Leadership is the ongoing decision to accept ultimate responsibility for the organization’s Vision, Engagement and Execution.
The Big Three of Leadership
Let’s dig deeper into that definition by further defining the constituent terms:
Vision is the ability to define and communicate a desired future state of the organization,
Engagement is the ability to help team members understand and commit to their role in achieving the shared Vision, and,
Execution is the subsequent unleashing of the team’s independent thought and individual actions in ways that are aligned, both deliberately and spontaneously, in service to the Vision.
The challenge to leaders is that to be effective, they must do all three of these daunting tasks simultaneously, because:
Vision alone is the stuff of futurists,
Engagement alone is the power alley of extroverts, and
Execution alone is the playground of technocrats.
It is only when all three elements are considered together and seen as essential elements in an interrelated system that this becomes the exclusive workspace of the leader. Success at the Big Three components of leadership in turn creates an environment that restores faith and confidence in the leader, the team, and the overarching vision. It’s tough to get started, but once it’s going, it fuels a virtuous, self-perpetuating cycle.
Invariably, the leader’s ability to pull this off is determined by the perspective or state of mind that he or she brings to their daily work. In this case, "state of mind" doesn’t refer to the psychologist’s buckets of happy, sad, glad or mad, but to five concrete measures of perspective that we will explore as we learn more about the Return on Leadership. Within the framework of a system called Universal Leadership, this specialized form of perspective measures the ways in which any given leader views themselves, the world around them, and their place in it.
Okay, you may say, that sounds fine in theory, but what does it mean in the real world?
Let’s take a look.
Chapter 2 – Accidental Science
Reunion
One of the unintended consequences of the commercialization of the Internet is that it has democratized access to information that has always been locked away, for reasons of both practicality and security. While that’s interesting in a broad social sense, one of the very personal things that it makes possible is for each of us to look up people from our respective pasts. There’s no need to wait for the Class of ’74 to host a get-together when a quick search of Google, FaceBook and LinkedIn makes it comically easy to get back in touch with pretty much anybody.
Like many people, I’ve looked up old college roommates and business colleagues, or in this case, a guy I used to fly with in the Navy. His name is JP Kelly, and for a few years in the early 1980s he was my crew pilot, meaning I flew with him and two other guys, a lot. At the height of the Cold War, our job was to launch from the flight decks of US aircraft carriers in search of the bad guys – Soviet cruise missile-equipped attack submarines in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean.
On a whim, I decide to look up my old Navy crew. My search rapidly turns up a JP Kelly in an online phone directory. He lives in southern Maryland, about an hour south of DC. Since I live in northern Virginia, about an hour west of DC, and considering the fact that we haven’t spoken in decades, this is an incredible stroke of luck. From what I remember of JP, I doubt that he is a leading adopter of social media, but I decide that Facebook and LinkedIn are worth a look. There’s nothing on Facebook, but when I search LinkedIn in December of 2012, I get a possible hit. But no, that can’t be him…a heavyset guy with close-cropped, thinning gray hair. No way.
I remember JP as he was in 1984, a young Navy carrier pilot with a “yeah, I’m that good” swagger and black, albeit gently receding, hair. Before clicking away to another page, I scroll down through his job history, and oh my god, there’s a naval aviation career, and it dawns on me. If he looks at my photo, he will also see, comparatively speaking, a heavyset guy with close-cropped, thinning gray hair where once a lean, dark-haired warrior stood. So it IS him, after all.
With some further digging, I ferret out JP’s current contact information and reach out to him. Yup, it’s definitely JP; he sounds the same over the phone as he did decades ago. A few weeks later, we meet at a local quarterly get-together of former aviators, many of whom work for defense contractors in the DC area. The LinkedIn photo has it about right, in that he’s older and the hair is definitely thinner, but JP is as jovial as always and still has that jet pilot/Corvette swagger. We hit it off immediately – really just pick up where we left off 27 years earlier. We are JP and DB, one half of the original Crew 11.
In my time in naval air, I flew with a lot of pilots, some good and some not so good. I flew with JP more than anyone else, and he was always on top of his game…one of the best, every day. As we talk, I learn that he stayed in the Navy for 26 years compared to my eight, and I’m sure he’s got some great, character-revealing sea stories to tell. I can’t wait to catch up.
Parallels
Over the next few months JP and I get together several times and begin to compare notes. We are reminded that we share a small-town upbringing in the Midwest, and all of the participation in sports and family and community that often comes with that. It’s interesting that even as kids we were on similar paths. We each found our way into directly parallel roles in naval aviation, JP as a pilot and me as a naval flight officer, a role that is equal parts tactician and navigator. When we first met in 1981, we were both new to the Navy and the fleet, eagerly stepping into our roles as junior officers for our first assignment to a front-line squadron. When our squadron tour ended, we parted ways and quickly lost touch, a commonplace outcome in the highly mobile military community before social media.
As we trade stories of how we’ve spent the past quarter century, an intriguing pattern begins to emerge. It turns out that after leaving the squadron in 1984, we’ve essentially lived parallel lives.
After we went our separate ways in 1984, JP continued in the Navy, building a lengthy career that included three command tours and an unusually fast climb through the highly competitive officer ranks. He finished his career as a captain, the Navy’s O-6 grade that is equivalent to an army or air force colonel. Along the way, he earned a reputation as a gifted leader by completing a “worst to first” turnaround as skipper of VS-37, a squadron that flew the S-3 Viking and specialized in anti-submarine warfare. He followed that tour with a “bonus” assignment as commanding officer of VS-41, where he led another successful turnaround in naval aviator training that was heralded as a model for the Navy. After that, while serving as commodore, Sea Control Wing, US Pacific Fleet, JP led the unprecedented deployment of all assigned squadrons following the attacks of 9/11.
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