Carrie Jones:

So the F-15E is, like, 65-foot-wide wingspan.

McKinlay:

This is Carrie Jones, a retired fighter pilot.

Carrie:

We call it a flying tennis court because it's huge.

McKinlay:

There are few jobs that so clearly demonstrate the need for high precision more than being a fighter pilot. One seemingly small incorrect decision can be the difference between life and death.

Carrie:

It's hard to describe, because there's nothing on the ground that mimics it. If you've ever been on a big roller coaster and you hit the bottom and it's that "push you into your seat" feeling—that's about three Gs. We fly nine. And the F-15 is so powerful, it can actually accelerate going up. There's nothing like it. So you would hold brakes, run up your engines to make sure your engines were good, and then you would kick it into afterburner and it pushed you into the back of your seat. I love that feeling. I absolutely love that feeling. Like, this is my roller coaster.

They always tell you, be ready to eject. Student would overperform, and I'm there to grab the controls if they try to go outside of that envelope. Even in your best efforts, there's times where it goes just a millisecond too long, and you'll feel the aircraft wing dip—which in a T-38 is, you know, impending death. And so I, very calmly, I was like, "I have the aircraft." And I start climbing away and I clean up the aircraft. I'm like, "Okay, let's put the gear up. All right. Do you know what happened there?" And they're like, "Uh, yeah, I got a little—" I'm like, "Uh, no. We actually almost flipped. You pulled way too much on the aircraft, and it didn't have the airspeed to do that. So it's going to stop flying, and it's going to hurt us."

McKinlay:

Hurt us, as in crashing to the ground and dying.

This specific example is extreme, but this experience of, "No, no, this does actually matter," is familiar to all of us in life and in business. Some tasks are black and white. You either succeed or you fail. There is no debate. But others—like my role as producer and one of the hosts of this show—are more ambiguous and subjective. Our goal today is to understand high precision and how to think about high precision when it comes to performance, even when the job is more ambiguous in nature.

Welcome to Leading Outward, the Arbinger Institute's podcast, where we explore the tools and ideas we've used for over 45 years to help people solve their toughest leadership and organizational challenges by leading with an outward mindset—seeing people as people. I'm McKinlay Uterson.

Laughlin Air Force Base is the largest pilot training base in the U.S. Air Force. And when Carrie became the first female operations group commander at Laughlin, the base was hurting. A favorite instructor had just died in an accident, and leadership had unexpectedly been fired. Meanwhile, pilot training was ramping up, and there was significant pressure to push pilots through faster.

Carrie:

Instructors were concerned that the syllabus had been cut back way too much, and that the quality of the pilot was at risk. They cared so much for their students. Because in that work, if they failed to do their job well, it could cost that student their life. It could cost the lives of other people that their student, as a future pilot, may be flying. It could cost the lives of the people on the ground that are being protected by the people in the air. There's so many implications. So they felt the weight of that responsibility.

McKinlay:

And then Carrie said something to me that I had never considered before, and was the start of seeing performance in a completely new way.

Carrie:

How you operate the aircraft—it's pretty clear whether or not you're performing. Tactical work is very one-to-one relationship. And the aircraft does not care about your intent. It's going to do what you tell it to do.

McKinlay (reflection):

The aircraft does not care about your intent. Carrie said that, and I immediately thought—that would be so wild, to have a role where what I input is exactly what is output, and that there would be such value in getting that immediate snap-of-a-finger feedback on your performance. So what about roles where that isn't the case? Where you don't have an immediate feedback loop? How does that impact how you think about performance?

I called my colleague Brad Harker, who manages a sales team, to explore with him how he navigates this reality. I wanted to know how Brad ensures that there's still high performance, high execution—but in roles that have a much longer, slower feedback loop. We often call it "the tail." Like there's a longer tail on the outcomes.

Brad Harker:

The thing about a plane is, it is literally a vehicle that requires input. In sales and leadership, you don't have that luxury. The moment you invite people and you involve people, it feels like you introduce this subjective tail of time. This plane analogy is beautiful. A plane is, like, machined perfectly. The tolerances are down to the micro, micro millimeters. And so this input has very little margin for confusion or subjectivity or error. But if you aren't establishing clear perspectives and parameters in your team, all of those changes that you're making, or leading, are all going to be filtered with a layer of subjectivity. And when it actually comes down to their interpretation through a lack of clarity, that slows down the process and dilutes the effectiveness of it as well.

McKinlay:

I'm tracking what Brad is saying here, because I've experienced the slowing down, the reduced effectiveness, that can come from human subjectivity. But I push on him a little bit, because at the same time, interpretation and subjectivity is a uniquely human capacity that is powerful and enables some of the best of what we can accomplish. So my question to Brad was, how do you leverage subjectivity and interpretation productively?

Brad:

I think that's a beautiful question. It's getting in front of your audience. It's talking to the people that make or break your success. And rather than trying to guess or speculate, it's to obtain absolute certainty and clarity about what they want. You can validate a sales process just like you can validate a product. You can validate a strategy. You can validate any of those things. When you get that clarity, when you get that insight from your team, and then you get the feedback from the people that you're taking those solutions to, and you're seeing their traction, you're getting their feedback—those data points are more instruments of validation, to say, "We're not yet into the flow state of what we're creating here. But man, I'm seeing a lot of indicators that I'm no longer guessing. I'm challenging assumptions. I'm getting feedback from people that don't have any other reason but to just give me honest, direct feedback. And a lot of those indicators and signals are all validating what we're doing right now. So let's proceed and let's keep going."

McKinlay:

So you're just constantly looking for data points. It is so easy to forget that what we do only matters in so far as it has the impact we intend for the people we're trying to help.

For example, the impact for fighter pilots is national security. For nurses, it's health and life. For architects, it's creating places for people to live and work. So as you think about you and your team, what is your intended impact for the work you do? And then how do you know if your intended impact and actual impact are the same?

Part of being able to identify that is what Brad was just talking about—getting that feedback from your customers, patients, and stakeholders. And then part of it is ensuring you know your impact on those you work with—your direct team. How do you find out if your work and performance is helping or hurting the performance of your team and the overall strategy?

Brad:

I think you've got to look at a few different data points. Impact on team is one of those. So, like, what does the leader's team say about the leader? What do the leader's peers say about the leader? Those are two indicators for sure. I think that sometimes you can put too much trust in your leaders—so much so that trust leads to a disconnect, a distance. And if you're not checking those metrics and getting under the hood and skip-leveling, it doesn't matter how good of a leader, like, MDs like Brian or I are. I fully expect leadership to feel comfortable and plan on calling anybody on my team or Brian or McKinlay or you, and just saying, "What is your experience with Brad? What's good? What can he work on?" And then coming to me and saying, "Brad, today, your scorecard, your report card today is a B+. A lot of great things going."

I want that feedback. I want to know what I'm doing well, because sometimes we don't hear that. And the other part: "Here's some things that we need to work on." Having just a really, really, really accessible, flattened feedback loop. There's no distance. There's no person in the organization that they shouldn't call any time, just to check in and say, "How are things going? I got a hunch that this feels like it's a silo over here. Feels like there's some conflict there. What are you feeling? Something's off. Okay, well, let's explore that further." And then you'll probably find other signals like, "Wow, there's a rigidity there. There's a lack of humility there. They seem unwilling to compromise on their approach." Okay, that could be a red flag.

McKinlay:

Where I've kind of gotten to is, okay—we start with this thought and idea of, in high-precision roles, the feedback loop is instantaneous, and so it's easy to identify your success. And what I'm hearing from you is, right, we have to incorporate that into our work in less-structured roles.

Brad:

And sometimes I need to adapt my strategy because I know what needs to happen. I've got that ability. And I've built that trust with my team, with my leadership, and the feedback loop has been really alive and well and healthy. Everything is functional. Everything is working. So that I now have the ability to deviate from the plan—to risk something so that we can break the paradigm.

McKinlay:

If this episode was sent to you, thanks for being here. That means someone in your life listened to this and thought of you, which is such a gift—to have relationships like that. And if someone has come to mind while you've been listening, it's probably because what you're hearing could help them solve points of friction in their life. So care enough about them to share this episode.

When I first started thinking about this idea of high precision, it felt strange to think that my job wasn't high precision, because somehow that makes it seem like there aren't things I need to execute. But high performance and execution is expected of me. So I was feeling unclear, because I thought I didn't really have anything in my life that was high precision. But of course I do. We all do. Every day I drive a car, and it turns left when I tell it to, and it stops when I say, and it lets me know when I do those things poorly.

The beauty of those high-precision tasks is that you are given feedback immediately. So how do we incorporate that benefit into longer-tail tasks? It's where Brad and I got to at the end of our conversation. You incorporate the benefit by intentionally seeking that feedback out. If you don't intentionally flatten the feedback loop, you'll get feedback when the natural tail ends. But if you're wanting to perform with precision—to be most effective—we need to gather data and make adjustments sooner than would come about naturally.

Carrie incorporated this into the strategic way of working at Laughlin Air Force Base. As high-precision as flying a jet is, there are many elements of Carrie's leadership at the largest training base that require the intentional seeking of feedback.

Carrie:

In the high-performing world, nobody wants to fail, and nobody wants to admit that they're failing. As the operations group commander, I would often get a very thumbs-up, like, "Well, it's tough, ma'am, but we're doing great." I tried to build the environment where it was okay to say how things were. It wasn't okay to keep them where they were. We weren't going to stay in a bad situation, but we needed to admit where we were.

And that's the key to strategy. You cannot build a good strategy if you don't recognize your current environment. You have to build the picture, share that picture, identify the problem, and then identify what right looks like.

McKinlay (reflection):

What Carrie is saying about strategy here is critical. We can't craft a plan that will take us where we want to go without getting crystal clear about where we are right now. But how do we get that clarity? That's where Carrie's approach becomes so interesting.

Carrie:

I had six squadrons that reported to me, and I took two representatives from every squadron. I told the squadron commanders, "Give me two guys. Give me the one that has been there about a year, still has time left in the squadron, is the peer leader, and people will listen to. Doesn't have to be in a leadership position—but the de facto leader. Send me that person. And then I want you to find the person that's the most upset, that grumbles and whines the most, and send me them, because I want to hear everything that they say."

So it was just me and 12 people that were within the squadron. I said, "Let me be clear. I appreciate you being here, and you're all getting bonus points for being here, but I need you to tell me like it is, and I will not hold what you say against you. Let's spend some time describing what's going wrong." And I thought it was going to take a minute, and I had to cut them off at an hour. I mean, they launched in. And they did not hold back. And I was really appreciative for that.

And I said, "Okay, now let's spend an hour defining what right looks like. And if you don't know, start with what was wrong, and tell me what it would look like if it was right."

McKinlay (reflection):

Sometimes we are so mired in the status quo that we can't even envision something different—even if we hate the status quo. So the question is brilliant: if you can't describe what right looks like, start with what's wrong, and we'll envision the opposite together.

Carrie:

So we spent a good another hour describing the perfect professional pilot training base. And then I took that data and I brought it to the squadron commanders, and I said, "Does this make sense?" And they said, "Wow, he put that really well." They didn't know who it was. But they're like, "Yeah, no, that's exactly what we were thinking. Oh, they missed this." And so from there, I said, "Here's some lines of effort to try to get this reality to change to this future reality. And I want all of you to take a month and go look at your squadrons, because one squadron is going to have this part figured out, but maybe they're not as strong in another."

McKinlay (reflection):

It's so helpful to get this breakdown of these steps, so that we can replicate what just occurred to Carrie in the moment. She gathered the people with influence—both the positive influence and the detractors—from each squadron. And this is exactly the skip-level work Brad was talking about, because Carrie isn't sharing what she thinks. She's communicating back to the squadron commanders what their people are feeling and seeing.

Carrie:

I said, "In one month, you need to come back." Well, all of that worked out really well. They came back. They had a plan. Now we actually could start tracking and going, "Oh, if we're able to have some type of professional development in this squadron"—because one squadron was great at it, another squadron wasn't so great. "How do we help our instructors develop and get back to the Air Force and be that next-level leader that they need to be?"

We did a check-back-in six months, and I got the same 12 people back in the room. And we had done a lot. I knew it was going to take a while, but I thought, in six months, man, we had really made some effort. And so I'm like, "All right, guys. How's it going?" And they're like, "It sucks. Nothing's changed." And I was like, "No, nothing's changed?" "Nothing at all."

McKinlay (reflection):

As Carrie was telling me this, I totally thought she was going to go in a different direction. Knowing that she is the high-precision, high-achieving fighter pilot, and that's what has led her to the success she's had in her career, I just assumed that what she does works. But then she went a completely different direction and told me that the report was that nothing had changed at all. And honestly, there's a degree of comfort in this. Even those people really skilled with high-precision tasks don't always get it right.

Carrie:

That was my big "oops" moment. And all of my strategy team from my previous job, if they listen to this, they're going to go, "Oh, what were you thinking? What went wrong, Carrie? What were you missing?"

I failed to set measures of effectiveness and measures of performance. So once you set your outcome and say, "This is what we need to get to," you need to take that extra step and say, "This is how we know we'll get there." Or, "This is how we know we've arrived."

McKinlay:

What did it look like to identify those measures of effectiveness?

Carrie:

When it comes to strategy, measures of performance are really easy to identify, because it's pretty clear whether or not you've achieved it. And that's usually where a lot of organizations will stop. But it's not always easy to say that, "If I get this number, that means I'm having the effect that I want." When you get to measures of effectiveness—how do I know if the customer is getting what they want?

If I'm properly taking these officers and getting them ready for promotion, and I develop them, maybe we'll have a higher-than-average promotion rate, or maybe we'll have more people that are selected to go to that next-level school. And that gets kind of dangerous, because then you start chasing after those metrics at the expense of the development of your people. Yes, you have to constantly revisit and make sure that the intent is clear.

McKinlay:

Once you really aligned your metrics with your intent, how long did it actually take to see change?

Carrie:

When you're at that level of dysfunction, it's going to take a good two to five years. And sometimes you have to shift things around. And that's why you'll find that, especially in the military where we have leadership turnover quite a bit, it feels like you're chasing things all the time. But I think that's actually a strength, because it forces you to re-evaluate the metrics that you're using and why.

McKinlay (reflection):

This was such a clarifying example for me in understanding this entire concept. Because this whole time I've been thinking to myself, "Okay, high-precision tasks are so valuable because they give us that immediate feedback. And, man, if we could only have that in every task that we had—so what can we do to make sure that we're getting that benefit in those longer-tail tasks?" But what I'm realizing is, actually, the effort of seeking out that feedback, of gathering those data points as Brad was talking about, is the benefit. That constant re-evaluating, that constant ensuring that we understand the gap between where our intended impact is and where our actual impact is, is the creating of alignment. And that alignment is what drives high performance.

Carrie:

What I learned in the strategy world was that half the time, the results of those meetings that we had with senior leadership wasn't the actual decision that was made. It was usually the conversations that happened in that process—the questions, and the way that they answered, and the nuance, and being able to figure out the why behind the actions. The intent.

Commander's intent is what we call it. Napoleon coined the idea back in his time, and I won't try to say it in French, but it's essentially the idea that, "If I can clearly communicate what I am trying to accomplish, and the why, then every person at every level can make decisions and execute after that—even if I'm not in the room to tell them."

McKinlay (reflection):

The beauty of people performing with high precision is that it gives us that ability to execute on commander's intent. And this is so invigorating to think about, because imagine a reality where your teams and your organizations were so aligned with leadership and the vision, the strategy, and the objectives, that they could make effective decisions that are productive and useful, without having to rely on someone else.

Carrie:

It's really important that every person at every level can go, "Well, they didn't directly tell me this, and I don't have time or ability to call the person that I normally would to get the answer—but I understand well enough, and I'm trusted well enough, that I can execute." That's what we want in business or in the military—is all of us moving towards that same goal, and using all of our faculties and our different perspectives and our different abilities and our different roles in a unified effort. And that's, you know, nirvana.

McKinlay:

Leading Outward is produced by the Arbinger Institute. To have a conversation about how we can equip you to transform your leaders and organization, schedule a complimentary strategy session at arbinger.com.

And whatever came to mind for you while you were listening—a conversation you've been putting off, or feedback that needs to be shared, an action you need to take—don't wait. Take that action. Because that's how change starts.