Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: General Michael Garrett

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

Adam: Our guest today is a retired four-star general who spent nearly four decades serving in the army, including more than a decade in the elite 75th Ranger Regiment. General Michael Garrett was the commanding general of the United States Army Forces Command, where he led the largest organization in the United States Army, leading roughly 750,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilians. General Garrett, thank you for joining us.

General Garrett: Adam, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here with you today.

Adam: Honor is mine. You're a native of Ohio. You were born in Cleveland, you went to college at Xavier. But you've lived just about everywhere. We could probably spend the entire episode going through every city you've lived in every country you've lived in. You grew up in a military family and you went to high school in Germany. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What experiences and lessons most significantly shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

General Garrett: That's a big question. To answer your last question first, I think any success that I've had in life, then that is being a man, being a father, being a husband, being a Catholic, being a soldier, I owe to the example of my father, command sergeant major Ed Garrett, he today remains the most influential person ever in my life. Because of him, we did move around, not as much as my kids did. But we did move around and we found ourselves during my high school years in Germany, he was stationed there and I graduated from Baumholder American High School. When it was time to go off to college, my dad joined the army when he was in the 10th grade. I think he was 16 years old. He was 18 when they found out that he was 16. And with my grandmother's permission, they let him stick around. But he didn't know much about college. So, he had his officer bosses help them. Long story short, I ended up like a lot of kids in Europe at the time at the University of Maryland and Munich and did a semester there. Then worked my way to Xavier University in Cincinnati a couple of years later. Graduated and was commissioned into the army from there.

Adam: You spent your formative years in the Army, as a member of the elite 75th Ranger Regiment, what were the best lessons that you learned from your experience as an Army Ranger?

General Garrett: I talked about my father, and how important and impactful his example has always been to me. Growing up as the oldest child and the only boy with three younger sisters, my dad said many things to me that I didn't appreciate until I got older. One of them was you only get one chance to make a first impression. To this day, I think about that. Not with every interaction, but I do think about it. And it's important to think about how I even got to the Ranger Regiment. I'm Second Lieutenant Garrett. My dad was my division Command Sergeant Major at the time in the 24th Infantry Division. The commander at the time was a guy named Norman Schwarzkopf. My dad one day says, “Mike, I got an interview scheduled for you with the commander of the First Ranger Battalion.” I went to Ranger School, but I didn't have an appreciation for what the Rangers really were. I went up and met with this guy named Keith Nightingale who was a battalion commander and I still keep in touch with him today. But he sat down with me, and he goes, “Mike, like all of the other lieutenants here, you're the best lieutenant in your battalion, and I'm gonna hire you because your father takes great care of us, and we'd love him.” But he goes, “Hey, you just need to know that once you come here today, your dad can’t help you.” And I'm like, “I got this. How hard can this be?” Well, it was hard. It was hard because there were probably 35 lieutenants in that battalion. But every single one of them was handpicked. They were the best lieutenants in their battalion. They were all very smart, very fit. Every day, you had to bring your A-game. In my early days in the regiment, especially in that battalion, they went through probably a couple of lieutenants a week. And when I say went through, lieutenants were fired for one reason or another. So the first two years that I spent there, for me, established or began the foundation that I would build on for almost 40 years in the Army. The lessons that I learned about people, about life, about leadership, I can take every one of them even the things that I thought about as a four-star general, back to those early days in the Rangers, I was fortunate that I was able to come back to the Rangers as a captain and command accompany to come back again, as a major. And one of my greatest disappointments in the Army is that I was not chosen to come back as a lieutenant colonel and command, a Ranger Battalion. I still think about that to this day. Growing up in the army, you have a different sense of race, and the impact of that. I had some experiences early on. The Ranger Regiment is a very homogenous, white organization. And I've always been, if not the only one of the very few African Americans in a unit that I've been in or meeting that I've sat in, but this was an interesting experience. I can remember as a lieutenant, something had happened with my platoon sergeant. I told you lieutenants get fired all the time. This was probably a fireable offense, and the only thing I was thinking about was my dad's gonna kill me, and he's going to be disappointed. Well, the platoon sergeant said to me, “I just talked to the squad leaders. They weren't good.” And at this point, probably seven or eight months that I had led that organization. Even though there were some issues early on about having a black platoon leader, and three white squad leaders that weren't all that excited about it at the beginning, eight, nine months later, when they had the opportunity to get rid of Garrett, they decided not to. That is something that I learned a great deal from. It's something that I think about from time to time. But the Ranger Regiment and the reason it's so important is that every day you're around people who just make you better. They're smarter, they're more fit. They're everything that you would want in a leader in a person. And just hanging around those folks makes you better. And they certainly made me better.

Adam: You shared several great lessons. You mentioned that you may have gotten in because of your dad. But once you're here, your dad can't help you. That's something that can be applied to every single one of us. It's really important to leverage your network. When there's an opportunity that you're interested in, don't pretend like your network isn't valuable. Use your network to try to get that opportunity. Who do you know, who could connect you to someone who is potentially a decision maker or might be a step away from the decision maker or two steps away from that decision maker? But at the end of the day, once that conversation takes place, you're going to be judged based on you. Once you're in the door, your performance is on you.

General Garrett: I think the other piece there is understanding that. And as you get to a point where you have influence and can use it for the greater good, you should. One of my favorite generals gave me some great advice when I was promoted to four-star general. One of them was to use your rank for good. I thought as a colonel, as a brigadier general that I could help people. But what I found as a four-star general was that it was almost a superpower. Every single day, I wrote several recommendations based on people reaching out to me for help and assistance. And I learned that, as you said, from people doing that for me.

Adam: I love that. How can you help people? How can you use your platform to help people? How can you use whatever it is that you have going for you to help people? In your case, it was your rank. In the case of anyone listening to this podcast, what do you have that you can utilize to help those around you?

General Garrett: We talked about leading organizations, from the very beginning, this is probably because of my father, this has always been very personal to me. The Army has been a very personal endeavor. I only know one way to lead. That's my personal example and from the front of whatever organization I was leading. And the more complex, the larger the organizations get, people use that as an excuse not to lead in that way. But the 750,000, that is a big number, almost the whole army. But it's because the whole National Guard has counted there, all of the Army Reserves is counting there, and then almost 500,000 of the active component. But my point is, even when I was leading that organization, people were like, “Oh, you can't know every one of them. It’s too big.” As a battalion commander, I can remember my brigade commander counseling me and he goes, “Mike, you're going to be a brigade commander. But you're not going to be able to lead your brigade of over 4000 people like you're leading your battalion of 750 people, every one of your paratroopers.” And I thought to myself, he thinks I know every one of my paratroopers. When I went to that brigade in Alaska, I did my absolute best over the four years that I commanded that organization to know every single paratrooper. And I would argue that you could ask any of them about an interaction with then Colonel Garrett, and they'd probably give you a couple of examples. So knowing your people, investing in your people, and doing everything you can to talk to your people, is the most important thing that any leader can do. As a leader, the audio and the video have to match. You'd have a lot of opportunity, as a leader to talk to people, you get to write policy and sign your names to things. Soldiers and the people that I've led, they'll read that stuff, they'll listen to it. But they want to see how you act if your actions and the way you live your life are in alignment with the things that come out of your mouth, and the things that you might put on paper. Leading by example is just that leading by example. I don't care if you're a four-star general, in the army, one of our traditions is that officers always eat last. The reason they did that is because that would ensure that nobody wanted a pissed-off boss at the end of the line with no food. That would ensure that the soldiers that went before got their fair ration. But as a four-star general, given the opportunity, I always ate last. I never tried to ask anybody to do anything that I wasn't physically capable of doing. When I had that many people and the demands on my time, I wasn't able to do everything with everybody. But there was no doubt in the army. And that's subordinates, my peers, my superiors. If I said something, I did it and did my best to live it. I think the thing that scared me most, I don’t know if scared is the right word, but I hate hypocrites. It would just break my heart if one of my soldiers were to be in an interview, and somebody asked him about General Garrett or Colonel Garrett or Lieutenant Garrett and for them to say, “Yeah, he talks a good game. But that's not how they live this life. And that's not what you see.” And I'll tell you, that's hard. And it gets harder with the more responsibility that you have. There were a couple of things that I did to stay grounded, one of them, and what I do now is I don't walk past trash. Never walk past trash. Pick it up. I do that because a lot of times if there's not a trashcan nearby, it can be a pain. But when I walk by it, I think to myself, you hypocrite. I turn around, I go back and I pick up that trash. I share that with folks because either literally or figuratively, that happens all day long. It happens all around us. I could go on forever. But those are just a couple of things that come to mind.

Adam: I love it. Everything you shared, speaks to how anyone listening to this conversation, as a leader can build trust, which is something that every single leader needs to do. It's a topic that leaders struggle with, and you just broke down how any one of us can do it. Lead by example. The audio has to match the video. Your walk has to match your talk. If you say something, make sure that you're also doing it. You shared a very concrete example of a small habit that you can incorporate into your life that helps you make this happen. You see trash, you don't walk past it. But there are so many small things that any one of us can do. And these small habits, build and build and build. And at the end of the day, to your point, it’s ensuring that you're the real deal. You're not a hypocrite. Being a person of character, and ensuring that the person that people see is the person that you are when the lights are off.

General Garrett: I think the other piece is I told you how personal this is for me. And I think my favorite thing about the army and what I miss the most is just being around young people, just gives you energy and reinforces. For me, the reason that I kept doing what I did for so long. It was because of every one of them. People tell you all the time, what you can't do. “Oh, you can't know every single one of them.” But every single day, I tried my best. I never walked by anybody without saying hello, I would stop and talk to folks. And even though at the end of the day, I may not have remembered the 50 or 60 people that I talked to. What I found is that they certainly remembered and that's what mattered. That's the other thing that I try and share with leaders. The most important thing, and now I have about a year in the public sector and working with corporate leaders, I tell them, “The one thing that business, or at least the ones that I've seen and the army have in common is that leaders have to lead and great organizations have great leaders. And great leaders know their people.” When I got to the Army Forces Command, I tried to learn the organization, trying to meet as many of the people who worked in our headquarters as I could. I'm a physical fitness enthusiast. I love working out, Stand and Shake*17:44 is one of the things that I have 1always been very proud of. But when I got to the fourth column, the first day, I kind of walked up the stairs. And the next day, I don't know if I was running late, but I got on the elevator. It was full of people. We chatted up to the fifth floor. That made an impression on me. After that, I thought, every day, I get the opportunity to engage with a few members of the staff. And even if it's only from the first floor to the fifth floor, it's better than nothing. So I always took the elevator. Everybody in that building, or at least the people that get on the elevator with me, you'd have thought they all worked on the fifth floor. But it dawned on me shortly thereafter that they just wanted to have the conversation with the boss and they all rode as far as the elevator would take them or until I got off. So again, just another example of the importance of people and one way to reach maybe one more person than you've reached the day before.

Adam: The core principles of leadership are universal. And you just said it. Leaders have to lead. Great organizations have great leaders. Great leaders know their people. One thing you didn't say expressly, but is implicit in everything you said, not only do great leaders know their people, but great leaders love their people.

General Garrett: Yes. As I said before, this has always been a very personal endeavor from the very first platoon of 30 infantrymen when I was a second lieutenant to the United States Army Forces Command. I have always made it very personal as the FORSCOM commander of a very large, distributed complex organization. One of the things that all senior leaders have to figure out is how to effectively communicate given the distribution complexity and all this other stuff. One of the things that I did with the staff, was every Monday, me and the Command Sergeant Major would do a 15-minute session. We started doing it via our classified network. We had a classified video network where everybody would pile into these conference rooms and Sergeant Major and I would talk to them. But I would always start with what I did over the weekend, I would share with them what my family was doing. I remember when my wife and I found out we were going to be grandparents. I told all of them, I said, “Hey, we're going to be grandparents. And I'm looking for my grandfather's name.” I got 1000 different recommendations. But the point is, I would share those things with them. Then I would share my observations from my travels the previous week. I would share with them what I was thinking about, and what I was most concerned about. Then the Sergeant Major would say a few things, and then we'd be done. And what I found in the way that I have always led is there are some talented people out there. If I assess that the person is of the right character, has the right competence, and my primary responsibility is to empower resources and just make sure that the guidance that I'm giving is clear to them. Every organization that I've been in, that has been my approach. I've never been in a bad organization, and it has had very little to do with Mike Garrett being innovative, creative, brilliant, everything with a bunch of really smart, innovative, creative people being empowered to do their jobs, that made every organization better. You get to a point in any business where you are no longer the expert because it's too big, and complex. Now you're managing a bunch of experts. I think what helped me the most, goes back to this audio-video alignment. Everybody knew who Mike Garrett was, everybody knew that I would be completely honest and frank with them in all of our dealings. But they all knew that they could come to me and talk to me and tell me just about anything. I think that was very helpful. It's probably human nature, to not want to go to the boss with bad news. But unfortunately, in the business that we're in, there's more good news than bad, but just barely. So create an environment where your subordinate leaders are comfortable coming to you. Because one, they know that you will listen. Two, they know that you won't overreact and three, they value your experiences and your feedback. I just think it’s important.

Adam: It's one thing, as a leader, to create an open-door policy. Tell the leaders within your organization, you have to have your doors open. But it's another thing to empower people within your company, people on your team to want to walk into those open doors. How do you do that? How do you create that environment? you just laid it out. It's by being an active listener. It's by being a person who doesn't overreact and wants to hear what the person you're talking to has to say. Listening rather than speaking. You shared some other really important lessons that I want to dive into. You spoke a lot about the importance of developing real, natural, organic human connections. At the end of the day, you're managing people. You might have had 4000, 40,000, 700,000 people on your team. Those are big numbers. But there are several people. Every single number is a person. To be successful as a leader, you can't look at your team as numbers on a board. Every single person in your organization matters has feelings, has emotions, thinks about things differently, and needs to be managed a little bit differently. It starts with being a real person yourself, being open, being vulnerable, being real. That's how you lead.

General Garrett: Yeah. Again, probably from my dad, but I've always believed that every single person in every organization counts and every single person has a position to play. I certainly recognize that and I don't care if I would walk into the headquarters on Fridays, and that's when the cleaning crew would be there. Every Friday morning, I'd see him and say hello and I'd stop to chat. I remember the head lady who was running this group. She shared one day. She goes, “Hey, they're making it harder for us to get into the building.” And I said, “I'll look into it.” The next week, she said, “Thank you for looking into it, because it wasn't as hard to get in.” When you sit in meetings with generals, depending on the kind of meeting, sometimes you have their executive officers, their aides-de-camp. These are all handpicked individuals of high potential that we're trying to groom to take our places 20 years down the road. It was not uncommon for me, and they figured this out pretty quickly. Generally speaking, everything that came to me was hard, or else it wouldn't have come to me. These guys would have already solved it. But I would always ask for input. As I would go around the room, I would even hit the aides. I'd ask the major in the room, “Hey, what do you think?” And the first couple of times, they were surprised, one, that I was asking. But two, what happened after that is they came to those meetings prepared. You can't say that everybody matters. You can't say that you value input from everybody if you don't show it if that's not what you do. That was a way for me, to establish culture, to establish norms, to allow people, to provide input in a forum where maybe it was somebody else they wanted.

Adam: Going back to the highest-pressure moments in your career. How did you perform at your very best in those moments? What takeaways do you have on how to perform in times of pressure?

General Garrett: Yeah, I think of Peyton Manning. A lot of people talk about the importance of agility. But you really can't be agile unless you've mastered the basics of whatever it is that you're doing. I think that foundation of mastery allows for the level of agility that you see with a guy like Peyton Manning, who could stand up there behind the center, look at the defense, and come up with the best play based on their alignment. I think the fundamentals matter. I can remember as the FORSCOM commander, responsible for the 750,000 folks and the readiness of our army, I can remember and he's my very best friend, but he was another four-star general. I said, “Hey, my focus is going to be on excellent squads.” The squad is a non-personal organization. It's one of the smallest units in the army. I remember he said, “Why are you focused on the squad? You're the FORSCOM commander. And I said, “Well, the bottom line is if our squads or platoons or companies or battalions and brigades are not going to be able to fight, we might not lose the war, but we’ll cause our senior leaders to make really tough decisions because we can't win the fights that we're supposed to.” I've always been focused on mastery of the fundamentals of whatever it is that you're doing. I think that is the foundation that I talked about earlier the 10 years that I spent with the Ranger Regiment, that was my foundation of excellence, that allowed me to walk into any training environment, and with a few inputs make a pretty good assessment about the readiness of the unit. I tell young people today, I have a son as a captain in the army, I have a son-in-law who's a captain in the army. I remind them all the time that it is about mastering the fundamentals of what you do. You can never lose focus on that as you continue to move up. The other piece is the importance of having and enforcing standards. I told you the kind of organizations that have been in. But every organization I've been in, every single person every day came to work wanting to do their absolute best. It was my responsibility to make sure that when they understood what the task was, they understood what the standard for that task was, and that we all collectively understood the thing that makes it hard and those are the conditions that you're operating under.

Adam: You have to master the fundamentals. You have to be prepared. You brought up Peyton Manning, I've interviewed many great athletes across sports. I dove into this topic with Terrell Davis, a two-time Super Bowl champion. I've dove into this topic recently with Bernie Williams, the great baseball player. It all comes down to preparation. What you do when the lights are off dictates how you perform when the lights are on.

General Garrett: The other I also wanted to mention, is when you said the most stressful situations, the first two or three were combat memories. The others were three and four-star memories. The first thing I do with really hard stuff is pray. I’ve always devout a Catholic, and I think my favorite thing about being Catholic is being able to go to confession. But I pray a lot. That has been helpful for me, because there are just so many variables, and I don't care how much preparation you do, especially in combat, there's just so many variables, and there's so many things that you can't account for. Even though you try your best to account for everything, you just can't. So I have personally found prayer to be very helpful and useful for me. It's because I'm able to remind myself that I am more than prepared and capable of whatever the task is, but also mindful of the fact that you cannot control everything and some of the situations that I found myself in. I did want to make sure that I got that in because it's a big part of who Mike Garrett is, and has been a very important part of my life.

Adam: General Garrett, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

General Garrett: Whatever you choose to do with your life, be good at it. The most successful people I know, are people who have committed their life to mastering whatever it is that they're doing. They've put in a lot of hard work. The very best of them are just wonderful people, people that you want to emulate, people that care about other people, people that other people want to work around. That doesn't happen by accident. Staying focused on one thing and mastering whatever it is that you're doing, two, not being a hypocrite. Reminding yourself often that you only get one chance to make a first impression. And that there is a little bit of good fortune in all of this as well.

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

General Garrett: Thanks for having me, Adam.


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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