FPP212 - Four Stars, One Secretary, Zero Ego - Gen. Goldfein & Sec. Wilson on Servant Leadership

I mean, ultimately, forgiveness is one of the most powerful forces, I believe, in the human experience.

And it, you know, it doesn't erase the past, but I do think it can break the hold that those anger, anxiety, kind of the demons of that experience, it can break its hold on the future, basically.

So you have these mistakes.

You have this one mistake that we talked about.

I'm sure there's plenty of others that we all go through and fail at day in and day out and wish we could've done better.

And now you apply it to this very senior role in the military.

What surprised you most about leading at that strategic level and dealing with the challenges that you face every day and the, the failures that you experience, but now you're kinda responsible, to a degree? I mean, there's only so much you can do regardless 'cause there's law and there's other factors at play.

But, you know, how are you able to basically deal with these challenges at that strategic level?

Well, one of the things that I learned, and probably didn't learn it until I was...

You know, I...

There were a bunch of lessons that I learned that I wish I had known when I was younger [laughs] and just wish I had paid a little more attention.

But one of the most important things I do now as a strategic leader running a university, and certainly secretary of the Air Force and with the chief was, the most important thing we did was hire great people and make sure really good people were able to rise in this institution of the United States Air Force.

Unlike most other institutions, including higher education, in the military, if you don't have a really good one or two-star to run, you know, pick a command, it's not as though you're gonna recruit them from the outside.

You've gotta develop on the inside.

And I think probably one of the most important things that Dave and I did together was to change the promotion system for personnel, and I think most of that has endured in two ways.

One is we found that when we looked at joint assignments, we were putting so much pressure on our people and such narrow windows on opportunities for promotion that our officers didn't compare well with officers from other services because they were generally less experienced and younger.

And by widening out that window where colonels could be considered for promotion to one-star, we had a tremendous increase in experience and breadth of expertise available for one-stars.

And the other one was we weren't promoting to, um...

We were short of logisticians and maintainers and scientists and engineers at the one-star and above level because the way in which we were promoting to one-star meant that we were very heavy in operational experience.

Tremendously important, but we didn't have anyone that was qualified to run the Air Force Research Lab.

And I remember asking, "Okay, give me a list of every general officer in the Air Force who has a PhD in science or engineering.

Just every one of them." And they said, "Well, does economics count?" I said [laughs], "No, it does not count." And, uh, we basically had almost no one because we were weeding out anybody who gets, "Well, you know, you don't wanna go for a PhD 'cause you'll be off track and you won't get promoted from lieutenant colonel."And so we had set up a system which meant at the one-star, two-star, three-star, and four-star level, we did not have the right expertise around the table.

So we had to change that system.

I think a lot of that has endured, and Dave was responsible for...

He told me to slow down once, and he was right.