Admiral Mike Mullen

Admiral Mike Mullen didn’t expect to make a career of the U.S. Navy—certainly not after the first ship he commanded crashed into a buoy. But thanks to persistence and a people-focused leadership style, he rose through the ranks to serve two presidents as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a job he says was the hardest of his life. He retired last fall. Interviewed by Alison Beard HBR: How would you define your leadership style? Mullen: No matter the organization, the goal, or the mission, you’ve got to do it through people. It’s been that way for me since my first command. I work to understand the people, their views and needs, and how tasks are being carried out. That interaction might cause me to modify my guidance or the way I delegate. It also affords me an opportunity to learn what goals people have and how as their boss I can facilitate their future in ways that not only help them, but also help the ship or the organization. Of course, when you go from the command of a ship of 100 people to the chairman’s job, overseeing 2.2 million men and women, it becomes much more difficult. You have these massive staffs who oftentimes just want to keep you happy and don’t like bringing bad news. Understanding the gap between what we’re trying to do and what we’re actually executing on is a real challenge. You’ve said that the chairman’s job was the hardest of your life. Why was it so difficult? I’d grown up in the Navy in an operational or staff environment, so I had very little experience on the policy side. As the chairman, you spend 95% of your time in policy at the highest level with, obviously, the president and the other principal Cabinet members. So that was where I had to grow. And then the job was relentless. It really was 24/7, 365. From my standpoint, I needed to get out of the office, out into the field. I was gone about 40% of the time. In Washington that’s dangerous, because when you’re not at meetings, sometimes they don’t come out the way they would had you been there. But it’s always been my style to get close to what we call the pointed end in war—to really see what we’re asking our men and women to do. Of course, a lot of commanders on the ground don’t want the chairman to get so close to the fight. I understand that. But I tried to push as far into their world as I could—and push in on the cultural side in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to understand the people and our impact on them. So about two-thirds of my travel was overseas, and the rest was in the U.S. because I had to learn the Army. The Army is the center of gravity for our military. They were bearing the brunt of the war. They were transforming themselves from a conventional into a counterinsurgency force. They were losing people. They were being wounded. Their families were pressed and stressed the most. So I had to spend time where they live, not just get reports into headquarters. My wife and I would visit them at posts throughout the country: Fort Sill, Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Fort Carson, Fort Lewis. That gave me a much improved understanding of just what we were asking of them, and I took all that to the table for major decisions in Washington. What’s the secret to bridging a cultural divide—whether it’s Arab–American, military–civilian, Democrat–Republican, or between branches of the armed forces? Persistence. And you need to be very sincere. I’ve always worked hard to build relationships with key people and to try to see things from their perspective, even if I don’t agree with it. That way I’ve been able to connect with my counterparts in Turkey or Russia or China or Japan or South Korea or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq or Israel or Italy. Some of those relationships are very strong, some not so strong. But it’s enough to be able to pick up the phone, particularly in a crisis, to get a better understanding of what’s going on and how we might work together. I recently reestablished relations with the Chinese defense minister, but we’re just getting to know each other. That’s better than nothing, but it’s worrisome if you have a crisis. We have no relationship with Iran. We haven’t talked to Iran for over 30 years. So I worry a great deal about outcomes there. As for Washington politics, in the mid ’90s, when I was the financial guy for the Navy, I developed relationships with key Capitol Hill committee members, because they were our bankers—the people who wrote the checks. I worked both sides of the aisle on key issues for the Navy, whether it was building ships or buying weapons systems or funding bonuses for our people. I did the same with people in other organizations. Within about a year of becoming chairman, I hosted a reception at my quarters for the heads of major NGOs in Washington. Those relationships proved to be pretty valuable. Haiti, for example: The time I’d spent with the guy who ran Doctors Without Borders allowed me to pick up the phone and talk to him. He couldn’t get his airplanes in. I couldn’t get the airport open. We were able to work together to solve this. I remember another person at that reception who came up to me and said, “You know, we’ve had representatives in 1,400 villages in Afghanistan since 1973.” I said, “Wouldn’t I just die to know what you know?” So I work in lots of different directions. I say that trust is the coin of the realm. That’s what I try to build. I know that you worked particularly hard with Pakistani leaders, applying first private and then public pressure. Probably the most intense, difficult relationship I worked on building was with the head of the Pakistani army, the country’s most senior military official. I made 27 trips to Pakistan and met him in other places as well. It was an enormously complex situation. I was losing people in Afghanistan; the Pakistanis were also losing people. The terrorist threat inside their country is getting bigger and bigger. We’re trying to support the training and equipment they need to address that. But when the Haqqani network came across the border and attacked our embassy, and shortly thereafter a truck bomb killed a bunch of American soldiers, I spoke out very publicly to say that I saw strategic support from Pakistan’s military and its intelligence agency for the Haqqani network, enabling it to kill our people. That was a bridge too far for me. Given all the effort I’d expended in the relationship, when I said that, it really got people’s attention. Why did you speak out against the policy preventing gays from serving openly in the military? When President Obama came in, it was clear he was going to try to end the policy. So I started to work on it with a small group to understand all the issues and how, if he did this, we might execute it. It was a very controversial issue at the strategic level, but my soundings on the ground indicated that it was a nonissue with our young people, which was an important input to me. I also sat down with retired or former military members who were gays and lesbians and just listened to them, to their views, to what they’d been through. All that work got me to a position where it was fundamentally an issue of integrity. Since June 30, 1964, when I went to the Naval Academy, I’ve been taught that honor and integrity define who we are—our core values. How could I reconcile that with the fact that we were forcing men and women who would give their lives for the country to lie every day about who they are? I knew I would be asked my personal opinion at the congressional hearing, so in my opening statement I chose to take it off the table. And although it wasn’t my intention, it fundamentally changed the terms of reference of the debate. Many people have said it was a courageous decision. But I was perfectly comfortable, at ease. We worked for the better part of 2011 to get ready. President Obama was terrific, because he was being pressured to make this thing happen quicker and quicker but he stayed with the process: first do a study to understand what was needed to execute it; then conduct the training; and then have the certification, which Congress required, that said we were ready to go. That finally happened on the 20th of September. It hasn’t been much of an issue since then. On a contentious issue like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell or the surge in Afghanistan, how did you in your role as chairman go about building consensus among senior leaders or motivating those people who didn’t agree with the strategy? I’m a collaborative individual. From the moment I took over as chairman, my style was to include the Joint Chiefs and the vice-chairman in everything, and to have healthy debates. It was my job to be back and forth to the White House. Where we had disagreements, certainly I would work that space. Sometimes we’d resolve it, and other times we wouldn’t. If I had a member of the Joint Chiefs who stood in stark disagreement with a recommendation on a major decision, my responsibility was to either voice it or put it in writing. You worked for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, two presidents with very different political views and leadership styles. How did you adjust? First of all, I never talk about them and their styles. But there wasn’t a difficult adjustment, because my advice was independent. I approached this from an apolitical or neutral point of view and gave the best advice. Then, when the president said, “OK, this is my decision,” the debate was over. We marched off and did that. It will always be that way. I know your parents were Hollywood publicists. What did you learn from them that helped you excel? Well, it’s a pretty rough business in spite of all the glamor that’s associated with it. But my dad, to his great credit, made sure that all I saw was the positive stuff. Both of them were focused on trying to make a difference in other people’s lives, and they were both incredibly hard workers. So I got from them this great sense of responsibility. The other thing is they were excited about a diversity of views, whether it was politics, arts and sciences, education, or sports, and they had people around them, friends, who were incredibly interesting people. I didn’t quite understand it as a kid, but I absorbed that. I understand that you weren’t a terrific student when you started out at the Naval Academy. How did you turn things around? I was a good student in high school, but I didn’t have to work hard. I knew I needed discipline, which is one of the reasons I chose the Naval Academy. Also, we didn’t have a lot of money. If I wanted to get a good education, I had to go someplace that would pay for it. So I went, and I met some great young men from all over the country. It was going from big fish, small pond to small fish, big pond. The competition and talent level were huge. I could compete, but I just wasn’t that interested in studies. My grades were OK. I just didn’t apply myself. I’m not proud of that. If I had that to do all over again, I’d do it differently. I read that you never expected to make a career of the Navy. Well, my original plan was five years, which was our obligation. But I loved going to sea. I loved seeing the world. Every day was different. It was difficult, demanding, exciting—we were literally writing history. And then the Navy gave me a command very early, at the age of 26, and I really liked it. For the most part I thrived. I always tell people that despite your views when you’re young, life marches up to you. The future can be pretty unpredictable. But I know you had a big setback when that first ship under your command hit a buoy. Yes. That’s not a good thing to do. It was the first time I’d really failed in my life. It was the first time my wife, Deborah, had seen me fail. So it was traumatic for both of us. I got an evaluation that by all accounts should have ruined my career. But I had a mentor, George Sullivan, whose enthusiasm was really remarkable. He helped me get through it. I fought the system, and it was a long, tedious, difficult process from 1973 to 1984, but I got eventually got that evaluation removed from my record. That gave me a chance to command at least one more time, which I did in 1985. And then I commanded again and again. So the lesson for me was: What choice do you make after you fail? Do you just give up? Or do you get up, knowing that you still have an awful lot to give? I chose the second path. Too often we just look at these glistening successes. Behind them in many, many cases is failure along the way, and that doesn’t get put into the Wikipedia story or the bio. Yet those failures teach you every bit as much as the successes. What do you teach the people you mentor? First of all, don’t burn bridges, because you just don’t know when you’re going to need to cross them. Second, create options for yourself with diversity of education and diversity of assignments. I once asked a group of young Air Force officers, Who can I send from here to the Treasury Department? Some people might think that assignment would be fatal to their careers. But when I assign people to positions like that, I send my top performers, because the military needs to have a much better understanding of the financial world. And once those people start succeeding, others will follow. I also try to do a great deal of mentoring by example, bringing people close enough that they can see what’s important to me and what isn’t, and how I act in certain circumstances. It’s also been my habit for a long time to run to anybody in trouble. Maybe it was that early very difficult period: I understand what they’re going through. You’ve talked about the dramatic change in the military’s competence between Desert One in 1980, for example, and the Osama bin Laden raid in 2011. What did the military do differently to achieve that? Well, Desert One was 1979. We were transitioning out of the draft and we had a very difficult funding environment. As a young lieutenant commander, I could feel decisions made at the national level down where I was living, in terms of support that I had or didn’t have. President Reagan was very committed to building the military back up, and it became a fulsome all-volunteer force that was resourced well so that we could carry out the missions. In the ’90s we started to struggle again because we downsized 40%; that was fine, but we did it very, very rapidly. We didn’t treat people very well. But then there was Desert Storm and Desert Shield. Success there was a tremendously important part of who we had become and who we would be in the future. Then came 9/11 and the response and the growth and the resources and the support from the American people. We got into these very, very difficult wars, and the American people stayed with us. That drove a lot of our desire to excel. Throughout this we improved our education systems and our training systems. We evolved into this incredibly professional force. It’s the best in the world—I would argue the best in the history of the world. The young officers sitting in the middle of Iraq and Afghanistan have had to become city managers, basically. We have these bright young people with this amazing ability to adapt. Everybody’s a leader. Has it been difficult to retire? It hasn’t, no. Both Deborah and I were bone tired by the time I left the chairman’s job. We needed to move on. Now the stress level is way down and it’s allowed us to focus on ourselves. We’ve moved back into our family home, and I’m sleeping a lot more. So it’s been good. But I look forward to continuing to represent our veterans and their families as they transition back. I really believe that this generation, these 20-somethings, are an extraordinary generation. I think they will lead. I think they’ll make a difference.

Admiral Mike Mullen

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