 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval Sea Power, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. I'm John Jackson and I will serve as the host for today's event. Today is Tuesday 222-222 for whatever significance that might have for the numerologist in the audience. I understand that in Singapore over 500 couples have signed up to be married on this day supposedly a sign of good luck. To provide us with a little bit of good luck, I'd like to call upon Admiral Chatfield to give her welcoming remarks. Ma'am. Good afternoon or good morning, good evening to wherever some of our virtual participants may be. I'd like to thank you all for coming to this wonderful lecture series and to tell you how delighted I am to be here in the audience personally to see the lecture from Dean Peg Klein who is speaking on a topic that she has quite a bit of familiarity about having served as a practitioner to decision makers at the highest level in this topic area and also as proof that there is always time to go back and get some education to fortify our experience with scholarship. So very much an inspiration to me and we are very, very fortunate to have Dean Klein speaking to us today. Thank you to all of you who are there online and participating. We really appreciate you and your continued presence here for this lecture series. Thank you so much. We've enjoyed bringing you this series as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. It has been expanded to include participation by the entire War College extended family, including members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport, and participants from around the nation. We are particularly pleased to have nearly 100 officer candidates join us this afternoon, some in the auditorium and many online. Looking ahead, please join us again on March 8th when Professor Walter Burbrick will speak about Arctic Affairs. Okay, on with our main event. During the presentation that follows, please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom, and we'll get to as many as we can at the conclusion of the presentation. Ethical leadership is often discussed in business schools after a public scandal or a crisis in confidence. It is always relevant in the military environment, but episodically discussed. This afternoon, Dean Klein will speak about why ethical leadership and things like moral muscle memory are worthy of attention without waiting for a crisis. Margaret D. Peg Klein currently serves as the Dean of Leadership and Ethics here at the Naval War College. She completed a 35 year career as a US Navy officer in March of 2017. As a rare admiral, she served as a Secretary of Defense's Senior Advisor for Military Professionalism. Prior to 2014, she served as Chief of Staff for the newly created US Cyber Command, and in 2008, she served as Director of Worldwide Operations for the Navy's Network Warfare Command. Her leadership experience reaches from aviation to cyber and from classroom to boardroom. In 2011, she commanded a military force of five ships, 30 aircraft, and 3,300 sailors and Marines in successful combat operations in the Mediterranean Sea. A Navy flyer, Admiral Klein flew in and commanded an aviation squadron, and later led the operational aviation wing under the US Strategic Command. She graduated from the US Naval Academy and holds a Master's in Education and Leadership and a doctorate from the Chief Learning Officer Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Dean, the podium is yours, ma'am. Well, good evening. I'll use our time zone here in Newport for the folks who are with us virtually. It is wonderful to have you all here in the auditorium and I appreciate those who have joined by Zoom. As John said and as Admiral Chapfield also mentioned, I'm here to talk to you about ethical leadership because it is foundational to everything I think about service as an officer or enlisted in the Navy. I'm going to talk to you about three things. We're going to talk about the profession of arms. I'm going to talk about what ethical leadership is, and then I'm going to throw in a little bit about mentoring at the end because in the way I see the world, these topics are very intertwined. So I'm starting out with a couple of book recommendations. When you think about ethical leadership, Rushworth Kitter has talked about this book, Moral Courage. Rushworth Kitter in my studies coined the term moral muscle memory in the environment where you are always open to being corrected. One of my philosophy professors reminded me, no, it was Aristotle that actually talked about moral muscle memory. I would commit these two books to you. Rushworth Kitter, no longer with us, but has written some amazing books, fairly accessible. But if you want to, I'm looking over at the officer candidates, I know that you don't just sit around thinking, what book will I read today? But at some point in your professional development, I commend this book. The Road to Character is much more accessible written by David Brooks, and it's probably five years, five or six years old right now. David Brooks talks about values in a way that really helps you think about what's important to me and how often do I ask the question of what's important to me. He opens the book by saying for a living, he talks about resume virtues, resume virtues such as, you know, highly effective and gets results. And then he talks about eulogy virtues as the things that you probably really want to be remembered about. And there are some who talk about the fact that when you are leading individuals, when you are leading sailors, and again, I'm looking at the officer candidates, when you're leading sailors, they might remember what you say, but they will always remember how you made them feel. And this is why I say David Brooks Road to Character is a really good book. Okay, before I dive deeper on the topic of ethical leadership, I'm going to dig out the clicker, and I'm going to get us to a short discussion about the profession of arms. To any of the officer candidate, have you heard, and I'm going to ask you, I think some of you have microphones in the chair in front of you. By a show of hands, how many of you have been versed in the profession of arms? Any of you talk about the Navy profession? Yeah, a little bit, I'm not going to ask you to talk about it, right? This is a learning experience, there's no quiz at the end, it's just great to have you here. The profession of arms is incredibly important and was introduced to the Navy about seven years ago by Admiral Chapfield's predecessor, two or three removed. And what is a profession of arms and why is important? The Army adopted this mental schema that they are a social trust profession, just like doctors, lawyers, they and clergy, they rely for their credibility, they rely on trust of the trust of the population at large. They perform a service for society that either society can't or won't do for themselves. One of the other characteristics or attributes of a profession, and this is the profession of arms I'm talking about, which the Navy is part of, it is also we hold ourselves accountable. Now it's really interesting, most of us don't think about lawyers in a positive light, right? They tell us what to do, they tell us what not to do, they try to manipulate the truth for their own game. But it's very interesting, if you study anything about the legal profession, if you go to any of the State Bar Association website, they will show you who they have held to standard, who they've held accountable since the time of their last newsletter. And I know the Navy has tried this, all the services have tried this at varying points in their history, but we hold ourselves accountable and we try to be as transparent as possible about that. Both of those components are necessary for a profession to be functioning. The most important thing and sometimes overlooked is we have unique skills and I can't help but think of Liam Neeson when he talks about unique skills, but those probably aren't the unique skills that we think about when we talk about the profession of arms. However, society has entrusted us not only to deter aggression, but if we are threatened, we do have special skills and we train our ships, our submarines, our aircraft and our people to be able to commit violence on behalf of our country. And this is the special skill that we talk about when we think about the Navy as a profession. So the next question, what does membership in the profession of arms mean to you? Well, since we have such a small audience here, I won't call on any of you in the physical audience, but I'll just convey some things that leaders have talked about. What does the profession of arms mean to me? Well, the Navy profession has been really valuable as I think about what, how am I different as a Navy officer than I am as a naval aviator? I grew up in aviation as John mentioned and there's so much more to serving in the Navy than to just my individual service as an aviator and whatever branch you and whatever part of the Navy the officer candidates end up going to, I think that you will find that the Navy profession is your way to think about your Navy service as a whole and not just that part of your tribe where, where you, where you grow up, how you're the people who advocate for you to go to really good jobs but it is incredibly important to think about being a member of the profession and serving. In the Navy, we serve the people. We, one of the other reasons, one of the other things that comes to mind when I think about the profession of arms is why might I need trust from society? I, and hopefully there's a couple people who can put comments in chat. I will tell you the first thing that comes to mind when I think about why we need society's trust and please if you have a, if you have a microphone and you want to jump in please do but I think society needs to trust the military and usually the military is the most trusted government organization by a long shot. But we need, you came from where, wherever you came from and whatever slice of Americana our officer candidates came from they were allowed to join with some amount of permission from their parents or their guardians or some other family member so we need the trust of the American people to continue to replace and to serve as the life blood. We need recruits to come in from the United States all across the country and states and territories and to do that their young people 17, 18 year old are doing so with the guidance of an adult or more than one adult in their life and I would say that that is my number one reason for wanting the American people to trust us. It doesn't mean they have to agree with everything we are told to do but they must trust that we are acting on their behalf. Anybody else want to want to contribute something to that conversation? Okay so as we think about how we earn a trust of the American people and I know there's some international partners here in in both here in the auditorium and in zoom how does your country why is it important for your countrymen to appreciate you and to trust you well I would offer that my second point is that ethical leadership is holds the foundational principles to help you think about how you serve so those of you in uniform and those of you who have served in uniform you know that you serve you take an oath to the constitution and you serve the people of your country and you serve you will soon officer candidates you will soon serve your sailors. Admiral Chatfield serves not only the chain of command above her but goes to great lengths to serve the people who work here at the naval war college whether faculty or staff government civilian uniformed service member she is a great example of serving both up the chain of command and down the chain of command so I'm going to offer to you a model of ethical leadership which is neither if you've heard of transactional versus transformational it is some combination of transactional and transformational it is a values based type of leadership it is also important to help you think as a decision maker that there is an ethical component to every decision you make I was interviewing an officer who was heading back to command and that officer I was talking to them about I was asking them questions about decisions they had made that had an ethical component to them and this officer said to me well I didn't really have to make any ethical decisions everything was black or white and I wasn't as good at interviewing for that very first interview as I got later if I had been a better interviewer I would have asked the question well isn't a black and white issue isn't that an ethical category that you've put things into anyway and so you don't have to just think of ethical decisions as those that are that end up in the gray zone transparency is a very important component of ethical leadership and transparency is is an interesting concept when we're in a national and security environment that that really protects information so that our adversaries don't gain an advantage by knowing too much about us but when you think about the human layer you have to kind of put to the side our national security thinking where everything must be protected and think about if you were to be empathetic and you could think about what you would want to know your boss just made a big decision part of us is how transparent can be well we can be as transparent as the conversation that we have between individuals where we convey the context of the question and the dilemma and then the things that you factored in to make your decision you don't have to disclose every every facet of what made the decision but if you can give people some context around how you made your decision and perhaps even the ethical framing do you think about values first do you think about outcomes first do you think about principled leadership helping your subordinates understand your ethical frame is incredibly important and can create that transparency because folks want to think that they can predict how you're going to make decisions because like it or not we all shape our behavior based on what we think is expected of us so that's that is incredibly important authenticity is another important component of ethical leadership and you can be authentic and still try to stretch and reach reach for a part of your personality that may not be your greatest strength but authenticity can be somebody Darin Darin and I worked together in a previous assignment Commander McClurg retired United States Navy works in CDE right now so I'll use Darin as an example I can tell Darin that I was working on a project and I'm not quite sure how good it is so if he'd give me some feedback I have both been authentic that I'm very interested in the success but also said that I'm really stretching my ability and by that you are authentic and that you're telling people no I am not a subject matter expert in this area and therefore you've shared with your people that that you don't have to be an expert in everything because there's not enough hours in the day to be an expert in every field you take on I would say I'm going to get to role model in a couple of slides but a continuous learner right I think it's incredibly important that that we model continuous learning that we're always striving to learn something more it doesn't it means that you're you know what your strengths are you know what your challenges are you know what your lane is you know what is expected from you and your job but there's something else you want to get better at and not because you're striving to be a hundred percent but because you're striving to learn more and to understand more leaders the best leaders I've known have worked really diligently to understand the people that they have not been exposed to yet I think it's carol dweck carol talks about grit but there's a angela duckworth talks about learning and she says you know when you're dealing with your children whether they're nieces and nephews or sons or daughters and and they haven't mastered something instead of saying no you don't do that well you've not mastered that yet and so it's a way to help you remind yourself that you can continue can continue learning okay ethical leadership I've just put a definition up here because it's another model it's another model of leadership that can help you think about the values how your values and how your organization's values impinge on how you do your job and so they positively impact followers by being a role model but not only do they say the right thing but they work they strive continuously to make sure their behavior their words and their deeds align and that is so much more difficult than it sounds I can talk a main game when I'm preparing a presentation but making sure that I live that between when I walk off the stage and when I walk into my car is a completely different story and so it's worth continuing to try in the studies that I've read about ethical leadership it is not just important that you are an ethical leader but what is also important and key to ethical leadership is that you hold your subordinates accountable to your values so an ethical leader both aligns themselves with the values of the organization keeps their own behavior in line with the organization and holds others accountable does that make sense and I would say that if there is any information in chat along the way that please um either Gary or Dean or Mark if there's somebody if you need to jump in with a question please um wave at me does that make sense all those components do they fit together okay all right great so why does it matter well first of all it's really interesting in business there's data that shows that ethical leaders lead more successful organizations and while we don't have a lot of studies inside the military anecdotally we see that over the long term ethical leaders achieve greater results why is that well your people trust that you are putting their interests ahead of yours that you are not we are all a little self-centered and you just that is the way we are wired but in general if you show up to lead on any given day and your people can trust that you are interested in the success of the organization then they're going to trust you and Covey had it right Covey has written a book Stephen Covey the elder and there's now Stephen Covey the younger they've both written about the speed of trust and while it takes time to do that initial groundwork to build trust when you walk into a room and your salty lieutenants or lieutenant commanders again the officer candidates when you walk into a room and you've got a reputation where people know they can trust you when you walk in and you start talking people are going to listen to you from a place of trust rather and they might be a little skeptical healthy skepticism is always good but they're not going to start from a place of mistrust and so this is why ethical leadership why there are so many business cases that show that ethical leaders are going to beat in the marketplace are going to be more successful than people who do not even measure ethical leadership respect again a two-way street a little bit different from trust but that you respect the input of your subordinates that we very naturally we take the input of our seniors that's how the human brain is wired not so naturally is to reach out to junior corners of the organization and help understand their view of what is going on inside the organization the last thing I put up here is on a lot of times when we talk about accountability people assume a negative frame and and accountability becomes you know in quotes a four-letter word well accountability doesn't that really mean we're upholding the organization standards and hopefully you know again to the to the officer candidates hopefully that's been a way that you've thought about accountability when you hold somebody accountable you can be documenting how they excelled beyond the organization standards or it can be you're pulling in all the facts because somebody didn't meet the organization standards so that's very important Ray Dalio very successful businessman but very deliberate and very deliberate aligning his values and his beliefs with his behavior has written a really good book principles and it's how he has put principles into action now you might say that it's easy for somebody like Ray Dalio who could use the power of money to align his organization along his principles and he could go out he's a small organization right the Navy has over 300,000 uniformed service members not as easy as taking a couple thousand people of a venture capital fund an investment firm not as easy but Ray makes some really good points about the principles that he lived by both in good times and in bad that that caused me to commit it to you as a good book okay I'm going to bridge to the last topic because I want to leave time for questions but one of the things I did in my research was I wanted to understand what were the tools available to ethical leaders the people who made good decisions regardless I talked to a commanding officer who one of the things he told me one of the very difficult decisions he made he was a commanding officer of a forward deployed ship when a Navy NCIS agent came to him and said hey we have a couple people who we think are are dealers or drug dealers and they said we'd like to interview a broad swath of people on your crew and he knew that worst case that could mean that his readiness plummeted so he had a conversation with his mentor he I think this is the right thing to do but in jeopardy is the readiness of the organization well how do you get to a problem like drugs if you've already got two identified drug dealers on your ship's company you likely have a bigger problem he went to his mentor his mentor helped him think through the pluses and minuses but he wanted to be sure in the end he wanted to be sure that he had not just taken care of the easy part of the problem but he wanted to make sure that he could look across the crew so he let NCIS guide their investigation and question wherever the wherever the evidence took them and all told he was CEO of a cruiser again forward deployed and he lost 20 people he ended up losing 20 people of his crew and if you have a crew of 300 people that's close to 10 percent public math but it's close to 10 percent that is significant and it takes great courage because nobody was telling in which way he had to go so in this particular case his mentor was help was there to help him think through not to make the decision for him but to help him think through the factors that he needed to consider in making his decision mentors can be vulnerable they can what do I mean by vulnerable mentors can tell them when they have a question that they don't necessarily have an answer to and in doing that they model this really good behavior that says no you don't have to have all the answers because if you have what we've seen in cheating incidents across the Navy I'll just say in the last 10 years is when you expect people to have the all the answers you back them into a corner and human behavior at some point is going to break and the two cheating scandals that caused me to be an advisor to the secretary of defense were based on that we backed humans into a corner we either told them that they had to be 100 percent gate 100 percent or their careers were in jeopardy on a written exam when the when the service standard was 80 percent that by by the time it got to the local level standard was 100 so people started cheating because they were scared they were going to lose their careers again we had a cheating incident Navy nuclear power school in 2013 where people were handing around answer keys you don't have all the answers you have to be able to go to somebody to tell them that you don't have all the answers mentors often share values so when we were talking about ethical leadership we talked about aligning your values or the how your values aligned with the service or the organization's values oftentimes the way people found a mentor was they found somebody whose values aligned with theirs and then I guess last the last thing I'd say is it's really helpful when mentees when people who were looking for a mentor when they found a mentor somebody they shared values with they looked for excellence and that gave them a mental image of what excellence looked like so you want to get your subordinates out of just hey I'm going to survive today I'm not going to screw up you know much today but they found models of excellence and this was incredibly valuable so mentoring why does mentoring matter I'd like you to all and you can you don't have to you don't have to answer this but think of three people who have helped you think about how you lead you and your very young careers some of the rest of you in your more expansive careers I mean the people the people who influenced my thinking were people I knew that they shared my values and integrity is incredibly important to me sometimes to a fault but they were people that I could go to and I could ask them any question and they didn't judge me for asking a basic question or for asking what could have been considered pay how naive are you to ask that question I never felt judged and so the people that I took on as mentors did that for me they could they let me go ask whatever question they wanted I would tell you that regardless of what kind of mentor you are what kind of mentee you are mentoring gives somebody you know what some academics would say a psychologically safe space a vulnerable place for you to be able to ask that question to not be able to be concerned not you know I'm not talking about covering up illegal activity but just that question of like is this socially acceptable if I want to turn very early in my aviation career an officer next to me was cheating on their exam was cheating on a qualification exam and I knew from four years of education inside the Navy that that was expected that I turned that person in later in my life when I had to make other consequential decisions about hiring or firing I had mentors who could help me who could help me think through and so this is why look for somebody to mentor you think long and hard about who that might be and as you gain seniority think about who you mentor because I would guarantee even my officer candidate sitting on the far side of auditorium I would guarantee there's somebody newer than you at officer candidate school who could use a little bit of a help maybe they're coming from a small town or a large city in Newport Rhode Island is totally foreign to them right you don't ever know when people need a hand and I would say that mentorship though don't overstress it or don't stretch yourself too far mentorship incredibly important to be able to pick up the phone especially when we spend most of our day in masks and we spend most of a lot of our time in the virtual environment so there you go there's a couple more things to think about and and what I will leave you with is um some of my favorite podcasts that helped me as a learner that helped me think about ethical leadership and helped me think about decision-making I love him brain and choiceology partnering leadership is a podcast done by a gentleman in the Washington D.C. area but he interviews some fascinating people Gallup has been doing surveys for decades for decades and and so I always they have a weekly podcast and so it's always very interesting um the books on the side culture code culture the culture of the Navy so influences everything we do culture code is really helpful to kind of look take a scholarly or a thoughtful look at what parts of culture are helpful um not just about human behavior and maybe how you design choices so that when you get up in the morning there's not a candy bar handy but instead there's maybe you know fruits and vegetables um so it's about choice architecture Simon Sinek wrote the next two games the infinite game which is about long term versus short term thinking start with why it's like why you need to think about why you're doing what you're doing on tactical and strategic level conversation written by a Harvard Kennedy professor about how to have conversations about race and other difficult topics with people who don't maybe look like you um noise is great it's about decision-making and how to think about decisions and how to separate wheat from chaff I guess is how I'd put it thank you for being late is a wonderful book that you can when you cross country driving you can listen to on your way to your first duty station Tom Friedman right Thomas Friedman wrote it and it's a little bit about um he had an encounter with a parking attendant and which made him late for a meeting if I remember it correctly but it's a wonderful book about reflection and thinking and then think again is Adam Grant and it is also about individual and organizational decision-making and the traps that you can fall into so though there is an ethical component to every decision you make it's really helpful every once in a while to read a chapter even a few paragraphs about what people think about thinking so that is that those are my prepared comments and I'm happy to answer questions from you all in here and I think Gary is also able to handle questions that come in on chat okay anyone in the audience has a question yes sir please use the microphone good afternoon uh so when we were talking earlier about gaining the trust of the public I thought to something that we talked a lot about in OCS which is making sure our sailors understand the mission which I feel like is an analog and at OCS we often use it as a leadership technique empowering our sailors and such and I thought about the Navy as being not only uh an organization of service to the public but also as leaders I was wondering if you had thoughts that you could share on both the Navy being servers of the public and also leaders and how you balance that or if they work together or contrast yeah thank you I like the short answer is they absolutely work their complementary right we serve we serve at the pleasure right of the president we we follow an oath we we utter an oath to the Constitution that is our loyalty right but in our service we have to lead I remember when I was working at the White House in the mid 90s and and shortly after I left the White House I went to squatter and command and the Monica Lewinsky trial with President Clinton and him being truthful or not being truthful was uh was a topic of great conversation and one of my sailors said to me at an all hands call if President Clinton doesn't have to tell the truth why do I and and so as leaders we we don't we're not like we don't get paid to be average we get paid to be leaders in not just the technical but in the in those things that are not as tangible right so you can call me you could say that I was a very early adopter of social justice right and and by that I mean like I had to treat my sailors the same and I couldn't I couldn't discriminate not only was it illegal but it would have absolutely destroyed trust and so for me to do that I had to be somewhat transparent and say listen you are a Yankees fan I'm a Red Sox fan I despise your baseball team but I my commitment to you and that might sound really trivial except as a Red Sox fan it's kind of difficult right it's you know just bear with me um and everybody understands like the rivalry but I had to tell that Yankees fan write this fictitious Yankees fan that that like no you can trust I don't like your baseball team but you are one of my sailors and my commitment to you is that I will treat you the same as I treat anybody else and so so this my answer to this sailor about Monica Lewinsky I'm just like president elected you both to the constitution he both to the constitution but guess what the American people hold that decision on what you know what to do with a president that they have found has lied to them and there's a process for that our UCMJ in so many ways is so much more clear cut right we're not elected officials we follow the UCMJ we make decisions about people who step outside our standards and we try to be transparent about where the where the lanes are where the left and right limits are and so in that way regardless of the politics of the time we show leadership I call it ethical leadership but we show leadership that we don't follow the wins of the whims and wins of politics we do our job we follow orders and and we do that because we serve the entire country and and we have established regulations that help us think through this and we have precedent in most for most things you know two years ago we didn't have a lot of precedent for how to deal with the pandemic but we learn so hopefully that's a that kind of helps integrate the two things that's a really good question and a very difficult one any other questions here in the auditorium sir in the back good afternoon ma'am going back to that example when you mentioned the lieutenant walking into the room with a bunch of people and that he's being trusted by his sailors do you think that trust is earned from his rank being a lieutenant or do you think it's the merit of the jobs he's done that's earning him that trust yeah so you will in the short term you will from most sailors you will get the benefit of the doubt that you are a lieutenant and that they are not lieutenants right they're junior to you you will get the benefit of doubt for some short honeymoon period of time you will have a short or period of time to be able to start earning trust now don't think for a second that this is a one-way street right they have to earn your trust too your sailors need to it there's reciprocity involved and so I guess the simple distilled the answer is you have you can probably walk in the door with some positional authority with some positional grace and and but you it's kind of easy to mess it up like you don't like it's very interesting my kids are in their 30s so I'm like old enough to be probably your grandmother which is fine but like I I remember growing up my parents not really leaving the door open for me to ask why they were doing what they were doing when I was raising my kids I never got away with saying because I said so right and and I think that's a good leadership thought which is to say like in combat because I said so might be a good answer if you have nanoseconds to respond because I said so is that is the right concept but the but the principle is you know and and again timing is everything but it's incredibly important to help people understand that you when you have time you are going to explain it and oh by the way weeding is often as trying as raising children it's trying because it takes in a well of patience and so perhaps one of the things I try to do is I'm a morning person and so you know if I have a bunch of hard questions or a bunch of people that I'm not sure you know if we're if there's a lot of intellectual bandwidth that goes into it I absolutely schedule it for the morning asking you a hard question at 1930 you know you know at 7 30 p.m um yeah that's difficult it's like my intellectual bandwidth is gone it's used up so you know think about all these things but yeah I mean just treating people with dignity and respect is going to earn you a lot of trust but you're allowed to demand the same thing not in a transactional way I don't mean for it to be transactional but you absolutely need to demand the same thing thanks big question gary any questions from the zoom audience we do have a couple here in the chat good afternoon dean kline the first question is how can mentees push their mentors to go beyond providing a simple career advice or problem solving but but real leadership development advice oh that's a great question that's like going to be probably my favorite question about mentorship um so a mentee has the ability to go to their mentor with a really good set of questions I will tell you amro chaffield every meeting we go into she's always got really good questions I would say it's her superpower um and so I would say for people who are addressing their mentors like if all your mentor is doing is giving you good career advice you're not using your mentor appropriately if your mentor won't answer your questions which have run into very few who are that way and maybe you need to go look for someone else who will sit down and have a leadership conversation with you I'm I have a constellation of mentors and I have always I don't know that I always call the mentors but I've always had a constellation of people that I could go to um my husband is really good at kind of giving me some kinds of advice but he has some blind spots with respect to me so like when I want honest feedback I don't go to my husband I go to my kids give me very honest feedback and they mentor me or reverse mentor me in in that case um and and oh by the way I didn't talk about it but reverse mentoring is a thing right if you're in a mentor-mentee relationship you should be teaching your mentor about things from your perspective now ensigns day one don't start there okay give it a couple months give it a couple months before you offer you start offering your sage advice but yeah I think I think you have the ability to as a mentee to ask your mentor a for time don't wait till your mentor calls you don't ever think you're bothering your mentor I've had people say why didn't want to email you I knew you were busy it's like I love like what would I rather do a task or for my day job or answer my mentee's email okay I would always want to answer my mentee's email and so it's usually the bright spot of your day so ask ask for time from your mentor and then come prepared with good questions thank you that's a great question and then another question that came in was what is your recommended um level up for a mentor and and if the junior person is uncomfortable approaching the senior how how what are some um how can that junior person overcome those fears sure so um first of all if there is um so there's no equation for you know how many pay grades difference um I was on the USS Kitty Hawk when the Navy came up with their formal mentoring program and I was I think a new 06 and I had an E6 come to me for advice and you know I said sure I'm I'm a high-risk person so I was like sure happy to mentor you he was an IT1 you know information technology specialist and and I said I'm happy to mentor you but I'm not sure how fruitful that's going to be why I still keep in touch with him and uh he's an LDO now Lieutenant Commander and we still keep in touch and so we just found common ground but if there is somebody you admire and you can put your finger on what you would like from them whether it's advice or you know knowledge or even a referral um you can go to them and ask them and the reality is if they say no all that means is they they don't have time they most likely if any time I've somebody has meant asked me to mentor them I had an Air Force Colonel asked me to mentor them when I was in the Pentagon and and she was an F-15 pilot and I was like sure but I'm not sure how much I can provide for you because I don't know the Air Force well enough to help you navigate but so we sat down we had a couple sessions I shared some of my leadership experiences and then I was able to connect her with somebody who was much closer to her skill set and so reach out if you're a mentee and you have somebody that you admire or you connect their values or you'd like to learn more from them make the ask make the ask and they will most likely be gracious enough to just say you know I'm probably not that person hopefully that's helpful since I have the microphone Dean I think that that helped answer our last question that we have is and a lot of this has to do with common ground I think of what you mentioned in your answer previously how do you know when someone who may may or is popular was really a right mentor for you inferred in that is that you know everybody wanted them as a mentor like you know again if you get good answers to your questions so the way the literature talks about it is career support or professional support and psychosocial support so can you go to that person to be more confident that you are developing along an appropriate glide slope I guess I got it going the wrong way but oh and and will they will they be honest with you so I think kind of push popularity off to the side and you know this is why having a couple of mentors is really helpful because you can get information from two different sources and not play them against each other but just kind of think what what really helps you and and I think a meaningful conversation with your mentor will help you understand are you going to click or was this just somebody who said oh that person is a great mentor you know but not for you right you'll be able to tell in a session or two if they really are able to provide career advice and advocacy and so and psychosocial support for you and career support for you you'll tell and you'll be able to tell in a couple of sessions it may be too late in the day and too hard but if you are a subordinate and you find your leader is not necessarily an ethical leadership what's the best approach for you to take see this is why I love mentors is because I I had a subordinate who I didn't think was ethical and I went to my mentor to figure out how I should approach that person other than of course talking to them directly and I considered relieving the person for cause um and my mentor helped me think through that so the first thing is don't be an island unto yourself if you have somebody if you have a either anyone in in your sphere of influence that you you think long and hard and you don't think they're acting ethically is you need an ally and and I would bring an ally into the you know into the uh equation I you know we have some safety nets I I say this a great peril right we have an IG process if you don't think you can find somebody to help you tackle this um but but I would tell you that is a last resort and I've always been able to um talk things out with people around that unethical leader and figure out not how not to be secret about it but just to kind of figure out how to approach it people ask similar questions about toxic leaders what do you do about toxic leaders whole separate conversation that fortunately we don't have time for but um yeah I mean you usually need some allies and bouncing some of these things back and forth may be able to provide an avenue for you to provide feedback excellent Dean thank you very much for a wonderful discussion I'm sure the dean will stand by if any of the officer candidates would like to go one on one for a few questions that concludes our session for today I will be stopping by and picking up a lottery ticket with all twos on it on my way home so thank you very much for coming see you on March 8th