on a tuesday morning i conducted a parachute jump at fort bragg north carolina
it was a routine training jump like many more i 'd done since i became a paratrooper twenty seven years before
we went down to the airfield early because this is the army and you always go early
you do some routine refresher training and then you go to put on your parachute
and a buddy helps you and you put on the t ten parachute and you 're very careful how you put the straps particularly the leg straps because they go between your legs and then you put on your reserve and then you put on your heavy rucksack and then a jumpmaster comes and he 's an experienced nco in parachute operations he checks you out he grabs your adjusting straps and he tightens everything so that your
he 's tightened so your voice goes up a couple octaves as well
then you sit down and you wait a little while because this is the army
then you load the aircraft and then you stand up and you get on and you kind of lumber to the aircraft like this in a line of people and you sit down on canvas seats on either side of the aircraft and you wait a little bit longer because this is the air force teaching the army how to wait
then you take off
and it 's painful enough now and i think it 's designed this way it 's painful enough so you want to jump
you didn 't really want to jump but you want out
so you get in the aircraft you 're flying along and at twenty minutes out these jumpmasters start giving you commands they give twenty minutes that 's a time warning you sit there ok then they give you ten minutes and of course you 're responding with all of these and that 's to boost everybody 's confidence to show that you 're not scared
then they give you get ready then they go outboard personnel stand up
if you 're an outboard personnel now you stand up if you 're an inboard personnel stand up and then you hook up and you hook up your
static line and at that point you think hey guess what i 'm probably going to jump there 's no way to get out of this at this point
you go through some additional checks and then they open the door and this was that tuesday morning in september
and it was pretty nice outside so nice air comes flowing in
the jumpmasters start to check the door
and then when it 's time to go a green light goes and the jumpmaster goes go the first guy goes and you 're just in line and you just kind of lumber to the door
jump is a misnomer you fall
you fall outside the door
an airborne sergeant had taught me to do that
i have no idea whether it makes any difference but he seemed to make sense and i wasn 't going to test
the hypothesis that he 'd be wrong
and then you wait for the opening shock for your parachute to open
if you don 't get an opening shock you don 't get a parachute you 've got a whole new problem set
but typically you do typically it opens and of course if your leg straps aren 't set right at that point you get another little thrill
so then you look around
you can 't delay that much and you really can 't decide where you hit very much because they pretend you can steer but
now the army teaches you to do five points of performance
the toes of your feet your calves your thighs your buttocks and your push up muscles it 's this elegant little
land twist and roll and that 's not going to hurt
i 'd shake my head
and i 'd ask myself the eternal question why didn 't i go into banking
and they 'd have pulled out their m four carbine and they 'd be picking up their equipment
they 'd be doing everything that we had taught them
they would do what we had taught them and they would follow leaders and i realized that if they came out of combat it would be because we led them well
and i was hooked again on the importance of what i did
when we landed on the drop zone everything had changed
and what we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being theoretical
was now very very real
and leadership seemed important
but things had changed i was a forty six year old brigadier general i 'd been successful
but things changed so much
i was raised with traditional stories of leadership robert e lee john buford at gettysburg
and i also was raised
with personal examples of leadership
this was my father in vietnam
and i was raised to believe that soldiers were strong and wise and brave and faithful
they didn 't lie cheat steal
or abandon their comrades and i still believe real leaders are like that
but in my first twenty five years of career i had a bunch of different experiences one of my first battalion commanders i worked in his battalion for eighteen months and the only conversation he ever had with lt mcchrystal was at mile eighteen of a twenty five mile road march and he chewed my ass for about forty seconds
and i 'm not sure that was real interaction
but then a couple of years later when i was a company commander i went out to the national training center
and we did an operation
and my company did a dawn attack you know the classic dawn attack you prepare all night move to the line of departure and i had an armored organization at that point we move forward and we get wiped out
i mean wiped out immediately the enemy didn 't break a sweat doing it
and after the battle they bring this mobile theater and they do what they call an after action review to teach you what you 've done wrong sort of leadership by humiliation
i walked out feeling as low as a snake 's belly in a wagon rut
and i saw my battalioncommander because i had let him down and i went up to apologize to him and he said stanley i thought you did great
and in one sentence he lifted me
put me back on my feet and taught me that leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure
when nine eleven came forty six year old brig gen mcchrystal sees a whole new world
first the things that are obvious that you 're familiar with
the environment changed the speed the scrutiny the sensitivity of everything now is so fast sometimes it evolves faster than people have time to really reflect on it
but everything we do is in a different context
more importantly the force that i led was spread over more than twenty countries and instead of being able to get all the key leaders for a decision together in a single room and look them in the eye and build their confidence and get trust from them i 'm now leading a force that 's dispersed
and i 've got to use other techniques
i 've got to use video teleconferences i 've got to use chat i 've got to use email i 've got to use phone calls i 've got to use everything i can
not just for communication
thousands of miles from me
has got to communicate to me with confidence i have to have trust in them and vice versa and i also have to build their faith
and that 's a new kind of leadership for me we had one operation where we had to coordinate it from multiple locations an emerging opportunity came didn 't have time to get everybody together
so we had to get complexintelligence together we had to line up the ability to act
it was sensitive we had to go up the chain of command convince them that this was the right thing to do and do all of this
on electronic medium
and so now what we had to do is i had to reach out to try to rebuild the trust of that force rebuild their confidence me and them and them and me and our seniors and us as a force all without the ability to put a hand on a shoulder entirely new requirement
also the people had changed
you probably think that the force that i led was all steely eyed commandos with big knuckle fists carrying exotic weapons
it was men women young old
not just from military from different organizations many of them detailed to us just from a handshake and so instead of giving orders
you 're now building consensus and you 're building a sense of shared purpose
probably the biggest change was understanding that the generational difference the ages had changed so much
i went down to be with a ranger platoon on an operation in afghanistan and on that operation a sergeant in the platoon had lost about half his arm throwing a taliban hand grenade back at the enemy after it had landed in his fire team
we talked about the operation and then at the end i did what i often do with a force like that i asked where were you on nine eleven
and one young ranger in the back his hair 's tousled and his face is red and windblown from being in combat in the cold afghan wind
he said sir i was in the sixth grade
and it reminded me
and shared consciousness
and yet he has different experiences in many cases a different vocabulary a completely different skill set in terms of digital media
and yet we need to have that shared sense
it also produced something which i call an inversion of expertise because we had so many changes at the lower levels in technology and tactics and whatnot that suddenly the things that we grew up doing wasn 't what the force was doing anymore so how does a leader
stay credible and legitimate when they haven 't done what the people you 're leading are doing
and it 's a brand new leadershipchallenge and it forced me to become a lot more transparent a lot more willing to listen
a lot more willing to be reverse mentored from lower
and yet again you 're not all in one room
you don 't reset or recharge your battery every time i stood in front of a screen one night in iraq with one of my senior officers and we watched a firefight from one of our forces
and i remembered his son was in our force and i said john where 's your son and how is he and he said sir he 's fine thanks for asking i said where is he now and he pointed at the screen he said he 's in that firefight
think about watching your brother father daughter son wife
in a firefight in real time and you can 't do anything about it
think about knowing that over time and it 's a new cumulative pressure on leaders and you have to watch and take care of each other
i probably learned the most about relationships
much of my career in the ranger regiment and every morning in the ranger regiment every ranger and there are more than two thousand of them says a six stanza ranger creed
you may know one line of it it says i 'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy and it 's not a mindless mantra and it 's not a poem
and they 've lived up to it which gives it special power and so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing
and i learned personal relationships were more important than ever
we were in a difficult operation in afghanistan in two thousand and seven and an old friend of mine that i had spent many years at various points of my career with
godfather to one of their kids
he sent me a note just in an envelope that had a quote from sherman to grant that said i knew if i ever got
in a tight spot
that you would come if alive
and having that kind of relationship for me turned out to be critical
at many points in my career and i learned that you have to give that
in this environment because it 's tough
this isn 't easy stuff
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