Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - How To Level Up Your Leadership with Chief of Navy Reserve - Vice Admiral John Mustin | Part 1

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

Welcome to PART ONE of our conversation with Vice Admiral John Mustin. What is it like to lead 59,000 people? What if those people are spread out all over the world? What does readiness as a leader look like? Chief of Navy Reserve (CNR), Vice Admiral John Mustin, knows exactly what it’s like and he leads with a singular, laser-guided priority in mind: warfighting readiness. When it comes to performing at the highest level, Vice Admiral Mustin is steadfast in his belief that individual performance is informed by both competence and character. We’ll find out how he helps instill these traits in his force and the challenges that come with it. Vice Admiral Mustin has an extraordinary grasp on leadership philosophy, communicating effectively across large organizations, and using his civilian experiences to inform strategy within his military career – and he’s generous enough to share some of his insights with us around both organizational and personal high performance. We covered so much ground in our conversation that we felt this episode was best shared in two parts. Part I is live now. Part II will drop on all audio platforms tomorrow – be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it on your feed. If you’d like early access to the full conversation, you can view the episode in its entirety on YouTube right now. No matter when or where you tune in, we hope you enjoy this gem of a conversation with Vice Admiral John Mustin._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. I've got a staff and I've got a team and they're looking at me. And if I come in and I am moping and grouchy and pissed, they're going to be too. Instead, I want to greet them every day with a sense of optimism, like, hey, I don't care how hard this challenge is that we're dealing with. We're going to figure it out and it's going to be awesome. And if you want to be a member of this elite high-performing team,

then that's the way you carry yourself and you work that down echelon with your folks too. So in order to participate, I'm pretty candid saying I only want high performers on my team. Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais by trade and training a highperformance psychologist. And I am thrilled to welcome Vice Admiral John Mustin to the podcast for this week's conversation. What is it like to lead 59,000 people? What if those people are spread out all over the world? Chief of Navy Reserve or CNR, Vice Admiral John Mustin knows exactly what it's like, and he does it with a singular, laser-guided priority in mind, warfighting readiness. So what exactly does readiness look like?

When it comes to performing at the highest level, Vice Admiral Muston is steadfast in his belief that individual performance is informed by both competence and character. We'll find out how he helps instill these traits in his force and the challenges that come with it. Vice Admiral Mustin has an extraordinary grasp on leadership philosophy, communicating effectively across large organizations, and using his civilian experiences to inform strategy within his military career. And he is generous enough to share his insights with us around both organizational and personal high performance. We covered a lot of ground. In fact, we covered so much ground that we felt this conversation was best shared in two parts. So enjoy part one now, and then make sure you come back for part two. With that, let's dive into this week's conversation with the very impressive Vice

Admiral John Muston. Admiral, this is an honor, and I do not say that word lightly. And so thank you for being here. Thank you for in advance for bringing a generational type of insight and wisdom to this conversation. So I appreciate you. Well, I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be here. And as I mentioned, I've been a long-term listener or a long-time listener. So this is kind of a big moment for me too. Yeah, there we go. Okay, good. So we're both in it. All right. All right, good. So let's start at the top. In your most succinct way, what is the U.S. Navy Reserve? And why is it important for us to understand the operations that you're running? Great question.

So the Navy Reserve is about 60,000 citizen sailors, as we describe them. And we're an augmentation force that makes our Navy more capable and have greater capacity in the event of peace or war. So at its most basic level, we were born prior to the nation's entry into World War I, so 1915. So we just celebrated our 108th anniversary. And in every significant conflict since then, the Navy Reserve has augmented the active duty force for our nation. In World War II, we had 2 million sailors that were reserved, that served in the Pacific and in the Atlantic. So the nation has come to expect that the Navy Reserve is not only ready to perform, but is qualified, certified, and able to mobilize when ready. So the missions

that we're doing around the world, I've got people in every time zone, in every area of responsibility, every combatant command area that are serving right now. I mean, they're around the world representing the interests of our nation. So it's important. In your organization, the reservist organization is civilian. Are they civilians? Or like, how does the bifurcation work between being a sailor versus being a civilian? Sure.

So of my 60,000, 10,000 are active duty sailors whose job is to train and administer the reserve force. The other 50,000 are called selected reserves. And those are the folks that you may know by the old bumper sticker of a weekend a month and two weeks a year. So we say, okay, that sums to 38 days. And it really, today does not need to be a weekend a month or two weeks a year. You know, that's the minimum requirement. You may want to do two weeks at one time and then do another two weeks and then not come in for a couple of months. As long as it sums to that 38 days, then you get what's called a good year. But the short answer is 10,000. So roughly 15% or 16%

of my folks are there all day, every day. They are indistinguishable from an active duty sailor, but their focus and their job is to administer the reserve force. That number 10,000 to the 60,000. Okay. Is that thoughtful or was that, that happened by accident? Oh, it's incredibly thoughtful. Okay. Pause the rest of the answer because I, one in five is where we've been working from. We found some research to be able to impact or create a critical mass across culture. We need at least one in five to be able to be like the heartbeat of what you're trying to create. And then I hear you say something very close to that, like one in six. And I'm wondering

if like I'm not being or being too ambitious with the one of five, but tell me more about that. And if you agree with that idea that you need like one in five to be able to create the heartbeat or one in six in your turn. You bet. And I don't want to make it sound too mathematical. So it's not that we have one out of every six in small units is active. No, right. Yeah. But from a broad stroke. Exactly. Like for instance, I've got 115 reserve centers. They're staffed by my active duty reserve sailors. So typically staffs of between 11 and 40 and they are civilian and active duty reserve sailors. So typically, um, staffs of between 11 and 40 and, and they are civilian and active duty reserve. Okay. And they manage a selected reserve population that could be up to 1500. So, so we do track that ratio very carefully. That will never be one in six. That's

more like one in 30, but, but that's what we found to be manageable at the reserve center level. My staff at the Pentagon, 55, all, we call them training and administration of reserve, we call them TAR. So all TAR sailors, my reserve forces command down in Norfolk, one of my echelon three commands for folks who know what that means. That's a hundred percent TAR staff as well. And then scattered throughout my operational units. So again, of the 60,000, 30% we call operational units. Those are small boat units. Those are expeditionary medical facilities, cargo handling battalions, Navy SEALs. Those are also populated heavily with tar sailors because they need to be there every day and they need to make sure that they're taking care of the training and the certifications, the regiments, the equipment and things that you just can't do if you're showing up only on the

weekend. Okay. Do you think that one in five or one in six from a heartbeat to create change in a culture, do you think that that's close? Does that intuitively feel right to you? It does intuitively. And just from an organizational behavior perspective, it sure does. The way I look at it though, is I scrutinize every billet and every sailor across our force as part of a pretty rigorous and iterative. Sorry. A billet is a specific job. Okay. So you scrutinize every?

Every billet. And? Every unit. Okay. Okay. So a unit is essentially a company and the billet is the job. But I look at every one of those because part of my job as the chief of the reserve force is to augment or improve, optimize our force design, which is what is our capability and what's our capacity? So what do we do and how much of it

can we do? So I've made trades over the last three years where I've said there are some things that we are no longer going to do, but I will harvest those billets or units to build up additional capacity in the things that we know we must do. And that's been part of a pretty generational transformation where we've said legacy functions that made a lot of sense in the global war on terror post 9-11, which by the way, non-maritime. Okay. So, so we were providing support to joint force requirements in the deserts. That's not why the Navy exists. Right. So, so part of my charter when I came in was we're going to modernize the reserve force. And what that really means is review, audit, assess, determine what is the utility of every one of our sailors and what are they doing? And so in many cases, I said, we know that we need more capability in Navy Special Warfare, our SEAL friends, the SEAL enablers. We need more there. That's a capacity and a capability that is in demand by our fleet commanders. I need more capability in space, space capability,

cyber. Those are areas of growth for us. Expeditionary logistics. This is another one where if we're going to be drawn into conflict in the Indo-Pacific region, in all likelihood, it's going to look a lot like it did in the war in the Pacific in World War II. Picture Guadalcanal, island hopping campaigns. We've got great reserve capacity there. In fact, there are seven cargo handling battalions in the Navy.

Six of them are reserve force. So I'm saying maybe we need more. That could be something that would be tremendously in demand and we should probably grow capacity there. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of,

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to you by David Protein. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm traveling or in between meals on a demanding day, certainly I need something quick that will support the way that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David protein bars. And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put them on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening. I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike. I love them. One a day, one a day. What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here.

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And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. And now back to the conversation. So capacity and capability. These two words I'm very familiar with from a sport and human development perspective.

I'm not sure everyone, I'm not sure the community fully embraces those two. But so capacity and capability, they work together, but they're very different. Absolutely. And when I think about capability, I think, what are you capable of doing? Or what are we capable of doing? And that, for me, points to skill, mostly. Yes. But what is it for you as well?

Well, it's skill, but it's also training and qualification. OK, right. And I would say those lead up to the ability to be able to express a skill. Okay. Right. And I would say those lead up to the, be the ability to be able to express a skill and then express a skill on demand under duress is like, that's what I'm most interested in, in high speed, accurate environments. Exactly. Right. Okay. And then capacity means something different. And so how do you think about capacity? So capacity, you know, and again, the easy way is okay., capability is what we do. Capacity is how much of it can we do.

That's right. So we talk about watch teams. You know, essentially, if you think of a football game, okay, you got your starting team. Well, if you're going to, if everybody gets hurt and you have to roll in with the second string, okay, that's the second team. The Navy operates around the clock around the world. And so typically the active duty manpower design accounts for daytime operations. But if we're drawn into conflict like we're seeing in Europe right now, we're going 24-7.

So the reserve force comes in and we're watch sections two and three if you picture an eight-hour workday. So the capacity that we bring is the ability to supplement from daytime operations to 24-7 operations. not the visual that I have when I think of our training. Right. Yeah. So, um, so like there's a active readiness for, um, two and three on an, on a 24 hour clock, three segments, you are responsible for two and three readiness. Yes. So if something strikes at 11 PM, you're up, we would be on the watch floor already on the watch floor already. Cause you're already there. Okay. Now that that's even better. Okay. And you mentioned the, what did you call it? The we would be on the watch floor already. On the watch floor already because you're already there. Yeah, exactly. Okay, now that's even better. Okay.

And you mentioned the, what did you call it, the Indo-Pacific? Indo-Pacific, yeah, the area of the world. It's hot there now. It is. Yeah. And so I think we're all watching, and I'm not asking you to say anything out of turn here. If something were to happen in that region,

what would the picture look like from a global perspective about responding to that call? Globally, for all of our services, it would be massive. And then I can get more granular about the Navy. But I can assure you, if something happened in the South China Sea or in the Strait of Taiwan or in the East China Sea or the Philippine Sea, it would be massive on a scale that we haven't seen since World War II.

And it would have global economic impacts before we even get into kinetic issues or collateral damage. I mean, you know, there are certainly scenarios where we see, depending on what exactly it is we're talking about, if it's gray zone conflict and to differentiate what that is. So if we think of conflict as being binary or either in peace or war, what we find is that's never really the case. Have we always been in gray? Since you've been alive, I've been alive? Mostly with the advent of cyber and social and other information warfare capabilities, which means it's below the threshold of armed conflict, but it's still conflict.

Yeah. because of that. So we refer to that as gray zone where you say, you know, again, if peace is white and war is black, kind of we're operating in a gray zone in a lot of domains. Now, you know, we refer to domains as under the sea, on the sea, over the sea, cyber, space. Those are all referred to as domains. So we recognize that. Wait, do that again. That was fun. Under the sea. On the sea. Over the sea. And you're, are you, you have that full stack. That's the Navy. Oh yeah. You're the full stack. the sea. And you have that full stack. That's the Navy. Oh, yeah. You have the full stack. You bet.

Yeah. And does each vertical in military operations have that full stack or the Navy uniquely has that full stack? Each of the services has a component. A component to it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And the Navy runs the vessels?

Sure. So we, on the sea, you could be a surface warfare officer. So we're on the surface of the ocean. Interestingly, the Army has boats too. Destroyers. Carriers. It would be weird if like your family name had a destroyer. Wouldn't that be interesting? That would be amazing.

Could you imagine? That would be amazing. That would be amazing if like your family. And what if there was two? Absolutely. Yeah. That would be something. What if there was one guy who had two named after

him okay i can't wait to go back to that to that part of story okay so there's a full stack you're under the sea on the sea over the sea so submarines ships airplanes okay and then cyber right and space and space so satellites and are you managing are you managing, are you managing responsibility, capabilities and capacity across all of those? I am. Yeah. So you can't just like. But to differentiate when we say manage. So, so I provide the forces.

So I'm a service provider. So I make sure that we have the units, the billets, the people trained and certified so that the active duty commanders can task them. So I'm not an operational commander, but I am a service component that delivers people. Okay. This is why I wanted to speak to you at this very intersection about you have a service, your service is primarily people, and scaling leadership, being able to cascade ideas, to create a heartbeat where people see themselves in an important mission and they're an important part in it or an important purpose and they see themselves in that. That is challenging.

That challenge is the best of leaders. And so I don't know if you're working from like a model or you've been figuring it out as you go and you've got three or four generations of, is it four generations? Actually more than that, but yeah, four from the Naval Academy. Four from the Naval Academy, generational. And maybe just walk us through that. Like it's great-grandfather. Sure. So my great-grandfather, Henry, was class of 1896. And his son, my grandfather, Lloyd, was class of 1932. And then his son, my father, Henry, was a class of 55. And for good measure, his brother, Tom, my uncle, was a class of 62. And then I was class of 90. But if you go on my

grandmother's side, then there were several others as well, but I won't complicate things. No. Yeah. So, so there's a bit of a baton passing, whether it's, I mean, I wonder how the DNA works here, but like there's a baton passing certainly of young, um, dining room, breakfast table conversations that I would never have been exposed to, like that you and your family were getting early on. And so before we go to that part of it, though, how do you think about leadership at scale? And I don't want to taint it in any kind of way, and I don't want to even butcher it by saying leadership at scale. So how do you respond to that? Well, I think what you're getting at scale. So like, how do you respond to that?

Well, I think what you're getting at is an important topic, which I've always viewed as the more senior we get, you know, yes, we're still leaders, but the leadership requirements and demands change. You know, as a young officer, you're a leader from the first day you joined the Navy, but you may be leading a division and that may be 15 people. That's certainly different than being the commanding officer of a destroyer with 350 people or being a strike group commander with 10,000 people or being the chief of the reserve force, you know, with 60,000.

And, and the Navy is pretty smart about this. And we invest in leadership training. So we've got what we refer to as our continuum of leadership training. So we give you essentially unit level training when you're young and then you get to be a mid-grade or field officer, you get additional different training and then you get an executive level training. And then when you become a flag or a general officer, you get different training. I mean, I would tell you when I was a one-star admiral, the training was different than it

was for a two-star admiral. And then as a three-star admiral, we're exposed to a really unique series of training opportunities that talk about organizational change and talk about large-scale dynamics and basic things about, okay, not only establishing a vision, but how do you communicate it? And what do you do from the ground up versus from the top down? And are you inspiring and rallying people or are you holding people to the line? I mean, what, how do you cultivate your personal leadership style? You know, in my view, I've always said it's hard to argue with results. And there have been occasions when I've said, Hey, I tried this and it was less effective than this other technique, which worked very well. And so, you know, the Navy in many ways is a large institution,

all total active reserve over 400,000 folks, but, but we are, is a large institution. All total, active reserve, over 400,000 folks. But we are very entrepreneurial as a service. So let's do that. Let's talk about some frameworks that make sense to you. And then I also want to double-click on the idea of how to help create a vision and then cascade that vision. Because that's super practical. And I'll tell you how I do it. Sure.

Not at the scale, of course, you're doing it. But are there models that you think through that have been meaningful to you when it comes to leadership? There certainly are. I mean, there are some that I would look at as a problem-solving framework. I mean, we use something called DMAIC. I don't know if you're familiar with DMAIC. Yeah. Make sure I look that up.

Well, and it's interesting that this is something that we're investing heavily in training all levels of our teams. I mean, from the most senior person to the most junior person. And that framework is important to us because, again, as it relates to problem solving, I just don't feel like we've got the time or the bandwidth to flail. You know, we want to be ruthlessly efficient in addressing the root causes of problems in ways that is commonly understood. So in my case, what I tell people is, here's how I want to take a brief. You know, I have some basic expectations before we sit down to talk about an issue. And I want the problem statement to be explicitly stated. Because what I've learned over the years is sometimes I get a 40-page

PowerPoint deck that talks about all the reasons that the world is hard, and yet there's nothing actionable in there because they're trying to boil the ocean. Instead of saying, the root cause problem is the following, and there are 10 stakeholders involved. This is what is required to fix it. Here's where I need your help. Or I don't need your help, but I want you to know what we're doing. And after agreeing on the problem statement, like a lot of times we don't get past that first slide because I'll say, I don't think you put enough effort in the problem statement. So, and that is drilling down to the, to the root cause and, and, and not treating the surface symptoms, which it's easy for us to leak, leap into activity and say something broke, slap some

duct tape and bubble gum on it and declare victory. When in fact, what we really need to do is think about why did this happen and what was it systemically? You know, in many cases, when we're talking about human beings, there's a degree of variability that we have to accept. But I always look at it as kind of the owner of the system to say, what could I have done differently to either train or enable the people to perform better? That's your central question.

That's my question. I look in the mirror every day and say, okay, someone, it would be easy for someone to say this sailor did something stupid and we should throw the book at him. My first thought is what could I have done differently that might have prevented the decision that that person made? And again, I just, I agree, or I assume that no one wakes up saying today, I'm going to do dumb things. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. So, and I don't think people are the villain in their own story. No, of course. Right. Do you, do you think people are fundamentally good? I do. You do? Yeah. Not this. So that's refreshing for me to hear because you and I have both seen people do some of the most egregious, like, I'm even at a loss for words thinking about some of the things that I've experienced and seen and heard secondhand that people are struggling with in both elite performing environments as well as something different.

So how do you come to that idea that people are fundamentally good? On one hand, I may be naively optimistic. You are an optimist. I am, absolutely. Yeah, me too as well. But I wake up and I think to myself, okay, today I get to make some decisions. One is, am I looking for the good in this day or am I looking to complain about all the things that are difficult in the day? And so the other thing that I realize is I've got a staff and I've got a team and they're looking at me. And if I come in and I am moping and grouchy and pissed, they're going to be too.

Instead, I want to greet them every day with a sense of optimism like, hey, I don't care how hard this challenge is that we're dealing with, we're going to figure it out and it's going to be awesome. And if you want to be a member of this elite high-performing team, then that's the way you carry yourself and you work that down echelon with your folks too. So in order to participate, you know, I'm pretty candid saying I only want high performers on my team. And granted, in the Navy, sometimes we are forced because of timing and inventory issues. You don't always get to pick everybody that you work with. But my expectation is we're starting from an opening salvo where I say, welcome to the team. It's a pleasure to meet you. And I greet everyone on my staff within the first week of their arrival. And I sit down with them and say, okay, you're coming to work in my manpower shop. Thrilled to see you. Your reputation precedes you. I've read

your biography. I got a couple of questions about where you live and what are your interests. Just so you know, you're relieving a person who was the best in this job that I've ever seen. And my expectation is you're going to be better than him. And if that doesn't sound good to you, then now's the time to mention it to me because I can find you another job. But my hope is that you're going to fit in and you're going to pick up that baton and run fast. And then honestly, everyone says, I can't wait to contribute, sir. I mean, I've never had anyone go, you know what? I thought maybe I don't want to be here. So that's interesting. So that's, so we've got a model that we work from support then challenge.

Right. You're coming right out the gate with a challenge, with a standard, maybe it is. And then so how do you think about that idea of support then challenge? I like it very much. Yeah. In fact, I describe this approach when I do meetings with my team, when they're new, when we do kind of an indoctrination period, I'll say, here's what you can expect from me. I am going to envision, enable, and encourage you. Envision, enable, encourage. Encourage. Yeah. So we're going to talk about what we want to achieve. Hold on, hold on. Admiral, where'd you, because that is like, that's something that I don't like the word enable for me personally, but the envision and encourage bit is so, so right down the center of how I've operated. Almost intuitively, I don't have a model for that.

I mean, I made it up, so I will give it to you. I want you to use this. Great. Yeah. But it feels for me right now, hearing that from you, it's like, I feel not validated. That's not the right word, but I feel like I've been doing this part, right. You know? Right. So I, I really appreciate that you're doing it that way. So the envision and then the encouragement part, I really get, and I want to hear how you think about enabling. Sure. So enabling is I'm going to give you the tools you need, the training, you know, what does that mean? Hey, in some cases it's the hardware,

it's the connectivity. If you're going to be in the field, you need to be able to communicate. I mean, that's a non-trivial task. So the enabling piece is in order for you to do your job, I don't want you to say I had a million great ideas and I was ready to go, but the system didn't allow me to do what I wanted to do.

So that's the enabling part. Okay. Quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, What you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission,

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Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. Let's jump right back into the conversation okay uh the encouragement can be problematic for me in my own head when it's not authentically sharp as well like i want so encourage is not like pat on the back encouragement for me also is what you can go a little further you can you can go a little deeper you know you can stand your ground a little more clearly or kindly. Sure.

Like, is there a sharp edge to it? There is. But it's interesting. I don't think folks who work for me are going to say, oh, my God, he's a tyrannical ass. Yeah. You know, I think most folks would say. Is that your epithet? No, no.

It's going to be my tombstone. No, I think they're going to say, I love working with him. I learned from him. It was a great tour. But I will tell you, I heard one of my subordinate commanders talking to his folks saying about me, The next discussion with us ought to be either I'm on it and it will be done by Friday or by June or whenever it may be, or I need your help somewhere, but I don't need the daily updates with status. I mean, I trust you. I mean, the enabling piece is you got the tools you need, right? Do you need additional support, top cover, up echelon communication? You know, where do you need me

to roll in on your behalf? If not, then why isn't it done? There you go. And driving to closure is another thing that is a personal pet peeve for me. I say, you know, I just don't want to talk about things. I want to get them done

and move on to the next. So closure to action, right? And then close the loop again. Is that part of, I mean, I like the OODA loop. Exactly. Yeah. And so, but that's a little bit different and let's describe OODA. Yeah. Observe, orient, decide, act. Yeah. And is that something you use? We all do. Is that closing the, is that closing the loop? Yeah. I just mean, if we say this is a policy document that needs to be signed by 20 people and we're targeting June, I'm saying in May, how are we looking? And don't come to me on the last day and say I was off by 90 days and it's actually going to be in the fall.

How do you keep all of that organized? I have a phenomenal staff. This is where I, me trying to keep everything intact was, is like, it's a disaster. And you can hear laughter in the background.

Yeah. It's a bit of a disaster. I have to, I have to admit, we're very fortunate in the military. And this is something that I do not see similarly

in the civilian world. But, but I've got a lot of folks who, who are my enablers. And, and some of them between a chief of staff and an executive assistant and an aide and a flag writer, they're there keeping the tickler list of the things that we talk about. And when we do a meeting with what I call my division

directors, essentially department heads, and we go through, we do a sit-down meeting. And as we're talking, I'm saying, that's great. How long is that going to take? OK, you say it's a month. All right, I'm making a tickler to say, check in at month or day 25. How are you looking on that month deadline that you committed to? So and again, some of these things that we're talking about, I deal in strategy and policy. So sometimes it's in three years, we want to see this movement, you know, which is different than saying update me every week on that. I mean, I don't have the appetite or interest, frankly, unless something is off plan.

Do you have a cadence to your meetings? Like every day there's a thing and every week there's a thing. Do you have some sort of cadence? With my own staff, I have standing meeting once a week. So we do a Wednesday morning session with the division directors. And how long is that? It's usually an hour. And then the offer is my door is open and they shouldn't feel like they need to wait until Wednesday to talk to me. I mean, I'm kind of talking to them all day, every day. And we're pretty fluent with technology. So whether that's on chat or some other mechanism, I said, preference is not to deal in email. That is really not my preferred communication mechanism. Because I feel like for decades, we as Americans got sloppy and lazy about saying, well, I sent an email, my work is done. So two things about email. I say not my

preferred mechanism. You can come by and poke your head into my office anytime, you know, face to face. I'll take that's a trump card or call me on the phone. No one ever does, but I offer that. But I said, or I would prefer I am over email and we've gotten pretty good now. This is relatively new within the Navy, but the Navy reserves leading the the way here. We've been very encouraged by the behavioral change to use a collaboration suite. So another reason why I've said, I don't want any attachments in email. You know, we can post them, we can work them in parallel. You know, we've got tools similar to what you probably use as Google Docs. And I've just said, why get into version control issues with people emailing things? I said, let's just have one version of the truth

and we can all access it together. And when I'm done, you know, we have a workflow that says like, okay, when everyone's put their inputs and then I get mine and we're done, we save hundreds of man hours in the way that we're working. So, yeah.

Yeah, I've noticed the benefit. Of course, yeah. And then when you go up to the envision part of the model, how do you help create a vision for people? Yeah. Like your direct reports, your leaders, your heads of departments. Well, I mean, there's a couple of layers to the answer. So as I mentioned, I deal in strategy and policy primarily. So the president writes a document called the National Security Strategy.

And the secretary of defense writes a National Defense Strategy. And the. And the secretary of defense writes a National Defense Strategy. And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs writes a National Military Strategy. And then the chief of naval operations, who's my boss, writes the service component element of that. We call it the navigation plan. I read all those. And then I get together with my staffs and say, here are the elements that I'm seeing where the reserves have either equity or potential capability.

I think we should drive activity towards delivering against those things, knowing full well that it's nested with the demands of my boss and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the secretary of defense and the president. So that's kind of reserve force wide. It's easy for me to read those documents and then circle the wagons to say, here's what it means to us. That's different, though, than when you say, how do you keep your people motivated or establish a vision? The vision that I want my staff to be aware of is I want to move fast. Velocity is important to me.

When I talk about any problem that's brought to us where the recommendation is I need more money, people, or time, I say we got to think harder about it. Once again, what's the problem statement? And just a couple of tips and tricks that I look at when we're talking about problems in particular. One is where are we now? Can we baseline our performance against what the standard is? Are we supposed to be at 85%? And if so, where are we? Okay. Well, if we're 82%, I see we've got a problem or, hey, maybe we're at 92%. Can we get to a hundred? You know, again, so we're meeting the standard. Who sets the standard?

Well, the standards are usually in instructions or documents or things where, you know, maybe I set the standard or, but, but it could be, you know, in the same way that, you know, your PSA should be a certain level. You know, there, there are just some things that we know we need to be able to do for certifications or training. Okay. So, so first question, where are we relative to the standard? Because a lot of times people come in and say, we need to change this. I need more people. I need more money. I want to do something. I go, okay, well first let me get a sense of the scale of the problem. Where are we now? The answer is not always, thanks for asking. It's measured very carefully and we know exactly. A lot of times it's, well, of course we know we

need to do this. I go, okay, well, show me. And then the second thing is, so what's the recommendation that you're making and how much better will the outcome be based on this recommendation? If we implement fully the change that you recommend, how much better will the outcome be based on this recommendation? If we implement fully the change that you recommend, how much better will we be relative to our performance today? And then we say, okay, so you're telling me it's going to be an 8% lift on where we are. What's the cost in money, people, and time to develop the change that you're describing? Ultimately, what I'm getting at is I want them to understand the quantitative rigor to assess whether is it worth it for us to do this? You know, I mean, I get 100 problems every day.

And sometimes I say, you're right. This is not perfect. It's number 20 on my top 10 list, though. I just don't have the time to dig into it. If you can affect the change, then more power to you. But the things that I want to sink my teeth into are the things that are going to give us 100% X return, the ROI like a portfolio manager. I want to move on the most impactful things because the other thing I recognize is if it was easy, it wouldn't come to me. It would have been done already. So I just, I walk in the door every

day saying, I welcome the fact that everything that is brought to me is going to be complicated and unsolvable. And then we'll solve them. Do you, do the people that are bringing you recommendations, do they come, do they come to their conclusions by committee or do they come from small groups of people figuring it out, like two or three folks, or is it their discernment as an individual? Generally, well, the answer is all the above. And it has to do with authorities in our world. I mean, if for some of the very complicated problems we've got, it's multi-constituent, multi-stakeholder issues. So in those cases, you really need a working group. And we, I don't want consensus to be an excuse to not move.

But at the same time, it would be disingenuous to say, well, I'm just going to solve this problem and then have five people screaming like, what the heck? What did you just do? You know, I don't agree with it. So if it's something that is within the ownership of the individual, then I would expect the individual to solve it. If it's more complicated, then we'll bring in the appropriate folks. OK.

And so the consensus can be a problem. It can slow things down. That's why I'm asking about velocity. And at the same time, discernment alone can miss some of the other signals that are really important. Okay. So, so when, when you're, when you are trying to make the decisions of things that are complicated and hard, what capabilities do you want of your people to be able to present in the right way, which is clear and brief. It's down to the root cause with action steps that they believe will help solve this or get it closer. Okay. And I love the reference point about where we are relative to the standard. I want to come back to that in a minute, but what capabilities do you believe are the most important for your people? And then I'm going to complicate it one more level and project out five years from now, because the world business and I'm imagining military operations

and sport in general are going to be different in five years. Yeah. Okay. Generative AI, fill in the blanks. Of course. Of course. Yeah. So what capabilities are you most interested in right now? You know, I studied operations research, operations analysis as a master's degree, and I studied systems engineering undergrad. So I've always been kind of a quant guy.

So the foundation for decision-making for me is typically born in data. And I certainly am a human. And so I have intuition. I try to mitigate the intuition with data. But I've also taken a lot of data. Oh, that's an interesting framing. Well, because it's easy. Because oftentimes, you know, I mean, we can all lie with statistics, right? I mean, I can- Oh, yeah. Closed-door analysis I mean, I can take any data set and convince you that it should be white. Nope, same data. No, it should be black.

So we want to be balanced. But I like objective decision making where possible. But what I found too is sometimes you don't have the luxury of all of the data. And if it would be necessary for me to wait six more months to make a decision that was not a multi-billion dollar strategic decision, I say, I don't want to debate it in the boardroom. I'd rather try something now and then actually collect data on how it worked, you know, consider it a pilot test. You know, this is kind of a lean startup approach. And I'm fortunate enough to have people who are smart enough to understand what I mean and what we're trying to do when I say that.

For instance, if it's something that we're trying to do with a training mechanism to get a boat crew certified, you know, okay, it was supposed to take 36 months. I go, hmm, would it be possible to do it in 18 months? You know, what would be required to make it happen in 18 months? Well, there's certainly an assumption about availability and people and funding. And what does that look like? I get all that. OK, that's that's fact. How do we assess the risk if we implemented that?

Would people quit? Would it be too hard? You know, is the operational tempo too rigorous? But but my hope would be that we're not saying, well, someone told me two years ago that we tried it and it didn't work, so we're never going to do it again. So anyway, that's kind of the here and now piece. As it relates to what's going to happen over the next five years, there is no question that AI is going to transform the way that we access and act on information. We need to be really careful, all of us, the world needs to

be really careful about the veracity of the information. I mean, you know that bots that are scraping the internet are scraping bad news and fake news as well as good news. So you have to be careful about kind of the sources. But in terms of just pure mechanics, I mean, this is obviously on the order of the industrial revolution where, you know, we're going to free up a lot of time for people. And for every copywriter or art director who's saying, this is travesty, I'm going to be out of a job. My first thought is the art directors who learn how to use AI to hone their craft are the ones that are going to be in demand.

So why not leverage it? This is like the invention of the wheel and saying those who can harness that are going to be in demand. So why not leverage it? I mean, this is like the invention of the wheel and saying those who can harness it are going to be the standouts. And that will have applications in business and military and elsewhere. I mean, there's no question we'll see changes. Okay. So it would be fair to say understanding how to interpret data, understanding how to blend intuition with objective data for discernment yeah that would be a skill there's something about risk-taking and acceptance of mistakes yes be able to move with velocity and speed yes pilot

test and there's something about being stimulated by what's coming so there's some sort of entrepreneurial mindset there. Like I want to get ahead of it. I like it. I like what I'm seeing. I'm going to invest my time and energy, even if it's like not spec'd in my job. Yes. Right. So there's, is that, does that sound about right? It absolutely does. And in fact, when I've described, um, the approach that I've taken to affect this transformation, I mean, my tasking was to modernize the reserve force, to transition us from the global war on terror from over two decades to prepare for what we refer to now as great power competition. Great power competition. Great power.

So we're past the point. This is not state driven. Well, great powers are states. Okay. So peer and near peer states. Yeah. Transitioning from Al-Qaeda, ISIS, violent extremism, that's global war on terror. Now we're saying Russia and China to some degree are on North Korea. Peer or near peer?

Both. Yeah. I would say, yeah. Let's say near peer. Yeah. Near peer. They're not listening, by the way. You've got an international audience.

This is fair. Right. So as we look at the driver, I have said there's a sense of urgency here. Oh, the race is on. Yeah. In many ways, I see similarities to the United States in 1939 to where we are right now. And I'm not chicken little and I'm not trying to scare people. But I'm saying that the readiness of the reserve force is something that I need to solve today because if we need to break

glass because of emergency in, say, 2027, I don't want then to start saying, how are we going to mobilize 50,000 people? Gee, we didn't think of this. You know, are they ready to go? And do they know where, do they know what building they're going to go to? Does their ID card work? Have access to the desk? I mean, those are things that I want to work on today.

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Absolutely. I didn't know this. This is obviously, you know, table stakes for you, but like logistics make and break. I mean, Napoleon said the army fights on its stomach. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And, and I mean, we and every other country are watching Russia's performance and giving them pretty low marks, but we're also preparing for, and we've done this for decades. I mean, we continue to pour effort into how do we maneuver? Like the United States, we're a forward deployed force, you know, and having a forward deployed force is expensive.

I mean, Navy, I always say, we are America's away team. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I mean, we've got ships in Yokosuka, Japan and Sasebo, Japan and Bahrain and Rota, Spain, and not only in Hawaii and in the continental United States and our fleet concentration areas, but, you know, we are in Singapore and, you know, we're everywhere that we know we would need to be to support our allies and partners and our national interests because the tyranny of distance has a time effect that we can't wait a week to get from Hawaii to Japan. We need to be there.

And we talked earlier about what's going on in the South China Sea. It's a long way from San Diego or Hawaii. But it's closer to Korea and to Japan. And so in some respects, it surprises me that we're considering that war would be anything other than cyber or in space. It surprises me that we're moving, we're watching, you know, war happen on people's stomachs, like, or whatever that phrasing that you mentioned, like Napoleon, Napoleon's. Yeah. It surprises me that it's, it hasn't, I don't know. I, I, I, I I always thought when I was a kid that the wars that

would be happening later would be information-based, cyber-based, something that you would watch on Star Trek or Star Wars or something. Not that we might see that, but it would trend toward that. Is it trending that direction? Or do you think that it's more likely that we'll be in a war with bullets and ships? I think it will be bullets and ships. But it will certainly be supported by the capability that's resident in space and in cyber. So I think the nation that controls cyberspace has a distinct advantage. And AI factors into that, but having command of how the electrons are flowing really has a tremendous impact on everything

from finding, fixing, tracking, targeting. I mean, all of those things now we do with computers. So- What are some of the most interesting weapons that you've been exposed to, or like a lot of different weapons there are probably don't want to go into it on this podcast i mean there's i mean i mean we've got things that go many times the speed of sound you heard of hypersonic weapons i mean yes you know they're they are mind-boggling

fast and so and what did they do? So they're missiles. That's a missile. Yeah. It's a missile, but it, but it goes so fast. Like keep in mind, our missile defense systems are pretty impressive in that even to defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles, what we do to defend is we shoot a missile at the incoming missile. So the hatch has to open. Oh, things got to get like the exact precise. Of course. But then I say to put it into perspective, that's like you shooting a 22 caliber rifle at me and me saying, I'm going to shoot another bullet at it.

You know, so, so the technology. What's easier, that or golf? Yeah. People brag about golf being so hard. I mean, come on. You're right. Okay. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. People brag about golf being so hard. I mean, come on. You're right. Okay. Exactly.

Yeah. Okay. Do you have a preference for operations in, in water or air or like, where do you naturally lean? Like just personally? Sure. Okay. Well, I'm a surface warfare officer. So, so I serve on ships and small boats. And so being on the water is, is kind of my trade. That said, you know, I own 150 airplanes as the chief of the Navy Reserve. So we do all of the Navy's adversary missions. So we replicate, we do threat replication for deploying strike group air wings so that we replicate what our adversaries, how they might look. So you've heard of like Top Gun, right? So the folks that play the bad guys are our reserve squadrons.

So the good news about that and the reason I bring it up is – Oh, so they get in the MiGs or whatever and that type? Yeah, exactly. So I've got F-16s. We've got F-18s. We've got F-5s. What's the one that we're most like enamored by? Our ships.

Our ships? Well, we just launched what we call a flight three guided missile destroyer. Um, I mean, just, just took ownership of it this week. So that is a, that's a game changing capability. That's the equivalent of a new cruiser. Um, so it's a destroyer hull, but it's got, uh, and the difference between a cruiser and a destroyer historically has been size. Cruiser is a little bigger than a destroyer.

So this is a little bit bigger on the existing frame of the guided missile destroyer, but it's probably the most capable warship in the world. That's a cool statement. I mean, that's different than an aircraft carrier. A destroyer is about 10,000 tons. An aircraft carrier is 100,000 tons. And an aircraft carrier carries an air wing wing and a destroyer carries missiles and guns so so they have different functions got it yeah complementary but uh different so um anyway when

you say like what's the coolest one you know my submarine brothers and sisters would say well don't forget about the submarines they're pretty cool too um yeah those are pretty good right yeah quiet down there you know we fly uh, my friend, I call him the air boss, but the commander of the Naval Air Forces. So we've got F-35s. They're pretty spectacular. You know, we've got lots of F-18s like you saw in Top Gun 2. Was there an uptick in enlistment or enrollment? In recruiting?

Yeah. You know, it was rumored. So there was anecdotal feedback there. And there was similarly with Top Gun 1, the first one. And I think the facts don't bear it out. But it is a great talking point. I'd love to say there was, but I don't think it's true. Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah. In fact, I mean. How'd they do? As a movie, like how'd they do? Oh, they did great. They did. In fact, you know, so one of the advisors for the flight sequences was a Navy Reserve captain aviator. So Ferg, call sign Ferg.

Nice job, Ferg. Anyway, so and lots of photos with him, with Tom Cruise. You know, they say like shooting their watch. What does that mean? You know, because you're shooting your watch as you're simulating what you're going to do with your hands. But anyway, but I thought they did great. Now, granted, my expectations for movies are probably different than some of my New York-based friends. It's hard for you to watch that and not pick out all the...

I mean, yeah, what I'm saying, I'm sitting there with my wife elbowing going, you know, OK, well, Jon Hamm plays my friend in real life. Oh, that's right. And I'm saying, and by the way, you know, he would never say that. And she's going, OK, you and like five other people world. Exactly. Yes. All right. That's the end of part one. I hope you enjoyed the conversation and make sure to come back to check out part two, where Vice Admiral Mustin and I go into some do's and don'ts of personal high performance and what it's like to lead and foster high performance teams. We also dig into the spotlights and shadows of generational legacies.

You're going to love it. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we

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