Focused On The Mission

“It is essential to understand that battles are primarily won in the hearts of men. Men respond to leadership in a most remarkable way and once you have won his heart, he will follow you anywhere.”    -  Vince Lombardi

This image has been in my mind since my early days in the Navy….and permanently ensconced in my approach to leadership as I closed out my Commanding Officer tour on USS CARL VINSON (CVN 70). It captures a young charge who has the spirit, the motivation, and belief in self to achieve phenomenal things….or not, depending upon the leadership brickwork done on his or her behalf. Without a constant, personal leadership approach, you will never know what is being cooked on the other side of the goggles – was the message received….was it validated by my actions…..was my energy constructive vs. toxic in our collective effort to achieve our goals?

Do you see the eyes? The soul? The spirit? Nope, you don’t. You may detect a swagger in that face, but you only know it to be legitimate if you and your leadership team have done the heavy-lifting, early and often…to ensure that each of your people have relevance, understand their critical role to the tribe’s success, and have every expectation that they are to be applauded for stretching their operational envelope. On each of my ships, I worked hard to ensure that those eyes that I could not see were telling me that they had my back, because they knew I had theirs. In the spirit of honest reflection, I could have fooled myself into believing this to be the case without one ounce of my own personal capital, if I only listened to those who told me what they thought I wanted to hear. I worked hard to ensure that I had a leadership team that consisted of diverse, often times contrarian thinkers. I did not want to be fooled into thinking that everything was copacetic, because it never was….it is the nature of any complex business. I wanted to know that the eyes not seen – either because of a pair of goggles, or because daily contact was simply not possible, were indeed confident that the obstacles had been removed to ensure success. Your people will run as fast they can if their motivation engines are fully charged and properly tuned.

It is important to your people….critically important to your people…. that you listen, observe, and speak to gain knowledge in order to win their hearts and minds…..even if they do not realize how important it is at the time.  Your engagement, as a leader, is directly attendant to your people’s self-worth and their sense of value as a person.  Many of these folks carry some personal baggage – I know I do. It ups the level-of-difficulty to achieving the level of excellence that is required from your team in order to win, and carry the day.

We all have people in our organization wearing goggles. We all have the capacity to minimize the uncertainty of not being able to see into his or her eyes. We also have the capacity to ensure that our people do not see goggles when they look back at their leadership team as well.

 Charge hard!!