 Welcome to MIT Supply Chain Frontiers from the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. Each episode features center researchers and staff or experts from the field for in-depth conversations about business education and beyond. Today, center researcher and instructor David Carell follows up with the MIT CDL military fellows about leadership and people management across cultures and across sectors. The views and opinions expressed in today's episode are those of the fellows only and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United States military. Take it away, Dave. Thank you guys for coming back to another round of our podcast discussion. We had so many interesting insights come out of the last one. We thought, as long as we have you here, we would take the time to talk with you again and get on tape, if you will, some of the many insights that have come out of that conversation, but also just, you know, our conversations in the classroom and in the hallway around CTL. One of the things that came up in that conversation that we wanted to mind further was you talked about the idea of risk management on the fly, and I wonder if you all could tell us a little bit about what your, you know, military training experience has taught you about prioritization and risk management in real time. So, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Lubbert, Dave, first of all, on behalf of all of us, we appreciate being invited back. We all spent a lot of time after the last podcast talking about how much we appreciated the back and forth. And so on behalf of Colonel Young and Colonel Parker and myself, just we appreciate this second opportunity to kind of addressing risk management from the Army's perspective. So we've got two different forms. One is kind of composite risk management, and that really pertains to how we protect soldiers and equipment when we're conducting operations. But the second form of risk management that we look at that I think is most applicable, Dave, to what you're referring to is essentially risk to mission. That is, as we go about conducting our operations in the Army, constantly assessing what is the risk to success? What is the risk that will prevent us from achieving the objectives that we've established or set forth that we're going to do? And in terms of risk management on the fly, I can only kind of give you some examples, you know, where I've done a form of risk management on the fly, and a lot of that's going to occur when we're overseas or when we're in the midst of operations. And we have something that requires a change of mission, a new priority, the boss calls and says, you know, hey, Colonel Luebert, I know I told you to do this or I know I told you to go north, but now I need you to go south. Take a few minutes, assess your ability to go south and get back to me with what you need and whether or not that's feasible. And when I'm presented with that kind of scenario, Dave, what I'm going to do is typically I'm going to red sell it. I'm going to identify some people within my team that have got the expertise or that may just be the most outspoken critic of going south, right, of doing something differently. And I'm going to ask them to to critique the decision. I'm going to ask them to to be the naysayer and we're going to discuss what are those risks to going south? How are we best prepared to go north and how are we not prepared now to go south? If I don't have a real, you know, naysayer to play that role, what I'll usually do is turn to one of my intelligence officers because the assumption is that they've got the best understanding the weather, the terrain, the enemy's capabilities, all those things that are going to play against us in that change of mission. And I'll ask him to kind of red sell my change of plans so that we ensure that we're not in an environment where everyone's just saying, yes, boss, that's a great idea. I can't have, you know, a whole bunch of people that are going out of their way to agree with me because something will get missed. And so that's part of how we address that. And then ultimately, as they red sell my plan, as they critique the way we're going to change up our operations, what we're looking for is, OK, we've identified risks, whether it's the enemy or it's the weather, it's the terrain. Now, how, you know, you said it earlier, how do we mitigate that? And we look at that from a lot of different perspectives. Can I mitigate that with personnel? In other words, do I have a really experienced person who knows how to go south? Can I move him up to the lead vehicle? Do I have somebody that's got experience where we're going that wasn't important on this mission, but now suddenly is? Can I change my equipment around to mitigate risks? And one of the things that we often forget is, can I call my next hire headquarters or one of my subordinate units to my left or right or to the front or to the rear of me and ask them for enablers, you know, any kind of capability that will help to mitigate a risk. And so I can give you an example. You know, when we would change routes in Iraq or Syria, you know, what we were always concerned with was when was the last time that that particular route or road was inspected for explosives or IDs or the types of things that you've all seen in the news. If it hadn't been inspected by teams that were very capable in doing those types of route clearance, I might ask, hey, before we go south, I'd like to get around clearance team to go inspect that route. And that's how I'm going to mitigate risk by reaching outside of my organization and bringing in another enabler. And it could be asking for a drone to do an overflight, so forth. So this is this is composite risk management and this is risk management. And a lot of it was done at the back of my vehicle, you know, literally, you know, doing a short halt someplace safe, establishing security, getting out a whiteboard or riding on the back of an MRE box. Hey, change of plans. Boss wants us to go south. Why isn't this a good idea? Why can't we do it? Hey, Colonel Joe Parker, to build on what what Stephen was saying, you know, the concept of risk is something that is taught and ingrained very early in a military career, whether it's as a non-commissioned officer, corporal or an E-5 or a second lieutenant, first lieutenant. In Garrison, like you said, we have the composite risk management worksheet and it's very deliberate. It is low, medium, high, extreme. Everybody throughout the Army, everybody throughout an organization grows up and knows, you know, what a prudent amount of risk is that they can take at echelon or in kind of their space. And if you exceed that, it's not that we can't proceed with the mission. Someone above you or someone with more responsibility, more visibility, more resources has to assume that risk. And so we're not a risk-averse organization. We are all about, you know, accepting prudent risk because our job and our profession is inherently risky, whether it's at home in a motor pool, fixing stuff, driving a tank, flying a helicopter or, you know, deploying into a combat zone. But the right people who have the right resources and the right visibility have to be involved in the process so that the right decision is made. And where you see things go south is where a junior officer, junior NCO, junior leader sometimes takes on more risk than is appropriate or they should, they aren't able to see kind of what's on the other side of the berm, so to speak or what's going on to their left or to their right, whereas that higher headquarters, that adjacent headquarters has additional information that they can help them out. And so, you know, it's extremely serious, you know, because we are talking about, you know, risk to force, risk to mission. We're talking literally in some cases about people's lives and safety. And so it's something that's taught very early on at every school of, you know, focus in pretty much every environment that you're in. You know, in an organization that is known for having to take risk, it's one of the most important and the most consistently talked about topics and what we do on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, this is Brian Young. All I had to add is that when we think about risk, we think about it in terms of, you know, probability and severity. And those things are often subjective assessments. And in order to get a good subjective assessment on those two aspects of risk management, you cannot do that in a vacuum and a leader should not and cannot, you know, effectively do that on her own. So, you know, good teams, somebody once told me that, you know, good bosses want to know your answer, bad bosses want to know their answers. And I think that good bosses in this context are the ones that, as Steve was saying, you know, reach out to the team and get a full assessment of what, you know, a diverse set of opinions on this to be able to properly assess that. Thank you very much for that. And that really leads to a follow-up. It was quite interesting the way you guys described, you know, red-selling or use that term to describe a way of getting, you know, new information that maybe you didn't have. And I really liked how you said to Brian with the, you know, what good bosses really want is to hear from you. Could you guys maybe describe, if I'm someone you've asked to red-sell something, well, first, could you explain a little bit about where the term comes from? But also, what does it mean to do a good job playing the red-sell? And then also, there's gotta be some tips towards doing a good job receiving the red-sell and making something out of that information. So, Dave, I'll probably let Colonel Parker, Colonel Young speak to the doctrinal history of it. You know, from when you're the good guys, you're the blue force, everything that's your opponent, we've kind of been raised to see it in red, right? So red team, red-sell, you know, the enemy is the red icons on the map. So it's anything that really is gonna pose a challenger plan, and it's also contextual. So if I just wanna know, you know, how's the enemy gonna respond to my plan in kind of a holistic way, then I'm probably gonna call him my intelligence officer because he has spent hours upon hours, most likely, studying how that particular enemy formation fights. That's what his focus has been. And so if I ask him, how are they gonna respond if I do this? He should have a pretty good understanding. He should be able to put himself in the position of that enemy commander and red team or war game my plan. The other side of that is, you know, perhaps the challenge to my operation is artillery-based or it's my ability to communicate with my forces. My staff wants to enable me to be successful. That means that they are going to be inclined to tell me that we can do whatever you ask us to do, sir. Because they want to, they wanna be successful and that's what determines success for them. It's probably gonna be up to me to say, let me bring somebody in that might not think the same way. And so if it's a communication question, I may walk across the woods to find a subject matter expert on communication who hasn't been part of this discussion. If it's a question of whether or not my artillery can outmatch the enemies, I may go find my artillery support officer and bring him into that discussion and ask them that I need you to take a look at this plan and tell me whether it's feasible. Tell me what risks I'm assuming. Tell me if this side of the tent is right in what they're telling me. And then somewhere in the middle, we're gonna come to a consensus as to what the real risk is and what steps or what measures we need to take to mitigate it. So red teaming is actually defined as a structured iterative process executed by trained, educated and practiced team members that provides commanders an independent capability to continuously challenge plans, operations, concepts, organizations and capabilities in the context of the operational environment and from our partners and adversaries perspective. The only reason I add that here is that red teaming or having a red cell, it's not something that we just kind of thought up. I mean, it's a very deliberate, structured process in the context of what we do on a day-to-day basis. I just need someone that can give me an honest look or an honest read on what my plan looks like, what the pros and cons are and give me a fair shake and a good leader and a good organization that can pull that in context and adjust on the fly. Yeah, I think the key aspect of that last part of the definition and what Joe was saying was the bad red teams will mirror image the organization that they're trying to provide a counterpoint to. So you have, when you're in a red team or you're trying to red team a situation or maybe in the case of business when you're trying to think about what your competitors are going to do or move to a bad red team will always mirror image what's going on in the organization themselves instead of thinking it from the enemy's perspective. Gosh, thank you guys. And that really seems to me like something as academics we could learn from, making space for those counterpoints, the way that you described it. And I wonder, does it ever happen that the leader takes the criticism too personally or is that part of the training is you know not to take it that way? Now, I think you just, we would all agree that you have to understand that they're doing specifically what you asked of them, that you need critical assessment. Even if we consider ourselves brilliant leaders and brilliant tacticians and whatnot, you're going to be tired, you're going to be fatigued, you're going to have all the emotional factors that a human being is expected to have when in those types of environments and under those types of conditions and you're going to make mistakes. I've gone as long as 36 hours without sleep and had to continue to make very informed decisions based on volumes of data. So if I don't have people that I trust to say, hey sir, you're not looking at this the right way, then I'm going to make poor decisions and those decisions can be incredibly costly. So I can't take it personally and I have to depend on my staff and the people I invite into those decisions to help me make responsible leadership decisions. And I think it goes back to some of the previous points. The discussion of risk and the processes that we do, all grounded in doctrine, all taught and re-taught at every major school, every major kind of leap from a company great officer to a field great officer to a senior leader. It's reinforced throughout our careers because of those environmental considerations. We train wartime-like operational environments under all those environmental conditions that Stephen alluded to, sleep deprivation under darkness, tactical scenarios, all that type of stuff. And so we have a deliberate risk assessment. We have a deliberate red team. We have a very specific doctrine because we have to build those sets and reps and then we have to train it in an environment as close to the real thing as possible. So that when we do find ourselves in a situation where it's game time and everything's for real, you can fall back on that experience. And so a good leader, especially, we've all got 20 or so years, 20 plus years in the military now, if at this point we're not taking advice, then we are in the wrong business. If you're not listening to your subordinates, if you're not listening to your staff and at least taking that under consideration, the problem might be internal. I think Colin Powell said it best. The second, your soldiers stop bringing you the problems. You've got a problem, paraphrasing his quote there, but the second you start hearing things that sound exactly like you and people start parroting what it is you're saying, then you might need to look internally because you're not getting a fair shake. And the worst thing that can happen as a leader is just that, like you've got to have the voice of dissent. You've got to have those different inputs. You've got to have that feedback to help make informed, educated decisions. Otherwise, you're off the rails pretty quick. I thought about, just now, about Malcolm Gladwell's book, where he talks, Lieutenant General Van Riper is a Marine Corps, retired Marine Corps general. He talks about his experience with Millennium Challenge 2002 and where he was running the red team for that exercise. I won't retell the story, but I think it's a good one to revisit to understand what learning organizations, adaptive organizations, how they respond to good red teaming and how inflexible organizations don't respond well. So that discussion takes us to talk about something that maybe people who aren't familiar with military leadership wouldn't expect to be as much a part of the conversation as it has been in our internal conversations. And that's empathy for the people that you're leading. You know, I wonder if you all could share with us how you build teams that are cohesive, that trust one another, particularly in the very extreme situations that you're managing these folks. You know, like you said, you want to hear from your subordinates. What does it mean to really hear from them, to take action based on what they share with you and what kind of things do they share with you that call on your ability to be an empathetic leader? I'll take this, I think the best way to encapsulate it is to provide an example. And that is that on my last tour in 2021, maybe one in seven to one in five of my soldiers had combat experience. So I actually had a lot of soldiers with no experience whatsoever, actually being in combat, very well trained, very well committed, just inexperienced. And within about a month or so of arriving at our position, we had an evening where we received a very significant enemy attack, very loud, very violent, that kind of persisted throughout the evening. People were injured, a contractor was killed, buildings were damaged and caught fire. It was a bad night. For me, it was, well, this is Iraq. I had been there before, I had been through similar experiences. It just kind of validated for me that I was back where I remember being at previous points in my career. It was scary, we fought through it, it was different for me because I was now in charge of a much larger organization. So I had greater responsibility, but it wasn't anything that I hadn't experienced before. And the next morning was ultimately another work day for me. I met my Sergeant Major, we discussed the events of last night, and then we did what we tend to do, which is battlefield circulation. And that's what we refer to driving around, walking around and visiting with your various units throughout the battlefield. When we came to the unit that was closest to the events that had happened the previous night and that were involved in a lot of deterring that attack, I was shocked at how traumatized they were. It stood out to me because I didn't share in that same trauma because this wasn't the first time I'd experienced an event like that. So I walk in with a cup of coffee and my Sergeant Major walks in and we're in a very different environment than we were prepared for. And we were dealing with a lot of soldiers that had a lot of trauma. And you could tell we're shook up and they weren't telling jokes and they weren't ready to jump at the next mission and so forth. And we had to immediately acknowledge that, to immediately ask ourselves, how do we reprioritize our day to acknowledge that these soldiers have got needs that have to be met right now in order for them to be able to continue to do what we need them to do for the next 10 months, 11 months, for the next 24 hours. As a commander, I had a pretty busy day on my schedule. So I needed to make a decision right then to acknowledge that those soldiers needed chaplains and unit ministry teams. They needed trauma specialists that we travel with. They needed to talk to their battle buddies that might be in another unit, but that's their best friend. And my Sergeant Major and I needed to understand that everything else we had could probably take a step back or be pushed to the right so that we could focus on those soldiers. Because if we hadn't, I think we would have lost the ability to relate to those soldiers and for those soldiers to relate to us. We had built up a lot of trust and a lot of respect with our soldiers. But I think if we had walked away from that or if we had just said, hey, brush it off and go get on your post, I think all of a sudden we would have lost that ability for that soldier to believe that their boss and their Sergeant Major could relate to what they were going through. So instead what we needed to do was address their needs, demonstrate to them that we went through all this. We went through these same types of experiences when we were there earlier and it was scary and it was shocking. But we took steps like we were going to take over the next 24 hours or so or the next several days if needed to get those soldiers back where they needed to be. But that was certainly probably the biggest example I have of when I really acknowledged that addressing those emotional needs and acknowledging what my soldiers required from me really stood out to me. First of all, thanks for sharing, Steve. That was an awesome example. I think the applicability to leaders and managers across both military and corporate organizations are is to say trauma is much more prevalent than we think it is, right? So for example, one in five or one in six females are the victims of sexual assault during the course of their lifetime. One in 33 men are victims of the same sort of crime. We have many people in the military and also in our organizations in the corporate world that come from extreme poverty backgrounds or from some sort of other trauma, you name it, right? So it is out there and the chances is when you're looking across your factory floor, you're looking across your formation and military that there is a high percentage of folks that have and are caring with them traumatic experiences through their life and if they haven't already, life will eventually catch up with us all and we'll have to face hardships, right? And work through them. I think one of our jobs and responsibilities as leaders is to be informed and be effective in helping people, first of all, if they're in crisis to work through that with them in an empathetic way but also understanding that a subordinate's first response or maybe their poor performance on a certain task maybe could be perhaps grounded in some sort of trauma response. So those soldiers, they're in Steve's formation, they get out of the military and they go do something else. And if that trauma is unresolved or it could be a person in a civilian company that goes through some sort of civilian trauma, we don't have the combat experience to be survivors of traumatic experiences that we can respond in an empathetic way in that moment. I think every manager should read The Body Keeps a Score by Bessel Banner-Colk, one of the leading experts in terms of understanding how early childhood trauma, especially, affects neuroanatomy as you grow older, right? So trauma is treatable but we're gonna face as managers a lot of experiences with people that have that that are unresolved. So, and I'm not advocating we'd be amateur psychologists as managers or leaders, that's not what I'm advocating but I'm just saying that what we do need to know is is that a certain response or an emotional response to a certain task or an event could be embedded in some sort of trauma response from something earlier. One of the lead questions I get, how do I be a good manager or how to develop a style? And I think that the answer that I always fall back on is understanding yourself too, right? So if you as a leader, there's no shame and we've done, we've made a lot of good progress in the military on this, we've still got a ways to go but I think we've come a long ways in terms of there not being shame to, hey, it's okay to not be okay but don't stay there, right? Find help and find healing in that moment so you can be a better leader to yourself and others. The military in general is a cross-section of society. We come from every walk of life, highly educated, poor, rich, you name it. And with that diverse workforce, you have to adapt your leadership style, whether it's to a brand new private like Steven was saying that's going to combat for the first time or someone that's dealing with trauma that might be triggered based on a scenario that we have to go through in a military training event. My story, my little anecdote's a little bit different. Usually two to three times a year, the army has block leave periods. So usually in the summer and around the holiday season, we all take off for a week or two and get to relax a little bit. And so I was stationed out in California and I was visiting my in-laws and I got a call from my Sergeant Major, hey, sir, and this is literally eight hours after I had signed out on leave, I'd just got to their house and I'm already receiving phone calls of, hey, sir, we got a soldier who's in jail in this town, we've got someone who's been in an accident here, we've got someone who's got another. And so immediately, I'm in react mode, I'm calling their first lines, I'm calling their company commanders, I'm calling their first sergeants, we're making contacts with wherever, we're trying to get as much information because every time there's an incident, we have to send up an incident report, we have to talk to our higher headquarters. And so my first, probably two or three hours at my in-laws house was me on the phone with sheriff's departments and my Sergeant Major and we're tag team in it and we're trying to figure everything out. And my mother-in-law goes, what are you doing? You're not trained to do any of that. You're not a sociologist, you're not a criminal justice major. I was like, you know, me being me, I'm like, well, at this point, I've got a minor in all of it because every soldier is a different story, every soldier is a different background, every scenario presents itself differently. And there is no singular perspective, there is no singular answer. Stephen hit the nail on the head, you've got to treat everybody, you know, according to how they are within that scenario. And Brian hit the nail on the head when it was a, as a leader, I have to understand when I am within, you know, my left and right limits of being able to address the situation appropriately or I need to punch it up to someone who's better trained. Yeah, I think it comes back down to really basically just knowing your people, right? Taking the time and having the personal curiosity to know them, to learn about them, to ask about what motivates them, what their pet peeves are, what they, to really have a strong feedback loop into, you know, to listen more than you talk when you interact with your subordinates and peers and to really, I think that is probably the number one recipe for, you know, high functioning organizations because out of those, out of that knowledge, you're gonna take away from that what you can do to apply to better lead that team. And there's a way, like Joe was saying, there is a learned art to it, there's a way to interact with people differently based on what motivates them while at the same time holding everyone to the same standard and moving the organization forward, right? So we're not saying that one person has one standard and another person has another standard. No, there is one standard of excellence that we're all aspiring to, but because of people's backgrounds, because of people's, you know, we are human beings and this is an inevitably a human endeavor that we're doing that we have to know people and know our teams in order to lead them appropriately. Gosh, thank you very much for that, guys. And I think I can speak for a lot of our civilian listeners when I say that, you know, your discussion just now probably really opened up a lot of our minds to what is on the minds of military leaders as you all are making decisions and leading teams. You know, I heard two themes from what you described. One, you know, the training that you've received and the experiences that you've had have led you to take seriously listening to your critics and in fact, even inviting criticism. And the second one, you know, listening to your subordinate staff about things that they're concerned with even outside of the mission at hand. And so if one of the points we take away is, all right, there's two listening goals. What do you do to make sure you do something with that information? What sort of steps or actions do you take or does your training suggest you take so that, you know, you spent all this valuable time listening, but now you've got to do something with the data that you gathered. How do you get there? So we wouldn't be the army if we didn't have a process. We have a very, very deliberate process called the after-action review. So AAR process. You know, Stephen, I'm sure has had plenty of them. The AAR process, it's a very deliberate process where we take a look at what was supposed to happen, why something happened. We then kind of dive into what worked or what didn't work. We talk about why. And then we talk about what we would do differently next time. And so in the form that we do this, we've got structured and unstructured, kind of like data. We've got structured and unstructured AAR. It could be as simple as what we would call a green book, which is where I've got my little green notebook that the army issues. And I've taken notes after observing, you know, a unit do something or an organization do something. And I grab a couple of folks and we would call it, hey, let's go for a walk in the desert. I think Jonathan Burns calls it a, you know, go walk by the river. Where I just take some leaders and say, hey, you know, let's talk about what just happened. Tell me, you know, what were you thinking? And I usually let the person that I'm AAR-ing informally kind of run me through their thought process. And then we, you know, we take him kind of on this journey. Well, hey, did you think about this? Have you thought about that? And that's more of kind of a one-on-one leader to leader. On a more deliberate AAR, we'll bring in maps, graphs, charts, data and actually show folks what they did versus what they thought they were doing. And you go in a room, you throw up a couple of slides. It's deliberate, so we usually have, you know, three or four main topics that we've identified that we want to talk about. And you kind of let folks talk. There's generally not rank in those discussions. Everyone's allowed to be very candid. It's important that you do it as close to, you know, the last action as possible because you want to have everything, you know, kind of fresh in your mind. And sometimes because it's so quick, you know, folks are tired, they're still coming off the adrenaline high. Tempers sometimes flare a little bit, but you get honest feedback. You know, we're there to orchestrate it and make sure that everything stays kind of deliberate. But the process is one of the most powerful things we do because, you know, there's nothing that's off limits. It provides everyone in the room the opportunity to say, hey, sir, you know, sir, you know, we address this back in the planning process, but we decided back then to do this and here was a direct result of that. And that's the type of discussions, very candid, you know, and it takes mature folks at every level to take that feedback. You know, we thick-skins, nothing's personal. It's for the good of the organization. How do we move things forward? Love the AAR process. It's continuous, it's deliberate, and it's how good organizations get better or get to great because you accept that honest feedback about your performance and what you've done. Yeah, I mean, the two things that make the United States Army the preeminent land force is the AAR process, the after-action review process in the non-commissioned officer corps. So the sergeants, the command sergeant majors, the backbone of the army that makes things run. And the AAR process is such a crucial pillar of that for all the reasons that Joe laid out, that we are able, as an organization, as a hierarchical organization to hopefully get into a room after an operation or after we practice and rehearse things, which again, going back to the beginning of this podcast, rehearsals are one way that we buy down risk. But going, you know, after those rehearsals, after the practicing of those operations that we can come into a room and in a way kind of shed rank for a bit and speak to each other honestly as teammates and come out of there after we've set our piece and be a better organization for it. The biggest takeaway from this after-action review process and Dave, it kind of gets back to, you know, how do we translate all this into process improvement or into action is AAR's end with essentially approves or sustains and because everybody tends to think and remember in threes, I can always recall that it was, you know, three improves and three sustains. A good observer controller like Colonel Parker or Colonel Young will ask everyone for that input. They'll want the lowest ranking individual to tell us something that we need to improve upon. They'll want me perhaps as the highest ranking individual to tell them something that I really wanna sustain and they'll capture that data for me or I'll have a note-taker that's capturing those improves or sustains. And in the end, you know, what you end up with is those sustains are actions or policies or processes or techniques that we wanna codify into something like a standard operating procedure, an SOP. We wanna codify it in a manual. We wanna capture it as a way of doing business that we wanna continue and then we'll refine that process. You know, those improves, I'm not doing my job and I'm not making the best of that AAR process. If I don't look at every single one of those improves and identify who is the action officer or NCO that's gonna be responsible for that improve, what references do we want them to refer to when addressing that improvement? What do they need in terms of resources to address that improvement? And what are we looking at in terms of a timeline for addressing that improvement? Is it something where, hey, before you eat tomorrow night, I want feedback on my desk as to how we're gonna make that improvement. Or is it something that, hey, three months down the line we've got another opportunity to do an exercise of this scope and I wanna see this improvement demonstrated successfully the next time we go and exercise. So I'm gonna provide that guidance as to the resources, the action officer, the team that I'm gonna assign to that particular improvement. And then really it holds me responsible for making sure that there's touch points along the way to see that that improvement's not just being captured on a whiteboard or in somebody's notebook and then it's never looked at again when we walk away from that AAR process, but that it actually, those sustains are captured as SOPs and those improvements are captured with a way forward to ensure that we do in fact improve because what we don't want is six months down the line we're in combat and something that should have been approved on that was identified by somebody like a Colonel Young or a Colonel Parker never got fixed and now it cost somebody their life. I felt like we talked a lot about very military things but I'm wondering what you took away from it to translate out into the business world or into corporate life, what resonates and how does that, but what kind of stood out to you and what maybe we didn't translate well or doesn't translate at all? Let me jump in because something happened globally to humans and we went through a pandemic together. So now every mother, every child, every father, every brother has an experience of trauma and loneliness and fear and uncertainty in their lives. And so I felt like the kind of teaching that you have from the military could be useful to all of us because it's not psychology, it's based on psychology, it's based on the touchy-feely wokeness but you're really using it in actual situations and I felt like there's some aha moment that people could have there with like, oh yeah, I've been through trauma. Just to give you the example, so when my wife catches me becoming unresponsive or not watching the movie or so forth and she says, where are you at? My go-to is I go back and I reassess every tactical situation that I was in where someone got lost or injured. And I reassess, I live through that moment and I mean, it's not, I'm sure people would call it traumatic, but at this point it's a constant learning process. And so I put myself back into all of those factors that I was aware of at that particular moment. Where was the enemy? Where was I? Where were my soldiers? What was the status of this, that and the other? And what could I have done differently that may have prevented somebody from being lost or being injured? And that's an AAR process that goes on inside my brain probably for the rest of my life. And I think that speaks to exactly what you were just saying is that is the nature of this particular business. So I think we have to take it very seriously. And I think that's also why the army invested because when I came home, obviously I had issues when I came home the first time but the army invested in retaining me and recalibrating me and addressing those concerns because what they don't want is they don't wanna lose that experience. And they don't wanna to lose somebody that does think about at night how can I do it better the next time? And just have that person leave the military because they've classified them as having some form of trauma and that they're not good to the military anymore. And instead the military said, no, Steve you just survived a year over in Iraq and we want you to stay in and we want you to be recalibrated and we need all that experience for the next 20 years because we don't know how long we're in this for. And I'm glad they made that decision. I'm glad people supported me to go and get help. So one day I've end up at MIT and be a Lieutenant Colonel because I probably could have gotten out if people hadn't said stay in and continue to contribute and we'll make you healthy. I think that's the power Steve in being a trauma informed leader is what you're doing there is you're being vulnerable in those moments to your team because when you are vulnerable as a leader you set an environment where it is, hey, that you are not an invulnerable Superman or an invulnerable person or even a cold person that doesn't wanna talk about emotions that you set the example and set an environment that's the rest of the formation that it's okay to have feelings and to face them and to talk about them, right? Because you're gonna get better and stronger as a unit. This is not about, you're saying the message is not about me. This is about you and us and- Right, yep, absolutely. But I do think it's interesting with everything going on in the workforce right now. Folks switching jobs so rapidly. The guy from, I can't remember what the company was where he fired all of his folks over the Zoom call, whether it's uninformed, uneducated leaders who are all very smart because they wouldn't be in the positions they were or successful in some way, shape or form. It's the we, not me. And that's a completely different mindset than honestly even the army I came in 20 years ago. We have the force we have. We have congressionally mandated in-strength. It takes a long time to recruit talent. It's even harder nowadays to retain talent. And there's a lot of things out there for folks to do. And if folks aren't being taken care of, that's not just an army thing. They're gonna find something else to do. And so we can't screw it up as leaders. Dave, I'm curious what your thoughts are on any of this, not necessarily that one, but whatever. Gosh, as you've been saying, so many things. One that's jumping out at me the most, and I don't know if this is the most helpful one, but is that, so like when you were talking about taking the criticism from the red team and delivering the criticism, the red team, I was thinking that requires an inner strength to not take things personally. You know, and you sort of describe that the leadership observes who can do that and who can't. And then the same thing I was thinking, Brian, when you were commenting on when Stephen was sharing the personal story, I was also struck by the way you shared it, Stephen, and that like a lot of people can't describe their own personal emotional experiences without getting emotional. And so then I was thinking, all right, well, how did he get there? And I thought, you can nail to Brian. And he said, he wasn't sharing it like in a self-serving way, it was a, this is something that I'm bringing out and it serves this broader goal. So I guess that's what's really struck me is how, if those of us who don't have the experience and the training that you guys have want to be able to do the things that you're doing, how do we get into that sort of stronger and more selfless mindset that allows us to take criticism and give criticism impersonally and also share emotions impersonally isn't the right word, but I don't know if what I'm getting at is coming across to be able to do it in a way that's towards a bigger goal and not emotionally charged. So I've been really impressed by you guys with that. How do you teach that? Yeah, it's almost an inverse logic that I would imagine in corporate environments and it happens in the military too, where you want to be successful personally, but at the same time, the way to make, the best way to make that happen is to make your team successful because and those around you successful and forget about your own ego and forget about yourself or your progression or the next job or whatever it is, those things will come as long as you focus on the here and now and focus on making those around you successful and most importantly, the team functioning and high performing and that's really hard for people to let go of it. I mean, it's been hard for me in some instances, I'm not perfect in this in any way, fashion or form, but the teams that I've been on or led that have produced have been those ones where we are focusing together on the way forward, not just on individuals, best performances in there. Oh, and that paradox that I really liked the way I said, if we could just even pointing out that, hey, that's a paradox, I bet you feel it, don't feel bad about it, but what we're trying to get you to is you're probably emotionally starting here. There's a lot of benefit if you can get yourself to here and like an example I thought of was, Yosi was trying to deliver criticism to someone and that person was taking it real personally and emotionally and kind of zoning out and so Yosi said, just assume that we already like you and think you're doing a good job, this is just to get you better. Exactly. Which just like flustered the person more, they didn't know how to process it and I was thinking, but gosh, like this is what we're deciding if you're getting into heaven or not, it's maybe you didn't see this angle on this thing and now it's clear to us, but. I decided when I took my last command that I was going to take every opportunity to explain the why and in doing so, expose myself if necessary or my staff to criticism, if we weren't able to convey that to every unit, every soldier that we went and visited with and what I told the squadron, which is an organization of anywhere from about five to 600, what I told them is, is that I will do this so long as the opportunity presents itself. Understand that the army, I'm under no obligation as your commander to explain why. I'm choosing to explain why, when the opportunity presents itself so long as you understand that if I say, take the hill and take it now and don't call me until you've taken it, you're going to move out without question. So I got lots of yesers and rogersers and on only one or two occasions, do I think it ever had to come down to that? But before then I invested in going to every unit, particularly when missions were either very complicated or hard for the soldier to understand, very demanding, more so than usual, put them in a position where they weren't going to be able to go home or spend time with their families or so forth or it was very inherently risky and the loss of life was high. We would go and explain the why and open ourselves up to questions from the organizations to make sure that we were conveying that responsibly. And I think that that paid huge dividends because I think when it came to those occasions where we had to ask them to do something without explanation, they knew that we were probably acting in the best interest of the organization of the mission and of those soldiers. And furthermore, as you guys know, probably way better than us. When everybody's on board, everything is much more smooth, right? So if everybody knows why they're staying up late, why they're working hard, why they're doing whatever it is we're asking of them as leaders, that buy-in just pays off as better morale, better productivity, a crease sense of purpose, all that good stuff. And so it turned out being really worth our efforts to convey the why, even if it meant that sometimes they came back and said, sir, we appreciate you sharing that, but it still doesn't make any sense to us. Do you guys ever get like the other thing I was thinking and thank you, Brian, for opening the floodgates? I would fear if I said, let me try to do the red selling of things that someone who wasn't trained in what it was for would just use it as an opportunity to kind of complain. Would, you know, it would be like, oh, well, it's cause you never liked me or something like that. I was like, well, that's not helpful. Well, so that's why during like the AAR process, so our job is OCs, we kind of moderate it. Now, when you're red teaming and it's a commander, you know, you're not necessarily, you're not gonna have an OC there to red team it, but you know, that's where like the role of the Sergeant Major or somebody like a trusted agent is there to kind of help moderate things. Like here's what we saw as the OCs and here's where the disconnect was. And so, you know, there's different levels, different ways, different methodologies. But again, I go back to the emotional intelligence piece. I go back to, you know, folks that have been given some sort of instruction or understanding on how to deal with their emotions in a professional manner and understanding, you know, that not everything is personal and not everything is directed towards you or not everything is about you. Do you guys think that you were team oriented people before you joined the military or did your military training experience make you team goal oriented people? I mean, I grew up in only child, so, but the difference being so, right? So it was all about some Steve Luebert. But what I do remember more than anything else is watching my dad lead. You know, my dad was an Air Force officer, he went on to be a general. You know, I watched him go through his various levels of command as we grew up as a family. And, but I spent so much time watching him and watching the way people responded to him. And I watched him make mistakes in leadership that I probably even as a young adult knew right then, yeah, he could have probably, you know, worded that better. But I also saw the things that he did right that created teams and led to followership and made people want to achieve things because it was important to him. And so I think I probably went into the military having watched military teams and organizations, you know, be successful and having watched my dad be a leader. And I'm sure that influenced me as a young leader. And I probably built upon that as I progressed through the ranks. I would say is just coming into the army as a logistician, you know, you're not the type, you know, you're not the tip of the spear. And so, you know, our success completely is dependent upon how well we support other people. There's very few opportunities for it to be about you. And again, my job, my focus is, I gotta make sure Stephen has everything he needs. I have to make Stephen the best Stephen he can be, you know. So the team concept is kind of ingrained in what we do in our field. If people come in and they don't have that, that ingrained in them early on, they will not be successful in the army as a logistician. Yeah, my parents were both youngest children and their families. I think my dad was youngest of three, my mom was the youngest of three, which is the best combination for a successful loving marriage, right? Because they are used to serving their older siblings and then it just translates into, you know, I think they've been married for like 40 plus years now. But so it was definitely modeled for me. I think I got exposed to some of it through team sports and through scouting. I don't think it was really solidified my own personality until the military though. I think that was where, you know, I got to live it out more day to day than it was sort of ingrained in me and taught to me in a way that, taught to me through example from others really through leaders that I've worked. I've had an amazing string of fantastic leaders throughout my military career. I mean, it's just unbelievable. People talk about toxic leaders and I have no doubt that they have crossed paths and been victims of that, you know, so to speak throughout their careers, but that has not been my case. I've had amazing leaders throughout my military career that have just, I've learned so much from and hopefully, and tried to frankly emulate and copy. You know. Yeah, and when you say, and thinking about the other side of the empathetic leadership thing, I was thinking too outside of academia, but you know, other places I've worked. Yeah, the weight of a kind gesture and listening ear from someone, a couple rungs above you is huge, you know, and I think maybe the, sometimes the people do it because they know it has that effect, but sometimes, you know, they don't even realize the effect that when someone's several rungs above you and spends a little time on your problems, it has to morale and to commitment and all that. Yeah, I think too, when leaders take a gamble on you or meet you where you're at in a moment of crisis in your life, like you will take a bullet for them from that moment on, you will do whatever it takes to serve that organization and that person. I mean, and they, that's not, you know, sometimes that's, they've let you go for a, meaning they've, you know, allowed you to go take some personal leave to take care of some things or, you know, maybe you had a parent that was sick or whatever, you know, and they've taken a hit and the rest of the organization has had to pick up the slack in your absence, but, you know, when you come back from that, what I found is that the leaders have been sympathetic or empathetic in that moment. Man, I will go, I will do whatever it takes to make them successful. Guarantee you we could all rattle off three to five folks that if we got a phone call at two o'clock in the morning that said be here at this time, don't ask questions, we'd all jump because of scenarios like that. And it, and it's, it's, it's not, it's not overly complex and it's not hard. It's just people being good people. I think one of the best examples or one of the best advice I got was from one of my Sam's instructors. It was, he told us, you know, someday the Army's gonna tap us on the shoulder and we're gonna be done with this, right? Or the Army's gonna be done with us probably maybe before we were done with the Army, right? Ready to be done with the Army. And that happens in corporate environments all the time too, I imagine, you know, at that moment, what's gonna be your legacy? You know, I mean, we're all gonna move on from whatever endeavor we're currently in. And when people look at, you know, think about you or look, you know, you look back at your legacy in your last days. What's it gonna be? Is it gonna be one that was just like driving everyone and driving everyone out? Or is it gonna be one that was building people up and making others successful? Gosh, thank you so much guys for your time, for the stories, the personal stories too that you've shared with us in your insights. Thank you for your service to our country historically and going forward. And thank you for your conversation today. I know I think it's gonna make me a better leader just for being able to listen to it and probably everyone else who listens to the podcast too. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Thanks Dave, we really appreciate it and we've enjoyed every moment with you, your team and the other students and graduates at MIT and CTL. Thanks Dave. Thank you. All right everyone, thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of MIT Supply Chain Frontiers. My name is Arthur Grau, communications officer for the center and I invite you to visit us anytime at CTL.mit.edu or search for MIT Supply Chain Frontiers on your favorite listening platform. Until next time.