Joint Force Leadership: How SEALs and Fighter Pilots Lead to Success
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About this ebook
Navy SEALs lead on the ground. Fighter pilots lead in the air. Together, they can lead anyone, anywhere. Joint Force Leadership brings together Jim “Boots” Demarest and Mark McGinnis’s combined fifty years of military and business experience, and presents battlefield and boardroom tested tools and skills that will resonate with business people, travelers, and military enthusiasts alike.
In military parlance, a “Joint Force” is the combination of forces from different service branches into a single unit. Each comes with its own culture, identity, and vocabulary. And just like corporate teams, getting these diverse groups to work together creates a unique problem set, and leading these teams is varsity-level work.
Demarest and McGinnis are both products of some of the best leadership laboratories anywhere: United States military service academies. Their lifetime of military and civilian leadership experience has taught them lessons they feel compelled to share. Their intent is to provide simple, practical, time- and battle-tested tools you can use right now to improve your leadership skills.
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Book preview
Joint Force Leadership - Jim "Boots" Demarest
A POST HILL PRESS BOOK
An Imprint of Post Hill Press
ISBN: 978-1-64293-483-0
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-484-7
Joint Force Leadership:
How SEALs and Fighter Pilots Lead to Success
© 2020 by Jim Boots
Demarest and Mark McGinnis
All Rights Reserved
Interior design and composition by Sarah Heneghan,
sarah-heneghan.com
Although every effort has been made to ensure that the personal and professional advice present within this book is useful and appropriate, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any person, business, or organization choosing to employ the guidance offered in this book.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Post Hill Press
New York • Nashville
posthillpress.com
Published in the United States of America
Table of Contents
Preface
About the Authors
Introduction
Part One: Focus
Chapter 1: Happy Birthday
Chapter 2: Zulu Alert
Chapter 3: Meridian Gold
Chapter 4: Hell Week
Chapter 5: SMARTS Goals
Chapter 6: Class Leader
Chapter 7: Team Over Self
Chapter 8: Never Leave Your Wingman
Chapter 9: Slow Down
Chapter 10: Mastery Breeds Confidence
Chapter 11: Two is Greater than Nine
Chapter 12: The Fifth Corps Commander
Part Two: Trust
Chapter 13: The Children’s Museum
Chapter 14: Shoulder to Shoulder
Chapter 15: Decision Time
Chapter 16: WET Design
Chapter 17: Mission Planning
Chapter 18: Wing Weapons
Chapter 19: News at the Ninth Hole
Chapter 20: Aerial Refueling
Chapter 21: Stand Up
Chapter 22: The Honor Code
Chapter 23: The East Timor Sea
Chapter 24: Let’s Talk About that Shot
Chapter 25: Ocean Crossing
Chapter 26: Packing a Parachute
PART THREE: COMMUNICATION
Chapter 27: Commander’s Intent
Chapter 28: Meridian Gold, Part Two
Chapter 29: Paint a Picture
Chapter 30: The Debriefing
Chapter 31: More Debriefing
Chapter 32: Debriefing in Action
Chapter 33: Share and Share Alike
Chapter 34: Dell Computer
Chapter 35: But Don’t Overdo It
Chapter 36: Red Flag
Chapter 37: The 9-Line
Chapter 38: There’s Always Room for Improvement
Final Thoughts
End Notes
PREFACE
Leadership is about people, pure and simple. It involves having the right people in the right place doing the right thing at the right time. It is hard work, requiring constant effort sustained over long periods—and it is not easy. There are some who say leaders are born. Yet while we are indeed born with the skills needed to lead, we prove, time and again, that leadership can be taught and learned. And nowhere is this more evident than in our nation’s military.
We are both products of some of the best leadership laboratories anywhere: United States military service academies. As cadets and midshipmen, we studied civilian and military leadership in great detail. More importantly, we have put that study to work out in the real world
and have honed our skills in the crucible of combat and through battles in the boardroom. Our lifetime of military and civilian leadership experience has taught us lessons we feel compelled to share. Our intent here is to provide simple, practical, time- and battle-tested tools you can use right now to improve your leadership skills.
We chose Joint Force Leadership as the title of our book because we wanted to highlight the need for people with different experiences to unite behind a common goal. In military parlance, a Joint Force
is the combination of forces from different service branches into a single unit. Each comes with its own culture, identity, and vocabulary. And just like corporate teams, getting these diverse groups to work together creates a unique problem set, and leading these teams is varsity-level work.
Plenty of ink has already been spilled over the science of leadership. And so, rather than taking a purely academic approach, we will share a framework for leadership. We will also share the stories and lessons learned by us, and those we’ve worked with and for, in an effort to make these leadership concepts come alive and show how you can apply them to your own life.
If you focus on our framework, trust in the fact we can all learn something new about leadership, and believe, as we do, that communication is the linchpin of leadership, we are certain this book will help you navigate the challenges and opportunities of your lifelong leadership journey.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
The stories which follow are designed to drive home our leadership model of focus, trust, and communication. Mark’s SEAL stories are denoted with the Navy SEAL Trident while Boots’ fighter pilot stories are marked with pilot wings to make it easier for the reader to identify who is telling the story. To better understand our perspectives, it might help to know a little more about us.
Mark McGinnis is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and four-year varsity football player with twenty-four years of Special Operations experience as a Navy SEAL. As a SEAL, Mark held leadership positions at all levels of command and has led SEAL missions worldwide. Following his active-duty service, Mark worked for a Fortune 500 medical devices company as a frontline sales representative and regional sales director. He is the founder and managing director of the SEAL Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit providing direct support to the families of fallen SEALs.
Jim Boots
Demarest is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy with over twenty years of military experience and currently serves in the Florida Air National Guard. He spent ten years as an active-duty F-15 fighter pilot, was a distinguished graduate of the Air Force Fighter Weapons School Top Gun
program, and served in Operation Desert Storm. Following his active-duty service, Boots graduated from Cornell Law School, where he served as managing editor of the Cornell Law Review. He then spent nine years as a commercial litigation attorney in a national law firm before entering the professional speaking and consulting world in 2002.
Together, Mark and Boots are the founders of Joint Force Leadership, a full-service leadership and consulting company.
INTRODUCTION
The view from the surface is different than the view from the air. Our dilemma is to appreciate and reconcile these differences when we team up to accomplish a mutual goal. Nowhere is this dilemma more evident than when comparing SEALs to fighter pilots. For the sake of simplification, we will offer general observations to make our point, understanding that any time we generalize, it is easy to find exceptions.
We tend to think of air power as a strategic asset, somewhat limited in scope and duration but available over a large area to create wide-ranging effects. SEALs and ground forces, on the other hand, have a more tactical focus, although they often bring effects of strategic significance. Just ask Osama bin Laden or the Somali pirates who kidnapped Captain Phillips of the cargo ship Maersk Alabama.
Culture for ground forces tends to be more structured, while pilot culture tends to be more fluid. Leadership in airpower is developed deliberately, while leadership on the ground is hyper-accelerated. Ground teams boast a collective accountability, while air power focuses more on individual accountability. Finally, ground forces tend to communicate horizontally, at the line of sight, while air power necessarily communicates over a more vertically developed network.
Our point here is simple: we have vastly different perspectives, yet we regularly come together to execute complex, no-fail missions, and our results speak for themselves. The key to successful missions, whether conducted on land or water, is leadership, plain and simple. And the same holds true in business when teams collaborate on any project, especially when the teams are made up of people with highly specialized yet divergent skill sets. However, this all starts with focus.
Our Dilemma
PART ONE
FOCUS
Be the Master of Right Now
—U.S. Navy SEAL leadership principle
CHAPTER 1
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Saturday night. I’m at home in Coronado, California, surrounded by friends, about to blow out the candles on my birthday cake when I get a call from the command.
My Platoon was recalled to conduct a rescue of an American citizen who was on his private