Musings at Altitude

As I’ve been tracking my contacts (see “Staying Connected”, 6/21), I’ve been thinking about those that mentored me in past years, those that are mentoring me today, and those that I may be mentoring today.  As I’ve aged and gained experience in business, much like a son appreciates a father much later in life, I’ve grown to appreciate things said and done and opportunities provided by my mentors.  In some cases, working with my mentors was a real business hell, because the expectations were so high and the consequences of failure so great that the pressure somewhat tempered the appreciation for the mentoring.  But with time, that appreciation has grown, and with experience, I find myself in some ways sharing with others much like those mentors of my past shared with me.  I’d like to share two very special mentors of mine with you.

Back in the mid 80’s, I was the youngest and most junior officer in Communications on the Air Staff at the Pentagon.  When I arrived, I was greeted by a hardened through experience Colonel who had fought in wars, fought the bureacracy of staffs and commanded large numbers of troops.  As he looked up from his desk when I reported in, his opening words were, “why in the world is a Lieutenant on the Air Staff?”  I provided some lame response about someone who knew someone and he recommended me for this job, and he laughed and said, “well you’ll need money living here in Washington DC, so don’t hesitate to ask”.  For the next two years, that Colonel put me in positions where he treated me like every other officer on his team, ignoring my inexperience and very junior rank.  I briefed 4 star generals and represented the US in NATO forums with other nations represented by very senior officers.  Each time he said, “you’re our rep; I don’t care about your rank.”  I was fortunate to have an open door to this Colonel’s office where I frequently asked questions and needed advice.  He never hesitated in spending the needed time to help me be prepared, and he never once questioned whether I should be the one doing that job or not.  To this day, I still smile in knowing that he gave me responsibilities and authorities that many others in his position never would have given.  But I remember even more that I never felt isolated or alone…I always felt like he shared the burden of decisions and actions with me, even though he let me charge forward and craft the strategy for our division. 

Just a couple of years later, I ended up taking an assignment that most of the Colonels on the Air Staff recommended against…they felt it was a career ending move, but I felt it was a chance to do something radical and get deeply involved in special mission environments thus out of the main stream of Air Force communications.  The Colonel who selected me for this assignment told me I was different than the rest of his team.  He felt like he needed new folks on his team that focused on the people side of the business rather than just the technical.  In an early meeting with his entire team, we all took a personality test, and just as he said, when they divided up the room as to “types”, I was standing alone on one side of the room while the rest of his team were together on the other side.  Over the next 4 years, I watched as this Colonel revolutionized the communications support to our organization and challenged his team to achieve a level of service that was very atypical of military commmunications organizations.  As he stretched us with technology and challenged us in service, he also delegated down and then trusted team members throughout the organization to deliver above and beyond what would normally be expected.  With millions of dollars per day riding on decisions made by team members throughout the organization, he remained unusually calm in the most critical mission scenarios, as he trusted all of his team to deliver against mission requirements.  He typically got the most upset with bureacratic responses to any issue or lack of creativity in defining solutions to mission or administrative needs.  He wanted us to be leading at all times, in all issues, and with all our actions.  He also wanted us to embrace change, accept risk, accept failure (as long as reasoning was sound to begin with), and challenge each other.  In the four years we worked together, he frustrated me beyond belief with his attention deficit to the things I needed him to focus on, but he trusted me to have things under control and thus he was off on the next big thing for the organization shortly after any decision was made and then action delegated down to others like me to execute.  To this day, I was amazed at the trust he so willingly passed around the organization, and I was even more amazed at the acceptance of failure as an expected result of some portion of actions because we were pushing so hard to advance the organization.

Both of these individuals had one very important trait in common – they trusted their teams and gave those teams responsibilities well beyond what their experiences or rank warranted and then stepped back and watched the magic (grounded in that trust) of phenomenal results.

Mentoring is so natural for some, and so unnatural for others.  Trust is not easy for everyone; accepting risk is not easy for everyone; allowing for mistakes is not easy for everyone…but they seem to be so easy for the mentors that I’ve respected the most in my professional life.  I’m very grateful to not only these two very special people, but to a very select list of others who have mentored me in my career and still mentor me today.