Sears: [00:00:00] This is Radio Stockdale. Welcome to Radio Stockdale, and this edition of the Flag Brief, I'm your host, Michael Sears at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership. I'm in conversation with Admiral John Richardson, the United States Navy retired. Admiral Richardson served as the 31st Chief of Naval Operations. Admiral, you've done almost everything a naval officer can do, especially in submarine operations. Our audience knows who you are, so I'll dispense with too much of an introduction and just jump right into it. And let me just say, welcome to Radio Stockdale.

Richardson: [00:00:47] Michael, I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me, and I'm very, I'm just so looking forward to our conversation.

Sears: [00:00:56] Well, that's great. I appreciate that. Let's jump into it. I've heard you talk many times and I'm impressed by your discussion of leader development, especially how you describe the three lanes of leadership development. Why do you describe leader development as these three lanes?

Richardson: [00:01:11] Yeah. Now that's a great question. And you know, when you talk about lanes, of course, the vision that comes into your mind is lanes and a road or something like that. And in fact, that was deliberate. We, you know, as we put the ideas together, we wanted to invoke a path of leader development and a path that has three lanes. But you know, of course, a path leads to something, right? And so, before we talk about the lanes, it might be useful to spend a little bit of time on, you know, where would we want this path to take us? What is the goal in terms of leader development, right? What kind of leaders do we want to develop? What attributes do they embody? And you know, I think we, everybody who's listening can think of those leaders in their lives, whether they were personally experienced leadership from somebody, or they've read about them, they're historical figures or either one that everybody can kind of converge around, a set of essential qualities that those leaders instill, embody, right? And so, you know, I think that as we thought about, well, what are those qualities for Navy leaders? We kind of converged on the qualities that Navy leaders inspire their teams to chase, best ever performance. Those are the leaders that we want. And I think that those are the leaders that inspire their teams to really go out and achieve something that they haven't achieved before, right? And they do this relentlessly, right. The leaders that really are world class, are relentless about doing this, Michael. They, they're constantly studying and experimenting and innovating. You know, they practice. They seize really every moment, right? They expend every effort in this idea to develop their teams and outfox their competition, you know, and in doing that, they're also mindful that they've got to do so in a sustainable way.

Richardson: [00:03:27] It's not sufficient to pour all of your effort into winning Sunday's game, and then you're done. You know, you've got to get back and you've got to win the next Sunday and the Sunday after that and the Sunday after that. And so it is with our teams, right? We're a we're a three hundred- and sixty-five-day, twenty-four-hour, seven day a week Navy. And so, we need to even as we achieve and relentlessly chase best ever performance, we've got to do so in a way that nourishes our team, makes them stronger over time. And I think also we'd like to think of our Navy leaders, our best Navy leaders, as being humble people that are open to meaningful feedback from their teams and others. They recognize that they're not going to have all the best ideas just themselves, and they're ready to learn because the only thing that matters is improved performance, best ever performance. And if the leader learns then then that can only make the team stronger. And when they win, you know that humility is there again, right? They're not. They're not doing the victory dance. They're not spiking the ball. They're humble. They're grateful, actually. And they're usually spent from the effort of the competition because they have dedicated so much to achieving that victory. And so, you know, in summary, they form ah, Navy leaders, bring their teams into a community of deeply shared commitment to each other and dedicated to the pursuit of victory. And so, you know, if I could sort of encapsulate the goal of our leader development path, right? Where does this path lead? I think that it would lead to a leader that embodies those qualities.

Sears: [00:05:12] You're talking about a. A leader who is humble, who understands that this is a marathon, but also understands that performance is what counts

Richardson: [00:05:23] Exactly right and not just it's not just, you know, getting to a goal, it's also how you get to that goal, right? And so how you do it matters. And that's where the lanes come in, I think, right? So, what are sort of the essential dimensions of that leader in terms of defining how you get to that type of a leader? And so, we described it in terms of three lanes on that road. Elaine, one being competence, you've got to know your job. In fact, you've got to become an expert at your job, right? You're not going to achieve best ever performance by having a casual knowledge of your job. You know, you're going to get there by being an expert and without that expertise, that competence, you know, no matter how inspired or dedicated or sincere you are, you're just simply not going to know right from wrong, you know, if it's going well or not going well unless you're competent at what you do. And I'd like to come back to that a little bit later in our discussion, know the kind of the nature of confidence. I think also that the Second Lane is character. And we've got to continuously strengthen our ability for our leadership to behave consistently with our core values, to inspire trust and confidence not only with our team, which is super important, but also with the American people who send us their sons and daughters to join the Navy, raise their right hand, join the Marine Corps, raise their right hand to make that commitment by taking that oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Richardson: [00:07:07] And so if we lose that bond of trust and confidence, well, it all sort of falls apart pretty quickly. And I was always struck even as the chief of naval operations that I was particularly with senior officers, sometimes too often when they had problems, it, they were problems of character. They weren't problems of competence, right? And it was judgment issues and character issues that that led to the undoing. And so, we've got to kind of continuously keep an eye on a character so that I can look every U.S. citizen, every mother, every father, sister, brother in the eye and say, you know, you sent your son or your daughter to us and they're going to be led by people who are people of integrity who are honest. People who have. Your child, your brother's best interest in mind. There are people of character, they're going to do the right thing even when the right thing is hard. And then the third lane, it was actually the newest lane, so it didn't come into existence, didn't become part of the discussion until sort of the third version of the leader development framework that we published. And it's this idea of connections. And I'm so proud that this this entire lane, a central idea of the thesis right now sort of came from out of the fleet, right? So, I really was thrilled every time I got feedback from the fleet and the connections lane was actually suggested to me by a Navy commander at the time, Emily Bassett, who was in commanding littoral combat ship. And she said, hey, you know, I've read this and I get version one and I get version two, and it sounds like you're open for feedback.

Richardson: [00:09:14] And so here's an idea. And she talked about the importance of connections. And, you know, it was something that she had found very useful. And you know, when I listen to it, it made a tremendous amount of sense. And this idea of, you know, again, in in the spirit of humility, I suppose we can learn faster by sharing ideas. We do everything that we do as teams. And so, you share with your team for sure and get feedback from them, even team leaders, you know, our peers connect with your peers and share your lessons learned. Both your good ones. Hey, this went super well. Let me just share what we did and over to you to borrow that. Steal it, take it. And also, those times when it didn't go so well, hey, I just had a terrible day, and I'm calling up my network to let you know. And hey, whatever you do, don't do this right? This does not go well. Again, know we just want everybody to learn as fast. And what'll happen, of course, is that network will respond, particularly if you've had a bad day. I've always found that people will say, hey, look, you'll get through this, we're together with you. We're still with you. You can get both an intellectual boost from those connections. Learn faster, but you can also get kind of personal boost. You become more resilient and tougher by virtue of having a network that you can rely on to support you in good times and bad.

Sears: [00:10:49] Now, all of that sounds fantastic, and I can see where that web of connectedness, competence and character come together. But how do you develop that? How do you get there? How do you, for instance, how to get to competence? How do you become a competent leader?

Richardson: [00:11:04] Yeah, I think that so what you're asking is, how do we move down that path? So, we've you can start to see the mental model form in your head. I hope, Michael, you know, we've got this goal that we're after the qualities of an effective naval leader, an inspiring naval leader. And you've got this road that leads to that goal. And that road has three lanes of competence, character and connection. So now what you're asking me is how do I move down that road, right? And I think that we would say that the Navy is very well set up to propel you down that road. And I think that in general, there are sort of three ways that you can develop competence, character and connections, right? One is through formal schools, right? So, you're there at the United States Naval Academy. It's a formal school. And at that school, I know that they are developing competence and character deliberately, and you're also deliberately developing connections between squads within companies on your sports teams. You know, other clubs, et cetera. There are just so many ways that these connections are forming a second way. You know, it happens some at the Naval Academy, but it happens to a great degree out in the fleet is on the job training. So, this is sort of, you know, you've left the school, you're now out in the fleet, you're part of a unit and you're going to have all sorts of opportunities to learn on the job.

Richardson: [00:12:44] You're going to have promotion opportunities and you're going to learn what it means, what it takes to be promoted to your next rank. You're going to have you're going to need to qualify it for different jobs, different watch stations. And all of those qualifications will have things that you have to do. You have to learn and you have to demonstrate. And so, there's all sorts of on-the-job training that you get while you're in the Navy operating from day to day. And then the third way is through what I would say is self-guided learning, right? And so again, you know, you go back to those leaders who are the models for inspirational and effective leadership, those leaders who seem to win not only when it really counts, but you know, when a vast majority of the. They are relentless self-learners, right, they're constantly reading, studying, doing everything they can to improve themselves. Yes, they'll go to schools, yes, they'll do on the job training, but they're not going to wait for those things. They're going to dive in and just, you know, be voracious, voraciously hungry about learning how to be a better leader, how to outfox the competition. And so those are the three ways I think that you develop it. You develop it through schools, you develop it through on the job training and then of course, you develop it through self-learning.

Sears: [00:14:13] Let me let me ask you about that self-learning thing is, is it what you're saying that that I should open up another calc book and try to learn more about differential equations? Or is it that I should understand the geopolitics and understand and let's listen to news. And you know what? What kind of training are we talking or education?

Richardson: [00:14:35] Yeah, it's a super interesting question. And the answer to your question is yes, all of the above, right? I mean, I think that certainly it depends on what kind of problem you're trying to solve, right? What question you're trying to explore? And so, if you're stumped right now on a particular technical thing that would be helped by a better understanding of differential equations, well, then yeah, you're going to seek out those texts and you're going to do that your very best to understand differential equations or whatever the technical thing may be, right? Let's not get too geeky here. Yeah. You know, if if you're out there and you are an athlete, right, and you are running the, you know, the four hundred hurdles? Well, you know, there's probably a lot of reading you can do. Edwin Moses and some of the classic four hundred hurlers you can you can understand what they went through, what they learn by virtue of reading their biography, understanding their experiences right? And then you can go out and try it right on your own. Sure, there's going to be practices and all that sort of thing, but I think the folks that are really achieving world class performance are spending a lot of time on their own. And so, yeah, so there's there is sort of that, but you also ask to you made an interesting point, which is they're read you read a lot of things.

Richardson: [00:16:01] And what I've always found is that if I'm let's say I'm, I'm solving a particular mission, right, I'm trying to accomplish a particular mission. Let's say it has to do with deploying a submarine to the Western Pacific. Ok, so I'm going to read a whole lot about what it takes to do that. Specifically, read patrol reports from from previous deploying CEOs. I'm going to talk to those CEOs, et cetera. But I'm also going to read, you know, I used to like sports coach, you know, books, right? And so, I think there's a book by Don Shula. Everyone's a coach and boy. I gave that book out to a lot of people when I was in command because I thought it had just so much practical advice. And there are other books that have a lot to teach us, maybe not in our specific mission, right? But, you know, we can kind of use a decoder ring, if we will, to translate what those other situations and how people achieve success in other fields. We can translate those into our field, and I think we become better leaders by virtue of becoming broader thinkers. There's a great book out called Range, and it talks about the the virtue of having broad experience rather than over specializing and staying in a stovepipe.

Sears: [00:17:35] You know, that's the beauty of the Naval Academy. It is a liberal arts school. I know people hate saying that, but we're, you know, you're learning how to learn. Yeah, a lot of stuff. You're learning also specifics, but you're learning how to learn. Let's. Let me ask you to go down that that second lane in terms of character. How do you learn that?

Richardson: [00:17:55] I'll tell you what there is a plenty of. There is plenty of sort of academic material, right? And I'm speaking to one of the most academically accomplished people that I know of Michael yourself, who can just tell us chapter and verse everything that's been written about integrity and character, et cetera, right? Going back to the ancient Greeks, we could start with Plato and Aristotle and move our way forward all the way through all of the heavyweights of queerness, you know, you name, right, all the way forward up to Stockdale, the very person who, whose name you took for the. Right. Right. And I've read all of those, so there's plenty of. Learning you can do there, either in a school or just pick up one to Stockdale's books, and that'll teach you a lot, but you know, like so many other things, I think that the on-the-job training part of the character development is very, very important, right? So, there's that classic thing, you know, if you if you want to learn, know, be a good writer. Well, how do you do that? Well, you're right. You know, that's how you do that. And it's the same thing. If you want to be a person of character, then, you know, go out and seek those opportunities where your character will be strengthened. And I think also for particularly for the midshipmen, but for people currently in the fleet, in leadership jobs, you know, your responsibility is not only to develop and strengthen your character, but you're responsible for deliberately developing the key that your team's character.

Richardson: [00:19:49] Right. And so how do you do that? Well, OK, there's the academic approach, and we've talked a little bit about that, but you can be the teacher of character for your team every single day. Right. So, here's your morning brief a team we're going to have, we have in front of us now a very, very challenging mission. It's going to be a tough day today, and it's going to require all of us to work together as a team. And we're going to I can almost guarantee we're going to get tired and we're going to get frustrated and we're going to get hungry and. And we're going to be challenged, right, we're going to be challenged to the limits of our endurance, the limits of our capability. This is what excellent team strive for is to be in situations like this. And let's make sure that as we all break from this meeting, from this brief that we fully understand what we're going to do because we're going to be all separate and distributed when we when we head out there. And let's make sure, first of all, that we keep our integrity strong, right? So that if they fight any temptation to take some kind of a shortcut, right, make sure that everything we do, we are doing up to the standards required and that when we put when we say something is done, it is done right and it is it is done capably and done properly and so.

Richardson: [00:21:16] So at the end of the day, when we're through this evolution, we can all look with each other and say, hey, we not only did that, but we did that right. We did that the right way. And so, this is operational character development, right? This is not something where I'm sitting in a classroom and trying to quote Thomas Aquinas. This is, you know, on the deck plate character development where you are strengthening on an operational day to day way the character of your team. And it's got to be that constant positive pressure, if you will, by the leadership and everybody who wants to to pile in to to talk about how it should be done from a character standpoint. Otherwise, all you're going to do is end up talking about bad news where people fail to live up to the standards that we would hope they would live up to. They made a bad decision, boy by cut by positively pressurizing it. You get way to the left of that decision. And when they face that challenging decision, they have to choose, you know, the hard but right way versus the not so hard, but wrongly they will be strengthened because they've been hearing a constant drumbeat of this on their day-to-day basis and their character is strong.

Sears: [00:22:38] So Point noted, let's go to that last, see the connections, connectedness, how whatever you want to, what do you want to call? How do you how do you develop that?

Richardson: [00:22:47] Well, I think that this is. Well, again, you know, you develop it and you become better at it by doing it, and so you seek out opportunities to connect with your team, you know, and that connection can be something as simple as a phone call. Now we have all these other technologies that allow you to do better than a phone call, right? It could be an email and you can kind of see this sort of spectrum emerge of meaningful or contextual connections, right? So, on the far left, sort of the sparse end of it, it might be an email or a text or something like that, right? As you move up the scale, you can maybe have a phone call or a voice conversation as you move further still. Maybe now you're into a, you know, a video conversation either on your phone or via one of those apps, zoom or whatever, and all the way at the at the very best you're in each other's company. And you know, I think we would all recognize that you, you communicate so much more, right? When you can be with somebody physically right, there's everything you're saying. There's all the nonverbal communication, there's how you're set up in the room. All of those things, you know, enhance that connection, right? And again, what you want to do when you're connecting is talk about meaningful things.

Richardson: [00:24:24] You want to have authentic conversations where maybe you're sharing a concern that you have or maybe you've got an uncertainty about what things, how things should go. You know, that's the substance of these connections so that you can elicit, help or provide help to the other person. You know, if you think about everything we do, Michael, it's, you know, we're just sort of one node in a network. We receive something from someone. We have our job to do with that thing and then we usually hand it off to somebody, right? We're part of a flow. And so, you know, understanding that and deliberately connecting with people all around us, I think positions us better in that network. And as a team, we become stronger and as individuals, we become stronger as well. You know, there are some great examples. If I could just wax on a little bit more great naval examples, right? So, you know, the great late naval leader Horatio Nelson, you know, the victor in the Battle of Trafalgar or Copenhagen or the Nile. Before they would go into battle, he would take his fleet into battle. He would bring all the captains of the ships into his cabin on his flagship, and they would have a conversation about the battle plan, right? They would connect and Nelson would lay out his plan and the captains would ask him questions.

Richardson: [00:25:53] And, you know, explore what? What happens if this happens? What if the wind shifts? What if they do this? You explore all those hypotheticals and then when they all got back into their small boats and went back to their ships by virtue of that connection, they were so much better prepared to execute that battle plan to deal with the expected and maybe the unexpected, because they'd had that great conversation. You know, submarine CEOs, when they came back from war patrols and World War Two, those were some really dangerous war patrols, right? And you know, whether you came back alive or not, sometimes often depended on how much you knew about the combat situation forward deployed, which was changing very, very rapidly. And so when a when a submarine CEO would come back, all the other submarine CEOs would gather around and they would be thirsty for the latest right. And they would have this conversation, this personal connection maybe work out the next tactic that could that could be the decisive thing for the next employer. And so, these connections are absolutely key to amplifying competence, character and building strength and resilience in the team.

Sears: [00:27:12] Let me jump on a comment you made a while ago about that authenticity of the connection. And, you know, not to drum too loudly the difference between digital and analog. We are analog beasts. I mean, we're part of, you know, there are sound waves that hit our ears. They're not digital sound waves. They're, you know, they're these organic things that thump against, ah, or our eardrums. I think I was hearing you say not to necessarily remove the filters, but digital things can be filtered very easily. It's a lot harder when you. Face to face or even phone to phone how however close you can get to the analog device is that people to people, that's probably the best way to build that authenticity. Tell me if I'm telling you saying too much here, but

Richardson: [00:28:01] Yeah, no, I think that, you know, I couldn't agree with you more of that sort of that fully contextual connection rather than a sample connection. That would be so I'm a signal processor by trade. So, you know, I mean, what digital signals do as they, you know, they sample the waveform at a particular rate and they try and reconstruct it. And but it's never, you know, the full reconstruction of everything that's there, right? What I meant by authenticity is to something related but a little bit different, which is, you know, as a leader, when you connect with your peer, your superior and certainly someone who might be working for you on your team. You know, I would hope that you're bringing your entire self to that connection, right? That you've got legitimately their best interests and the team's best interests in mind. And you know, I did a lot of one of the jobs I had was that I had the great privilege of teaching the submarine command course, which was all of those officers that were on their way to submarine command came through the course. And it was. It was, of course, about command. And we would, you know, a big part of that course was. Putting the students in the position of the commanding officer, right, so they would have this, we would be at sea on a submarine, they would have a crew and a team, and we would give them a pretty challenging mission and watch the students execute it. And a lot of that involved briefs to the team in the control room, right? This is what this is, what I intend to do and this is how we're all going to work together as a team to do it.

Richardson: [00:29:58] So many of those officers, many of them, they were very effective in communicating with their team because they authentically wanted to transmit their message and their understanding into the minds of their team, right? And so, you could see they were looking for the body language, our people getting this, what are they? What are their faces telling me, et cetera? Those were the better the students on the other end, you know, you would have these students that they might as well have been standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and just yelling into the Grand Canyon, right? I mean, they were just transmitting without any sense of communicating to the team. They were just sort of speaking at the time. Right? And it was it was kind of phony, right? And it was ineffective and the team got that right away. Hey, this guy, I don't know what he's about, but he's clearly not interested in really communicating with me. He's just interested in making a noise or whatever. And so, when I talk about authenticity, Michael, it's that real, authentic desire to transmit, understanding, concern, compassion from you to your team or from you to the person with whom you're connecting. And if that's authentic, I think you make progress very quickly. If it's phony, right, you can actually move backwards.

Sears: [00:31:26] Admiral, these are very good points. Let me ask you in the last few moments we have together, you know, after a very long career in the Naval Service, what do you know now that if you knew back in the time you're a midshipman, you would that would inform what you should be doing, the things you should be doing as a mid? Yeah.

Richardson: [00:31:49] Well, I'll tell you what. We could go on for several hours, Mike. Sure, sure. What I would do differently. Believe me, I would do a lot differently. But I would say that this is just speaking for me personally. But and it might have some use for your listeners. I would say that I was a late bloomer in terms of catching on to the importance of connections. Ok. And so, you know, did I do OK academically going through the Naval Academy? Yeah, I did OK academically in terms of the honor code and integrity and all of that. I don't, you know, I mean, I was probably doing all right in that regard, but where I wish I would have been better is forming, you know, lasting and meaningful connections earlier with, you know, my teammates, my classmates, my my company mates, you know, you name it. And then. You know, keeping those connections vibrant as we all went out and, you know, fell into the fleet right and began our naval careers. I think I know I would have been a much more effective naval officer if I had been better connected with all of my teammates, particularly in those early days. As we're learning so fast and I could have called out, you know, I should have, I should have called out and connected with those folks. Just how are they doing? What's going on with you? Oh, here's what's going on with me. I would have been a better naval officer if I'd done that sooner.

Sears: [00:33:31] That is fantastic advice. Admiral John Richardson, former chief of Naval Operations Thanks so much for joining us on Radio Stockdale.

Richardson: [00:33:39] Michael, it's ah, it's an honor and a pleasure to be here.

Sears: [00:33:48] You've been listening to Radio Stockdale, a series of podcasts produced by the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the United States Naval Academy. You can hear more podcasts at Stockdale Center's podcasts.