Leadership Lessons From A Naval Fighter Pilot | Rear-Admiral Mike “Nasty” Manazir  | Episode 257

Scott McCarthy [00:00:06]:

Mike sir, welcome to the show.

Mike Manazir [00:00:10]:

Hey, it’s great to be here, Scott.

Scott McCarthy [00:00:12]:

Or should I say nasty? Welcome to the show.

Mike Manazir [00:00:16]:

I’ve had that identity for like 36 years, so either one actually works. The word sounds funny to people sometimes, but to me, yeah, that’s my name.

Scott McCarthy [00:00:26]:

Yeah, for audience out there, they’re probably, like, going, Nasty, what the heck are you talking about? Scott? So not everyone may get the whole understanding and backgrounds. Why don’t you just give us a quick rundown on what Nasty is and where that comes from and we can dive in from there.

Mike Manazir [00:00:46]:

Yeah, it sounds great. So Nasty is my call sign. So in fighter aviation, it’s not nickname or call name, it’s call sign. And the reason call signs are out there is because for communications brevity. So if somebody calls on the radio and says, Mike on the radio, there might be four or five mics out there, so you’re not sure who that is. And so the call signs, if somebody says, hey, nasty, slammer. Then they know exactly who they’re talking to. Similarly, each flight or each aircraft is given a call sign as well. So you instantly know what people are talking to, who people are talking to. So they come from different places. Typically it’s something you do or something that you’re known for. Or if you have a play on your name, scott McCarthy might just be Mac, and you go, hey, Mac, and then you know who Mac is, and maybe you do something to earn something else. So my call sign story is actually sort of silly. It’s in the book. Fairly early on in the book, I’ll let people dive into that and how that came about, but that’s where the call sign comes from.

Scott McCarthy [00:02:01]:

It’s definitely a cool tradition for you aviators. I personally like it. I definitely like your buddies. AWOL. Without leave. Pretty much anyone who doesn’t have military background can figure that one out pretty quick, I think. So you were a fighter pilot, you’re a Top Gun graduate. You were actually there for the recording of the first move, which I thought was pretty cool, and then you finished up as rear Admiral in the US navy. So pretty prestigious career, I would suggest. But I’d like to go dive back to the beginning quick. What took you to go on that path not only just to join the military, but to be a leader within your force and to kind of that what was that drive? To continuously progress up to the ranks and not just be happy flying jets.

Mike Manazir [00:02:54]:

Yeah. So it’s interesting in my book, Learn How to Lead to Win, I write about three major themes, Scott, and one of them is kind of having a vision or begin with the end in mind. Covey writes about that’s one of the seven habits. And then that vision for me way back a long time ago, for me, in the 8th grade right around the early 70s or so. My father had been to the US. Naval academy, and I heard stories about that growing up, but I didn’t really give it a second thought. Of course, I’m less than 8th grade at this time, so I’m a fairly young guy, and we went to a football game between Georgia tech and the naval academy. And I watched the midshipman march on, and I had an instant flash like that. Those long coats, white hats. You see them during the army navy game march on. I said, that’s what I want to do. Had this boom. I mean, that’s instant flash. Still remember back to this day. And I said, I’m going to the naval academy. And so I went into the guidance counselor on Monday at my junior high school, and I said, I’m going to the naval academy. What do I need to do? And she took a piece of paper and lined out every course I needed to take in high school and said, you take these courses, and you go to the nail academy. And so I went to four different high schools. My dad’s marine moved around a lot in the United States, and each high school I went to, that’s where I said, I’m going to nail academy. What do I need to do? And it refined down to, well, what do you want to go to the nail academy to do? And somewhere in the back of my mind, somewhere there, I wanted to fly. And it’s like, well, I want to fly, and I want to fly fighters, and I want to fly fighters on carriers. And so that drove me through the naval academy and going to flight school, I did as good as I could at the academy, and I got like, a 2.7. I lived test to test. I don’t even know if I learned anything there. I learned it a lot later on in navy nuclear power school, I’ll tell you that. But I went there to fly. And then when I went to flight school, I really wanted to fly to tomcat. The final countdown movie was out, and tomcats were really cool, and I was really into fighter aviation, so I drove myself to get the highest grades I possibly could in flight school so I could have a choice, and in case tomcats were available, I could do that. And that happened. And then when I started into my career, I just loved flying and navy fighters off carriers, so I continued to do the best that I could, and I ended up being the commanding officer of a squadron because I drove myself to kind of just do the best I could in the navy. And I fit there just for some reason. The whole situation fit what I want to do with my life. It just ended up that way. And then after my squadron command VF 31 Tomcatters in the f 14 d in 1997 and 98. After that tour, I got selected to go to Navy Nuclear Power. And even though I didn’t want to go that path, it’s remarkably hard. A bunch of my mentors pushed me through there, basically kicked me through the door and said, hey, go do this nuke thing. And I ultimately finished that path, commanded the USS Nimitz, and then after that tour, got selected to be an admiral and kind of went on every time. I was like, I don’t know if I want to do this anymore. They’d give me a cool job or a cool thing to do, or, hey, that sounds pretty good. All right, I’m back in again. I’ll go do that again. And so the second and third themes of my book, learn how to Lead to Win, come about. If you listed all those things out like you did very easily, look at that guy. I mean, gosh everything he achieved. Oh, my gosh. Second theme. I have so much failure in my career. I mean, there are times when I got stopped, I failed to carrier qualify in the A four skyhawk in advance. The first time, I thought I was done. Thought I was done. And then after all the work in the Navy nuclear power pipeline, I failed to select for an aircraft carrier through the very heavy selection process until the very last time. And I was so angry, and I did all this for nothing. And then I get NIMITS at the end of that, the fact that failure and the feeling that you’re done and kind of pick yourself up. And then the third theme in the book is resilience is that, okay, I can go do this some more. You don’t quit when you get back up again. And I found the hand of Providence in my career, in my life. When you turn around and look at that failure, something better happened because of it. The path I thought I was on, no, I was going to go this way. It’s like, bang, go left or go right, and there’s oh, my gosh, that’s why that happened. And so it’s a very interesting going through life, and I think what I want to tell your listeners, in either leading a group somewhere or in their own lives, you having a vision of where you want to go. A North Star that’s way out there, and you keep going to that North Star and it’s not going to be straight, and it’s not going to be the path that you thought it was going to be on. And that’s kind of what my career in life were like.

Scott McCarthy [00:07:58]:

It’s funny, we have very similar beginnings. So I’m a graduate of our Role Military College up here in Canada, which is equivalent to your Annapolis Valley annapolis roll. Sorry. But I learned about it in grade nine and went to my guidance counselor and said, this is where I’m going. This is what I’m doing. So very similar story. It’s like showed up and scraped by academically as well. Not necessarily my forte back in those days, but much like yourself now, run with two masters. Very different story that way. But I love a lot of things you hit on, but I loved how you were open about failures. And I find a lot of leaders out there. They kind of hide their failures, not hide behind them, but rather hide them behind and hide their failures behind them because they don’t want people to find out about them. But you said it yourself, you learn through it. And often, if not always, something better comes out of the end like I’ve had mine. And then I’ve realized as I’ve reflected back, if I got what I wanted back then, I wouldn’t have had this, that, and the other thing, which are actually much better than what I wanted in the first place. Right now, what I’d like for you to jump on is overcoming these failures and not getting yourself down. Because as leaders, it’s not just us. We have our teams, we have our organizations, we have friends, family, our coworkers that are relying on us. So how might we get back up and moving again once we get kind of hit that wall?

Mike Manazir [00:09:40]:

Yeah, it’s effort. So the first thing is nobody gets up in the morning goes, I’m going to go fail today because it hurts. Oh my God. And you’re like but in going towards that goal, and the secret here is having that North Star. Whenever somebody asked me about going to the Naval Academy or I mentor somebody to go to Naval Academy and the same for you at the Royal Military College. Well, why do you want to go? Well, I just want to go there because I think it’s cool. You have to have something on the other end of that. There’s got to be something on the other side. And so for your listeners who are business people or they’re doing a startup, or they’re doing something particularly hard, or they’re training for America on, or they’re training for an Iron Man or something like that, the vision is I’m going to finish what I’m starting out to do or I’m going to get to the next line of what I’m starting out to do or I’m going to have a million dollars in revenue by the end of five years from now. And they keep that North Star out in front of them. And so when they trip and fall or they try something and it doesn’t work, they have to remind themselves that they have that North Star out in front of them. So I’m still working here. And you don’t actually fail until you quit and quit getting up and you don’t do, and even if there’s time. So let’s say something happens in my life different than my goal of making a million dollars in five years and all of a sudden, I can’t do that goal anymore. Well, hang on a second. You can. The time frame has just shifted, and so it’s about resilience and getting up. It’s about you’re on midway through your training for the marathon, and you sprain an ankle and you go, oh my God, I can’t do the marathon anymore. Sure you can. You just have to heal it and work back into it. And now maybe you can still make the marathon that you were trying for and maybe you accept a slower pace. The idea is you got to push yourself off the ground, metaphorically, look down the road at that North Star and then get up and go to that North Star. And whether it’s a life or a goal or a job or something with a family member, you got to keep reminding yourself and you’re taking a team. And sometimes it might be like the darkest times. COVID is a wonderful example of failure and resilience. The number of people and companies and entities that got slammed by COVID. The number of stories I’ve heard, I joined the team and then COVID hit or I just had my startup, we just went public or we just got the first round of funding and COVID hit. And even if they had to stop and there was bankruptcy or there was a failure, they had to stop. If they still have that North Star, then I still want to go through that and go that direction. Then they can still move forward. So the secret in any effort like that is having that vision out in front of you that end in mind, that North Star, that makes you get back up, but you got to get back up. And that’s really what I did. And I found to your point, you look around and you go, wow, that’s actually better than I thought it was going to be. And there’s a hand of Providence in there. There’s quotes about better to be lucky than good, or there’s another one about sort of how good somebody is versus they’re lucky. I think people make their own luck, and they make their own luck by getting up and continuing to go with that North Star.

Scott McCarthy [00:13:21]:

Yeah, I fully agree. I’m a firm believer. I’m not a fate or faith based person, so I’m a firm believer, much like what you just said there, that you make your own luck in that it’s through perseverance, it’s through hard work, it’s through getting up and having that drive, because the luck comes from the fact that you’re there, you’re still in the game, and that opportunity showed up. Because if you weren’t still in the game, you would have missed the opportunity. Therefore, you were so lucky. No, it’s not lucky per se, but rather, you’re still there. You’re still in the fight and you’re still trying to go after whatever it.

Mike Manazir [00:13:58]:

Is that you and Scott, you’ve got it right. I think when that opportunity showed up, you were there to see it, you were there to take advantage of it, and you had the perspective to say, that is an opportunity. We’re going to go this direction. And especially when you’re leading a team and when the team is looking for opportunities and they know what the plan is, they can help seek those opportunities.

Scott McCarthy [00:14:19]:

That’s actually you just hit a great segue. So here at the podcast, like the focus I want to refer to as three domains of leadership. We just talked about the first one, which is leading yourself. A lot of resilience and perseverance and all this stuff. I like to shift to domain three, which is leading your team. So from your experience, how might leaders out there, what are some of the best advice you have for leaders out there to develop high performing teams that can be cohesive under pressure, have each other’s back, hold each other accountable, and really hit that peak performance level?

Mike Manazir [00:14:51]:

Yeah. I’ve been actually up in the corner of your screen, your very cool screen here. It says peak performance. And I’m really hoping you’re going to go this direction because I have learned through 36 years of leading in the Navy and then another five and a half years in industry, there’s one secret to leading a high performing team, and that is you don’t lead with your title. You don’t lead with your title. You can lead from any position on the team. You don’t have to be the manager or the boss or the admiral or the captain. And when you are those things, you don’t lead with the title to say, I think everybody who’s listening to your podcast knows that you don’t come in there and go, because I’m the boss. That’s why we’re going to do it this way, because I said so. We know that never works. When I started thinking about this in the military, actually back in 1997, when I went to take command of my first squadron, so VF 31, and I was about to accept the mantle of command, and it was like, oh, my gosh, I’m about to be the person in charge. And up until that time, I had been part of high performing teams in fighters and in Top Gun and stuff, and it was like, oh, yeah, I know how to lead. And then all of a sudden it’s like, okay, here it comes. So you’ve been chosen to be a CEO, you’ve been chosen to be a commanding officer, you’ve been chosen to be a manager, and you should think about, oh, wow, how am I going to do this in the military? Of course, I can order people. I can order them to do what I want them to do, and they’re probably going to do it. But you’re not going to get the peak performance out of the team when you do that. Gaining high morale on the team getting to the point where you don’t want to disappoint the team members and they don’t want to disappoint you. The way you do that is getting to know them, leading from the heart, leading from the heart and you will lead a winning team. And leading from the heart means getting to know everybody, getting to know what makes them tick, valuing them for their input, their background, their work every time they come in, their trials and tribulations their family stuff. I mean, you’re getting to know them, you know their names I talk about and learn how to lead to win. My book, how powerful it was when I figured out that if I knew somebody’s name down and in my organization, they assumed that I knew a lot about them and that I cared about them. And so learning everybody and leading by human connection is the secret and you establish a trust and the trust is, hey, I trust the boss and he trusts me and I know he’s not going to let me down. By definition, he has my back and when I come to him and say I’ve failed, he’s going to help get me back up and pull me down that direction because I’ve heard stories from him that he has failed too and we’re all in this together. And that approachability, that human connection, it even overrides people that go, well, I’m kind of an introvert. I’m not good at meeting people. Well, if you’re going to influence a team of people, you’re going to influence people. You kind of have to be good at connecting with them and so you sort of have to have that. But you can still be an introvert and you can kind of get comfortable. And the reason last point about this, the reason I do share all of my failures in the book and in my stories is I’m not all of that. I mean, it took a heck of an effort to get here and I failed here and here and here. And it’s okay for you to fail too. And I really want you to because this team is going to succeed if everybody is willing to fail. And we know we got each other’s back and I’m not going to rip your throat out because you failed in this effort for the team. Maybe in the most important thing, I understand the failure and the best leaders, they take that failure on themselves. They go, I didn’t train you adequately enough or I didn’t communicate the plan adequately enough, so let’s go in again and let’s go do this. And you start to endear yourselves to each other and the team starts to get really tight to where we enjoy working with each other.

Scott McCarthy [00:18:46]:

Yeah, I really appreciate everything you had to say there. We’re talking about failures a lot here and I’d like to add on one of the reasons why I personally talk about my failures to my team members is actually I want them to learn from my failures so they don’t turn around and make the same mistakes. And in fact, that to me is like building the team up. That’s actually using the experience for good vice, hiding it. And if I hit it, then maybe they turn around and they would do the same exact same mistake I did in the past. And then how far back does that bring us? But what I hear from a lot, what you said there was there’s a lot of humility involved, right? A lot of basically a lot of humility, a lot of patience, and ultimately just talking to people like they’re human beings. And you talked earlier, you mentioned earlier about how that the audience, they think themselves as leaders on bosses. Well, the actual tagline of the show is lead don’t boss. So you almost hit a nail on the head there. Mike, cognitive time. I know we got a hard stop coming up, but I got a question I’d like to hit on with you real quick.

Mike Manazir [00:20:02]:

I want to segue something. When the team is performing, scott and you talked about, I want to share my failure so they don’t repeat those things. Everybody has a different experience. I have been on teams and have been leaders at teams where we have to be high performing and we go after the results and we do highlight the failure. And if somebody has a failure, say, okay, we recover from that. But if they repeat that failure, if they don’t learn from the failure, that can be a debrief event, right? That can be like, okay, look, we can’t have this happen again. So if some people talk about as an error, hey, I made an error, not a failure. If you repeat the error, and we’ve already talked about it and we’ve talked extensively about how to avoid it and it happens again with somebody, they either don’t get it and they need to be moved to something else, or they didn’t listen or care about the debrief. So sometimes we have very hard discussions when a failure gets repeated. And it was particularly egregious in my world of driving big ships or flying tactical aircraft. Out in the fighter thing, there were some in air combat, there are some things you do that if you make that mistake again, you’re not going to be allowed to fight anymore or even fly airplanes anymore. I have several stories from my fighter aviation career where people did something, got debriefed on it and said, okay, that’s something you can’t violate again. You didn’t get the learning, which we got the learning this time they violated again, they’re done. And so there is that hard edge to failure that you don’t just fail and fail and fail and fail at the same thing and get ready to go, okay, we’re learning here. You do pick the team up by those debriefs about why you failed so your point? You already said it. You learn from the failure, and then you go another direction. You might fail again, like, right after that, but the team has to learn from the failure. You need to take advantage of any failure you have and make sure you learn from it in some way, shape, or form.

Scott McCarthy [00:21:58]:

Yeah, absolutely. Wholeheartedly agree. If you don’t learn from it, then it’s ultimately a waste of time for sure. What I’d like to dive into right now is domain three, and that’s leading your organization. So that’s like the actual institution, the company, the business aspect. From your experience, from your standpoint, how might leaders out there develop that high performing culture, that institution, aspects of their company?

Mike Manazir [00:22:30]:

So what I have found in my career so I led a fighter squadron with 350 people flying twelve F 14s all the way to when I was a one star Admiral, 10,000 people, one to seven ships, and another eight ships in maintenance back in the United States, almost across the world. And so what I have found is the secret is communication. And people go, well, okay, communication great. What do you mean? Well, you’ve got to be able to connect with every single member of the team that works for you. If you’re a close team of six people, pretty easy. And you all work in the same zip code, right? So you come in the office, you have a weekly meeting. Cool. Let’s say now you’ve got 100 people, and they’re dispersed across five areas in the United States. And now you have to figure out how to connect with them virtually like this. And COVID actually did help us a little bit in the ability to connect virtually. But then you have to make sure you’re going out and connecting with them on site. When you do things like send visions out or you send objectives out, or you send the annual fill in the blank out, you’ve got to make sure that you’re enabling dialogue with everybody on the team. You’ve got to make sure that you get the feedback about what you’re trying to do. A lot of leaders will go, hey, I sent the email. I was actually leading a group one time, it was a seminar, it was a company, and they said, hey, we have a new strategy. And I literally so how did you communicate your strategy? Well, we sent an email, and that was literally the answer. And I was actually kind of shocked because the company was doing pretty well. And I said, well, how did you get feedback? Well, we allow people to write back or whatever. So I counseled them on having town halls about the strategy, about getting down and in and getting that feedback about what it is you’re trying to do. So it is literally about communication. I’ll tell you a story. When I was the CEO of USS Nimitz in 2007, we were operating in the South China Sea and that’s 5000 people on the carrier. And I’d run around and see people. Well, most of my communication was on the general announcing system called the One MC. And every night I would get on the One MC and I would tell people what we were doing, what the weather was like outside. Some people never get outside on a carrier, what it was like outside and why we were doing what we were doing. And I was very upbeat, kind of like this. I mean when I’m talking to you. A lot of passion, a lot of energy. Because I really pictured that very junior, maybe brand new homesick. Sailor down on the second or third deck doesn’t want to be there. It’s like this isn’t the navy I signed up to. Very unhappy person. And I wanted to listen to the speaker and go why is that idiot so happy? Maybe there’s something I ought to be thinking about. And this one time, three days in a row I’d been on the bridge. We did flight operations in South China Sea. There were congested waters, I had to be on the bridge. Then we went through the Strait of Malacca, which requires me to be on the bridge the entire time. That’s a 24 hours transit through basically a shipping superhighway. And then we did flight ops on the other side in the Bay of Bengal. And I was tired. I got on the One MC this particular afternoon evening and I wasn’t my usual abuiant self. And I had to get out and see the command master chief down to the second deck. So after I got done doing the announcement, I hung up the microphone, walked out of the bridge, ran down the ladders and I got down to the second deck and a sailor stopped me. She put her hand right in the middle of my chest at captain. I said yeah. She goes Are you okay? I went sure. What’s going on? Because you sounded really down on the One MC. And right then I knew that my tone actually affected sailors on the ship and that they were concerned that my tone was there. And if they’re listening to my tone now, I know that the communication is effective. I would encourage all those leaders out there when you’re trying to lead an organization, really listen to and look at and seek feedback on how effectively you’re communicating, written and spoken. You can’t sit at your desk, you can’t just send emails, you can’t say hey, the boss says or whatever. You’ve got to get out. And you’ve got to run around in the middle of the team. Even if they’re dispersed and even if they’re across time zones, you got to shift the times of your meeting so that you’re not always doing the DC time and 800 DC time when it’s some god awful hour in the middle of the night where somebody down in Australia. Is getting up to talk to you. So you shift those around so you’re cognizant of what the rhythm of your team is and you get in the middle of that rhythm everywhere your team is.

Scott McCarthy [00:27:19]:

That’s an awesome story. I like that you got a young sailor putting their hand into the chest of the captain and saying, hey, are you okay? Kudos. That person, should they be listening? Mike, this has been a great conversation. Again, cognizant of your time. I do got two last quick questions for you. One, a question I asked all the guests here at the Peak Performance leadership podcast. And according to you, Mike, aka Nasty, what makes a great leader?

Mike Manazir [00:27:46]:

Leading from your heart. If you lead with your title, you’re not going to get peak performance out of your team. They’re not going to want to fail for you and they’re not going to give you their best and you’re not going to establish high morale. When you connect and show them that you’re just the same human being they are, you’re going to be able to lead a high performance team or at least get your team to go with you the direction you want to go.

Scott McCarthy [00:28:08]:

Awesome. Love it. And the last question to show is how can people find you, follow you, be part of your journey. It’s all about you now.

Mike Manazir [00:28:15]:

Yeah, thanks. Www.mikemanazzer.com and you’ll see content leadership content. You can sign up for a free newsletter. We’re starting to put together groups talking about leadership techniques. All the content on the website is about the way that I think about leading. And then, of course, you can get my book learn how to Lead to win by going through the website or by going to Amazon, including an audiobook where I narrate the stories myself. And so www.mikemanazzer.com and we’ll extend a lot of the topics you and I talk about, which by the way, your focus, your questions and your show is spot on. It’s exactly what I think it takes to lead high performing teams and get peak performance out of that. So, Scott, I think you’ve got it exactly right.

Scott McCarthy [00:29:04]:

Wow. I’ll take those words from a rear admiral any day. I’ll be sure to send this recording to my boss. It Mike. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule, though, I appreciate it. Appreciate you. And no doubt the audience got a lot out of you. For the audience, it’s easy for the links, just go to lead, don’tboss com. Two, five, 7257 and the links are there in show notes. And Mike, thanks for taking time and have yourself a great day.

Mike Manazir [00:29:33]:

Hey. Thanks, Scott. Have a great week. Lead to win, everybody.