Start With A Win - Life is Not a Spectator Sport with General Martin E. Dempsey

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. And coming to you from Denver, Colorado, home of REMAX World Headquarters, this is Adam Canto, CEO of REMAX with Start With A Win. Producer Mark, how are you doing today, buddy? I'm doing so good. Awesome. I love it. We have an amazing guest on today, Mark. You ready to get into this, buddy? Oh, yeah. Let's go. Awesome. All right. Well, our guest today, we are honored to have on General Martin E. Dempsey, the 18th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, named one of Time Magazine's most influential people. General Dempsey retired in October 2015 after 41 years of military service. Now he teaches leadership and public policy as a Rubenstein fellow at Duke University and serves as chairman of USA Basketball.

Starting point is 00:01:12 General Dempsey is co-author of the best-selling leadership book, Radical Inclusion, What the Post-9-11 World Should Have Taught Us About Leadership. And General Dempsey is the author of the new book, No Time for Spectators. I love that title. The Lessons That Mattered Most from West Point to the West Wing. General Dempsey, welcome to Start With a Win. Thank you, Adam. It's good to be here with you. You bet. And I want to start with thank you for your service. I mean, it's general, I mean, being a general, that's there. This is rare air we're talking about here. There are very few people that make it to chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff and general in the United States military. I mean, this is you impacted so many lives over your career, both domestically and internationally. And we thank you for your leadership. So thank you so much for your service and leadership over the 41 years. Well, thanks for saying that. I mean, I always considered it more a humbling privilege than anything that would allow me to dwell on it for too much,

Starting point is 00:02:20 actually. Well, I want to ask you to reflect a little bit, General. During the 41 years, how did your regard for leadership begin and evolve during your service? I mean, it's clearly as a second lieutenant is different than your view of leadership as a general. How did that evolve and change during that timeframe? Yeah, that's such a rich question that I'm going to, you know, I'm going to kind of cherry pick a few moments to try to illuminate it. You know, I actually believe leadership is best seen with our peripheral vision rather than, you know, staring it down, because I think it's mostly in those peripheral moments that you become the leader that you ultimately become. But as I reflect in the book, one of the things that started me down this path of trying to be the best leader I could be

Starting point is 00:03:16 was an English professor at West Point when I was a freshman or plebe who, at the end of a lecture, I was with a thousand or so of my classmates in a stifling hot auditorium at West Point in July. And he said, I wish you the quality of a felt life. And it really bothered me that I didn't understand what he was talking about. But what I what I eventually, you know, came to appreciate is that he was essentially saying to all of us, don't get swept along. You know, don't don't mail in your contributions, you know, feel them, you know, feel what it means to be a leader and never forget that feeling. The high, you know, when it makes you feel good, when things are going well and you're succeeding and don't ever forget what it feels like when things don't go so well. So that was part of it. You know, when you say, you know, how did I approach 41 years? Yeah, I approached it one day at a time.

Starting point is 00:04:20 You know, I didn't try to get out in front of my skis, if you will, to use a Denver metaphor. And then the second thing was early on in my career, I had the occasion. The early 70s were a rough time for our army transitioning from a conscript force to all volunteer force. And we had a lot. We had racial issues and drug issues. You know, the men and women who served, you know, who had been drafted, probably about half of them didn't really want to be there. And so it was just a different environment. And, you know, it was easy to kind of write off a handful of your soldiers if they didn't, you know, completely align with what you were trying to accomplish in your unit. And I had an occasion where someone had seen that I had kind of written off about three or four out of 40

Starting point is 00:05:14 and took me to task for it and took me to task by, you know, asking me, you know, have you written off those three or four, or are you still trying to do everything you can to make them feel like they belong? And I had to admit to myself that I had kind of written them off. You know, they were consuming, you know, much more of my time than I thought they should when I had, you know, a platoon of 40 to actually deal with. But when I came to grips with the fact that probably my most important responsibility as a leader is to build a sense of belonging, it kind of opened up that aperture for me to see that if that's right, that, you know, the primary responsibility of a leader is to build a sense of belonging, then you can't write people off. Now, some of them will opt out themselves.

Starting point is 00:06:10 But from that point on, they were going to have to quit me. I wasn't going to quit them. And, you know, a lot of them did through the years, but more didn't. Fascinating points. I mean, and I love that concept or that question, have you written them off? I mean, that's a great question just for the humility of leaders to ask themselves when they look at their team. Thank you for sharing that. I also love, I mean, in your book, you know, No Time for Spectators, that statement in and of itself is amazing. And you focus on the premise that life is not a spectator sport. And I think that that discussion in your leadership there demonstrates that. What does this mean in daily life? Most people are not, a lot of our listeners are not in the military. Some are in law enforcement. But what can we take, in your opinion, to daily life and business? And what are some of the other key takeaways readers can take in your opinion to daily life and business and what are some of the other key

Starting point is 00:07:05 takeaways uh readers can take from your book yeah thanks for asking because i what what happened uh when i retired i wanted to write a book about leadership but you know no shock there i i'd had so many wonderful opportunities i thought i should share them and also force myself to think about them you know back to this idea of a felt life. And so I did. I wrote a book about leadership, co-authored it with a gentleman named Ori Brothman from Berkeley. And I liked it. But when I finished it, I realized that there was something missing and I wasn't exactly sure what. I came to realize pretty quickly what I realized was that I had written a book about what it takes for men and women to be the best leaders they can possibly be. But I hadn't said a word about the fact that you spend most of your career, even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, you spend most of your career as a follower.

Starting point is 00:08:01 And I hadn't said a word about, you know, whether there's some attributes that would define someone who is actually a good follower. And furthermore, the enterprise, whether it's a military organization or an Olympic basketball team or a corporate headquarters or an academic institution, the enterprise only works if there's kind of this shared sense of trust between leaders and followers. And I hadn't said a word about being a follower. And I reflected back on the things that I had learned by being a follower that I could then apply when I became, you know, more and more senior through the years. So, but nobody wants to, if I titled the thing,

Starting point is 00:08:42 you know, be the best follower you can be, you know, they would still be sitting at Barnes and Noble or on Amazon. You know, nobody's going to, that's not going to turn anybody's head in a walking through the airport. And so I thought that what I needed to do was kind of find a metaphor, you know, to capture the idea that we're all in this together, you know, the leaders and those who follow them. We all have something to contribute. And in fact, if we don't both contribute, we're not going to get done what we need to get done. And even if we get it done, it's not going to make the organization better. So I came up with No Time for Spectators, the idea being we're all in this thing together. And, you know, the old Teddy Roosevelt, man in the arena. Well, we're all in this thing together. And you know, the old Teddy Roosevelt man in the arena, well,

Starting point is 00:09:26 we're all in the arena now. And so that's how it came upon that idea. Oh, that's, I mean, fantastic. I love the analogy to the Teddy Roosevelt saying, and for all of our listeners, if you're not familiar with the man in the arena, go look it up on Google. It is an incredible short read that really gives you the heart and soul of not just being a leader, but being a follower and the integration between those things. So General Dempsey, thank you for sharing that. Your book dives into the ideas. These are interesting ideas, the ideas of sensible skepticism. And I never thought I'd hear, you know, this is kind of contrary to my military upbringing of, okay, does this term work? The value of responsible rebelliousness.

Starting point is 00:10:13 I mean, can you give us an overview, a flyover of those concepts and how they apply to effective leadership? One of the things that I'm actually thinking about pretty deeply now as we watch what's happening in Afghanistan is, you know, how did we how did we end up where we're ending up after 20 years of effort? And I mean, good faith effort by hundreds of thousandserculean effort to, to make that mission succeed. And I think, you know, I think that what happens is that I was just toying around looking, you know, for another quote, you know, to kind of help me think through things. That's what I do. I, you know, if I, if I can't figure it out myself, I go look to see if someone else has at least started to figure it out. And there's a really good John Madden quote that said that, you know, leaders have to look for the things that they don't want to see. And they have to listen for the things that they don't want to hear. And I thought, wow, how timely is that? Because I think, I think, you know, what happens in missions or that's a military term, but even in tasks that languish and linger, I think what happens is you lose the

Starting point is 00:11:41 ability to look for things you don't want to see and listen for things you don't want to hear. And they, you know, there's a certain momentum that, that builds up. And, and so, um, in answer to your question about sensible skepticism, I do recall, uh, in dealing when I was chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, one of the examples I use is every six months we owed President Obama, and I served President Obama during his presidency, and every six months for four years we owed him a review of our missions around the world, to include in Afghanistan. And the reviews were intended to come in through the bureaucratic stovepipe. So, you know, the military would do a review, the intelligence community would do a review, the Department of State would do a

Starting point is 00:12:29 diplomatic and a foreign policy review and so forth, and the budget. But one of the things I found that bothered me about that is that they came in with such really dramatically different assessments. You know, the military, which is credited often correctly for having a can-do attitude. Of course it would. You know, why would you send somebody to risk their lives if they don't think they can accomplish the task? But the military generally felt like, you know, with a little more time and additional resources, we could pull that off. Right. you know, with a little more time and additional resources, we could pull that off, right? The intelligence community, you know, who honestly, to their credit, does, I think, a phenomenal job, but they know they only get an A or an F. You know, there's no B, Cs and Ds handed out in the intel world. And so, you know, they tended to be more pessimistic. And then the

Starting point is 00:13:20 State Department might be somewhere in between. And I thought to myself, wow, you know, we're not really doing the president heavy lifting in the Pacific and in the Middle East and in South Asia. And I said, look, you know, I'm not asking you to change your assessment because you have to make it. But I said, just know that I've seen a lot of these reports and I generally force myself, although it's not hard to force myself, to be a little skeptical about them when they are, you know, either too optimistic or too pessimistic. And so I thought, you know, that's that, why that sensible skepticism shouldn't threaten us either as leaders or followers. But I do think over the course of time, sometimes it does threaten, you know, the idea that someone would question my work, you know, of any big organization, generally speaking, real innovation only happens when somebody pushes on the, you know, the edges of the box in which, you know, we're all sitting. And, but, you know, I felt like there should be some boundaries established. I just don't

Starting point is 00:14:59 want rebelliousness. You know, you're never going to see rebelliousness on an organizational chart of values. But I did think that if I could find a way to define what responsible rebelliousness look like, and notably, that if I could define it such that it's something that an individual does inside an organization, not for their own self-aggrandizement or their own self, you know, their own self-advancement, but rather for the good of the larger organization, then you could find a case where you might actually encourage a little bit of it. And if someone sees a way to change a process or change something about the way the organization is operating, and they know they can because the senior leaders will accept a little rebelliousness if it's done responsibly. Then, you know, the organization is going to be a better place to work and it's going to produce better results. Awesome. I mean, thank you for that vulnerability, creating clarity, vulnerability, transparency in those briefings and how leadership is able to interact with pushing back or allowing others to push back

Starting point is 00:16:12 against them in a respectful and productive manner. So I mean, it's just, thank you for sharing that. It's great to learn from amazing leaders like you with this. I have a question about where you're at now. So you're a Rubenstein fellow at Duke University. You teach leadership and public policy. How have you carried your experiences into a classroom setting? And what are some of the core teachings that you think are important for our listeners to hear? Well, one of the things I really enjoy most about teaching is the, you know, and especially at a place like Duke where in the spring I teach public policy, mostly to undergraduates. And in the fall, I teach mostly graduate students in the business school about leadership. And what I really appreciate about that is I get a generational look. You know, the undergrads are 18 to 22,

Starting point is 00:17:05 the graduate students are, you know, 32 to 42. And, and they, you know, the undergraduates really come at it with not much life experience, but a lot of questions and a lot of, you know, I guess idealism, but I don't want that to sound pejorative. I mean, I, I always say to my colleagues, you know, I hope we're not going to try to beat their idealism out of them because we need a little bit of it. And then with the grad students, you know, they come with they come with life experience. And so, you know, they're far more likely to challenge you on a process or attribute that you might have something to say about. And, you know, what I, what I try to do with them is, you know, you know, there's others in their lives who will give them the kind of the, the research, you know, the, the background, the, the, the, the discipline of public policy,

Starting point is 00:18:04 the process of public. And what I tell them is, look, first of all, I promise you, I know that because you have to know it to work inside of it. But what I want to do is communicate with you and answer your questions about how does it really work in practice? Because we all know that, you know, it's like, it's like grammar, you know, we all know grammar or, well, I hope we all know grammar, but we, it's like, it's like grammar, you know, we all know grammar or, well, I hope we all know grammar, but we violate it all the time, either to make a point intentionally or because we're just sloppy. And the same thing is true of processes, you know, that drive companies. And so, you know, I, I, I try to help them understand that. The other thing I think importantly is I

Starting point is 00:18:42 try to help them understand how our most senior leaders at the national level actually make decisions. Because, you know, I wish somebody had allowed me to understand how a president of the United States makes a decision. You know, what's the process? You know, inclusive, exclusive, big group, little group, you know, does he or she prefer to get their knowledge from reading something or listening to it or, you know, watching it? How do they deal with time? How do they manage their time? chairman, at least I think so, at the end of my time, my four-year tour, because I learned how to recognize what the president, what was going, what he was dealing with, so that I could take what I was responsible for and have the best chance of accomplishing it inside of his decision-making processes and cycles.

Starting point is 00:19:46 This is amazing, General Dempsey. I appreciate you being on here. I have one final question that I ask all of our guests on Start With A Win. And General Dempsey, that is, how do you start your day with a win? So one of my best friends in the military through the years, and in particular the last 20. A guy by the name of Admiral Bill McRaven, who probably, I mean, honestly, maybe our finest special forces officer. He's an admiral, I think, that we've ever had. And by the way, has all of the attributes that I described in abundance.

Starting point is 00:20:24 Well, he gave a speech, a commencement speech at the University of Texas and subsequently wrote a book about it. And the title of the book is Make Your Bed. And the underlying theme is that if you start your day by making your bed, you've accomplished something that day and you just go on and build on it from there. I would say to people, you know, focus on the fundamentals. What's something fundamental to your organization or, you know, wherever you find yourself and get something done fundamentally in your day and make people feel like they're important. And if you do that, you'll always start your day with a win. Focus on the fundamentals. That's one of the best answers I've ever heard, General. So thank you so much. General Martin E. Dempsey, 18th Chairman

Starting point is 00:21:17 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of Time Magazine's most influential people. Thank you so much for being on Start With A Win, everybody. Be sure to check out General Dempsey at generaldempsey.com and his book, No Time For Spectators, The Lessons That Mattered Most from West Point to the West Wing. General, thank you for being on today. And thank you for listening to Start With A Win. If you'd like to ask Adam a question or tell us your Start With A Win story, give us a call, leave us a message at 888-581-4430.

Starting point is 00:21:46 So go to startwithawin.com and you know, until next time, start with a win.

Start With A Win - Life is Not a Spectator Sport with General Martin E. Dempsey

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