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How to Lead When the Budget Changes but the Mission Doesn’t with Max J. Stitzer · Commander's Intent

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever frozen in the key moment of making a critical decision?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it's in business or in life, it can cost you everything.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Commander's Intent will teach and inspire you how to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: So here's your host, retired Air Force Colonel, fighter pilot, and your leadership mentor, Derek Oakes.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: Hello and welcome back to Commander's Intent.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Derek Oaks.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: I'm here today with my special guest, Reader General Retired Max Stitzer of the United States Air Force.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: Max and I go not way back, but we met each other first on the flight line at Boggham Air Force Base in Afghanistan about 16 or 17 years ago.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: He was in charge of the maintenance operations and I was in charge of the flying operations for the wing over there.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: When I was flying A-10s, he was fixing A-10s and fixing 15Es.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: So a small world.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: And then we have a bunch of mutual friends, but that's a topic for another day.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: What we're going to talk about today, I'm going to let him introduce himself to kind of bring relevance to why I think he is the perfect guest for this show today.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: We're going to talk about finding that right mix for your team and what does it look like?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: How do you maintain it?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: How do you train it?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: How do you grow it?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: How do you shrink it?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's one of the major challenges I've seen from at the Air Force level, you know, so an organization of 500,000 plus individuals when you count active duty, guard, reserves, and civilians, all the way down to a small startup of two people sitting in a garage and asking themselves, what layer do we add next?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: And it applies to nonprofits, it applies to for-profit organizations, just straight charitable organizations.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: It applies to church organizations.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: And how do you make that mix work over the long haul is the million dollar question that I I know every CEO is asking himself every single day.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: Max has some great insights, and so we'll go through his insights and apply them to a couple different situations.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: So, Max, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and talk about your Air Force career and then your since the Air Force career, some of the things and organization that you've worked with.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, howdy.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: But Derek, I sure appreciate this opportunity.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: You've got a great podcast, a great forum, and you have a lot of reach.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I I actually just posted on LinkedIn, I bragged about you being recognized as a top 100 Apple podcast for 2026.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thanks.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that was significant enough to put a post out there and make sure because you're usually too humble to self-promote like that, so I tried to help you out a little bit.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: But you should be justifiably proud of the work you're doing because it's important.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's important to talk about these things.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, personally offline, we've talked a lot about our shared experiences and some of the common background we have as well, and the things that we think about and that are on our mind because we we work in some of the same overlapping circles in the Venn diagram out in this ecosystem.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: So much of our work together has been centered on helping industry be successful, especially in the defense enterprise.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I chose that path very deliberately as I was winding down my time in uniform at the Pentagon in my last assignment.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I I recognized there was an opportunity to help a lot of organizations out there to leverage experience like you, like you and I both have.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think almost three years into that part of my journey in the private sector helping organizations, I I think I made the right choice for sure.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think our interaction certainly has reinforced that that was the right decision because I've enjoyed working with you and it's been absolutely mutually beneficial.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I started in our Air Force as a as a high school senior.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: I had a choice to make and what I was going to do with my life, and I chose thankfully to be part of a great organization that gave me abundant opportunities.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And growing up up to that point, I'd been part of teams in sports.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a member of a family, you're part of a team.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's a team, your neighborhood.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're built to be parts of teams and families, those building blocks of society and of industry and of organization.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was a natural transition to be part of the United States Air Force team as a young kid.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: And they gave me, like I said, so much opportunity.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't not love it, and I couldn't not stay for subsequently four decades in uniform.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: As I made that decision, for me, joining the Air Force Reserve, the minimum enlistment time was six years.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: And as I pondered that decision and whether I was going to sign on the line or not, and I thought, as an 18-year-old, 18 plus six, I'll be 24 years old when I finish this commitment.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't know that there was anything beyond that.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, 24 years old, I'll be an old person compared to what I felt like as an 18-year-old.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: So it's even funnier and more poignant and more uh ironic that I subsequently stayed, you know, nearly 40 years, four decades total, before I took the uniform off and transitioned back and moved back home here where we belong.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: But along the way, so much opportunity and experience being part of, leading, creating teams.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, teams is kind of what I like to talk about the most.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm grateful for that opportunity here today with you.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate that.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: So almost four decades in the uniform.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: You started out as a young airman, basic airman first class.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: And how many years were you enlisted?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: I was enlisted for 10 years.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I made it to E6, a technical sergeant, by the time I had taken my time to finish my undergrad studies, and then I applied for officer training school when I was selected and went off.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: I had, like a lot of people who don't fly in the Air Force, I had intended to fly and wanted to fly, and I actually had support to do that.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: But my last semester of college, I I turned up needing these MIG finder glasses.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: And in those years when I was commissioned, there were no waivers for anything like that, which in subsequent years that that has changed.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: They've loosened that up a little bit.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: But that was actually a huge blessing because knowing me now much better than I did at that age, I probably wouldn't have been successful in flying training.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: But I think I had great success in aircraft maintenance and as a logistician.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: One of the great things about that, immediately I get to have impact on teams because as a brand new second lieutenant, just having graduated your technical training as an officer, I was responsible for a couple hundred aircraft maintenance airmen on a flight line, helping an F-16 wing perform its mission.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so I got an immediate immersion in team dynamics, interpersonal dynamics, taking care of an organization and all of its resources and all of the people in it and all of their responsibilities to perform that mission.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I loved it.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: I thrived in it, and the Air Force gave me a lot of opportunity to learn and grow and even fail forward at times in being part of a team and in leading teams and in building teams.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I I got to do it for a bunch more decades.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I absorbed a little bit about it and was able to pass a lot on a lot of that wisdom and continue to try to do that.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great summary.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think it it segues into a lot of what we talked about.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: I want to clarify something.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I asked you about how many years were you enlisted.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I think something uh and you said that it was knowing your personality now, it was a blessing that you did not fly, that you got to go into aircraft maintenance.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I think if I could explain that, you can counter it or agree with it.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: In the Air Force, if you are a pilot, you are a technician, you're operating an aircraft, you're a technician, and you spent a lot of your career.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, when I was a when I was a fighter squadron commander, I would fly three times a week, between two and four times a week.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: And the prep work for that, the flying and the debrief for that, that was a 40-hour week by in and of itself, just to do that technical thing.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: And there are leadership aspects to it, but then you look at the rest of my job, which was leading a squadron, rating people, doing, you know, handling the finances, doing the career advancement and everything else that I had to do as a fighter squadron commander, that was like on top of flying.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: But so much of my time was focused on the technical aspects of it.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: When you're enlisted, you're a tech by definition.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there are leadership roles, but so much of your time when you're enlisted is as a technician.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: You are the expert on technical tasks.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: And then when you become an officer, like you became an officer in aircraft maintenance, you're never fixing aircraft.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: You're managing people who do fix aircraft.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: So you have to identify those technical skills and manage those technical skills and put those teams together properly.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: And as a young officer, as a second lieutenant, you're doing that really right out the gate.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: You've got technicians that are much older than you, much more experienced than you, and you're the one managing them, and you're the one supervising them.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's a somewhat of a unique environment, and the two are very different: being a pilot versus being an aircraft maintainer.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was quite an immersion because, especially in a reserve organization, the senior NCOs and the chief master sergeants who I actually directly supervised, many of them were Vietnam veterans, some of them from different services who had made their way to the Air Force or the Air Force Reserve after the war.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was an incredible mix of experience and perspectives.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: And they they truly raised me.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: They took it as a sacred responsibility on their part to not serve under me, to not have me, the junior lieutenant, be their boss, but to prepare me for what they saw I would become later on as a more senior officer.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm grateful that they were that kind and patient with me and also had, you know, that very deep experience.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And in some cases in the Vietnam, had been through hell as aircraft maintainers, had seen probably some of the best and some of the worst leaders, and made sure that they brought those lessons back and they distilled them on me for sure.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I credit them for building the foundation that I got to serve on in much later years.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: I just had a thought that the two different paths that you and I took, there are definite positives and definite negatives about both of them.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: And they are transferable.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: The lessons learned are very transferable to the commercial market.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you as a second lieutenant, a brand new officer leading an aircraft maintenance unit, you're kind of like the MBA who steps into a business and you have the schooling, but you don't have the experience, you don't have the training, and you have to rely on those technicians.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes that's very, very good because you walk into a room not knowing that you're not the expert, so you have to find the expert and you have to rely on those experts.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: And you kind of just talked about that.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: The flip side, as a pilot, uh, I was the technical expert, and I was the you know, nitty-gritty mission expert when it came to flying and fighting and employing aircraft.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes being the expert is helpful, and sometimes it is a detraction from getting the overall mission done from running the organization.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: You know, because as a as a colonel, I wasn't as good as I was from a technical perspective as when I was a captain or even a major, a younger ranking.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: And it was, I had to remind myself there are younger, smarter technicians than me, and sometimes I need to shut up and let them be expert, and I need to focus on managing them and leading them and creating an environment where they can grow and develop.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: So two very different organizations.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: And you see it, I'll use an example of Boeing.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: Boeing has had CFOs running their organization for the last little bit, and it has hurt them dramatically because they have not relied on their technicians like the hand.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of like if you had been as an officer, a young maintenance officer, and you thought you knew everything and you ignored the expertise of the technicians that worked for you, that would not have gone well.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that the same has happened, and the same does happen quite frequently in the commercial market.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: When you get in, you're an expert on one thing, don't know anything about other aspects of the business, and and you hurt the organization.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: Me in the flying world, because I was a technical expert, I could have hurt myself, and maybe I did hurt myself.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: You can ask people that work for me, but I could have hurt myself and the organization because I thought I was still the technical expert instead of just using that expertise to inform decisions that I made as the leader later on in my career.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a complimentary relationship if you do it right, because those those airmen and junior NCOs and even the senior NCOs, though they had the technical expertise to perform their aircraft maintenance mission, I had the leverage and the visibility and and the authority to get them the resources they need to make their ability to perform their job better, to make their life easier on the flight line and in the shops.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: And because I had that legal authority that they they made the flying schedule happen, I was responsible to make sure they were trained and had the resources to do those jobs and everything.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I could do that more credibly if I lived and worked and served where they did.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so even if it meant going back to the days when you'd hand your dad the wrong tool or hold the flashlight for him while he was working on a car or under the kitchen sink or whatever, I I did that as a lieutenant.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: And because I was accessible and approachable and present, I got to hear what their problems were, what they liked, what they didn't like, what senior leadership, including me and more senior leadership, could do for them.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that wasn't always the model that my peers followed.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: I felt like I didn't have anything better to do with my time than understand and help them be the best they could be at their job, which effectively made me the best and that I could be and effective in my job.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: So it worked out really well.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I just I kind of made that my pattern, even though that kind of wasn't the norm in my career field.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: Looking at the two different approaches, the flying community in the Air Force versus the maintenance and the officer supervision community.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just maintenance, but a lot of other communities are like that.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: I I think the key is understanding who has what expertise, understanding who has what role, and then putting the organization together accordingly and employing people accordingly so that you can get the most out of your team.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that really pays huge dividends as you go into what we kind of decided we wanted to talk about here is how do you create that right mix and how do you make sure that everybody is standing on the right chest square and everybody is able to contribute at their maximum level, even when you are you know, especially when you are shrinking or growing an organization.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you you can make a team work well when it's stagnant and when there are no changes in the organization, everybody gets comfortable in the roles, but that seldom happens.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: You're gonna grow or you're gonna or you're gonna shrink at some point or another, depending on the needs of the market.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: So how do you manage that?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: And if you don't have people in the right spot, that's gonna be it's gonna be more apparent when you do shrink or when you do you know have to grow an organization.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: What are some of the experiences, or can you think of any experience off the top of your head where that has really stood out to you?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: I was very fortunate to be in organizations that gave me a lot of latitude to experiment and kind of break the mold.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I had very very tolerant commanders and bosses too, right?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Who I think maybe it was because they saw potential in me and just sort of cut me loose, gave me a lot of leash to go do the things that I wanted to do.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so in my earlier days, our earlier days in the Air Force, we had more institutionalized competitions like Gunsmoke and William Tell and Mobility Rodeo and things like that.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I contend we were some aspects of our Air Force, in some ways, we were better during those days because of those competitions.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because they raised the bar for the entire community, whether it was fighters, tankers, airlift, rescue, whatever.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so whether it was an opportunity to participate in a competition and build a team, build up a team and train them and deploy and be part of William Tell or Gunsmoke, or just take a 12-ship fighters to a snowbird deployment at Eglin, the normal model that I think through our cultural conditioning in the Air Force that people revert to hey, if I'm going to take a small team, I want in aircraft maintenance, I want the best load crew, I want the best avionics folks, I want the best debriefers, I want the best crew chiefs, I want the you know, the the highest MC rate jets, best performers all around.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind it's kind of your natural inclination.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: You want to build a winning team, and everybody wants to be part of a winning team.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: But not long after those early days when I had those opportunities, I thought, you know, I would see, I'd see the effect of people who didn't get picked for those teams.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes, you know, growing up, we were last picked for dodgeball or sports on the playground or whatever.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: And you don't like being that person, right?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: Who who they didn't necessarily want to be on the team.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that same effect happened.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: I would see it, and you could see the dejected look on people's faces and the, you know, that they were relegated to the B team or the C team.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought we send all these people get all the same ASFAB scores, the entry entry-level testing that we do in the military to determine what your, you know, your abilities are, which specialty will put you in, determines which training opportunities you've had, which specialties you can have, and then we send you to the same technical school.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: So an avionics troop or a weapons loader or an ammo troop or a structural maintenance troop, they all go to the same tech school, whether they pop out at unit level and are deemed an A-team person or a B or C team person.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so I said, you know what, let me pick the team.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I picked the B and C team, you know, the quote B and C team folks.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'll get you the same performance because I think those folks are just waiting to be cut loose, like I had the opportunity to have a little autonomy and to strut their stuff and to be innovative and put their energy towards things.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the times and opportunities I had to do that, we did get the same performance.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: They are the same.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: They're the treasure of this nation, every one of them, the sons and daughters of American families.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we put these artificial boundaries and constraints and labels on them and everything.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: And to the extent I could, I tried to eliminate that and make us all the same.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody wants to be an 18 person.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And to the extent I could, I made that happen.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that's an interesting approach because I I remember those competitions.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: I've been in some top gun competitions, turkey shoots is what we would call them all the times.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: And you hate to lose, and it did make you better.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: You would sit there and you'd go to school on how well you're bombing and how well you're shooting and and how well you're flying your aircraft because you wanted to win.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: And you a squadron thrives on that competition, so that is important.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: But the guy who comes in last is still a highly qualified individual.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: And how do I make sure that they know that they're a highly qualified individual?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a what you shared was a great approach of making people feel like they're still part of the team and a valuable part of the team.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it also highlights the importance of how we label somebody.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: If I say you're going to go compete with us to this competition, even if you may not have won at the local level, you're saying that everybody in this squadrant is capable of winning at the higher level.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody at this squadrant is capable of representing the unit.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think there's a lot of value in something like that.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: You know, people don't like to they don't like to lose and they don't like everybody to know that they lost.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: So finding a way to get the most out of those individuals.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't mean that everybody gets a trophy.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: And that doesn't mean that you don't value the winners because they won.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: And you you still want to highlight that, but you also want to highlight the fact that every single person on your team is capable of doing the job at the maximum level that you need them to do the job.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it truly costs you nothing to be good to people and to be kind and to reach out and and to reinforce and appreciate them.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes that's all people need.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: That turns the tide from being not good or mediocre to being really good and achieving their full potential.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: So let me, with that in mind, I'm gonna throw a really negative commercial example out there.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have the stats in front of me, I should have brought them with me.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_02: But we've seen it all throughout our lives.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: A company in trying to meet their quarterly earnings numbers, they will slash 5,000 jobs, they will slash 10,000 jobs, and they may hire those exact same people or those same positions back six months later.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: How are you really managing your workforce when you do that?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: And and I understand sometimes you have have earnings objectives to meet and you have to make, you know, you have to bottom line requirements for the company.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: You're there to make money.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: How do you manage your workforce in an up and down time?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: Recently, Amazon literally by email, they fired, I don't know what the number was, I think it was like 15,000 people just by email.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so here you think you're a valued member of the team and you show up for work in the morning, you're going through your email.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: By 12 o'clock today, I don't have a job.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: And there's severance package, whatever.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe I wasn't as valued as I thought I was.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe I wasn't doing as good of a job as I thought I was.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: How does that affect your force?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it even has a financial effect that I think companies in a lot of cases don't anticipate or don't don't put in their cross-check when they make those decisions.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: They get a short-term bump in their financial status from doing that.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: But then in the end, if you have to rehire those positions down the road because growth continues, the the economy is over time, is always on an upward vector, right?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: We have recessions and even even depressions at times over time.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: But overall, you know, you see the the trajectory that the market's on, the slope that it's on.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so it seems like with a much longer-term strategic perspective, keeping that workforce on builds camaraderie and loyalty and higher productivity, or certainly has the potential to do that.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're one of the people that's not one of those 15,000 that gets laid off, you know you could be next the next quarter.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: So you're gonna hold back, right?
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because you see the company's not necessarily loyal to you.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: So you might start your job search a quarter early instead of waiting for that email to to chime into your inbox 90 days from now.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think it affects people's behavior and perspective and and the degree to which they want to be loyal and productive and innovative in an organization and help the bottom line instead of just taking home a paycheck and waiting until you're in the employment line next time when it's your turn.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I I think there's a more strategic way, more holistic way to look at that that companies don't when they have the opportunity.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not to say that layoffs aren't going to happen.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: I love your comment about how the natural progression of things is for a company to grow, for a market to grow.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't always happen because you may have missed the market.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: Your product may not somebody sell.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Selling horseshoes 150 years ago may not be selling as many horseshoes today as they were 150 years ago.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I you can go through a lot of different examples of technology that was superseded by other technology or superseded by other desires for the market.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: But if you have the assumption that we're growing and that you're always looking for what is my next step towards growth, then I think you're gonna do you're gonna treat it a little bit differently and you're gonna approach those layoffs a little bit differently.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: You said something about how the people who weren't fired are gonna view themselves and view their position a little bit differently.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: They may be looking for a job a little bit earlier.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen that myself.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: If you think that the ship is sinking, you're gonna be jumping for another ship.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: The rats are gonna be leaving the boat as quickly as possible, which means that when they are on the clock with you, they're not nearly as productive.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: They're not nearly as committed because they don't feel a sense of ownership, they don't feel a sense of family within the organization.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: So how do you do that?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: And the question I'm gonna throw back at you is okay, you don't want to make those kind of quarterly only cuts, but how do you keep the company growing?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: How do you avoid stagnation?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: Because there are going to be ebbs and flows in the income of a company.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: And there are going to be times when there's a downturn on revenue and you can't, you know, a company doesn't exist as a jobs program.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: A company doesn't exist to give people work.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: A company exists to make money.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: And if ever if the companies make money, then everybody makes money and everybody is able to benefit from the spoils of that.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: But what happens when you're in a downturn?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: And what happens when, like how can you manage that team that by just by the nature of the market has to shrink?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's for those decisions, there's a spreadsheet cost and there's a cultural and values cost as well.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: And in in my time in uniform, I taught organizations the same thing that I teach them now.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: The hallmarks of a quality and high-performing organization are how you recruit the people you bring into the organization, what you do to retain and develop them while they're part of the organization.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then when the time comes for them to leave, whether it's a layoff or retirement after an amazing, productive, honorable career, how you treat them.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Because the rest of the workforce is always looking.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: When it's the people on the outside deciding if they want to be part of your organization, the information is available to them.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: There are websites that grade companies for prospective employees that they can look at.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the same thing is true of, you know, college professors are rated and ranked and everything by students, you know, teachers in public schools, so on, and everything.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: So your culture and your processes and your mission and your values are transmitting to people who and what you are, regardless of what you say, what you put on a billboard or a bumper sticker or a framed document on a wall.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: People are smart and can sense and make those decisions.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then the same thing in the organization.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't make a really big deal about somebody leaving after a 20 or 30 or 40 year very honorable career, the people who are far below that point who are making the decision whether they'll stay that long are looking to see how the organization reacts and responds and how those people are treated and whether they're going to make the commitment to stay that long.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Those instances, you know, that sort of organizational institutional loyalty has diminished significantly over the decades.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, our parents' generation and before that, you often worked for the same organization your whole life, and at the end you got a modest pension and a gold watch, and then you retired and you didn't work anymore.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not the world we live in anymore.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: So people are much more transitory and mobile and have more choices, are not held in negative regard for changing jobs more often.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: So that makes it, as a person leading, owning an organization, it's more incumbent on you to do the things internally in your company to create a culture that makes them want to stay.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to keep those high-performing, innovative employees who are high value, who are going to perform the mission and bring the profit and the growth that you want.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, as you're as you're talking there, I was thinking about the gold watch and the pension, and and you're right, it doesn't exist.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's partly why the generations afterwards don't feel as much commitment to the organizations.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's almost like a chicken or the egg.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: Do we not show loyalty to the employees because the employees aren't loyal to us?
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: Or do we wait for the are we waiting for the employees to show loyalty before we show loyalty?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the answer is you show loyalty.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: The minute somebody signs on the dotted line and they're part of your team, you treat them like part of your team, a value part of your team, and you treat them that way the entire time they're on the team.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: And when they step away, I love what you said about making a big deal out of letting everybody know how much you appreciated their time by acting with that sense of loyalty.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_02: People are going to want to stick around.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: People want to be on a team that's a winner.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: People want to be on a team where they're valued and they're treated properly.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: So let me change the discussion a little bit.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: Let's assume our organization is growing.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm going to use George Marshall as an example.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: General George Marshall, who was chief of staff of the Army from before World War II all the way through World War II, and he saw the coming storm of World War II.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: He knew the United States was going to get involved in it.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't know when, but he also knew that the Army and the Army Air Force was woefully inadequate to meet the challenges of it.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: So he came up with some numbers.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: I don't remember the exact number, but it was almost like 400 combat groups, air groups for aircraft and 90 divisions.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: So that was the goal he set.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so he literally built his numbers.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: Here he's got a very small army in the 30s, and he has to start growing leadership and he has to start developing people so that when I have that 90 division army and I have, which is a huge amount.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: Right now we have about 10 divisions.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: So you think about nine times what we have right now, and it's an astronomical number.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: And the the Army Air Forces, you know, now the Air Force, what they had then was so much larger than what we have today.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: The number of aircraft, the number of pilots, the number of maintainers, support personnel, so much bigger.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: And what they had in the 30s was a pittance, even from what we have today.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: So he saw that and he was a visionary enough leader where he started, you know, kind of creating the skeleton for what that force looks like and putting people in leadership positions and growing his leaders so that when all of a sudden he had 90 divisions, he had 90 division commanders.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: And when he had almost 300 regimental and brigade commanders, that you've got to grow when in 1937 you've got almost nothing.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so, how do you do that?
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: So you look at an organization, you've worked with a lot of small organizations and they want to be big and they want to grow.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: How do you teach them to train the right people and they're going through ebbs and flows, just like the Army was in terms of how much money Congress allotted them?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: How do we retain and grow the right people so that when the organization does explode, you've got the right leadership in place?
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's easy to explain and conceptualize.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's tough to do, right?
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the one of the things I've learned and share with, I seem to be kind of a magnet for startups who are pre-revenue, who don't have the resources, you know, even necessarily to get the kind of consulting and advisement externally that they that they might benefit from.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I've actually made a model as a consultant and advisor to be available to help them in those situations, to help give them the resources, because that's where the help is most needed.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: The bigger organizations, the defense primes certainly are effectively a part of the federal bureaucracy.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: They have all the resources, their brand names.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we've built the acquisition system around them to get the exquisite weapon systems that only they can produce and provide.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: We haven't undertaken the same kind of help to institutionalize getting resources and to develop and grow the rest of the industrial base, including what comprises the defense industrial base.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: So you start with with some inventor, innovator, a single person who has some great thing that we need to put in the hands of war fighters.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: At that point, they're they are every component you need in an organization.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: They're the dreamer, they've come up with an doer.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: They have to figure out how to get that done to get in front of the right people with decision and budget authority, and then the driver to get it through whatever sort of bureaucracy and into a market over time.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: When the money comes along that allows them to grow and scale, you separate those into people with those particular subject matter expertise.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's tough for organizations too, right?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's a lot of pride of ownership and authorship and development from those people who invent and are entrepreneurs and inventors and innovators to kind of let go and give somebody else with more expertise and ability the responsibilities that those people are better at, right?
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, somebody who's an inventor may not run a business great, may not be able to run a production line, might not be able to hire the human resources and the talent they need to actually scale that.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so the bottom line is it's a team sport to be successful in the marketplace, and you need to find the right people who can help you.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: The good news is we're never short of subject matter expertise in anything you can dream of doing.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's somebody out there who has the right expertise, the right maturity, the right experience to help you.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: The tough part is sometimes finding them, right?
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so accordingly, the highest value people are the people who are integrators, who can see across and among and into those very narrow functional silos and pick out all of the right individual pieces to actually make a mission happen, to make a product a reality and to be able to scale it and get it in the hands of war fighters in the case of the Defense Enterprise or whoever the client or customer is for that.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it you know takes conditioning.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: You have to have some insight and experience.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it's why we have courses of study in universities.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: We have business schools, but we also have engineering schools, and we also have people that we train to be human resource professionals and so on, because those are all rightful disciplines.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: And to make the big things happen in a big way, you need that kind of trained and educated expertise and then bring it together to make a mission happen.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think you're right.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I going back to Marshall's approach, he hired and fired a lot of people.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: And if he fired somebody, he recognized that that guy came here voluntarily, and in that case, it was it was most all guys, they came here voluntarily.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: They want to serve, so I gotta find the right place for them.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not to give everybody a seat, but there was plenty of work to go around.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so he was very good, even if he fired somebody at looking where else can I put this individual?
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: Where else do they fit the best in my organization as I grow?
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there were some guys, you know, Terry Allen, General Terry Allen is an example.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think he was a division commander throughout the entire war.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: So he was a two-star general division commander throughout the entire war.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: That was not common, but that's where that was his sweet spot.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: He was really good at being a division commander.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: If he had been promoted to be a corps commander or a numbered army commander, he may not have succeeded like he did as a division commander.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: So five some people were better in a training environment.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: And they were very fan, they were fantastic in a training environment.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: Some people were great on a staff, you know, doing a lot of the administrative work that just had to be done.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: And he was good at recognizing people's skills, even if he if they were fired in quote unquote disgrace, he needed to find a place for them and he looked to find a place for them.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think if you're a business owner, and I'm not saying to keep Deadwood around, but if you have people who want to be there or who are desires to be a part of your team and to serve and to contribute, finding where they fit best on the team is critical so that when you do grow, you've got not only do you have that common knowledge and the experience, but you've got them spread across the organization in a way that you can benefit from from all of their different inputs and all of their different skill sets.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_02: Instead of sticking that square peg into the round hole and saying, What it doesn't work, so I'm gonna cast it off and get rid of it.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: Now I have to start from square one and go back to go out to the market and try and find somebody that can that can fit fulfill that position.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: The military is a special case because it's not as conducive to that because the rank gets in the way, right?
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: So so once once somebody's risen up and achieved a rank, if we come to the realization they were better as a flight commander than a squadron commander or as a technician at a bench instead of a flight chief in a shop, we can't put the person with more stripes back under somebody with less time and less experience and fewer stripes and everything.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's where you know we kind of get in into the mindset again, that institutional conditioning of up or out, right?
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: But a company can can do things differently if they choose to.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: Again, there's a lot of upper out in corporate settings as well, but it's more titles and pay rates and everything.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: Can you can find a place for somebody in a company, especially the smaller and less formal their organization is for sure.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I won't say that Marshall demoted people, but a lot of times he made lateral moves after firing somebody and put them in a different position that may not have been as prestigious, but it needed to be filled and they needed that individual's expertise and skill set in that other position.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: It is difficult.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's even difficult in a corporate environment.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: If you're a CEO of a mid-cap, you know, mid-range company, if you lose your job, are you gonna want to be a CEO of a startup?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe not.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean me personally, I would like to.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_02: I would love that kind of a challenge.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna I'm not gonna care as much, I don't think.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: I just care am I getting something done?
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: Am I enjoying the process and the challenge?
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_02: But not everybody's gonna be that way.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: It is reality.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_02: Some people they rise to the top and that's where they are, and all of a sudden they're no longer fit for that organization.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: They they need to move on.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: So how how do you contract gracefully and how do you contract effectively?
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: In the Air Force, we often literally, it was a it's a line I had a budget.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Guess what?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: That squadron is no longer here, and we're we're gonna have to cut, you know, thousand airmen.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes it was just a riff, you know, reduction in force, and you got a pink slip and you were out.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: I remember when I was early in my career, a lot of highly qualified pilots, highly qualified officers that all of a sudden found themselves on the street and found themselves out of the Air Force because the Air Force didn't need pilots as much anymore.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_02: And yet sometimes you're able to do it with retirements, sometimes you're able to do it just by scaling back by finding what the individuals want and hopefully matching enough individuals and their desires with the needs of the company.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: But that's not always the case.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: How do you how do you do that when you're in a smaller organization?
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I've I've seen this a couple of times, but how do you do it when you're in a small organization of let's say 25 to 125 people and you lose a contract or your sales goals, you don't meet your sales goals for a year, and all of a sudden you're looking at your bank accounts going, I I can't keep the same workforce anymore.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: So what manage that?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've I've got a great friend that I work with who's founded a couple of organizations.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: He's an Air Force veteran and uh has has a successful business here in this local area.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: Just about two months ago, he he came to the realization after a company, couple of reputable name brand companies had not paid like they were supposed to, he realized he couldn't continue with his current workforce and laid off about 10 people.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: And we talked about that.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: I watched him agonize over it.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: I watched him sacrifice personally to the extent that he could tolerate until he couldn't anymore before he had to make that decision.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: So again, you're so susceptible to, you know, other market forces and other people's decisions and and the ripple effect from one company to the next if you're a supplier to a supplier, you know, and somewhere along the line a contributor to larger mission, larger organizations and products and everything.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: But the way he did it when it came time to make that decision and communicate that was with complete empathy and grace, with the same care that he took when he hired those people in the first place, the same kind of communication.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: So not the, you know, not the mass email to seven digit numbers of people or whatever, but you know, actually bringing them in, warming them up to the idea that potentially layoffs were coming.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: If in fact it's gonna affect you, I'm here to help.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: We're still well connected in the industry and in the local area and can give you some resources and it will definitely be a soft let down if that time comes.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, don't jump too fast because we could be rescued.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: So don't assume in two weeks you might be gone.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: So you give me two weeks' notice and go find something else anyway.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think most of those people weren't in that position.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: They'd rather stick around and and wait till the last minute, and they did.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the humanity of being a boss, being an organizational leader like that is so important.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: And part of the reason I know this particular guy did it the way he did, he'd been through Air Force reductions in force.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: He'd seen that impact both to civil servants and uniformed people in the federal environment and in companies that he'd worked for before he'd started his own company.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so he committed if that situation ever confronted him, he was going to do it different and better.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he did it different and better.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was certainly an example.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: And any one of those people, given the opportunity, would come back and he would hire him back because of the grace that they left without bitterness and without judgment, because he communicated to them and and didn't leave them hanging when other organizations do that.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: So we're you know, it's a team, it's a team sport when you're part of a team, you care about your your teammates.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think if I was to take anything away from our discussion, it's number one finding how to put people in the right on the right chest square, knowing your team to put them in the right place, building that right mix of people, and then leading with a sense of empathy and a sense of connection with them and a sense of loyalty so that when number one, if you expand, you're able to expand and and you're able to move people into the right position as you expand.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_02: And if you have to contract, it's not an email, you know, it's not a blind email from a they kind of see it coming, and they feel that your pain as a leader or your frustration as a leader almost as much as you do, even though it's gonna directly impact them.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: They see that it directly impacts you also, and I think that's a big deal.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_02: Any parting thoughts about how to create that right mix of an organization amidst contractions and growth?
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you can, you know, you can kind of look at running an organization.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: Some people are are so much better able to compartmentalize for better or for worse, right?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: So they have their work life and they have their personal life, and they have the way they treat people at work in the professional environment, and then how they treat people in their personal life.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're, you know, I I come from a from a place, you know, spiritually and and culturally, where we recognize we all have infinite potential and we're all of equal value.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we were sent here to be part of this earthly journey together.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: And along that journey, you can look at things from two kind of binary positions, a position, a perspective of abundance or of scarcity.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the scarcity mindset is people are just numbers, they're just names on a manning document, numbers on a spreadsheet, or whatever.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: I do what I need to, you know, functionally to run my organization, increase shareholder value, whatever, or from a position of abundance, right?
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: We're all in this together, we're all the same.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: Could be, it could be me next.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna handle this with empathy.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: There are opportunities for all of us, and even this layoff might be a springboard for you to do the great thing that you really should be doing anyway, right?
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: So again, it it's how you look at things, how you look at opportunities and treat people, how you see yourself as part of society, as part of an organization or family or uh part of a mission team, and where you all fit in.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it's we're all in this together.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's the bottom line.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: We're all built to be part of a team, and it's hard to find anything you do that's not team oriented, even when it's first taking care of yourself and making sure you achieve your full potential so you're the strongest team member and give the the greatest potential and possibilities to to people who will place you on a team and give you a role and responsibility so you can accomplish a mission.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a good place to be.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_02: That I think goes along with all of this.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: And of all the roles you've held, what has been your most enjoyable role?
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_02: Grandpa.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_02: That's totally fair.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_02: Totally fair.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: No, gosh, you know, in in an organization in the Air Force, right?
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of people would agree if if I asked you what's the best rank in the Air Force?
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_02: I would say it was Lieutenant Colonel for me.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_02: Because the the leadership, I was half tactical, half operational strategic, and the number of people I got to affect at a very on a very one-on-one basis, I loved.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: It ranges, right?
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: People sometimes people will say captain, right?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're a tactical expert and a warfighter.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: You're a master of your craft.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: And some people would go up one from what you said and say colonel, because then you can affect positively a lot of people.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: You're responsible for a pretty significant mission set in an organization and you can do a lot of good.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: You have a lot of leverage because you're still at the tactical operational level, but you're senior enough to affect change and to get listened to and to be able to marshal resources.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody says the lowest rank because you can't wait to get promoted and get out of that.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: And hardly anybody ever says the higher ranks either, right?
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it's interesting.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: We're democratic in our thought.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: We think we're all equal, and kind of in the middle is our comfort zone.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's where we're built to be.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: And anybody else, especially above that level, their responsibility is to make it so you have the resources to do your job as a tactical professional.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_02: Amen.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate that insight.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_02: Max, thanks for joining us.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: And for everybody else, thanks for being here with us.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: If you have any questions, if you want to connect directly with Max, reach out to me at AstericNow.com and I'll make the introduction.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_02: If you have any further questions on what we talked about, about how to scale or contract an organization and make it work best for you, then reach out and we'll have a direct conversation about that.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: Or if you have any other topics that you want us to talk about, again, reach out at Astericnow.com.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: And if you have not already done so, subscribe, follow our show, and together we'll become better decision makers for better results.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that's it for today's episode of Commander's Intend Podcast.
• 44:22
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• 44:27
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• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: So head on over to CommandersIntent Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Derek's Leadership Guide and join us on the next episode.