Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Interview with Admiral James Stavridis

I recently interviewed Admiral James Stavridis on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam:  Our guest today is one of the most revered military leaders of our time. Admiral James Stavridis served for 37 years in the United States Navy, including his last four as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Admiral Stavridis currently serves as the chief international analyst for NBC News and has written extensively on geopolitics, the military, and leadership. A distinguished graduate of the US Naval Academy, Admiral Stavridis also holds a PhD and a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University where he went on to serve as Dean after retiring from the Navy. Admiral, thank you for joining us.

Admiral Stavridis: My pleasure to be with you again, Adam.

Adam: You wrote a memoir and called it The Accidental Admiral. What were the defining moments and experiences early on that shaped your career trajectory and success?

Admiral Stavridis: Well, let's start with The Accidental Admiral. Folks must wonder about that. I called it that because of my assignment to go be the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, which had always been a general, going back to General Eisenhower, who was the first Supreme Allied Commander. I was lucky enough to be the 16th and I often said that if all those generals knew that an admiral was coming in to be Supreme Allied Commander, they would have been spinning in their graves. And I think that I was sort of pushed into that and it was a bit of an accident. My boss at the time, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, had originally thought I would go to the Pacific and be the commander of the US Pacific Command, which is kind of where admirals typically go and that job, Adam ,would have been like getting in a Jacuzzi. It would have been so comfortable. But he had a vision of kind of shaking up NATO, and so chose me to go there. It was kind of an accident in my career, hence the title of the book but here's the point; you asked about turning points and hinges. There are going to be, in every life and career, there are going to be moments that are just hinge moments, over which you will have no control where somebody or something reaches in and bends that carefully crafted trajectory that you think is in place. And certainly going to NATO in a very different, difficult period when we were with 150,000 troops in Afghanistan in a land war in a landlocked country, was hardly the place I would have sent an Admiral. But I think Secretary Gates wanted just a different set of eyes on the problem. Again, the point is, in every career, there will come moments where something just changes the trajectory. And I'll conclude by giving you one from the beginning of my career. When I was 25 years old I'd been out of Annapolis for about three years. I was on a brand new, beautiful, high tech US Navy destroyer. I was the anti-submarine officer; terrific job. And I was all set, I thought, to come ashore and go to graduate school. And I got a call from my human resources professional. In the Navy we call them your detailer. My detailer called me and said, “Stavridis, I know you think you're going to graduate school, but we have a need for someone with your background to go and be the Boilers Officer on the oldest aircraft carrier in the fleet.” The USS Forrestal was an old dog of a carrier and the Boiler Officer is the officer who works in the engineering department making sure the boilers produce the steam which is what drives the ship through the water. So it couldn't have been a more wrenching change for me. I pushed back against it and said, you know, I've been at sea, I've been on a brand new ship, I deserve to go ashore. And it was all about me, me, me. And the Detailer correctly said to me, “Hey, this is a need of the Navy. You have to go and do this because you're the right person for this job.” And, again, that accidental moment, changed the course. But here's the bottom line; that second tour when I went to that aircraft carrier and left that beautiful brand new ship, and I was dealing down below decks; 120 degree boiler spaces on a carrier became seminal To me. It established my credentials as a real engineer. It showed the Navy that I cared about the Navy and I was willing to take the hard jobs in the Navy. So those accidents can work out for you if you're open to them.

Adam: How did you grow as a leader over the course of your career in the Navy? Can you compare and contrast your leadership style as a young commander to your leadership style as a four star Admiral?

Admiral Stavridis: First and foremost, everyone's leadership style evolves as a result of three things that happen and that was certainly the case for me. I started out kind of inexperienced, somewhat cocky and overly sure of myself. I'd done extremely well in Annapolis and started out very, very well in my ship, but then I went to this aircraft carrier and I had many hard problems and I had failures on that ship. So, first and foremost, your leadership style evolves as a result of colliding with the actual challenges you face. So for me, I learned I wasn't invincible. I had to rely on my teammates. I needed to dial down my ego. Those kinds of experiences; that collision with reality, I think, is the first thing. The second thing that is equally important are the mentors you acquire along the way and I was very lucky. I'll give you one quick example; when I finished that aircraft carrier tour. Then the Navy finally was willing to send me to graduate school, and a mentor stepped in and pushed me to go to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Instead of going to study engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School, this mentor said, “No, you need to broaden yourself, Stavridis. You're a good sailor, you're a good engineer, but now it's time for you to work on launching ideas instead of launching missiles.” And so he pushed me into that job. His name was Lieutenant Commander Mike Mullen and he went on to become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So there's that mentorship piece- [that’s] the second thing. And third, and I really commend this to anyone who's trying to improve their leadership skills, is something that's inexpensive, simple, you can do it yourself at home. It's called read. Reading and leading are two things that go inextricably together. In fact, I wrote a book about it, called The Leader’s Bookshelf and it's simply a compilation of 50 books that make you a better leader and I think when you combine those three things together; the collision of real world events, the impact of mentors, and the self study and self education of building of intellectual capital, and the reading that you do. I think that's what allows you to progress. By the time you are very senior as a four star Admiral in the case of a Navy career, you have developed that empathy, that sympathy, that sense of humor, that humility that maybe you didn't have when you were 22 years old and invincible walking out the door of the Naval Academy.

Adam: Can you talk a little bit more about the role that humor has played in your leadership style in the Navy and NATO? It's something about you that I found very relatable.

Admiral Stavridis: Well, first of all, you know, you've met me and I am not a towering six foot two, eyes of blue, silver haired, distinguished- you wouldn't pick me out of a lineup. I'm 5’ 5”, I lost my hair in my 30s; I'm hardly the visible archetype of a Viking leader, or a World War II Admiral. So for me humor and a sense of humility have always been sort of tied to the fact that I'm not the biggest guy in the world. I'm never going to walk in and dominate a room, but I can use that emotional intelligence to relate to others and that's been extraordinarily helpful to me. Secondly, the business of the military, let's face it, is life and death. And yet, so often in the tense situations of combat or near combat, it's that ability to just shake your head and laugh in a rueful way at the irony of what is on display in front of you. And then, third, and finally, as you go through life you begin to realize, Adam, that you're not going to live forever and that you are passing through this world. And hopefully, that gives you, over time, a sense of perspective that you don't take yourself endlessly seriously. And I'll give you two examples of people that I've worked with, who are very funny. One is Colin Powell, who's been a lifelong mentor of mine. And you know, in another life, he could have been a stand up comic. He will get on a stage and he says very humorous things. Obviously he delivers all the serious messages in the world but there's a kind of a fundamental humor and goodness about Colin Powell that really stands out to me. And another individual for whom I worked very proudly was President Bush, Bush second, W. And President Bush is very funny. Got a quip about everything. Unafraid to deploy humor in the most tense situations. I have always been a believer in humor because it's tied to humility and empathy.

Adam: Your most recent book Sailing True north makes the case for why character is essential to effective leadership. Can you make the case to listeners?

Admiral Stavridis: I can. I hope I can. Here's a way to think about it. Think of it like a door. Think of leadership as this massive door that swings In the world, influencing others and that door will swing for good or for ill. FDR; a great leader, that door of leadership swings through the United States and brings us through the Great Depression and the Second World War. But how about the Killing Fields of Cambodia? Pol Pot was a great leader in the sense that he could energize a population and bend it to his will. Again, that big door of leadership swings kind of indiscriminately through the world. But that door swings on a hinge and big doors swing on small hinges- Think about it. And that set of small hinges in each of us is our character. It's the human heart. And it's what determines whether when you swing that door of leadership, are you swinging it for good or for ill? And here's my thesis, Adam. We are awash in books on leadership. Many of them are very, very good. But there are so many books dealing with leadership, we're underweight in thinking and writing about character. And that's what I chose to do. And you know, newsflash, you should write about what you actually know about. So what do I know? I know the oceans. I know the history of famous admirals; great leaders whose big door swung through the pages of history. So the way the book is framed, I looked at ten great naval leaders, ten admirals, and I looked at, for each of them, at their individual voyage of character. And some of them that door swung for good and some it swung for ill. And from all those stories, I tried to frame lessons of character, so Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character is a book that talks about leadership a lot but in the context of character. iIt's not talking so much about that big door. It's talking about that hinge of character.

Adam: You mentioned earlier on that early in your career you were very self assured. But what were some moments of self doubt that you encountered that stood out to you and how did you overcome them?

Admiral Stavridis: I'll give you two from the first five years of my career. One was on that brand new, beautiful spruance class destroyer where I was anti-submarine warfare officer and I was in charge of the nuclear weapons on the ship. And one of the aspects of the nuclear weapons program is that every year you have an extremely rigorous inspection for which I was responsible as the anti-submarine warfare officer. So I prepped for a year, got everything organized, we went through the inspection. And we passed with flying colors with the exception of a small portion of the exam that was the administrative portions upon which I had depended on our navigator, who is in charge of the administration on the ship, to manage that function. Here's what I learned; I hadn't followed up. I hadn't worked closely with him. I sort of assumed he would get it right. I didn't energize my peer network and so we flunked a little part of it. But in the end, that was my failure, my accountable moment. So I learned in follow up, I learned that, yeah, you need to delegate things, but you need to follow up to that old lesson that you get what you inspect, not what you expect. So I should have inspected a little more. So that was one. Not fatal, but kind of dinged me a little bit. So then on that second ship, that old beat up aircraft carrier, I was in charge of the alarm systems on the carrier, which are extremely important because again, nuclear weapons, conventional weapons, special security arrangements. And here I failed again to inspect sufficiently and we failed that inspection of this alarm system. And that could have been a career ender for me. So here's what I learned out of that; first it reinforced that message of diligence and looking hard at things. And then secondly, my captain, who went on to be a three star Admiral called me in and said, “You know, Jim, you got a lot of talent but I'm seeing a pattern here of you trying to glide over things. You need to do more deep dive, you need to do more diligence, you need to inspect more, if you're going to succeed as a naval officer,” and he, he let me not exactly get a pass- you know, there was an appropriate mention in my fitness report, but he kept my career moving forward. And the lesson I learned there was really in his shoes, was that giving people that I thought had real potential a second chance. And again and again, in my career, I had moments where I was tempted to say, “No, you're done,” but I was able to draw on that experience and give people a second chance. That's a valuable lesson to have learned early on. So there's a couple of things that helped me along the way.

Adam: That's tremendous. We've all had job interviews, but you've interviewed for the job of Hillary Clinton's vice presidential nominee during the 2016 election. Then when Donald Trump was elected, you're in the running for Secretary of State. Could you talk about both experiences, including how you prepared for the interviews, and any details listeners might find interesting?

Admiral Stavridis: I can certainly share a couple of thoughts just, you know, being vetted for vice president with Secretary Clinton and then being interviewed for a cabinet job by Donald Trump, I kind of think of [it] as two bullets whizzing by my head. Now seriously, seriously, I was, you know, honored, obviously to be in the running for either of those. What I did to prepare for the VP interviews was to work very hard on areas of weakness in my own portfolio about domestic issues. Obviously in things like international relations, cyber security, global events, all of that- that's wheelhouse, right. But when you go into an interview, obviously you have to focus on the things you're not as well prepared to talk about. So for me, those were things like a woman's right to choice, the healthcare system, mass transit, a whole basket of experienced issues about which I had no track record. Now, I'm an informed citizen. I had views on all those things, but I had to deepen my knowledge base to do that. And ultimately, I was one of six people vetted by Secretary Clinton- formally vetted. She ultimately, of course, chose Senator Tim Kaine- great choice. At the end of the day, if she had been elected, I suppose there might have been potential for me to go into government, but it certainly would have been in one of my wheelhouse areas. So the lesson there I think is in preparing, it’s focus on what you don't know. I think often there's a tendency to, really because it's comfortable, to really think through your third order conversation and what we should do about Kim Jong Un's nuclear weapons program. Far smarter for me to at least have the basics down on what I thought about healthcare. So for President Trump; totally different circumstances. Here I was invited to discuss Secretary of State as well as an option on a couple of other positions, including Director of National Intelligence. Here, I really did do the deep dive because I knew he wasn't going to ask me about the healthcare system. So there I wanted to focus on having an interview where I could connect with, President Elect at the time, Trump, and so I looked at his leadership style and how he operated and I read The Art of the Deal and thought about him and his background and I thought about it not in a way of being a sycophant, but rather, he's the President Elect of the United States, how could I best serve? What could I bring to the table that would be useful? And so knowing his background, reading about it, having met him a couple of times casually before that, I knew he's not someone who wants long answers or a lot of details. He wants opinions, he wants it correct, he wants it fast. So that's what I did. I went in there and hit it hard. We covered a lot of topics in about an hour interview. I was there with Steve Bannon on one side who, folks won't know this, but I served with Steve when he was a junior officer in the Navy back in the 1970s. And on my other side was Reince Priebus who, despite his name, is actually Greek American. I know Reince pretty well through the Greek American connection- point being I was with people who knew me and I will say it was a very amicable, I thought, informative conversation. At the end of the day it was clear to me, however, that I would not serve well in a Trump administration because I'm not someone who wants to give a quick snappy answer and then move on to the next topics- just not me. I'm a deep dive, let's think this through, let's create a strategy, Let's operationalize that strategy. Thus, I declined to come into government with the Trump administration as opposed to John Kelly, or Jim Mattis, both of whom I know and respect very well. So, again, the lesson, the takeaway, I think, for anybody doing an interview is; know the person with whom you're going to interview to the degree you can. Know their proclivities, their personalities. This is where human intelligence can help you out considerably. Emotional intelligence can help you out considerably. It's not always, it's not always crucial that you know every single fact if you can establish a good rapport with someone. So there's a couple of lessons from those two experiences.

Adam: Given how divided our country is right now and how the topic of politics can ruin friendships and relationships with family members, what advice do you have on navigating the divide, while at the same time, not shirking from advocating for what you believe is right?

Admiral Stavridis: So I do a lot of speaking and I conclude every speech with the following; and this is my best answer to the question. And it starts with how often people come up to me and say, “Admiral, thank you for your service.” And that means a lot to me. I was in the military and uniform for 37 years, as you mentioned that, Adam, but here's my point; there are so many ways to serve this country. Certainly the military is one way, but how about our diplomats, our firefighters, our police officers, our CIA officers are NSA operators? Peace Corps volunteers, Teach for America, volunteer for America? How about a schoolteacher in rural South Carolina teaching a packed classroom for $37,000 a year? You think she’s serving the country? I do. So what I asked the audiences is when you see others serving the country, thank them. Thank a teacher for their service. Thank a fireman for his service. And, and I think Adam to answer the question, service- a culture of service- a celebration of service is part of the way we can get out of this angry season in which we find ourselves. We have got to find a way to move ourselves back to your point, Adam, a place where we can have a civil conversation; where we can disagree without being disagreeable. And I'll close by saying I'm a registered independent, always have been. I'm a centrist. I think that's why I was invited to interview by both sides after 2016. We need people to find the way to the center and on each side of this political divide; to stop yelling at each other and start listening to each other and I think service can be part of that.

Adam:  We often hear of coaches who lead their players into battle. You actually lead troops into battle. How do you prepare troops for battle psychologically and emotionally?

Admiral Stavridis: Well, let me give you a famous example from history. And this is in my book Sailing True North; Ten admirals and the Voyage of Character. And the first Admiral in the book is from 2500 years ago. His name is Themistocles and Themistocles is facing an existential threat. His city state, Athens, is under attack by the Persian Empire, which outnumbers Athens ten to one. And Themistocles knows that in the morning, there's going to be an epic, crucial, existential sea battle fought in the Bay of Salamis just outside of Athens, it's outside of Piraeus. And he knows his rowers on these triremes, these ancient Greek warships, are going to be outnumbered ten to one on the battle the next morning. So here's the answer to your question; he gathers all of the rowers and all the captains of these warships and he says to them “Tomorrow, you must row for your families. Tomorrow, you must row for your city, and tomorrow, you must row for freedom itself,” because every one of those horsemen, every one of those captains was a free man. And in the Persian ships, all of the rowers, 90% of that fleet, were slaves. So what does Themistocles do? He appealed to emotion, to families, he appealed to life and economics, your city, and he appealed to the ideal of freedom to freemen, and that, on the next day's battle, despite being outnumbered ten to one, the Greeks destroyed the Persian fleet. They rode for freedom; they rode for something bigger than themselves. And I think that's the essence of leading people in any situation; in a difficult fight in the boardroom, in a medical situation where a hospital is failing in front of you, around your kitchen table at night, you have to appeal to people emotionally, about the other people in their lives. You have to appeal to people about their economic basis. And you have to appeal to their ideals; to things that are bigger than just themselves. That, I think, is the essence of leading people in very demanding situations.

Adam:  What are the best lessons you learned from your time serving as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO?

Admiral Stavridis: Great question, just to frame it NATO is now 29 nations and all decisions of NATO, whether to forward deploy to Afghanistan, whether to send ships off the coast of Africa to counter piracy, whether to continue a mission in the Balkan; peacekeeping missions. Every single decision must be attained by consensus meaning that any one nation can spite that decision so it is a very challenging place to be effectively the Supreme Commander. What you really are is the supreme compromiser trying to figure out how to navigate 29 different cultures, 20 something different languages, 29 different historical frames. It is the ultimate place where you learn that you cannot exercise simple top down leadership; you have to build consensus from the bottom up. And I think that that is true in every single organization, and I’ll conclude with an example of where I failed to do that, not at NATO but at my previous job as commander of U.S. Southern Command. I was in charge of all military activities south of the United States. And I decided in my wisdom that I would simply reshape the structure of the command and change it from a kind of a war fighting command, because I didn't think we were going to go to war in Latin America, I still don't. But I tried to reshape the command to focus on humanitarian operations, on medical diplomacy, counter narcotics, kind of soft power. And I did it. Without really much consultation, I simply imposed it top down. And as I discovered, there were a lot of people that didn't agree with me, throughout my own organization, which numbered 10s of thousands of people. And over time my brilliant idea- which I kept in place rigidly throughout my three years there- my successor came in and completely undid it and went back to the old way of doing business, because I had failed to build the consensus and make the case. So that brings us back to NATO. By the time I got to NATO, I realized top down is not going to work; especially in an organization like this where you’re dealing with sovereign countries. So the primary lesson I learned at NATO, back to where we started this conversation, was empathize. Understand the culture, perceive the difference between Albania's worldview, a new member of NATO at the time, and Great Britain, one of the founding members, but both have an equal vote in this process. So you've got to understand 29 different nations, their views, and build consensus from the bottom up. That was a life shaping experience for me at NATO. And by the way, just to close, that, of course, was my last job in uniform. Hard to go anywhere after Supreme Allied Commander. And so that's when I became the Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. And, as I used to say to people, I thought it was tough at NATO getting 29 nations together- wait until I got to Fletcher and I had to get 200 faculty members. So it was a lesson that translated pretty well coming out of the military to the civilian world.

Adam: No comment. We have a lot of academic people who are very academically oriented listening. So I'm gonna let that one sort of go with the wind.

Admiral Stavridis: Oh, well, let me, let me, let me say that is very nice of you, but I used to show my faculty and they love this- because you know, what are they going to think when a military guy shows up to take over a graduate school? They thought, “Oh, boy, here comes rigid discipline and chain of command and he's going to expect us all to shine our shoes and cut our beards,” and it was anything but that.

Adam:  Along those lines, it's funny you mentioned that. Something that I remember from our previous conversation was when I asked you, what is the greatest misconception that people have about military leadership? You had said to me that everyone assumes that leaders in the military are like Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men. And it couldn't be anything more different. And in my personal experience, having the privilege of getting to know a tremendous military leaders like yourself, by having the honor of interviewing many great current and former generals and admirals, that couldn't be any more true in every lesson and every general, [and] Admiral I've spoken to, has advocated the style of leadership that is very, very similar to yours; a style of leadership that is centered around humility and focus on connectivity and focus on empowering your troops and not about commanding people to do something and saying, “This is an order you have to do it.” So it's, it's funny that academics you worked with had that same misconception until you got there.

Admiral Stavridis: Indeed. And let's face it; in the military, you, you have to have that sense of camaraderie that really is what wins battles at the end of the day. And I'll give you an example of it from another marvelous book called Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. And it's, one of the books, one of the 50 books in The Leader’s Bookshelf that I mentioned earlier. It's a story of the Greeks fighting. This is the story of the 300 Spartans. There's a conversation between King Leonidas, who is the king of the Spartans on the battlefield, and he's talking to the son of one of the other soldiers who was fighting alongside his father. And the young soldier says to King Leonidas, that he thinks that courage is what will win the battle for the Greeks. And Leonidas says, courage is important, but on the battlefield, the opposite of fear is not courage. The opposite of fear is love. It is love for the soldiers and the sailors who stand alongside you in that battle. It's that camaraderie that makes the greatest forces able to succeed. And I would argue that is again as true in Silicon Valley, as it is in the Peloponnese of Greece 2500 years ago. You have to have that embrace of those who are alongside you if your organization is going to succeed. Great leaders know that. Leaders of character can inspire that better than anybody else.

Adam: Admiral, I have about 10 more questions, but because we're pressed for time, I'm gonna ask one last sequence of questions, which I think our listeners will be able to gain a lot of valuable information from. And that is,; what was your daily routine during your years as Admiral? What advice did you give your troops on how to optimize their daily performance? And along those lines; what advice would you give to listeners on how to make the most out of their days and out of their lives?

Admiral Stavridis: Yeah, I think this is really one question, which is time management. So let me tackle it in that context with some examples. Throughout my life, I have worked very hard to carve out time to read and build intellectual capital and we've talked about that. I can't imagine a day that doesn't start early because in those early hours, you can build intellectual capital, you're going to spend it as the day goes on but if you don't absorb, at a minimum, the day's events, the day's news And I would argue if you don't build into your diet of intellectual capital, reading longer articles, reading books, finding time early in the day to do that. And I'll put in a plug here for The Economist. It's a weekly magazine. It is 200 years old. It has no byline, no  egos involved, and it is extremely accurate. I would say 90% of what I saw in highly classified US intelligence that I received on a daily basis as a NATO commander, you can see in the economy. So read; read and build intellectual capital. Second, always find time to work out. That is great and even if all you can manage is to get up from your desk and go for a brisk 30 minute walk, I think everyone can find that level of time.

Adam: That’s great.

Admiral Stavridis: Far better, if you're able to get 45 minutes to an hour, get to an elliptical, get to a squash court, go for a jog. But find time for physical activity to break up the day. So that's kind of a middle of the day piece. And then, at the end of the day, always, always, always find time for your family. Come home and make that the best time of the day. So often we are our best at work; the most charming at work, we're patient at work, we’re full of funny lines at work, we write good emails at work to commend each other. And then we go home, and we're tired. And that's when you can not be your best person. And I have fought, fought, fought throughout my life, not always successfully, to be the best person in my day when I come home and I'm with my family. So I think those three anchor points show for anything and I'll close back to time management. Boy, take advantage of technology. Just the fact that a Kindle exists and you can load books on it and articles and newspapers. And then when you're standing in line uselessly, waiting for the grocery line to move more quickly or you're at a dental appointment waiting to get into the chair- even if you have 10 minutes or 15 minutes- have that technology. Read, and when you read take notes and record them. That's all part of building intellectual capacity is finding those little corners of time; technology can help you do that very, very effectively and use technology both to manage those small pockets of time, but also to tap away into various quarters that you might not otherwise find yourself going.

Adam:  Admiral, thank you for the tremendous advice and thank you for joining us.

Admiral Stavridis: My pleasure to be with you Adam. All the best.