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Advice to Any Airman
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As a former one-term Airman, now an Air Force Association State President, I am frequently asked "how" and "why" – how I became involved with AFA and why, especially given the brevity of my time in uniform.
The answer is in part simple. Pride in our Air Force and a desire to help support those in uniform today in any way I can. The second part is a bit more complex and far more subtle. Over the years I came to the realization that the Air Force had done more for me than immediately met the eye and I had a strong desire to give something back; not only for what the Air Force does continually today, but for what it had given me personally in the past.
Not that many years ago, I was thinking about my civilian career and how, over thirty-plus years as an operations manager/director, I had been able to make radical moves across industry segments and functional barriers.
What enabled jumps from retail distribution to high tech engineering to medical products manufacturing? Not my liberal arts degree, and certainly not any personal genius. Not surprisingly, the common ground was transferable people skills. What was surprising however, the more I thought about it, was the realization that…
…..everything I knew about managing people, I had learned in those four years in the Air Force.
I could trace absolutely everything I know, or think I know, back to very specific situations which occurred between 2 May 1966 and 2 February 1970.
- I learned about respect; its value, how to gain it, and how to lose it more quickly. I learned that lost respect is probably gone permanently.
- I learned about leadership and the lack thereof. I also learned that in the absence of leadership, new leaders will emerge; nature does in fact abhor vacuums but does not necessarily fill voids with good leaders. There will also be impromptu leaders – ones who emerge situationally; the ones who make an enterprise run.
- I learned how to motivate people. Probably more importantly, I learned how to de-motivate people. Treat people equally, fairly. Give them reasons when you can. When they realize you do, they will follow you when you can’t tell them everything. Create an environment of distrust or abuse of power and they’ll follow only to the "extent of the law."
- I learned about myself, both as an individual and as a leader, albeit in a small way. I learned to
listen; to those above and below me. I learned to make it clear to people below me that I heard them, even if my decisions didn't reflect their positions. I learned to listen to the great officers and NCOs above me, and to listen to the poor ones and learn from them equally.
- Lastly, and most importantly, I learned about
responsibility and the critical importance of understanding, assuming and bestowing responsibility.
This is the big one; that upon which all else rides. I learned seek and assume responsibility even if it was not formally given to me. I quickly learned that anytime anyone under me did anything wrong, I paid a price. Why? Accountability - it was my watch. I also learned the corollary to that fact in that if I did something wrong or made a bad decision, all of “my” Airmen paid for it. As I said, it was my watch; I owned it.
None of this is new news from a Management 101 perspective. As I suggested above, there is no genius here – only a set of experiences, opportunities and challenges and a willingness to absorb and learn from them. What is profoundly interesting to me is that as I look back across the intervening forty years I realize that each of these lessons came not from school or civilian experience. They came from Lackland, Amarillo, Rhein Main and Otis.
John Hasson
President,
MA State AFA
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