Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Lieutenant General Jeff Buchanan

I recently interviewed Lieutenant General Jeffrey Buchanan on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today led troops at every level over the course of his 37-year military career. Lieutenant General Jeff Buchanan led the military response for five major hurricanes. Matthew, Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Florence, served four combat tours in Iraq, and one in Afghanistan, and commanded nearly 6000 federal military troops deployed to the southern border. General Buchanan, thank you for joining us.

General Buchanan: Thanks for having me on your program, Adam. It's really great honor.

Adam: It is great to have you. You've had a number of unique leadership experiences over the course of your career, all over the country, and all over the world. Now you get to relax at home and in Arizona, which is where you grew up, where you went to undergrad at the University of Arizona. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What experiences and lessons were most foundational to shaping your worldview and shaping the trajectory of your success?

General Buchanan: Well, I'll mention two things. And two things are service to others and leading by example. So I grew up as the son of a soldier, my dad was a helicopter pilot, with a couple of tours in Vietnam. And from both him and my mom, who was a lifelong school teacher, she started out teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Kansas and ended up at the university level, but service to others has always been really, really important to me. I lived that a little bit growing up through scouting, doing a lot of outdoor things, climbing, and caving in my youth. And now I'm inspired by my kids. One is an Army Ranger. One is a hotshot in the Forest Service, and once a teacher, and they're all continuing to serve others. But along the way, through both my experience watching my parents, and through what I learned in scouting and on sports teams, I figured that the most effective way, the most powerful way to influence others to lead others was to try to lead by example. And so that's something I still tried to do today. Obviously, I'm not as fast or as strong as I used to be. But I still tried to walk the walk instead of just talking about it. So I've always felt it's more important to show people if you want them to behave a certain way, it's more important to show them how you want them to behave rather than just tell them

Adam: Were there any pivotal moments looking back, as you are rising within the military that you could say, this was a game-changing experience? This shaped me as a leader. This helped me get from where I was, to where I ultimately went.

General Buchanan: I tell a story pretty frequently when I'm speaking to younger leaders, about the criticality of some of the decisions that you make early on in life and how they can have impacts much later. I tell the story of a guy named Thomas Ballard. And the story unfolds in January of 2007. And Thomas Ballard was a master sergeant, a team Sergeant deployed in Iraq. And he led his team through an incredibly tough fight. He was a true hero, arguably, he saved the city in the jaw. He did all these tremendous things against overwhelming odds, and none of his troops were killed. Most of them were wounded in this really tough fight, but it's a very inspirational story. And that's only the first part of the story. But 20 years earlier in November of Nike 87, I was Private First Class, Ballard's company commander, and we were deployed on a training exercise to Far North Queensland and Australia. And this particular unit, we're in what's called a long-range surveillance unit, but our job was to parachute deep behind the lines, if you will, to collect intelligence and report that back. And we were on this exercise working for the first Australian division. Our exercise area was bigger than the Republic of Korea. It's an incredible place. We're in the field for 35 straight days, and that's all that time without a hot meal without a shower or anything, at the end of it. The Australians being Australians brought in a bunch of beer at a party. And it was fun and Private First Class Ballard drank more than his share of beer, which was probably okay. But then he got drunk, which was probably okay. But then he beat up an Australian soldier which was not okay. And it came to me that I was the only officer in this outfit. As a captain came to me to deal with Private First Class valor. And all of my noncommissioned officers, and all my subordinate leaders had come out of the Ranger Regiment first or second Ranger Battalion. And those guys were pretty legendary for not having any sense of humor when it came to soldiering discipline issues. And so they wanted me to deal with Private First Class Ballard and kick him out of the unit. I had a first sergeant who was a phenomenal leader, his name was Bob Bales. And he came out second Ranger Battalion, but he told me you know, Ballard's a good kid, he just made a stupid decision. But I think we ought to bust him we ought to, you got to do your thing with him, but we got to keep it. And ultimately, that's what I did. I took away seven days’ pay, I reduced him and wrecked from Private First Class to private, but I kept them in the unit. And I have no doubt that if we'd have kicked him out, we're based in Hawaii, and we're the only unit 41 to hold people in parachute status would have been easy to kick him out. And he would have been probably out of the army in a year because he continued to get in trouble. But we kept him. And 20 years later, he's a master sergeant and the hero of the battle and arguably saves the city in his job. And so from that, three key lessons emerge for me. One is to listen to your noncommissioned officers. I mean, this wasn't new to me, I knew it. And I don't care what sector you're in, if you're a CEO of a business or the head football coach, you should listen to others. And ultimately, you're gonna have to make the decision, you're gonna have to own it. But if you listen to others, I've always found I can make better decisions. The second thing was, I don't care who you are, we all mess up. We all make mistakes. And what I found over the years is if I can give somebody the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, but keep them on the team, sometimes you can sometimes actually need to go to jail. But if you can, 90% of the time, they'll become one of your best employees. And the last thing was, and this is, this particular context, doesn't work in any sector. But don't kick out all the guys that can fight, because you might actually want to do your theme. 

Adam: I love that story. And I love those lessons. Listen to others, something that all listeners of this podcast have heard me say time and time and time again, great leaders are great listeners. We all mess up, we all make mistakes. If you're not failing, you're not trying. If you're going to do anything that requires any level of greatness, you're going to screw up along the way. As far as your last lesson. That's the first time I've heard that, but it makes perfect sense. You know, I'm a lover, not a fighter. So if I'm going through an adverse situation, I would love to have someone around me who's a great fighter. I have a good buddy from back in the day who I used to hang out with all the time back when I was in business school, and he's a mixed martial arts fighter. So I always felt really comfortable hanging out with him. So yeah, you always need good people around you who are great fighters.

General Buchanan: Thanks. So you talked about listening to others. This to me is one of the keys. And I recently wrote a book and I know we may talk about it. But there's a whole chapter on diversity. And what I think is the criticality of diversity, but I think people get it wrong a lot. Because they look at diversity as an end, they look at diversity as a series of targets, oh, we need to have X number of people of this ethnic origin or this religious group on our team. And that's, to me that's missing the whole point. The point is to surround yourself with people that have different perspectives and don't necessarily think exactly like you do. And yeah, some of those could be driven by ethnicity, or gender or sexual orientation, religion, national origin, what country they come from, it can be just about anything, but you want people around you who don't look at the world, exactly the same way that you do. If all you have is a bunch of yes, men or yes, women around yet, you're going to be limited to your own imagination, with respect to every decision you make. But if you surround yourself with people that have different perspectives, and you're humble enough to actually listen to what they have to say, I think you can make much much better decisions for the organization. In the end, if you're the key leader, you're going to still have to make the decision and you're gonna have to own it. But at least in my case, I've found that I make much better decisions when I open myself up to others' perspectives and consider them really instead of just a pro-forma deal. If I come in free judgment. Yes, I have an instinct, I have an instinct that I know which way I want to go. But if I'm open enough actually to listen to others, sometimes I fight to figure out that my instinct wasn't the best way at all.

Adam: I love it. I literally agree with every word you said. And you mentioned your book, which is not out yet. But when it is out, I will be the first person to read it, you're describing it to me off the air. And I'm really excited about it. And one of the things we were talking about is the focus on culture, and how important it is to understand the culture and the power of culture. Essential, whether you're trying to build a winning organizational culture, in the military, in the world of business, or really, in any organization, what are your best tips for anyone listening on how to understand the culture and how to build winning organizational cultures?

General Buchanan: I'll describe how I see the culture. If you think about it as a set of glasses or lenses that you look through, and how you interpret the rules. How you interpret the world, and culture is all the unwritten rules or the unwritten assumptions about how things work. And so with people from the United States of America, we think are logical, if you ask somebody, what did you do today? They're gonna say, well, I woke up, I had some breakfast, I went for a run whatever they think chronologically. If you ask somebody from a rack, what did you do today, they're not going to start out with what happened first, in order of time, they're going to start out with what was the most important thing that they did. So that's just a small example of two different ways of interpreting the rules. Neither one is right nor wrong. They're just very different perspectives. And so my argument is that if you're going to be successful in dealing with other people, you need to be a student of culture. But what are your own unwritten rules or assumptions about how the world works? Every organization has a culture. Sports teams have culture, businesses do, and the Marine Corps is a different culture than the army, which has a different culture than the air force in the Navy. I've worked with all of them. But if I'm going to be successful in dealing with Marines or sailors, I need to understand our culture. I don't need to necessarily adopt it as my own. But if I can understand what's going on, then I can be far more successful and communicate with them in understanding their perspectives, and in fact, influencing them to do what I think the right thing to do is. So you mentioned, how you understand the culture, it's actually easier from the outside than it is from the inside. And this is by studying things that you can call artifacts, but about how the world works. I saw this in Puerto Rico for hurricane Maria. And I was able to use this understanding to counter a narrative that was coming out of Washington DC, that the Puerto Rican people were lazy and not helping themselves. But that's not at all what I saw. What I saw when I went around is evidence of people whose sense of community and family was probably more powerful than almost anywhere else I'd been in the United States. But then based on that understanding, I couldn't go into a neighborhood delivering water without somebody not reaching up to me saying, hey, don't forget about this widow that lives up here in this corner, she can't come out to get water, but she needs water, too. These kinds of things. They really went out of their way to care for each other and to help each other. And so it's very apparent from an outsider's perspective. I'll tell you one more brief story in 2005, and 2006, I was in Iraq, and I was deployed as a combat advisor with the Iraqi special police commandos. And one thing that's common to the military in our country, in our culture, is that we're very self-critical, or learning organizations after every training event or combat operation, we're going to sit down and take a hard look at ourselves and try to learn from our experience. And what did we do well, what did we not do? Well, we invite back, can we demand the candor from the lowest ranking first and President? And we want them to get engaged and say, well, here's what I saw. And you know, you can't find a rifle company of the army or the Marine Corps where some Lance Corporal is not afraid to step up and say, look, here's where the company commander screwed up. We expect that and we demand that and that's what we want. That's part of our culture. Well, our problem when I was dealing with the Iraqi special police Commandos, by the way, the only thing police about these guys was their name. There was an urban light infantry raid force. We would go around in the dark of the night and snatch people that usually focused on al Qaeda targets, but anyway, great dudes, but we're trying to help them learn after every operation so we would have this American style after how we shouldn't review after every operation. And when I would ask, well, what do we do? Well, I might get a comment or two, what do we need to work on? I heard nothing, they would never be so. And it wasn't until we step back and consider. They've just got a different frame of reference for how the world works. From their perspective, they can never criticize their commander in public. And in fact, they tend to look at their commander as all-knowing and all-powerful. Well, once we really understood that we changed, our techniques would come off in operation by noncommissioned officers, and I would sit around a table with that commander, just put the commander not with U.S. troops, and say, well, what do we do? Well, what do we not do? Well, we'd have this discussion. And all we were doing is equip him to go do an Iraqi style after-action review, then he goes stand up in front of his troops. And he didn't ask anybody, what did they think, but he would say, here's what we did. Well, 12345, here's where we screwed up. And we need to work on 12345. That actually reinforced their perception of him, whereas this guy is all-knowing and all-powerful. But it started from being a student of culture. And once we understood that, we could actually help them improve, it was not going to be our way because our way didn't work. But it starts with an understanding of culture.

Adam: So much wisdom there and so much to unpack the power of taking a step back, and focusing on trying to see things through the lens of others. You're never gonna go wrong when you do that. The importance of humility. You mentioned that right at the beginning of our conversation. And that's really a key theme. When it comes to understanding those around you, have the humility to know that you don't know everything, and if you think you know everything, you're gonna make a lot more mistakes. Then you need humility. It is essential when it comes to successful leadership. What do you believe are the key characteristics of a great leader and what can anyone do to become a better leader?

General Buchanan: I'll start right there with humility. And a lot of times, I think we confuse humility with modesty. And they're not the same thing. In fact, I think Maya Angelou said this best she said, “You don't want modesty. You want humility”. Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less. So again, this exactly fits with your description of a leader who thinks they're the smartest person when they enter a room. They won't be open to input. They don't think they have anything to learn. And they're frankly, they're doomed probably to fail. They're certainly doomed to the mediocre limits of their own imagination. But if you can draw on the power of others, you actually have confidence in yourself to do this. But if you can listen to others, bring them in, and consider their perspectives, then I think in my case, at least, I was always able to make better decisions. No, we didn't have a vote on it. And I used to tell my troops, hey, we defend democracy. But this isn't a democracy. I'm going to make these decisions. But I honestly want to know what you think. And I want to know what your recommendations are. Well, what I found is, first of all, I make better decisions. Secondly, you involve everybody in providing input, who are gonna get to help shape the decisions. And then in the end, even if you don't accept their recommendations, they tend to be far more enthusiastic about carrying out the decision than it actually is. But it starts from a perspective of confidence, and then a willingness to surround yourself with people who don't think exactly like you do, and then being honestly open to their input. And sometimes you don't have time to go through all that. Sometimes it really is a crisis, and you need to decide right away. But then you can take time over the next day or two or hour to actually take a look at things and you might be able to shift it a little bit. Even though you had to get the ship headed in a certain direction. You can steer it a little bit left or right depending on what you've learned from others.

Adam: Through my hundreds and hundreds of interviews with America's most successful leaders, fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, the greatest military leaders like yourself, and Hall of Fame athletes, I put together a list of the key caracteristics of the very best leaders. And among those are characteristics that you either ticked off or alluded to self-confidence, self-awareness, and flexibility. And it really starts with understanding, to your point, that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're either in the wrong room or you're the wrong person. Yeah.

General Buchanan: That's perfect. That's perfect.

Adam: You made reference to a pivotal moment in your career, which happened toward the end of your time as a leader in the army. And that was when you were leading a military response to Hurricane Maria. That was one of many crises that you faced, in your 37 years in the military, wars, and hurricanes. During your time at the southern border, I want to single out a couple of these experiences, one being Hurricane Maria, and the other being your time commanding troops on the border. What were the best lessons you learn from leading during those two crises? And what are your best tips for any leader on how to lead during times of crisis, uncertainty, and upheaval?

General Buchanan: I'll give you one thing. And this actually comes out of my experience in Afghanistan. And again, I had known about this principle, but then I had to live it in both of those other instances, one during Hurricane Maria, and then one on the southwest border. And it's a principle called unity of effort. When our young military leaders, we learn lots of doctrines and everything, and we have these things that are I think there's nine of them, principles of war, they're supposed to be universal. One of those principles of war is unity of command. And the idea is that if you're going to be successful in combat and war, you should have one person in charge making all the decisions and flows down from their unity of effort. And frankly, if I was in charge of the right doctrine, I would replace unity of command with unity of effort. So I think it's more important, rather than trying to figure out who's in charge, and who can actually command troops to do something. It's important that you unite organizations, sometimes organizations that you have no authority over, or no command over around a common purpose. How are we going to work together to solve a wicked problem? So my experience in Afghanistan in 2015 and 2016, I was the director of operations for the NATO forces, but it also included the entire coalition, we had about 40 member nations. And some of them were there on a NATO authority, Germany, the United States, etc. Some of them were there, based on their own interests in Australia, the country of Georgia. Well, if I told somebody from Romania to do 12345, their first callback is going to be to their nation's capital, and we have clearance to do this or whatever. Well, we should expect that, because that's going to be the same across the board. And I really didn't have directive authority over them, let alone the Afghans that were there supporting. I didn't have that kind of directive authority. The big idea, though, is how can the Romanians who can do certain things, marry up their efforts with the Georgians who could do other things? So along with the Danes, the Brits, and the Americans, how are we going to work together to solve some of these wicked problems, even though we're not necessarily all doing the same thing, and I can't make it happen by ordering people to do things? So the big idea, from my perspective is to get everybody to agree on a common purpose. This is what we're trying to achieve, and more importantly, why we're trying to achieve this, then people can lend what they can to actually help solve the problem. And so let's go to Hurricane Maria. I'll describe just one example. So I was in command of all the military forces. It's about 15,000 troops we had for ships, 72, helicopters, Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, all involved in this support. Ultimately, we were there to support FEMA, and the governor of Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as they lead this effort. I was in command of the military forces, but not in command of the whole response. So I had no directive authority over a lot of the effort that was there. And I want to describe a wicked problem. So we had a wicked problem with airspace, the people that were actually in charge of the airspace, where's the Federal Aviation Administration, but their radars had been wiped out by this hurricane. So we had some military radars in place at a couple of the airports that gave them local control just of the airspace over those airports, but there was no control of the areas between the airports. And again, I didn't have the authority. But what I did is I directed my aviation commander, look, let's roll up the sides of the tent and invite all these people in. And let's listen to them, and then try to come up with a solution that works for all. And so we did. And ultimately, we came in with an airspace control plan that ended up looking a lot like Fort Campbell, Kentucky, there are three east-to-west routes and four north-to-south routes. And we got all these different organizations to agree to this, even though we had no authority over, hey, if you're gonna fly from east to west, you flew 1000 feet over the ground on this route. If you're gonna fly from west to east, you flew it 500 feet, you can only enter these routes at certain control points. Everybody took all these maps, and they all agreed to them. And we had zero mid-air collisions, even when flying at night. But we had no real authority over that that was about bringing together disparate organizations uniting around a common purpose and then solving a wicked problem even when we couldn't mandate the solution.

Adam: Really interesting perspective. And as you're describing your experience, the first thing that I'm thinking is, there are people listening to this conversation, who are probably working in organizations where they want to get things done, and they don't necessarily have the authority to do it. What would be your clear tangible tips and takeaways for anyone listening on how to exercise authority that they don't necessarily have?

General Buchanan: I think that you can bring others together, who may have pieces of authority within their own organizations, but explain the problem, and involve them so that you better understand the problem, you understand the problem from their perspective. And then sometimes you can actually draw on their authority to help solve the problem. We do this all the time in international operations, sometimes we leverage the authority of one country to do something, and in a military operation where the other country, even the United States, may have something that requires approval at the presidential level. But you can find it in the United Kingdom, a lieutenant colonel kind of proves that particular operation. Well, so we do it under British authority, and the Brits take ownership of it. And that's how we work together sometimes to make these things happen. But you got to start by understanding how they perceive the situation, and what their authorities are before you launch on it. And again, starts with an assumption that not everybody looks at the world the same way. Not everybody has the same capabilities and limitations. We bring different potential understandings of the problem as well as different potential solutions. And so when you involve others, I think you can be far more successful. If you're the marketing person, and you live in your own world, just in marketing, but you don't understand what's going on from a risk management perspective or the financial perspective, you're probably going to be doomed to a limited answer. But when you understand the world from another's perspective and can get them involved in the solution, you can probably go to have a lasting and more powerful solution. You know, if you're the defensive coordinator on a football team, but you never spend any time with the offense, you're missing the boat says, isn't part of the same issue.

Adam: Great advice. And it actually brings me to something I think about. We have a good mutual friend, General Ronald Hoover. And a tip that he shares is the power of having a great Rolodex, having a great network, and the ability to build relationships with lots of people, with people of all kinds of backgrounds. And when you're adept at developing relationships, and invested in building relationships, it's going to pay off. And it's not about trying to find the immediate payoff, today or tomorrow. It's about the process. And it's about understanding that when you go all in, in trying to understand those around you trying to see things through their worldview, trying to help them, it's going to pay off, you're going to be able to be all that much more successful in whatever it is you're trying to accomplish.

General Buchanan: Yeah, absolutely. And so sometimes I've done exactly that. I've been facing a crisis. And I call on people that I know, hey, this is I'm getting ready to get on a plane and go to x. This is what I think's gonna happen. What do you think? What's your advice? You've lived in part of this dream in the past? What do you think about it? But just as importantly, I've been called two years ago, maybe the U.S.-appointed a special envoy to Haiti. And it was a friend of mine and a very experienced ambassador. You know, once upon a time we were running around with rifles in Iraq, and over 10 years ago or something, but I've known this guy over the years, and he's a phenomenal leader. Anyway, he's getting ready to go do something in a country where I had some experience in Haiti, but not a lot. But he just wanted to know my thoughts, not because it's specific to Haiti, but because it was a wicked problem. And then drew on me. Hey, do I know anybody that might have some specific knowledge? And so I think that Rolodex is a really important idea, especially in a time of crisis, you can call on others and ask, well, what do you think about this? And generally, you're gonna get some great input.

Adam: What can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

General Buchanan: I think it starts with understanding what your purpose is, what's your big idea? What is it that motivates you? And then how can you leverage that to overcome some adversity because you're going to face adversity. We're all going to face adversity. And one of the nonprofit boards, I'm honest, started out as the National Resilience Institute, and then evolved eventually into World Mecca International. They started out with this focus on building resiliency in individuals and communities. And the particular target audience was school kids, first responders, and the military, which is how they got me involved. I've been through a lot of their events, and I've met a lot of their people under the speaking circuit. And it's always inspirational. And these are people that have undergone some incredible experiences. You usually see bad things from one young lady who was a victim of gang rape. Another was a gold star mob, she lost her son in combat, a PTSD person who was paralyzed from the waist down since when she was 16 years old. All these different people have undergone some things, traumatic experiences. But here's the thing, we're all going to face adversity. And if you accept that, and you prepare for it, and then you try to become more and more resilient by doing things like listening to others, and not bottling up problems, but actually dealing with them at cetera, then you can use these experiences as opportunities for growth, rather than something that's going to crush it. We're all going to experience some form of trauma or we're going to lose a loved one. You may get fired from a job, you may have a divorce. Okay, that happens, and life happens. But how can you take that experience, and then use it? This is not going to be automatic, and it's never easy, but how can you use that to grow into a more effective person more effective later than you weren't beforehand use these adverse situations as opportunities for growth.

Adam: General Buchanan, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

General Buchanan: Thanks. It's a pleasure to join.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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