A Leader From the Past

I have never worked for a purely, or even highly, transformational leader.  I have seen a few; two different Pastors from churches that I have attended come to mind.  These two were charismatic, excellent orators, extremely knowledgeable and insightful, and inspiringly visionary. They each grew their congregations not only in numbers but (more importantly) in Faith and moral character as Christians.  In the course of their ministries, they did indeed transform the membership and the position of their respective churches; in essence, they raised their congregants to a “higher level” and left their churches stronger and more cohesive than they were when they first arrived. One of these Pastors is now deceased, and the other is about my own age and still going strong.

In my professional career, I would have to say that the closest I came to working for a transformational leader would be my first boss on active duty in the U.S. Air Force. He was also my first mentor, and in retrospect the best mentor that I ever had; mentoring is an inherently transformational act of service. This man was a civilian who knew the business of acquisition program management as well, or better than, anyone else I have known or met since. I was indeed fortunate to have landed in my first assignment with such a strong and capable mentor. He was intensely professional, yet mild-mannered and easily approachable. I remember clearly how he would spend time explaining all of the various concepts and knowledge components of program management, then he would give me work to do that built upon those explanations. He would have me learn by doing, answering questions patiently, but quietly insisting on high-quality work and output.

Bernie was his name and one day he took me through the Air Force budgeting and programming process, teaching me all of the different types of appropriations, how we developed our official budget submissions to The Pentagon, and so forth. Then, he handed me our last budget position documentation and asked me to update it, after which he reviewed my results and then tasked me to build a briefing on our budget and travel with him to Washington DC to present this same briefing to various program personnel from The Pentagon! Bernie taught you how to swim, then asked you to dive off the high board at the deep end of the pool like that. Early on, he also talked to me about our weekly Program Staff Meeting, Action Item tracking, etc., then he had me take over running those same Staff Meetings the following week. One thing that I observed about Bernie is that he would not tolerate anything being “put on the street” about our Program that was not perfectly accurate and represented high quality and pride in workmanship. One of our financial managers once let a budget document go out that had errors in it and I suspect that the whole of the first floor of our building heard Bernie dress this person down before he threw them out of our office.

Those are some examples of how Bernie operated. Everything that he did was carefully planned and timed to provide the most benefit to the health and successful execution of our acquisition program possible. To this young Second Lieutenant, watching Bernie in action provided me with a high degree of Idealized Influence. In the business of acquisition, he was a superb role model and certainly someone that I wanted to emulate. He commanded the respect of everyone associated with our Program, from the local office and various functional personnel on our team, to senior leaders at The Pentagon, and also among our Prime Contractor folks. His knowledge and business ethics were second to none. I used to joke with people through the years that all I ever really learned about acquisition program management, I learned from Bernie in the first six months that I was in the Air Force. This turned out to be a good thing as everyone, including Bernie, in our program office either moved on to other assignments or retired shortly after those first six months and I was left there by myself to carry on and run the Program. Day in and day out, I was able to succeed in this endeavor by remembering all that Bernie had taught me, and doing everything just as he had instructed and demonstrated.

Bernie also provided Inspired Motivation. His expectations were indeed high, as I have stated, and through the many “learn-by-doing” activities that he coached me through, I became knowledgeable and “bought in” to the overall mission and vision of our program office. In fact, the examples that Bernie gave to me of how to effectively run a program stuck with me for all of my career and many is the time over the years that I drew upon what he had taught me to sort out and fix other programs that I would run later on. By his having me work with our program representatives in The Pentagon, he also inspired me to want to become a Program Element Monitor (PEM) and nine years later, when I was transferred to Washington DC, that is exactly the job that I got. And through Bernie’s examples and insights, I knew the PEM job well and got to fulfill one of my biggest career aspirations.

After all that I have said, I don’t think that I need to spend much time relaying that Bernie’s assignments for me provided a great deal of Intellectual Stimulation. One thing that I will always remember is that he would task me with work that I thought was beyond my capabilities, and then he would provide instruction and mentoring to grow me into those new and more responsible activities over time. He continually challenges what I thought were my limits and then he helped me to exceed them. In an Aristotelian fashion, Bernie would also hand me open-ended challenges and then help me to figure out the solution, asking just the right questions at just the right times to prompt me to take the next steps in figuring things out.

The last major element of Transformational Leadership, Individualized Consideration, was a given with Bernie. He always had my back and whenever I truly got “stuck” on something, he would talk me through it with patience and empathy. His biggest interest was to not only teach me the business, but to see me succeed and to eventually stand on my own two feet where I could see what needed to be done and (without prompting) I would go do it. It’s a bit cliché these days, but Bernie taught me how to do things well enough that he enabled me to also “think outside the box”. Later, after he had left the Program, I was able to use those abilities to challenge our prime contractor to take on a technical issue that had plagued the program for several years. And in the end, we found and successfully implemented the new technical solution to the amazement of several senior Colonels in Strategic Air Command (SAC), who were our customers for the system we acquired.

So I guess that I’d have to say, as I draw to a close, that perhaps my opening statement was in error. I did indeed work for a transformational leader at the very beginning of my career. I’ve given a lot of examples of how Bernie exhibited these behaviors and qualities for me, but he also did the same for everyone who worked on our Program. I watched him coach and mentor others, both in our program office and across the cross-functional team that supported us (financial managers, contracting officers, manufacturing specialists, and engineering). Whenever I lament that we don’t have good mentoring going on in the Air Force today within program offices, Bernie is the guy I’m thinking about. If all of our young acquisition program management troops today had a Bernie to teach them the ropes, our acquisition programs would all be in far better shape than they are. I was lucky.