Are You Grounded in Trust?

Real relationships are built on trust, and trust cannot be established during a firefight. Years of watching combat operations taught me many things, but none more important than this.

In war, seconds can mean the difference between life and death. More times than not, what happens in those seconds depends entirely upon trust. One would assume that trust evolves naturally through shared experience on the battlefield. To some extent it does, but my years in command also taught me the vital importance of investing early and often in relationships. Trust will follow. Then sustained success.

On more occasions than I like to remember, I would sit in my headquarters in Balad, Iraq and observe real-time surveillance video of an ongoing firefight. I would watch the pixilated black and white video feeds with a level of awe disproportionate to rank, as a young tactical leader on the ground, engaged in combat, calmly made life and death decisions for his team.

With a click of my laptop, I could monitor their radio communications. Many times, I heard these young soldiers coolly reach out to request assistance from supporting elements. From the relative comfort of my operations center, I could listen-in on any number of scenarios – as a ground force commander spoke with the pilot of an aircraft providing air-to-ground weapons support, as a helicopter pilot brought in a quick-reaction force, or as the leader of a local conventional military unit reacted to an ongoing situation.

“Eagle Lead, this is Charlie Two One…over,” might be the opening communications from the ground commander to his lead helicopter pilot supporting the mission. It was sometimes difficult to hear them over the gunfire. These circumstances left no room for tactical error.

A call from the ground force commander to his pilots during a firefight generally indicated that the team had encountered unwanted contingencies. Deviations from plan in the military are frequent and inevitable; there is no way to foresee every possibility. We knew that the trust between our operators would allow for constant adaptation to an ever-changing problem.

“Go for Eagle Lead,” the pilot would respond. Translation: I’m right here. What can I do to help?

A steady, focused voice would reply, “Eagle Lead, Charlie Two One. Request medevac of one friendly casualty, hot landing zone, coordinates to follow.” Translation: one of our operators needs immediate medical attention. If the injury were manageable, I would wait until this situation was under control – but I need you here now. I need you to fly your helicopter, in total darkness, to a landing zone you’ve never seen before. I need you to land in close proximity to an ongoing gunfight. The enemy combatants on the ground will hear you coming. They would love nothing more than to shoot you down. My team and I will protect you. Come get our man.

Then, instantly and unwavering: “Roger Charlie Two One. Two minutes out.” I hear you. I understand the risk. I am putting my helicopter, my life, and the lives of my crewmembers in your hands. I will be there in two minutes. We will leave this fight together. No questions and no delays.

This was the sound of pure trust – the kind that spread across our Task Force every day, and saved lives on the battlefield every night. Listening to these operations, I understood why our units could move so quickly and work so effectively – our success as an organization was rooted in the trust that bound our members.

Trust elevated our organization beyond the traditional understanding of excellence. It allowed us to move past being merely an assortment of world-class warriors, and towards becoming a single team with a shared consciousness. Ordinarily, even the most dedicated soldier has reason to take pause when asked to fly headlong into heated firefight. But that pause can cost lives. It can be overcome only through unquestioning trust for the person on the other end of the radio. These professionals never paused.

But the trust we built had to exceed even the high standards of the special operations community. It needed to permeate all functions of the organization in order to meet the ever-increasing complexity of the environment in which we were operating. That meant it had to bind not just our operators, but our intelligence analysts, our support staff, our elements back in Washington, and a myriad of others spread around the world. Together, only their collective focus could drive success, which meant that they all needed to move at the same speed as the operators we saw on the battlefield.

The success of the operation described above depended on unflinching trust between the helicopter pilot and the ground force commander – soldiers from separate units, with separate chains of command, and perhaps even out of different branches of military service. But they trained together at home, and they spent time together off hours. They were an elite band of warriors, so trust was not shocking to see. We needed to produce that level of trust at a massive scale – across units, between large military commands, and ultimately with the many external partners. Much like the networked decision-making that I’ve described in previous blogs, our organization needed to develop an adaptable network of relationships based on trust. Speed would follow, and allow us to stay ahead of the threats we faced.

But ours was a complex organization. We were thousands of people spread around the globe. As with other large organizations, we were riddled with legacy politics, quasi-tribal allegiances, and overly bureaucratic processes. We had merged many different cultures over the years – giving the appearance of unity, but were still challenged by the hidden silos. The strength of each unit’s internal culture made them incredibly effective, but also presented obstacles to building organization-wide cohesion. In order to achieve strategic, not just operational success, we would need to create a similarly powerful dedication to the organization at large. Additionally, we needed effective external relationships – with key stakeholders that were part of the effort. And all of this needed to take place in the midst of fighting a relentless war against an unpredictable enemy. As one team member and good friend put it, “we had to rebuild the plane while it was already flying.”

In many ways, we looked and felt like many other large organizations in today’s environment, as they struggle to modify old operating models to fit a new world. So we began by building relationships with systematic discipline. In my next post, I will discuss what that meant, and how we approached the challenge.

Photo by Ashokboghani (Flickr)