In this podcast episode, my guest is Lt. Col. (Ret.) Jack Matthews.
Jack spent time in the Army, in corporate life at Intel, and in a civilian capacity at the Air Force.
The launching point for our conversation is one of The Big Six Leadership Principles®: “Trust and Empower.”
We discuss how to begin building trust into the framework of a team, the meaning and importance of the phrase “Power Down,” and more! You’ll learn from these leadership insights.
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Podcast Episode 14: Jack Matthews interview
Robert Mixon:
Welcome to the Level 5 “Journey With No Summit” podcast series. I’m Robert Mixon, glad to have you today.
We are privileged to have a guest to interview — our 13th I think, in the series here — Mr. Jack Matthews, retired Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army.
I should address him in that fashion, Jack, so I apologize for that, but you know, we’re just thrilled to have him on the podcast today, as we’re going to talk about trust.
First, I want to tell you a little bit about Jack. Graduate of West Point, my alma mater, so go Army! Spent 20 years in the United States Army, in various levels of command responsibility, ultimately commanding a battalion of several hundred engineers.
Later … joined the corporate world, was with Intel Corporation, then served with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in a number of positions of increasing responsibility across the U.S. and in Europe… then became a U.S. Air Force civilian in another context over the past several years, and is currently the director of the Mission Assurance Group of the Integrated Capabilities Office of the Department of the Air Force. I think it’s wonderful to have you here, Jack.
Jack Matthews:
Thank you, sir, it’s a privilege to be here, and I really appreciate the invite. I hope I can add something of value to the long line of people you’ve already had walk through these doors, so I’m excited to give a talk on this topic as we interact.
Robert Mixon:
Thanks, Jack. Today we’re going to talk about the third principle of the Big Six principles, as you know they are:
- Set the Azimuth,
- Listen,
- Trust and empower,
- Do the right thing when no one’s looking,
- When in charge, take charge,
- Balance the personal and professional.
With Jack’s background and experience, I thought that ‘Trust and Empower,’ the third principle, would be an appropriate topic for today.
So, Jack, I’d like to start with… first question… what’s the most important aspect of building trust you have observed throughout your leadership journey?
Jack Matthews:
Well, sir, I think the most important aspect is initially a commitment to both being trustworthy and trusting. I think dancing, like in a relationship, ‘it takes two to tango,’ and I think that that is really the bedrock.
But beyond that, it’s about building a relationship. Trust, in my opinion, is a belief in your reliability.
Do I have confidence that you’re going to carry something out? Do I have confidence that you’re going to do what I’ve asked you to do?
That’s that initial trust that I also personally believe — and this may be a debatable topic, I know it is — I think trust is not earned, at least not initially.
Trust has to be a default value. If I don’t trust somebody that I’m just meeting for the first time who’s coming onto the team, I’m starting in negative territory. I’m implying they’re not trustworthy, and for me, a ‘glass is half full’ kind of guy, I like to say at least an entry level of implicit trust is gained right off the bat in a relationship.
Now, we may go to PhD levels of trust over time as we build that relationship, but I really believe that the assumed good intent, assumed trustworthiness in similar fashion is a good place to start!
Then I think beyond that, if leaders can do a good job of modeling, keeping a commitment, being transparent, caring about their people, I think that sets the tone that allows people to follow… so to go back and answer your question simply in a word, I would just say it’s all about “relationship.”
Robert Mixon:
Hmm. Thanks, Jack.
Having said that, how does trust affect your ability to empower others?
Jack Matthews:
I think the ability to empower others is a direct linkage with trust.
I’m reminded of when I was a very young officer, and had a lot more hair on my top, at least on the top of my head in those days!
I remember a cover of an Army Times, which showed the father of a classmate of mine at West Point, actually he was a year ahead of me… but General Walter Ulmer, was one of the Army’s pioneers in organizational climate and the whole theory of decentralized leadership… in a two-word phrase, “power down.”
I latched onto that when I was a junior officer, and the whole life I’ve lived since then has been all about how do you ‘power down’ … how do you put the level of responsibility and ability at the right level in any organization, only retaining the things for yourself that only you can do, but enabling others.
I think that… the more you trust someone, the more you have an ability to empower them, to transfer that power to the right place… If you do that, you can scale, you can impact much wider swaths of any organization, and you help people grow, you build the bench, you entrust with them responsibilities.
We always used to say in the Army, ‘we learn by doing’ … it was one of the ways we were going to always beat the Russians if we’d ever had to fight them, because we had decentralized leadership, we had people willing to work autonomously, and with agility, and with the ability to be bold, and not have to wait for orders on high.
So, in remembering my own journey, that’s very important, and I think in today’s world, we have to resist the impulse to micromanage, because of what technology does for us, we can be commanding something halfway around the world, like in the movie ‘Eye in the Sky,’ where you can have complete control over the battlefield or a situation simply with technology, and I think that can be a real danger as much as it can be a benefit, so we’ve got to be careful about that.
Robert Mixon:
Great point. What or who is the best example you’ve seen of precedent powered by another leader?
I know General Ulmer’s ‘power down’ was a great role model for all of us, but how about someone that you personally observed, who walked the talk?
Jack Matthews:
This is exciting for me to be able to talk about this person because in General Ulmer, I was looking way up the chain of command, as a second lieutenant to a three-star general.
In this example, I’m looking just slightly in the other direction. When I was a branch chief working for the Army Corps of Engineers in Fort Worth, I had a section chief who worked for me by the name of Jessica Napier.
Jessica was amazing at ‘leading from the rear,’ so to speak. Sometimes you think you only can lead if you’re out front of everybody, but a lot of times you set the example from lower levels of that chain of command for the more senior people to observe, and you influence tremendously people even above you in the chain of command.
Jessica had a team that she built, I think, by turning the traditional organization chart upside down.
She became a servant leader. She trusted her people implicitly because she knew them intimately.
She was able to tell you birthdays. She was sending cards. She was asking about kids. She was listening to them, training them, tailoring their work schedules to meet medical needs from time to time.
There’s a phrase, an old missionary… said, “wherever you are, be all there.”
Jessica was all there in her leadership.
There’s a cost to that. There’s time. There’s energy that you have to commit to doing that.
But when you do that, and you engage each person as you go, and you put them in a position to succeed, and then turn them loose, and then put them in an environment where they can fail, and it’s not ‘zero defects.’
To me, that was a very powerful success story as I observed Jessica’s leadership, and I know she’s continued to do well since then, and it will serve her well throughout the rest of her career, and I think that’s contagious. Other people will see that and hopefully adopt it as well.
Robert Mixon:
That’s a great story, Jack, of someone who embodied trust and empowerment. I think, Jessica, what you’ve said is that person.
So, in a little shift here, I would ask now, Jack… what are the characteristics of a world-class culture?
Jack Matthews:
I think culture is an evasive thing. We can certainly define it as the environment that you’re working in, the sets of beliefs, the values, the behaviors, but I’ve been in so many cultures over the years — outside of the petri dish! — it’s a little bit different everywhere I’ve been… but if I was going to distill it down, I would think that any good culture… the main seed in any kind of a good culture is that people are valued above anything else.
That won’t surprise you probably with some of the stuff I’ve said already, but to me, it all starts with people. It ends with people.
Leaders will communicate and listen to those people. They’ll set the tone. They’ll instill values.
I think you could come up with a whole bunch of different values.
The Army certainly has, and they’re a very good set of them.
If I was only going to take a few away, though… I think it’s those ideals of the honesty, or you can say transparency in some ways… integrity, being able to do the right thing, being counted on to do that, the commitment that people make.
Kind of when I went back and said commitment is the first element of trust… the commitment to do your best, to do a good job, to value others, to buy into that culture, to be a team, to be a team of teams.
I think leaders who encourage this, who model this, who enforce this from time to time, they can be more caught and taught … if it’s an appealing culture like that where people are truly valued, people have a voice, and people thrive. They want to be there. They want to be a part of that mission.
The ‘mission first, people always,’ is an old saying, but you can accomplish any mission that you set out to accomplish one time if you don’t take care of your people… but if you take care of your people, you can keep going back to that well.
For me, the single most important characteristic of a culture is the people — on top of the right values and norms that you establish.
Robert Mixon:
Okay, well that makes a lot of sense to me, Jack. Going back to Jessica or General Ulmer or others, who would you say is your hero or heroine as a leader and why?
Jack Matthews:
This is one that is probably an answer … when you think about the person who I look to most as a hero in my life. I’m sure a lot of people would say something very similar … when I say it was my father.
I don’t think the reasons for that are as traditional as they might be. You know, you admire a hero for their courage, their bravery, their action, but also for their skill, their strengths, their accomplishments, things like that.
My father was many of those things. You know, he was a high school athlete, very famous in that. in the local area. He was a sportswriter later in his career. He served in World War II.
But, the things that really make me say my father is my hero are the things that really began to materialize in my mind over time as I was growing up through my early teen years, as the blanks began being filled in.
We were a family that grew up in central Florida. We went to a Southern Baptist church every Sunday morning.
My dad would drop me and my mom off at the church. He’d go park. We’d go to Sunday school in our age group, so my mom was one place. I was another place. I assumed my dad was another. When we’d go to church, he was never there until about halfway through the service, and I never knew why.
We used to go to Morrison’s Cafeteria on Sundays for lunch after church, and every once in a while, the waiters would take our tickets and not let us pay for lunch. That should have been the clue that really clued me in, and it did turn out to be what my father used to do.
This was in the mid-60s. You may know that the Civil Rights Movement was in full bloom in those years. We were wrestling with all of the things we needed to fix in America with race relations, and my father used to sneak out after he dropped us off at church to go teach the waiters at Morrison’s Cafeteria, Sunday school, because they had to work to provide for their families. They couldn’t go to church.
My dad was a white man teaching African-Americans on a Sunday morning without anybody really knowing, but I wonder how much flack he took for that. I wonder how many relationships he might have strained because of that because that’s what he was doing in those years. He took a stand for what was right.
He valued people regardless of the skin color, and you talk about an example that carried with me the rest of my life, especially in this day and age. That’s a very powerful message, and I’m very grateful to have experienced it.
Robert Mixon:
What a wonderful story, and certainly, Jack, that your father was obviously somebody I think all of us would aspire to be, as servant leaders.
I would now ask you here, Jack, what advice would you give aspiring leaders to learn how to develop the skill of trust and empowerment?
Jack Matthews:
I think the advice I would give is to go back to some of the stuff we’ve said before.
First of all, you’ve got to get out and practice it. You’ve got to try some things.
You’ve got to step out. You’ve got to invest some time and energy. You’ve got to build some relationships.
Be an active listener. Learn what buttons people need to have pushed. What is their ‘love language’?
Is it acts of service? Is it affirmation? Is it recognition?
There’s time people have to invest to be able to really understand who their people are, and I think that it is a continuation of that culture discussion, to be able to value the people.
I think to recognize that as you ascend the ladder… your job, as we call it, is probably less about doing — and more about equipping and enabling people.
I think, be available. I used to say that my office didn’t have an open door. It had a revolving door. It seems like somebody would come in about the moment somebody was leaving.
I got to a point where I’d go home at the end of the day and tell my wife when she’d say, ‘what’d you do today?’…
I wouldn’t say ‘absolutely nothing’ anymore. I’d say I was ‘helping build into people.’
I was helping to coach and teach and share experiences with them that would have been helpful to me when I was at their place.
Robert Mixon:
… One big idea you’d like our listeners to take away from today’s discussion. What would that be?
Jack Matthews:
No pun intended, sir, but I would say the big idea that I would offer is to think small.
Robert Mixon:
Hmm!
Jack Matthews:
I look at a phrase I heard a few years back when the Europeans handed the Americans a crushing defeat in the Ryder Cup golf tournament. They were winning every match by one stroke, one point, one hole.
At the end of the three days, they had killed us because they’d won almost all of them. It looked like an absolute slaughter, and yet every match had been really close. I think whether it’s in that… or in banking with interest rates, it’s that accumulation of marginal gains.
If you look at just small improvements, small advances over time, you have an opportunity for things to build up to really large things. Big things have small beginnings.
I think quality over quantity, if you’re having a focus that’s a little bit narrower, you’re not overwhelmed with trying to achieve so much at once.
A quality over quantity, incremental approach, is both achievable and sustainable.
I think just to have that overall idea of when you went home at the end of the day, like I talked earlier, when you’re asking yourself, ‘did I help someone today? Was I able to?’
Your legacy is not in the things you build or the things you accomplish. It’s in the people that you were able to work with, and help coach and guide and build into. Over time, that’s a legacy that keeps giving. I think that’s the ripple effect.
I used to always like the story of the turtle on the fence post where you come around the corner and you see this turtle on a fence post and you go, ‘how in the world did the turtle get there?’ The answer is the turtle had help.
I’ve had a lot of help in my career, sir, that has been very indispensable for where I’m at now. I’m grateful for it. I’m excited when anytime I have an opportunity to help others wherever they are.
Robert Mixon:
I think that’s really some insightful answers today. We’ll give our “Journey with No Summit” listeners some real food for thought.
Hopefully, they’ll listen to this podcast and the others in this series on a regular basis to help everyone equip themselves with the tools for your toolbox.
The Big Six are all interrelated, those principles. I think today, Jack, you alluded to several of them in the discussion about ‘trust and empowerment.’
I really appreciate your being here and your level of engagement and interest.
I’m sure listeners out there in the Level 5 audience will have some wonderful takeaways that they can employ, today and tomorrow, next week and next month and next year … to grow as listening, learning, servant leaders.
Thanks very much, Jack, and wish all of our listeners well. Take care.
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