TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. – I’ve had the pleasure of working for a number of Air Mobility Command’s senior leaders in my career, and I’ve always enjoyed hearing their thoughts on leadership. I noticed that most of them had a way of taking complex ideas and boiling them down to a phrase or concept that everyone could easily embrace and rally behind. Over the years, I’ve collected a few quotes that I thought were particularly great and worth sharing.
Lt. Gen. Rusty Findley, former vice commander of AMC, would mentor those around him with what he called “Findley’s Axioms.” The axiom that always stuck with me the most was, “People want to know you care, before they care what you know.” This quote, or some variation of it, has been attributed to numerous people, including Teddy Roosevelt, but Gen. Findley made it his own as it applies to the Air Force.
I believe this phrase is important because it highlights the difference between leadership and management. A manager can succeed by knowing his or her job inside and out and simply applying that expertise to achieve results. A good leader, however, knows their people and rallies his or her team to reach their full potential together. People don’t need a leader to have all the answers, they just need a leader who truly cares about them and helps them be the best they can be.
As a young staff officer in the AMC Commander’s Action Group, Gen. Ray Johns, the AMC Commander at the time, used to say “Watch your pronouns.” This phrase hit me hard the first time I heard him say it, forcing me to think about the words I routinely used and the messages they conveyed. What pronouns do you use the most? Do you often say I, me, or myself, or do you use words like we, us, and they? Nobody wants to be part of a team where the leader takes sole credit for the team’s hard work. A good leader looks for opportunities to share success, and they aren’t afraid to own failure. As Ronald Reagan once said, “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.”
When I was a Joint Mobility Fellow for Intermediate Development Education, Maj. Gen. Thomas Sharpy, the current deputy commander of AMC, once told my class over lunch, “People won’t always remember what you say to them, but they will remember what you do for them.” Servant leaders take the time to genuinely get to know their people, and invest time and resources to make an impact on their lives. Gen. Sharpy remarked that Airmen will go out of their way to thank him for things he did for them several years ago, sometimes for things he didn’t even remember doing. He made the point that most times a leader won’t even realize the significance of their actions, only to find out years later that they made a huge difference in someone’s life. Actions speak louder than words, and you never know whose life you’ll have a positive impact on.
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.” I saved the best quote, in my opinion, for last. Not only is it catchy, but it also comes from an unconventional source…the mind of Dr. Seuss in The Lorax. I didn’t get this quote from the Lorax though, I first heard it from our current United States Transportation Command commander, Gen. Darren McDew, who ends every commander’s call with this quote. Let that sink in for a minute…a combatant commander and four-star general routinely presents this quote on a slide with a word-bubble coming out of the mouth of a little orange, fuzzy cat-like creature. Have you ever heard a quote that rings more true though? What are you doing to make things better? A good leader doesn’t complain about problems; they roll their sleeves up and get to work!
I hope you found these quotes interesting and useful. You never know…if you take these leadership principles to heart, maybe one day we’ll be quoting you as a senior leader in AMC!