Don't be a Knucklehead
Chronicling an important leadership misfire
Changing the culture of an organization takes time and persistence. When you observe live examples that either support or undermine the target culture, it’s important to take notice.
In the US Air Force, a “341” is a form used in the training environment. It’s something an airman has to give a supervisor when caught in the act of being a bonehead. It’s how we track demerits.
A drill instructor or supervisor says “give me a 341.” The airman hands over the pre-filled slip of paper, which the supervisor documents with the offending chicanery.
His shame complete, the airman carries on, ferrying his blushes to the next incident while the supervisor deposits the purely symbolic slip of paper into the nearest roundfile.
Today, I suggest Chief Cole Fricke give his boss a 341.
Fricke occupies an important role and has a lot of authority. The evidence says he’s misused that authority in an annoying way. It should be noted, then he should proceed to the next incident.
I think and write and advise a lot about organizational culture.
One of the recurrent themes in organizational culture is the valid use of authority. Organizations can’t help but become authority structures to some degree. While postmodernists fantasize about quasi-Marxist havens of featureless equality in workplaces, the cold reality is that to exercise responsibility, authority must also be conferred. So every organization is a vertical power structure.
But authority can easily become an unhealthy element of culture. Because as it turns out, humans are imperfect creatures acting on a complex set of intellectual, emotional, and primal impulses. Given power over others, many of us will stumble in how to exercise it without misusing it. And some will just abuse it.
Necessity is a decent rule of thumb for whether authority is being used properly.
Authority in service of a valid and necessary objective is healthy.
Authority in the service of personal preferences, views, whims, or appetites is not.
But the tricky part is it’s not always clear which of these is in control.
Alcohol is a great lens for thinking about military authority.
Commanders who limit or ban alcohol to protect mission success or honor host nation legal constraints are exercising valid authority.
Commanders who limit or ban alcohol because they don’t want to deal with the messy consequences of individual liberty or because they think drinking is evil and wrong are not exercising valid authority.
The problem, of course, is that we can seldom know which motivation is animating the decision.
Military leaders exercise a lot of authority. And because the concepts of mission primacy and good order/discipline are so expansive, virtually any pretext, no matter how improper, can be successfully obscured by a valid rationale.
All of which is to lay the foundation to assert three things:
The uniqueness of military authority makes its exercise a high-risk activity.
We need to be damned careful who we give it to. Character should be central to how we make this call.
We need to continually train people with authority on the complexities of exercising it carefully and responsibly.
Because when it gets abused, the injury to morale can be catastrophic.
In a tall vertical organization like the Air Force, mid-level managers hold the power to nullify the desired cultural direction of the service by imposing their own preferences through the invalid use of authority.
Which brings us back to Chief Fricke.
Here’s a screenshot of an email sent by Fricke a few days ago.
To summarize.
The USAF Chief of Staff is visiting Langley. He wants to publicly recognize a deserving airman. It’s the job of Fricke to understand who in his unit might be a good candidate.
In casting the net for a superior performer worthy of 4-star recognition, he imposes his own conditions. The person needs to have a clean record. They need to be “sharp” on customs and courtesies. And they need to not have a beard.
Now my view.
This email from Fricke is way too long. It just needed to say “tell me who is most deserving and why.”
If the most deserving person has had past disciplinary issues, so be it.
If they don’t look like a poster child in uniform, so be it.
If they are on a shaving waiver because a medical professional has deemed that it’s bad for their health to shave naturally coarse or curly hair which is likely to become ingrown as a result, leading to painful and potentially serious health issues, so be it.
This kind of nonsense is how we end up disengaging, overlooking, and downshifting our best performers. It’s how we end up promoting the wrong people. They are not the best or most deserving, but they get favored for other reasons. The wrong reasons.
You could reasonably, as some have, accuse Fricke of being discriminatory. It’s an inference he probably needs to deal with.
I’m not prepared to do that because I don’t know the workings of his mind. I don’t know what pretext is animating his actions, though he demonstrates a bias that makes me wonder how airmen in his unit who don’t align to his preferences might be faring.
What I am prepared to allege is misuse of authority. Which for a Chief is just knucklehead behavior from someone who should know better.
Now, this might just reflect one misguided leader. Or it might reflect a good leader making a rare mistake.
It might reflect someone not understanding the length of his shadow or weight of his words.
But it might reflect an entrenched Air Force culture wherein leaders take too much enjoyment in flexing their authority and lack sufficient care and restraint to balance their personal impulses against what’s best for the team.
So much so that they defy the guidance of superiors or exploit ambiguity to push their own preferences. This beard thing is, after all, an old issue.
Here’s a memo from the service’s highest-ranking enlisted leader explicitly directing that people like Fricke be “deliberate and proactive in removing any stigma associated with shaving profiles or accommodations.”
That’s crystal clear. It’s an attempt to change the climate around this issue, which is the beginning of changing the culture around it.
Fricke either hasn’t seen this memo, which would be bad … or he’s choosing to defy it, which would be worse. But we can safely assume Fricke won’t be the only senior leader oblivious or in defiance.
After being at war pretty much non-stop for three decades, we’ve arrived at a cultural position where an airman has to look like a recruiting poster just to be coined. That to me reflects deep dysfunction … because if we don’t know by now what makes us lethal and how to get more of it from our teams … we will never know.
I think the Air Force, despite having absolutely superb leaders in most of its key roles at this moment in time, continues to have an authority problem.
In this case, the incentives attached to flexing authority and pushing conformity outweigh the incentives attached to inclusivity and merit-based recognition.
Air Force senior leaders openly want this to change. They want to do better.
But wanting is not enough. Now comes the hard part … actually making intent come true at unit level. And that means persistent influence to change the climate until frontline leaders embrace new norms. That's hard work and will take years and new resources, not just memos and talk.
But it will take longer if we’re too timid to call it as we see it when the opportunity arises.
So when we see live examples like this one, we don't sit passively with it. We call it out and we learn. Then we move on.
Chief Master Sergeants are extraordinarily privileged. They exist for one purpose, and that’s to advance and safeguard the interests of enlisted airmen, to whom our nation owes a debt of gratitude it is incapable of even understanding.
I hope to see more of that and less of this on my radar.
TC is a retired Air Force officer who served six enlisted years as an F-15 crew chief.
There are Chiefs and there are E-9's; based on this, am pretty sure I know which side of the line this "Chief" falls...