Building Bridges

Connection as a key differentiator of leadership potential

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the promotion of my old friend Corey Simmons to Brigadier General in the US Air Force.

It was an amazing ceremony. The best of its kind I have seen by a country mile.

There was a heart-swelling rendition of the Star Spangled Banner by Corey’s children, several hilarious rounds of karaoke (yes, karaoke) brokered by presiding officer General Mike Minihan, and a speech by Corey himself that managed to make hundreds of past and present colleagues feel genuinely appreciated in little more than 6 minutes.

Had there been a grain of doubt about his readiness to enter the strategic domain, it would have been laid to rest by the magnetic authenticity and obvious commitment of this officer and his family, on notorious display for all to see.

I’ve known Corey since we were classmates in a Pentagon internship twenty years ago. Even then, it was clear this day would come. It just seemed obvious.

But being back among my old clan got me reflecting with the clarity of hindsight on how my working definition of leadership has evolved over the years … and why what I saw back then gave me the strong feeling he’d go all the way.

When we were captains, I was certain leadership was all about operational delivery. Whoever could be given a team, a mission, and resources … and could be depended upon to deliver consistently, and to do all that requires … that person exemplified leadership.

That’s not a bad definition. It gets us most of the way.

But as our careers evolved in parallel and sometimes criss-crossing journeys over the years, I realized operational delivery was necessary yet insufficient in defining leadership.

To move the dial on a bigger playing field, such as across an entire wing/base, a command staff, or a combat theater, takes something more. You have to be able to influence others, be effective in a bureaucracy, and exercise enough political skill to secure outcomes for your people.

For a while, it seemed to me that operational delivery + political ability got pretty close to defining leadership.

But in the past few years of working in senior roles, I’ve realized there is another important thing a leader needs to move big levers at the strategic level.

As I sat in a standing-room-only auditorium, marveling at the sheer scale of presence and support for Corey’s advancement, this realization was crystalline.

Strategic leaders build bridges between communities, nodes, organizations, and people. They connect people for the sake of doing so, not because of any immediately obvious imperative. In a “believe it to see it” sort of way, they just know it’s important.

In building bridges, such leaders foster cohesion, interoperability, and interdependence spanning countless overlapping and intertwined communities of practice.

This cohesion is what fosters scaled unity of purpose when it matters. People who might be functional strangers with disparate roles to play are bound together and find themselves moving toward common purpose, sharing at least a partially common understanding of the situation.

This becomes absolutely critical in the dynamic environment of combat (be it kinetic or budgetary) when gaining and sustaining an advantage depends on being able to dynamically re-prioritize, sort competing imperatives, and make rapid decisions. Sources of friction are eased by commonality.

The Air Force Weapons School attempts to manufacture this effect by impressing upon its graduates that (a) war can’t be won without the effective combination of all types of combat power, and (b) air power can’t play its part without effective integration.

Weapons officers tend to connect actively and habitually with others; they do so because they know there is a combat-relevant reason. This makes the connection more transactional, though no less important.

(As a fun side note, Corey attended my graduation from Weapons School in 2006, where he made and brokered connections which continue to this day. Others bypassed the chance to attend because “it wasn’t their community.”)

But in its most effective form, bridge building happens because people like Brig Gen Simmons act on their natural impulse to lash together people who might not otherwise connect. At first, they know each other through a common contact. After a while, that contact fades into the scenery and they are simply tethered.

Over the years, this happens thousands of times until an army of loosely confederated operators exists, conjoined by a series of tacit understandings. And when the moment arises, they meet on those bridges and sort out the problems that unleash strategic success.

At Corey’s pin-on, I saw an impressive fractal of the multi-factional legion he has built over the past two decades. He’s become the Kevin Bacon of the Air Force, with any two people able to connect to one another through him in a few moves. It is remarkable, and fun, and inspiring, and already paying tangible dividends.

Organizations without bridge builders find themselves bogged down by factionalism and haggling when the time comes to deliver at scale and speed.

Different nodes of the overall organization are strangers to one another, so rather than a quick acknowledgement of trust and nod of alignment, they find themselves engaged in long-winded contests for whose priorities will drive the agenda.

Lumbering about while others accelerate and sprint, they lose strategic ground to competitors.

Executives often find themselves appealing to their senior managers and HR teams for predictions on which leaders within their organizations have the potential to rise to strategic level.

If you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow, and which will not, speak then to me, they implore.

Any decent response should consider not just who delivers operationally and has the political skill to make it count, but should also contemplate who builds bridges for the sheer sake of doing so.

Because these are the people who have extraordinary intuition about what strategic success requires. They invest in a future they can’t yet see … by building something as powerful as it is shapeless.

The Air Force is in a tough spot at the moment, defensive on a few fronts. With leaders like Brig Gen Simmons, it gives itself the best chance of regaining the strategic initiative.

Written with obvious and unapologetic bias.

TC is a retired USAF officer and former Amazon operations director with more than three decades of leadership experience. He writes about leadership, focusing on what makes leaders effective in the context of organizational life.