Preface

The most demanding and gratifying leadership role of my life was my time as the commander and demonstration leader of the United States Air Force (USAF) Thunderbirds. My selection for that position was the culmination of a lifelong dream. The passion for flying began when I was four years old, standing on the roof of our home in Fairfield, Alabama. Three Kingfisher biplanes came screaming overhead so low that I could see the pilots waving at me. I got so excited I almost fell off the roof. By the age of nine, that passion had shifted from flying, to flying fighters, to leading the Thunderbirds.

For the first dozen or so years after college, I lived a dream that few rock-and-roll stars can compete with and flew the F-16 all over the world. About the time I could apply for the commander/leader position on the Thunderbirds, I ran into a wall like few others: I was diagnosed with cancer. My family history is rife with the disease, and after a second operation I was told to prepare for the battle of my lifetime—and that I would never fly again. Putting that childhood dream back up on the horizon helped me recover from one of my biggest setbacks, and capturing thedream came through a series of miracles that I will never be able to explain. What I found when I got there exceeded every expectation I had framed through the whims of adolescence.

The annual turnover within the Thunderbirds was significant. We lost a third of our enlisted force: half the officers and, with them, half the pilots who flew the demonstration every year. That programmed attrition forced us to train a new team from the most basic level forward at the end of every demonstration season.

In just three and a half months of training, we took men and women who had never worked together and methodically developed the kind of trust that allowed them to thrive at the extremes of performance and risk. We really did trust one another with our lives, and the method the team developed to ingrain that kind of dynamic was nothing short of phenomenal. By the time I came on board, our organization had been refined by 48 generations of Thunderbird teams that streamed seamlessly into the one I led. The process that lineage passed on to our team was the best I’ve ever known. My goal in writing this book is to share the steps for generating trust at this level—trust that can further the nature of your team or workplace, no matter what you do.

Along the way I intend to engage a bias you may be carrying—that leading in the military is somehow different from leading in your world. Even in combat, getting people to deliver what your team needs depends on something much more than blind obedience. It relies on your deliberately building the foundational elements that compel the desire to follow. The biggest of those elements is trust.

All the stories in this book are true, and while many of the names are those of actual people, others were changed to protect individual and organizational trajectories beyond our time together. The world of the fighter pilot is big on call signs (nicknames), and you will find many in the pages that follow. Some are simple, some are creative, and some are designed to make a relatively intense occupation a little more enjoyable.