Share “The Why”

Looking back on your career, what would you consider maybe your biggest failure or your biggest missed opportunity?

Yeah, I mean I had a lot of them. I would say there's a case that's tactical that I had British Special Air service people working in Iraq and we worked together for several years. And they did an assault on an objective, an Al Qaeda in Iraq objective one day. And they started taking intense automatic weapons fire from this building. And as they should have they brought in an AC-130 gunship and they leveled the building. Right answer, completely. The next day there were accusations that civilians were killed in the operation. And I don't think that was true, but we investigated every accusation to make sure that we either prevented it or knew. So I implemented an investigation.

About three weeks later, the same organization is doing another assault on a target against an Egyptian bomb maker, a really bad character. They landed the helicopters and they started toward the building and I'm watching again and I see this, the flashing on the street. And you know it's automatic weapons fire and I said, "Whoa, all right." And I'm waiting for them to level the building. And they don't. They attack the building head-on and I'm watching this going, "What?" And they pull four of the operators, Brit operators away wounded, fortunately, none were killed, and I am beside myself. I said, "Have they lost their minds? "Why don't they level that building?" And they attacked it again. They eventually took it. Why did they do that?

What had happened was when I instituted the investigation, my American units all knew that it was just standard operating procedure to investigate anything. The Brits didn't. They thought general Stan, one of two things, either didn't trust them anymore, cause he's investigating them, or he doesn't want them to use AC-130 gunships. So they're trying to do what they think I want, at great cost, and the entire fault of that was mine for not communicating. You're gonna investigate somebody, tell them why. Be transparent, say here's the background, here's the concerns and whatnot.

Wow, that, I mean that is just, that's an amazing story, and what's interesting is it comes down to the a simple leadership principle that you've used millions of times, and that is telling people the why.