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Major General Douglas Crissman · Five Questions for a General

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign.
• 0:03
  Speaker B: You're listening to five Questions for a General, a production of the Modern Morses at West point. I am Dr. Charles Feint, the team lead for this podcast series which features interviews of senior military leaders conducted by specially selected and trained West Point cadet hosts. These exchanges produce timely, relevant and inspirational insights for professional development of leaders at all levels.
• 0:25
  Speaker C: Welcome back to the west point class of 1974 recording studio and the five questions for a General podcast. I am Cadet Orion Van Buskirk, your host for today. And today's guest is retired Major General Doug Christman. General Chrisman, welcome to the show.
• 0:39
  Speaker A: Great, thanks for having me, Orion.
• 0:41
  Speaker C: General Chrisman, you graduated West Point class of 1988 and commissioned the infantry. First of all, why did you decide to make the Army a career? And then why did you choose West Point? And more importantly to me, why did you choose the infantry?
• 0:54
  Speaker A: Well, I'm a third generation graduate of West Point, so I was initially interested in West Point because both my father, father and my grandfather on my mother's side were graduates. And so it was part of my upbringing. I also was a kid here in the young age, second, third and fourth grade, went to West Point Elementary School when my dad was teaching here on the faculty. And I became enamored with cadets and the army and everybody played army here. As a kid, I used to run around the woods, you know, right here at West Point, cadets were in the house on the weekends. I just thought they were the coolest thing. They were great role models for a young element, elementary school age kid. So that's how I got interested in it. I think my dad recognized that it was more than just being mesmerized by cadets. As a third grader, you needed a little bit more commitment. So as it got closer to my decision, he actually tried to play devil's advocate and tried to talk me out of it and tried to say, hey, look, this has to really be something you want to do. This is a big deal. So you can't just go because you think it's a family tradition. You can't just go because you liked going to football games and parades when you were a kid. You gotta go because you have this desire. And honestly, at that point, I thought that West Point, if nothing else, was a great place to start. I didn't have anything else that was causing me to think I'd rather go down a different path. And I was at least comfortable enough with this path that I thought it would be a great place to start. As far as the infantry, once I got here I've always been kind of fond of the outdoors and the woods and just doing hard things and the infantry, I thought would provide me the great, greatest opportunity to not just do that individually, but to lead soldiers in that capacity.
• 2:41
  Speaker C: That's great to hear. As somebody who had a similar experience with my dad telling me, hey, don't do this unless you really want to do this. I think that's a really valuable thing for people who are just kind of like, thrust into, you know, maybe a family lineage thing. But that's. That's an excellent answer, sir. You've led soldiers in combat, worked alongside senior civilian leaders, mentored newly selected brigadier generals, and now advise corporate leaders. When you strip away rank uniforms, doctrine, and organizational charts. What separates genuinely great leaders from people who are just simply good at getting promoted?
• 3:16
  Speaker A: I think it's the leader's ability to connect with those that he or she is privileged to lead. And that's more of an art than a science. There's a little bit of charisma, there's a little bit of trust, there's a little bit of authenticity in how you communicate that and how people see you as a real person, but a real person who is their leader. And how do you build a level of trust that causes a group of people to not just want to follow you because you're their boss, and you may outrank them and they're somewhat obligated to, but they're willing to follow you because they trust you, because they respect you, because they admire you, and got to kind of build all that together. And so I certainly didn't always get it right. And I certainly had the benefit of learning from a lot of great role models along the way. You build your own leadership style and approach based on those lessons that you learn, many of them by watching others. And I still tell people that we're on a continuous leadership development journey. It's never over. You're not finished at any point along your career. Right. It's. You have a continuous appetite to get better and to continue to learn. And I love the quote of, you know, it's what I learned after I thought I knew it all. That really mattered. Not that I ever reached the point where I thought I knew it all, but this continuous learning approach, I think is part of any successful leader's pedigree.
• 4:43
  Speaker C: Absolutely. On that same kind of note, talking about learning and developing your leadership style, what does combat teach you about leadership and your own leadership style that you just simply couldn't get at West Point, CGSC or anywhere?
• 4:56
  Speaker A: Else, Yeah, I would say that the principles taught at West Point or at CGSC or in any leadership course were probably still there in combat, but combat situations in the combat environment allowed those principles to absolutely come to life. So the importance of being really, really good at the fundamentals and therefore training your teams in peacetime and during preparation for combat on those fundamentals, so that when in the complex environment of combat, you're not worried about building competence, you already have the competence and you've built that competence, then breeds confidence individually and collectively in each other, up, down and laterally. And confidence over multiple reps builds trust. And that kind of trust is, in the best of circumstances, exists before you are in a combat situation and therefore everything begins to happen like a well oiled machine in combat. Or at least it happens so well that you are only making slight adjustments and you're able to leverage that competence, that confidence and that trust and therefore react to the additional challenges that combat may throw at you.
• 6:09
  Speaker C: Thank you, sir, that's an excellent answer. And I want to talk for a little bit about mission command, the idea that leaders have to create enough trust and kind of shared understanding to allow support and exercise discipline, initiative. Why does the army keep saying it wants decentralized decision making while so many organizations still seem to struggle to actually let go of that, of that top down control?
• 6:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's really hard because we as an army, I mean, our line of work, it's pretty complex, right. And we often do some challenging and dangerous things that cause leaders at all levels to sort of feel like they've got to be in more control as opposed to less control, for all the right reasons. But I would say that mission command as an approach to how we want to lead is still largely aspirational in our Army. It's still a stretch goal and I would say maybe a third of our army at any one time, because our army's constantly changing. Because, you know, we rotate leaders every two years in commands most of the time. We rotate soldiers every three years most of the time. And so our teams and our leaders and our combinations of humans that are actually out there delivering the climate that Mission Command happens or not in are constantly changing. So it's not that the army says this is the way we want to lead and then publishes doctrine and that it magically happens. Mission Command is an approach to how we lead. And it doesn't happen by accident. It happens because leaders understand the seven principles and leaders understand that putting those principles in place, it starts with competence and competence is gained through hard training. And then competence, as I said before, breeds trust. And when subordinates are trusted by their leader and their leader trusts their subordinates, that opens up a whole another set of opportunities for things like disciplined initiative and accepting risk. We're more comfortable with that if we've trained our units to the point where we're confident they can handle that. Not every unit sets all those conditions in the right way, and it's a constant effort.
• 8:18
  Speaker C: So in terms of an approach to mission command going forward, what would you maybe like to see done differently to advance that kind of cultivating that trust and that competence to allow mission command to be successful?
• 8:30
  Speaker A: I think as we continue as an army to say that's what we think. Right. Looks like we just got to try to provide more examples where we think it's happening, happening appropriately. And we've got good units that I served in or maybe I was fortunate to lead, where I think over time, we got mission Command as a climate, as a culture. We built it to the point where I sort of felt like we had it right. But, you know, then I would go and join or become part of another unit, and I felt like I, you know, have to start over in some cases. So I think it's just recognizing that, like any good sports team, if you win the super bowl and you come back with a new lineup the next year, you got to start over. And yet you sort of know where you want to go. And Mission command remains our aspirational goal to remain the best army in the world, to be a team that can execute the way we want to execute, which is decentralized with empowered subordinates that are able to take command or take control and exercise that discipline, initiative, and leaders that can recognize and accept prudent risk. That's what we want, but it's a constant effort for us to get there. It's not a. You either have it or you don't. You're almost in a constant state of amber.
• 9:41
  Speaker C: Right.
• 9:41
  Speaker A: Going from no mission command to ideal mission command. You're almost in that constant state of getting there. And I just think we need to be comfortable with that. Sure. Just like any good sports team is comfortable with every practice getting better.
• 9:55
  Speaker C: Absolutely. Absolutely. That makes sense. Switching gears a little bit, sir, you were the second American general officer to serve as the deputy commander of the British Army's 3rd Division. What did the British army do differently that made you question something you had previously kind of taken for granted about how the US army leads, trains, or fights?
• 10:12
  Speaker A: Yeah. So what an interesting Assignment, two years, one star general. You know, it's one thing to be a general in your own army after serving a career in that army. It's completely another thing to then be asked to go serve as a general in someone else's army, even someone else that's a trusted ally and partner. And you know, they speak our language. It was still a challenge. I was the only American in that formation and I was the deputy commander. And talk about a broadening assignment, talk about thinking outside the box. It's easy to just go and be surrounded by a bunch of people that think like you, act like you wear the same uniform and have been through all the same schools and experiences to go and then immerse yourself in another in an environment where people aren't like you necessarily or 100% like you. You have to sort of defend your position. And, and in some cases you strengthen your thoughts about how you've come up in the US army, in my case, because you're having to defend your actions to a bunch of folks who haven't come up in the United States Army. And in other cases, you soften some of your views because you're able to see, understand and appreciate how another army, in this case does things. So I learned a tremendous amount being the only American in a British army division.
• 11:30
  Speaker C: So can you elaborate briefly for people that might not be totally familiar, how did that position get stood up? What was the origin of that position being fully integrated into the British Army?
• 11:40
  Speaker A: Yeah, so the, the, the army has a program called mpep. Mpep, The Military Partner Exchange Program. And it's been in existence for years. And at multiple grades, non commissioned officers, warrant officers and officers are exchanged between armies of key allies and partners. And the size and scale and scope of that exchange, like the number of people that we actually exchange and where they go and what they do is negotiated every few years. And the UK happens to be one of our largest exchanges, for obvious reasons, of course, but we have MPEP soldiers in multiple armies with, from allies and partners. And it's meant to bring our two armies closer together. In many cases, we get as much out of it as they do. But it's often about, hey, look, this is an ally and partner that we would want to understand and appreciate. The way we fight, the way we train, the way we're organized better. And so let's put some people in their army and grab some of their folks and put them in our army to help strengthen that connection. Talk about interoperability. That was a key, one of my key goals in that role as the deputy commander. So we had had a relationship with the British army for many years, but we had not exchanged a US General because they didn't have a US One star or they didn't have a one star as their deputy commander. So we had British one stars in several of our divisions for many years, but we never gave them a US one star because they were just going to put them on staff somewhere. We said, no, we're only going to give them to you if you put them in the same position we're putting our guys in.
• 13:17
  Speaker C: Right.
• 13:18
  Speaker A: So once they decided to do that, I was fortunate to be the second person to have that opportunity. And it was a great experience.
• 13:25
  Speaker C: That's an incredible opportunity. On that same topic of developing, you talked about, obviously a broadening assignment in every sense of the term, but developing others. I want to talk about that a little bit. You wrote fairly recently about the Army's difficulty with developing others more than a decade ago, and today you're still involved in developing senior army leaders. What are we getting right about leader development? And maybe more importantly, what are we still getting wrong a decade later?
• 13:52
  Speaker A: Well, I'd say, I mean, the army is probably one of, if not the preeminent leader development organizations in the United States and the world. Perhaps nobody does it better because of the amount of time, energy and resources that we put behind leadership development. But we can always get better. And it's a continuous process. And so while we may feel good about what we did for one person or one group or one cohort, you know, we've, we've constantly got to get better. And often, I think we, like many good organizations, we convince ourselves that we're too busy for leader development. And often we are. You know, the army is very busy and they continue to be busy. And often one of the first things that when you get busy, one of the first things that falls off the calendar is some of that what people might consider as optional or extra credit leader development. And I submit that, number one, there's a cost to that. And number two, it's not in leader development. Sort of happens every day, Right. It's not just, oh, it's Tuesday, we're going to do a brown bag lunch. So it's leader development day, right? No, every day is leader development day. And there are leader development opportunities in, in every single day, from how we do PT in the morning to the way we might run a meeting during the day, to the way that we're running a platoon live fire range that night or Leader development lessons. But if we don't approach it and we just have this get it done attitude, then perhaps we're missing an opportunity. So that would be my thought, is where we have opportunities to go slow so we can go fast and dedicate that extra few minutes to raising the next generation and cementing some of those key lessons. I think that's always time well spent.
• 15:44
  Speaker C: Absolutely. And maybe just being more mindful on a day to day basis of the development aspect. So kind of just to bake it in to things that are already happening
• 15:53
  Speaker A: rather than treatment whenever we can kind of connect lessons and make more of a comprehensive experience as opposed to people feeling like they're getting developed episodically, you should be getting developed continuously. And so how our leaders think about that I think is important.
• 16:11
  Speaker C: That's a great lesson to learn, I think. And on that same kind of note, talking about competence and confidence, we touched on that earlier. You spent more than three decades inside an institution that places a lot of value on competence and confidence. Can you talk about the lessons learned from failure and success and how maybe those play with each other, but more importantly how failure has been equally less or more important than success?
• 16:34
  Speaker A: Yeah, you think about every, every day, every week of a 30 plus year career, I had far more failures or things that didn't go exactly as I had hoped that shaped who I became as a leader and my ability to kind of learn from missteps, learn from those mistakes. In some cases, maybe they just weren't things I did wrong. They were just things that I learned that I was able to influence and make better the next time I did them. And I think I learned as much or more from things that were not successful. Maybe they weren't failures, maybe they just, you know, I didn't get an A. Right. You know, I didn't get selected. My, my course of action wasn't selected by the commander, my proposal wasn't accepted by the boss. I didn't get the, that I was looking for for a particular thing. I didn't get platoon live fires to be as successful as I wanted as a battalion commander. Okay, well great. How do I fix it the next time? And taking time for an after action review, taking time to reflect and say what could have done gone better and how can I set conditions to meet those expectations next time?
• 17:40
  Speaker C: Yeah, that's definitely good. We do talk a lot, I think about failure and I think we do an okay job about discussing why failure matters, but maybe thinking more about how it's actually baked into the process you talked about after action reports, but I think that's a, that's an excellent point to touch on, sir. You retired as a major general after 33 years, but instead of simply stepping away, you've been pretty involved in continuing to mentor army leaders, working with civilian executives, supporting wounded warriors, and even working in an outdoor gear store. Would you like to talk about what it's like to find your purpose after hanging up the uniform and just finding what gives you life after the army and identity?
• 18:20
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. And as I talk with folks, colleagues and peers of mine that are at the same stage in their life or are considering how to plot their own course for transition after a career of service in uniform, one that a lot of people struggle with, right. It's like, hey, I've had a great time in the army, otherwise I wouldn't have stayed for three plus decades. Like, you know, but now it's done, it's, it's over. What do I do now? Because I'm not ready to just sit at home and plant a garden, right. Maybe I'll do that in 10 more years. But what am I, what, what, what's going to make me happy? And so in some cases it's, you know, I want to continue to do this type of work. For me, it was about, I am passionate about leader development, and I am. Why am I passionate about it? Because a lot of great people invested in me as a young leader and throughout my career and made me better and made me enjoy the army more and helped provide cool opportunities for me to continue to serve. And I thought, well, I want to figure out how to pay some of that back. I want to figure out how to continue to contribute to the Army. I want to talk about leadership development to corporate America, if some of these military fundamentals can be useful to them. And so all of that sort of defined the combination of, of work that I do now. I enjoy mentoring and participating in events with the army and helping to raise the next generation. I enjoy sharing some of those military leadership principles with, with corporate entities. Absolutely. And you know, and like you said, I enjoy doing some, some other more technical work and even, you know, working in an outdoor gear store for absolutely about three years and selling backpacks and tents and sleeping bags and, you know, just being Doug and helping people find ways to enjoy the outdoors with being better informed and having better gear. So I enjoy that combination. So I think my advice for anybody is figure out what's going to help you fill your tank. And for most of us, it was the people that helped fill our tank and the satisfaction we got building and leading teams and you know, how. How are you going to find ways that you can fill your tank in a slightly different way in retirement?
• 20:40
  Speaker C: Great. Yeah, that's very helpful. And then kind of on that same note, knowing what, you know now, what advice would you offer your younger self?
• 20:50
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's always a great question in it. So I have no regrets. Right. I would choose the same path. Looking back, if I came back now and like started out as a new cadet today, man, I would be awesome.
• 21:02
  Speaker B: Right.
• 21:02
  Speaker A: But that's unfair, right, because everybody does get that opportunity. But I guess, you know, I would choose the same path. I would, you know, approach my life in the military perhaps the same way. But you know, there's certain things I, I think I was, I was. Even though as a third generation graduate of West Point, I was still a bit naive about how to succeed here as a cadet. So I, you know, I'd probably work a little bit harder or maybe I'd work a little bit smarter. If I were a cadet today as a young officer or a young leader in the army, you know, I think I would approach problems with, with a longer term view and you know, don't sweat the small stuff. I would try to just focus a little bit more on, you know, what's most important. And I know I was distracted by some of those short term goals and aspirations and you know, it was just me being naive and me not understanding what was really important until much, much later in my. And so I think that would be my advice to my younger self.
• 22:06
  Speaker C: That's a great note to end on for today. General Chrisman, thank you so much for your time today. I know I had some very valuable insights from this discussion and for this great discussion about mission command, strategic decision making and developing leaders. On behalf of Colonel Patrick Sullivan, the director of the Modern War Institute, Dr. Charlie Feint, the director of this podcast series, it is my pleasure to present you with this rare and coveted Modern War Institute coin.
• 22:31
  Speaker A: Awesome. All right, I will proudly add this to my collection. Thanks for the time today. Orion, it's great to meet you. Best of luck in your first year here. I hope you get to branch infantry as you would like.
• 22:42
  Speaker C: Hope so too.
• 22:43
  Speaker A: Look forward to hearing great things about your future, sir.
• 22:46
  Speaker C: It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
• 22:47
  Speaker A: Likewise.
• 22:51
  Speaker B: This has been an episode of Five Questions for a General a production of the Modern War Institute of West Point. If you like what you heard today, please download, like subscribe and share this podcast to help us reach an even larger audience. All statements in this podcast represent the personal views of the speakers and do not represent an official position of the United States Military Academy or the United States Government.