looks right because it represents your command. Even though you may not be the principal analyst for a product as an intel professional, you're the senior analyst. It has your commands name on it. There's an administrative burden that comes with it and you'll be working more hours. Something is way off if you're working less hours while you're in a position of significant leadership.
I like the phrase, “If you want to get something done, give it to someone who's busy.” They know how to do things and turn it out and it takes physical energy. I always played sports growing up. I never gave that up until I was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, which you brought up. I'll talk about that in weariness as well. You need to have the stamina to succeed as a leader. You never know, when you come to work one day, in a profession of arms in particular, how long is that day going to be?
How many people came to work at the Pentagon on 9/11 2001 and didn't know they may be gone for 36 hours? It’s probably every single one. Some of them performed better. We're coming up on the anniversary of the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. This is Al-Qaeda's first attack against a dedicated US military target afloat and in a damage control evolution or the Khobar Towers maybe some decades before that. You don't know how long you're going to be out there and there's a physical wherewithal that others will depend upon a leader to be there. You can't phone it in that you're tired.
“My deputy has it at this point. I'll be back after my eight hours of sleep in a crisis.” There's a reason for eight-hour sleep. As a profession of arms, you want to be well-rested and alert. The Air Force is keen on crew rest for a good reason. There are crisis situations where you'll need that stamina and I've had many over the years. You can share the load. That's for sure. There's a chain of command. I've seen some commanders, CCs as the Air Force calls them, give a lot and some of them give a little bit of responsibility to their deputies.
I always wanted a lot of performance out of my deputies and I always worked for commanders that wanted a lot of performance out of me. Hopefully, I met the target but in order to get a lot of performance, I found you have to give them a lot of authority. You have to not only give up the work but give up the authority to direct some of these activities. You're accepting some risk, leader, in this case but it needs to be a measured risk. If something goes wrong, you need to buy that risk in case something goes wrong. You may delegate the activity but you own the responsibility. There's a weariness that comes from both keeping your head on a swivel and being able to follow up, if necessary, in other places as well.
You need to watch out for your fatigue. Back to a protégé-mentor relationship or another colleague either in your specialty or without, if someone comes up to you and says, “You're looking tired. Do you realize you've misbuttoned your shirt?” There are small tells. You're consistently misspelling some of your emails, you stop spell checking, your attitudes a little snappy when you're not normally that. You may see it yourself. You may not see it yourself, to avoid the signs that you're missing weariness, it's good to have another partner there.
Weariness can go to a whole other level and some of it may be medically induced as was the case for me. At the time in 2014, I was the Joint Chiefs of Staff J2 Director for Intelligence. I come from Hawaii, a much happier place than the Pentagon, for the record, where I was the J2 or Director for Intelligence of the Pacific Command, as it was called back then. I run the Honolulu Marathon before transferring to DC. I had the fitness part to avoid the weariness, which is fine, but I had a knee pain that wouldn't go away. Upon further examination with an MRI, a tumor was found and the tumor was biopsied. I was told I had something I'd never heard of before, multiple myeloma or bone marrow cancer.
I asked how these things are scaled, and the doctor glumly said, “This is at Stage IV.” Being my first exposure to cancer, I never even had a family or a close friend involved. We've got six stages to go until we get to stage ten because, in America, everything's based on ten. David Letterman's list, people's books, everything's ten. He’s like, “There's no Stage V.” That got my attention quickly. I spent most of 2015 in the ever-increasingly famous Walter Reed National Military Medical Center formerly called Bethesda Naval Hospital.
My leg was saved but I had to go through a lot of high-dose chemotherapy. I went through a stem cell transplant, which is a rather sporty procedure. To this day, I remain on low dose maintenance chemotherapy. This is my way ahead, considering the alternatives and I was on the ropes on a couple of occasions. I'm happy with this outcome. There's a weariness that comes with worry. There's a weariness that comes with factors beyond your control of taking care of your body. What helped me get through it and we'll talk more about teamwork, tone, and tenacity in a little bit. That was a framework but there was also faith, family, and fitness. You put those together and that's a recipe to use against weariness. That’s a recipe to use against loneliness as well so I'm glad we bundled those two together upfront because there are a lot of similarities there.
You're going to encounter them. There is a potent cocktail that we can do. You know as well as I do that a lot of contingency planning, a lot of preventative maintenance and making sure your faith is solid, and do everything you can fitness-wise. That's unbelievable, Paul. How are you now strength-wise? Does the low dosage still impact you? Do you feel like you’re back in your fight in shape? Where are you now?
I don't think I'll ever be back to that level of fighting shape because I can't run anymore. I have an 8-inch titanium rod as a big part of my right femur nowadays. Running is out so I've adopted swimming and other exercises. I'm healthy. I'm in a steady deep remission and the sky's the limit.
Thank you for sharing that, Paul. We talked about loneliness and weariness. My dad then talked about abandonment and typically abandonment has this negative connotation like you're walking away from something. His version of abandonment was, we need to give up what we like and want to think about in favor of what we ought and need to think about. I look at this as a hyper-focus. As a commander, you can't command if you're thinking scattered and barking out different orders to everybody. Can you explain to me what abandonment means to you and how you've been in incredible command positions? How did you stay on point, stay on mission point and move forward?
I never use the phrase abandonment as part of my leadership lexicon either. As I prepared to speak with you, I started researching it a little bit. Your dad was onto something there and others have written about it eloquently as well, so I have some background. At first, I thought it may be, “None of the leaders that I worked for and admired ever abandon me. I would hope people didn't say I abandoned them.” In this aspect, there's no physical component like there is for loneliness and weariness. I would phrase it this way. An element of leadership is managing loss.
Leadership In Uniform: An element of leadership is managing loss.
Let me be more specific. It's freeing up resources. It's cutting loose something that is no longer of value. It's trying things and when they fail, being comfortable enough to say, “That was a real mess. We're not going to do that again.” That's abandoning an idea. It may be cutting loose a person to the degree that you can from your organization. Over the years, I've had way more failures than successes. The failures are funnier too.
They make for better stories. There are some epic fails. The epic successes were few and far between and rather boring and as an intel professional, we don't talk of them publicly. Success teaches nothing, only failure teaches. It is a famous citation of former naval officer, father of the nuclear Navy, Admiral Rickover. Jedi Master Yoda has a variant of the same. My point is not to compare Admiral Rickover and Yoda but it's a theme that crosses galaxies in that regard.
It’s pruning. Before we experience growth, we're going to have to go back and look at getting rid of what no longer serves us and things change. The end is still here, but you may have to adapt. That’s the old fight or flight but we may need to adapt things and what worked in a season before. You got new orders at any time different so you have to be able to pivot and let go of the sacred cows so you can embrace the new future, which is always unpacking and revealing itself.
It's an important unstated task for leaders. They must prioritize what needs to be done for the organization. I enter any position with a long list of things I like to do. I'm hired in a lot of places because I'm good at doing what I like to do, but I've also shown that I can expand that. I've probably been hired because people think, “He could probably do this too.” I may have gotten there and found out that I don't like it, but I do need to realize it needs to be done.
Back to the Middle East, for example, the N2 in Bahrain so we’re looking at Iraqi the maritime terrorism component malign activities of Iran in three dimensions in the air, surface, on the sea, under the sea as well and cyber. Make it a five-dimensional threat there. We’re supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. You’ve got this piracy problem off of the Horn of Africa. We're in real combat up here and this portion of our theater. I don't like to do piracy.
The return on investment is so small as a warfighting organization, but it was what the international community and our own national command authority demanded of us. As much as I didn't like it, I probably spent at the peak of piracy timeframe of several years ago now off of the Horn of Africa probably half of my day, devoted to piracy issues compared to what I would have rather spent on it 10% of the time, but that's not what needed to be done. That's a trade-off.
Everyone abandons something all the time, usually at midnight. Yesterday is behind you. Tomorrow is ahead of you. We're abandoning yesterday on a 24-hour cycle, at least administratively. Whether you use sports, military, or a corporate analogy, there are some things you can't affect any longer. Every situation is different so the goal is not to quickly jettison everything or hold on to it for a certain amount of time. It depends but you need to be looking forward and that's abandoning what's behind you.
Another thought on abandonment. Some of the epic failures I have, in retrospect, we probably didn't remove people from the task that was a bad influence on the team or the effect we were trying to achieve early enough. If I could do some of those over again, the goal is not to be tougher on people. I try to be consistent if nothing else, on both fairness and equity. To take it more jaundice, are people the problem here, and if so, which of the people are the problem to achieve a better effect sooner?
In the spirit, when I was a more junior leader, as an old sports player, everything's about loyalty to the team. I'm not sure I balanced the effectiveness of the mission and the larger organization, versus the loyalty and the camaraderie of the team. I found out over time that the teams that are insulated from failure continue to fail. Unless you tell them, “This is bad work. You did not hit the mark.” If you try and sugarcoat it too much, in terms of unity and morale, but you're not candid enough to let yourself accept others telling you that you've failed, you're setting the team up for more failures in the future. In that regard, when you're trying new things, don't be risk-averse, mention that briefly. If you're going to give your deputy more responsibility, give them more authority. That's a prudent risk. Don’t risk-averse but be averse to taking a bad risk. Think through it with a group of people before you make the choice. Those are a few thoughts on abandonment.
I'm still stunned because I am all-in with what you said. This is the biggest thing about leadership, and maybe it's because we're military people, where we've got to look at stuff and say if this a good fit or not. You get this in civilian sectors where it's like, “It’s his culture and we need to unlock people in their best environment.” Being prior military, I was always like, “They have to also meet the needs of the mission.” That’s why I still studied followership.
Paul, especially being in the military, where you can't let people go, everybody's in unless they do something horrific and wind up cast out of the corps or whatever. How would you do that process? Would you meet with them a certain amount of times? I go back to leadership and we're supposed to get the best out of people but what do you do if somebody is not stepping into what the needs of the mission are?
There's verbal counseling at multiple levels. The titular head of the organization last works it up. The leader is responsible so if the verbal is not working, there’s this escalation model I have in mind and in writing. At the same time, you could be doing other things with problem individuals in a team. You keep them in the larger umbrella organization but move them off this team. That may not be possible. We could minimize their roles and responsibilities. Administratively, I can't remove the person and control what level of trust and work we give.
Others will see this happening so you need to be candid with the others as well as to why this is happening. More often than not, finally, when people were minimized, they've all those things didn't work and they were ostracized by their own peers. That was a level of pressure and concern that they had that brought them back on board. Some never came that way but more often than not, when they started feeling the pressure from their peer group is when they turned around.
This is tough because a lot of people that are reading are solopreneurs or 1 or 2, but Paul's principles are still solid. Paul, when you said you waited too long on some of these, is it that you saw early inklings? Do you think people turn the corner quickly? I look at the book of Proverbs and there are the wise people that accept rebuke. There are the fools that will laugh, but come along, and there are people that you know that leadership or not, it's not going to work. When you say it was too long, why do you think that was? I ask this on behalf of every leader and myself too, because we're ‘get it done’ people especially people in the military so people look at me and say, “Why didn't you act sooner? You knew there wasn't this level of trust or performance?” I'm like, “I don't know.” I’m interested to hear your thoughts on that.
By nature, I'm overly forgiving. I've benefited from mercy, professional and spiritual over the years so I'm sensitive to it. For example, here's an epic fail. We call them Sea Stories, their wingman, we shipmates call them Sea Stories. This is after 9/11. I was assigned to an aircraft carrier Strike Group, embarked on the Stennis based in San Diego. Stennis wasn't in the Central Command area of responsibility on 9/11 but we were getting ready to go there that winter for what would have been a routine deployment. When 9/11 occurred we all got out to the ship quickly. We didn't know what was next.
Leadership In Uniform: Leaders should look at any object through a different lens.
Instead of a four-month training cycle to get ready to deploy, we were given four weeks to get out there and support the other aircraft carriers that were on the line. We relieved one of them. Things were moving rather quickly and an evaluation team comes on board at the end of your training period. Like any group of evaluators, they've got their clipboard, building their PowerPoints, and they make a presentation in front of a room of senior officers.
The intel evaluator, who I didn't know well but didn't say anything particularly negative to me during the process, the first graphic he puts up, and his words begin, “Significant problems noted. Not ready for a combat deployment.” This is a 1 or 2 weeks away from going to war for our country. The country is already at war. I was stunned. The room was stunned. There was no coordination. No other evaluator laid that lumber on the other participants. Maybe they didn't deserve it.
The meeting breaks. Others continue. Everyone's walking around me at the end of the presentation in the conference room like I'm radioactive. They want nothing to do with me because they don't want to be next to the anchor who may be getting fired. It’s like, “We do things differently than Becker. He's not ready. We're ready.” Up there, I was left with a couple of admirals. I was a commander at the time. A couple of admirals, so one who I worked directly for and one who was the Admiral of the whole evaluation team. My immediate Admiral, Jim Zortman was his name, put his arm around my shoulder and he said, “Paul, you did fine. There are some things that need to be fixed but I have every confidence that you will do that and we deploy in one week with you as our Intel Officer.”
I failed. There was no doubt about that in the exam, but my boss didn't make me feel like a failure. It's a different take on abandonment. He didn't abandon me. I'll never forget that act of forgiveness. It’s more of a kindness. How motivated was I to work for this guy for the next eight months of load. The other Admiral, later on, would command US Naval Forces in the Central Command and when it came time, a few years later for orders, he asked that I join his staff as the Intel Officer. They said, “I remember how you handled that evaluation scenario back off of the San Diego coast in October of 2001. I haven't seen what you've done since then, I knew you could handle all that's happening here.” He didn't abandon me either. He forgave me. He showed some mercy and how motivated was I to work hard for that person on that mission.
The other thing is, you had people that gave you the second opportunity and I love that you said overly forgiven and benefited from mercy. Thank you. Maybe that's why I'm so long-suffering too because I'm like, “Nobody was a bigger screw up than me.” It took me seven years to get my undergrad. I look back at this. What I love about what you’ve said is they gave you the opportunity, but you produced the outcome.
That is the hope when we give people feedback and say, “You need to abandon this type of attitude or will problem and I need you to step up your game and come back into the fold,” and you did it. You didn't accept their opportunity to rise and shine, but you delivered. You made them look like they made the decision and that's where that dual nature of leaders and followers, you can't have one without the other. Great followers need great leaders and great leaders need great followers. We're in this together.
Lastly, we have vision. My dad talked about the fourth price of leadership is vision. What he referred to vision as is seeing what needs to be done and doing it. I love it because I'm such an integrator. I'm like, “I’m a high D. Can we get this done? Let's get to work.” I'm sure I pulled that trait from him, but what does vision mean for you? We hear all these esoteric and some of our emerging leaders may be like, “I don't consider myself visionary.” What does vision mean for you? How do you hone it, craft it, get it and let it drive you forward?
Vision is understanding where you're going. There's a metaphor there on where you're going. Back to the team concept, there are two things teammates want to know from their leader. Do they care? Do you care about me? If you don't, you're going to be an ineffective leader. You'll never garner the trust and loyalty of your teammates. Do you care and do you know where we're going? Where do the company's sales go?
Where is this aircraft going? What is the purpose of raising these Combined Federal Campaign funds? Why are we doing this? Simon Sinek talks about this, getting to why. Leaders’ vision is the why we're doing this. Not only must they understand where the organization is going, they need to drive it there. It doesn't happen on its own. These are not fire and forget weapons. It needs constant input, and how does one do it?
It's good to have a credo, a maxim, a commander of philosophy, or a commander's intent. I thought about this long and hard. I took good notes from leaders who I admired and did not, a combination of both for decades. When it came time for me to develop my own command philosophy and commander's intent, I thought about what made a tremendous leader compared to an average leader. I binned them into three categories that apply to vision.
There's the teamwork, the tone, and that fighting spirit of tenacity. When you put them all together, you have something that's short, memorable and actionable. It lets everyone know the vision of how we're going to do things. You need to also incorporate into that what we're going to do but back to the vision, here's why we're going to do it. These things are easy to forget. I was never a fan of someone who framed their commands vision statement. They left it near every doorway in the office and people walked by it and didn't pay attention or those that insert snappy quotes at the bottom of their signature block. It’s like, “This is my leadership philosophy.”
It doesn't work that way. It needs to be visible, constantly reinforced, incentivized and repeated all the time. It's a little bit kitschy but I turned mine into something I called the Gold Standard. I put it on a piece of gold paper and made it into a trifold. I had 5 or 6 of these different and every command that I went to since about the time when I was a commander. This one happened to be from the Joint Intelligence Center Central Command. That was the large command that I talked about. That’s an image of our command logo, but we were directly subordinate to the central command.
On the back fold in case, someone left it upside down, that's our mission right there. That's the why we do what we do. We rapidly provide all source operationally relevant intelligence to CENTCOM, warfighters, and decision-makers. We will provide the knowledge to defeat any enemy. That's why we do what we do. Inside there are other panels, I won't read the whole thing, but we get to the what and the how. The how is we execute our vision. That's the teamwork, tone and tenacity. Teamwork is about developing trust and loyalty amongst partners. The reason, in my experience, that teams fall apart or they're ineffective, there's a lack of trust and loyalty. There are ways to improve that and a leader needs to be mindful of that. That's what teamwork is about. Think about how many times you trust someone, even if you disagree with them?
In our political environment, there are a lot of people in the military or former military that I trust and I have a different political philosophy, but I trust them. Because of that, we continue our friendship and our loyalty to each other in fighting organizations or a company that's fighting for performance and profit. That's important, that cohesive bond. The tone is that cascade of positive effects and outlooks and the goal is not to be the Pollyannaish Ned Flanders from the Simpsons. Not that optimism but the pragmatic positive outcome to be triumphant along the way.
Back to things, we talked about in the other quadrants when you ask someone how they're doing, you need to mean it. That's part of the tone. Admiral Zortman is telling me, “You failed, but you're not a failure.” That's part of a tone. There's tenacity. There are other synonyms like perseverance. Angela Duckworth wrote a great book a few years ago called Grit. I love that word. It’s the same concept, but tenacity is not endurance. If you've ever driven in a car around Los Angeles, New York, or DC, that's endurance. It’s like commuting to work.
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Tenacity is persevering, but with a purpose. It's understanding what the end game looks like and working your way backward to achieve it. You need to go through, over, around, and underneath all legally, morally, and ethically. That's the way to do it. The most tenacious people in the military I ever worked with were those junior to me. I was sure I couldn't compete with them. Later in the career, I was like, “How did they get so tenacious?” I think of Master Chief Petty Officer Todd Schroeder or Colonel Annette Torrisi and these are people who I'm dear friends with now. We're all out of uniform, but at the time, I drew inspiration and energy from their tenacity. Trying to get things done when we were stationed together in Afghanistan, in some pretty trying circumstances for a 1.5 year in 2009 and 2010.
I love that you brought up the trust and one of my favorite quotes is by George MacDonald. He said, “To be trusted is a higher compliment than being loved.” I don't have to like you, but if I trust you, that's the most important thing because if I don't trust you, there's no way I'm going to like you anyway. Trust is a big deal and organizations now are finding collaboration, unity, and all that stuff. Without trust, everything splits apart. You can't have a team if you don't trust each other.
Trust is the glue that holds, call it a triangle, teamwork, tone and tenacity. It's a little bit alliterative, it's memorable and actionable things we should be doing, but you need all three. Without one of the legs, you have two sticks and the figure collapses. What holds the joints together is trust.
Thank you for sharing your insights on vision, Paul. As we're circling back, we covered loneliness, weariness, abandonment and vision. I've got five pages of notes so thank you. I can't wait to go back again. Anything else that you have not unpacked in your leadership that you would like to share? We talked about the price of leadership and anything else while our readers have the benefit of reading your wisdom. Is there anything else you would like to share with the group?
A final note on vision, leaders should look at any object through a different lens. As much as possible, let me be more specific. Here's a computer. I've got a keyboard in front of me. I'm looking at my MacBook Air talking to you now. Computers aren't in the computing business as much as they are nowadays in the communications business. Think about those leaders. Any asset, any human or physical asset that you may have, as part of your team as part of your organization. Think about what dual uses and innovative uses you can use to expand someone's professional horizons or use a tool in a different way. “Reuse those space rockets,” says SpaceX.
“Let's try a different type of battery,” says Mr. Tesla. Innovation goes into vision and back to the triangle. Not every leader is the perfect balance of teamwork, tone and tenacity. They're not all equilateral triangles. By all accounts, someone with a great vision with Steve Jobs, but by the same all accounts, he wasn't a fun person to work with. I've read his bio and seen his movie. He’s a tough boss but has an indisputable vision about something. That may have been an isosceles triangle, that teamwork, tone and tenacity, so be flexible that way. It’s not always going to be one side equals all.
Paul, how can our readers reach out to you, learn more about you, or connect with you? I'm sure they'd love to have you in their tribe of connections and also talk about your website and what you're doing now.
With pleasure, my website is TheBeckerT3Group.com. I'm on Twitter @BeckerT3Group, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram as well. We provide organizational development expertise, leadership coaching and instruction to individual roles and organizations in the private sector. In uniform, our metric of success is how ready were we to fight? Are we combat-ready now? It's tough to put a dollar figure on that. Military tries, but it's not the same as dollars and cents. What I do, as a leadership coach, mentor, and expert, working with private corporations, is to make that transition from teamwork, tone, and tenacity, to performance, productivity and profit.
I've worked with Fortune 500 companies down through two-person startups to help get them moving. I continue to contribute to national security, through boards of advisers with companies that work with the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Most happily in 2020, I began teaching leadership at the US Naval Academy here in Annapolis. I'm teaching the class of 2023. Not all of them. It's a big class, but two sections of ethics and moral reasoning for Naval leaders.
I know some of our readers out there may have some kids or grandkids going to the Naval Academy.
I retain an active social media footprint. We've been kind enough to comment on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. I try and match world events, or memorable personalities, or their birthdays to the core elements of teamwork, tone and tenacity.
For readers out there, be sure and connect with Paul. Link up with him and check out his website if you're an organization. Paul, I love that you're taking what you learn from the military experience and bringing it into the marketplace because there is much beautiful relevance that we can use in productivity and profits. It's not about going to war because everybody knows running a business and entrepreneurship can be a lot like war on a lot of different days. Thank you for that.
Paul, we are thankful for you being here. To our readers out there, if you like what you read, please hit the subscribe button. Do us the honor of a rating wherever you listen to us. We're across all the different platforms. Share with other people that want to hear what it takes to pay the price of leadership. Retired Rear Admiral Becker, thank you for your wisdom, Paul. To our tremendous leaders out there, have a tremendous day.
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About Paul Becker
Paul is the perfect high-energy, inspirational speaker. What sets this decorated military leader apart from others is his “Teamwork, Tone, Tenacity”™ leadership principles that add value to every bottom line. Each one of his engaging, interactive presentations are tailored to support your team’s vision of success.