Avoid the fallacy of the "go-to guy"

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Richard Wagner
  • 571st Global Mobility Readiness Squadron commander
TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  You see it in Air Force performance reports all the time: "Go-to guy." So it must be a good thing, right? Wrong. "Go-to guy" is not so much a compliment as a warning, a flashing red light signaling a potential single point of failure to a vigilant commander.
A go-to guy is a band-aid that can hide a severe capability shortfall as long as it's in place.

Commanders and subordinate leaders need to save their squadrons from becoming dependent upon a go-to guy. They are responsible not only to preserve their unit's capability to meet current mission goals, but also prepare it to meet future Air Force requirements.

Go-to guys are usually very talented individuals with a desire to excel and reluctance to wave off additional taskings even when they're approaching saturation. Their capacity for high performance is relied upon heavily by their squadron to get them out of tough spots. On the surface, they appear as a valuable asset to busy squadron leadership. They know they can always rely on the go-to guy to get the job done.

But, if you look a little deeper, go-to guys can actually create more problems than they solve. Once a commander or supervisor gets hooked on their go-to guy, challenging taskings have a tendency to flow to this person at the expense of other talented leaders within the unit who need the challenge to develop and grow. Eventually, the go-to guy becomes so saturated with tasks that there is no time to actually document how these tasks were successfully accomplished, leaving zero continuity for others to leverage to spread the knowledge and preserve the capability. It's the perfect trap. What happens when that go-to guy leaves? The squadron is unprepared to pick up the slack.

Never has this been more apparent to me than in my current job. I command a rapidly deployable contingency response group squadron of expeditionary combat support teams comprised of 14 Air Force specialty codes in 10 functional specialties. We are a light and lean organization tasked to assume control of forward contingency air bases from seizure forces.

We then assess, set up, initially operate and transition them to follow-on sustainment forces. Because we're so lean, many of our essential functions are one-deep or are forced to operate at less than optimal personnel strength. Our size constraint gives us no choice but to seek other ways to overcome our limitations.

How do we do it? Not by blind dependence upon "Go-to-guys", but through process documentation, cross-utilization training and a team mentality where nobody says "that's not my job." We seek to develop multi-dimensional warriors where every Airman is a rifleman, a pallet-builder, a tent-builder, a forklift driver and a sentinel standing the wire. We strive to spread our most critical functional skills across as many AFSCs as possible. If we don't, a loss of one person in the field could mean mission degradation.

Additionally, we put CRG-specific master training plans in place to preserve and transfer our critical one-deep functional capabilities to our PCSing experts' replacements. Lastly, our group had the vision to document many valuable pre-deployment, employment, and redeployment processes and lessons in a two-volume tactical flimsy that has been issued to all CRG members. Critical process information is now shared, not hoarded.

Avoid the fallacy of the "Go-to guy." Instead, leave a legacy that will preserve your units' current and future capabilities: challenge and develop all your subordinates to be multi-skilled leaders with the expertise and will to train more leaders. After all, national defense is a team - not individual - effort.