COLUMBUS AIR FORCE BASE, Miss. -- Great things tend to come in three’s: the three legged stool, the three Stooges, the three French Hens, the tricycle, and my personal favorite, the three aircraft used in Undergraduate Pilot Training (the T-6 Texan II, the T-1 Jayhawk, and the T-38 Talon (all of which have three landing gear). Our leadership in the Air Force has this same structure. There is a commander, a director or vice commander and a senior enlisted advisor. This triumvirate has different titles in different organizations, and perhaps play slightly different roles at times, but there is none-the-less three, and each individual is critical to mission success like each leg on a three-legged stool. The senior enlisted role tends to be a lesser known element to the triad’s success, particularly in pilot training, but has proven invaluable to operations.
This past week, the First Shirt Council trained approximately 15 up and coming first sergeants here at Columbus. What is notable about this particular First Sergeant Symposium is that flight commanders attended, marking the first time that officers and enlisted have taken a first sergeant course together. Chief Master Sgt. Jill Victor, Air Education and Training Command’s new first sergeant functional, offered great advice to the crowd: always get the full story, do not operate in a bubble, know why you came to a certain decision, and clearly communicate both the decision reason to the boss. The officers in attendance were able to get into the weeds with the First Sergeants and gain the valuable understanding of the “First Shirt’s” role and responsibilities. It was a huge win to have future First Sergeants and current Flight Commanders connecting at this early stage of their Air Force careers. Chief Victor mentioned this is a definite “best practice” submission.
I rely heavily on my recently assigned Shirt for advice, administrative support, and to care for and help my students and permanent party with their various needs. I cannot imagine how difficult command would be without a Shirt’s perspective, experience, and all the details they work to sustain each Airman in my organization and throughout the base. The senior enlisted leg in the triad is vital to our flight, squadron, group, and wing’s success. They are critical to the numbered Air Force and higher leadership as well. Several officers attending the symposium commented that they wish they could have attended the First Sergeant’s symposium prior to beginning their duties as a flight commander. The officer and enlisted leadership team is vital to our Columbus mission. Our senior enlisted advisors and shirts are unsung heroes in our base mission to cultivate airman, create pilots, and connect. They are truly one leg of great things that come in threes.
· Chief Victor – Shirt Functional – Major Command First Sergeant
o Look at each situation as unique…past experience helpful but each situation is different
o Get the full story
o Read the AFI
o Know why you came to that decision and share that w/the boss
o Each shirt sees the issues through their lens…call each other and see the problem from a different perspective
o Do not operate in a bubble….talk to peers and learn from them as well.
o Remain: Cool, Calm, Collected even when you want to come across the desk
o Years doesn’t matter as much as the types of experiences or situations you have seen
· Example: no matter what is happening in the Airman’s life, you have to still care for that airman.
o Help them
o Protect others
o Make sure they have services for help, you may be that Airman’s one and only confidant.
· Example: functioning alcoholic – hoarder scenario in the house and in the car…how to help this person…get to inpatient and other support
o Shirts duty is to care for their people, not about accolades or anything else than caring for people well before there is trouble.
o SNCOs job is to mentor your officers, you can’t help them until you have a relationship to build from
o You need to have the honest conversations with your airmen…honest…help them see the impact and the eventual results of the direction they are going.
Students, Habits and Success
Be a Finisher
In baseball pitchers are hired for specific purposes in the game. Some pitchers are skilled at opening a game, others are the long stretch pitchers with many pitch types in their arsenal to battle through the middle innings. Finally there are those with specific skills that finish the game. They are called upon in the end to ensure the win. We do not the luxury of substituting out when you are the first responder on scene dealing with a tragic accident. Nor are pilots, medics or combat controllers able to sit on the bench during the heat of the battle. Our nation’s defense demands that we be finishers. To effectively be a “Finisher” in the Air Force requires you understand your mission vision, objective and be willing to pay the price mission success requires.
Vision is critical to success. Just as the pitcher must know his role and purpose in the whole of a baseball game the Airman in the fight must see themselves in the bigger picture. Airman want to understand, they want to conquer the objective and accomplish the mission and need leaders to instill that vision. An anecdotal story about my boys and chickens illustrate this point. My boys go out every day and feed the chickens. To them feeding the chickens means placing food into a feeding apparatus inside the chicken pen. My boys think that putting food in the chicken coop equals feeding the chickens. The food could be lodged in the food dispenser, wet, moldy or even hung out of reach and in such a place or condition that chickens cannot possibly eat it. But when asked, “did you feed the chickens?” Their answer is yes we fed them! They are missing the vision. The purpose of having chickens is to get eggs to eat. The purpose of putting food into the pen is so the chickens can eat and produce eggs. Did your efforts equal chickens actually eating to accomplish the vision? Of course not!
Day in and day out our Airmen do great work in the Air Force. The Military Personnel Flight processes hundreds of emails and or documents that allow other Airmen to access information and provide services to accomplish our wing mission to create pilots. The Airman that has the vision sees their work as part of a greater whole and does more than accomplish a task. Instead they use energy and time to understand how that particular action benefits the greater mission. The have a shared vision with their supervisors, commander and the Air Force at large and see the bigger “why” behind what they are doing. It is simply not a task but a mission to accomplish an objective that creates mission success.
Airmen who have vision find their decisions are shaped and influenced toward completing the objective right. They see what objective has to be accomplished and attempt to accomplish it in the best way possible. Vision causes us to consider how the objective should be accomplished. It clarifies how to approach the problem and improves aligning the right talents and resources a given scenario. There is an old adage written found in several texts throughout the years that says, “as a man thinketh so is he”. When people have the right vision, they think collaboratively to accomplish tasks in a unified manner. Working on an objective then is simply a subset of accomplishing the greater vision and it comes with a cost and huge reward.
The cost in this endeavor is the energy, thought, and effort put into acquiring the right vision and then working on the objective until the vision is achieved. The cost includes making mistakes and errors while learning how to best achieve the vision. It does not only mean completing a task or objective but it achieves the desired vision. Being a finisher means you do it and you do it right, all the way. It means that you do your part at the right time and you do it in its entirety. A finisher not only places food in the chicken pen but makes sure the chickens can eat it so the greater vision, having eggs is achieved. As an Airmen the greater vision is ensuring our nations freedom through creating pilots one at a time. It may mean for your task that the gym equipment and facilities are in top working order. It may mean that you spend additional time understanding an Airmen’s orders and impact to his or her life before submitting for approval. It may mean extra time digging through the Air Force Instructions or even submitting changes to better accomplish the vision. Regardless of your mission, you must have vision otherwise we the Airmen, like the chickens, won’t really be fed and the mission won’t really be accomplished. Be a finisher because a “finisher” makes sure the vision is done right, completely, when it really counts and it really matters in our Air Force today.