How Robert G. Novotny Makes High-Stakes Decisions: Fighter Pilot Leadership Secrets

Have you ever hesitated in a critical moment—knowing a decision had to be made, but unsure if it was the right one? In this high-impact episode of Commander’s Intent, Derek Oaks sits down with retired Air Force General and fighter pilot Robert G. Novotny to break down how elite leaders make decisions under pressure—and how you can apply the same principles in business and life. 

From the cockpit of an F-15 to leading large-scale operations in the private sector, Robert shares how fighter pilots are trained to process massive amounts of information, make fast, effective decisions, and adapt in real time—where hesitation can cost everything. But this isn’t just about speed—it’s about clarity, structure, and confidence in execution.

You’ll learn how to gather the right information without overthinking, when to act immediately versus when to wait for better data, and how empowering others to make decisions can transform your leadership. This episode also dives into one of the most powerful but overlooked tools in leadership—the debrief—and how reviewing decisions (good or bad) is the key to continuous improvement.

If you’re leading a team, running a business, or simply trying to make better decisions in your own life, this conversation will give you a practical framework to cut through uncertainty and act with confidence.

Hit play and learn how to think, decide, and lead like a fighter pilot.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Have you ever frozen in the key moment of making a critical decision? Whether it's in business or in life, it can cost you everything. Commander's Intent will teach and inspire you how to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose. So here's your host, retired Air Force Colonel, fighter pilot, and your leadership mentor, Derek Oaks.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Hello again and welcome back to another episode of Commander's Intent. I'm here with my guest, Rob Blender Lovotney, Brainer General retired from the United States Air Force. He retired a number of years ago and he worked for himself for a while, for Boeing for a while, and now he works for Carbon Aerospace. In his career, he was an F-15 guy, the Eagle Driver. He commanded at the squadron group and I think multiple wing level, and probably a flight commander also. He's got vast experience at the command level. And we're going to talk about fighter pilot decision making and how fighter pilot decision making is really applicable well beyond the cockpit and how beneficial it can be. And you don't have to be a fighter pilot to learn how to use it, but I recommend you get taught by a fighter pilot of what its value is and how best to use it so you can apply it in whatever sphere you work in. So I'm going to turn it over to Blender so he can go ahead and talk about a little bit of where he is, his company, and we'll start introducing the topic from there. Go ahead, Wonder.

unknown 1:20

Great. Great.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Thanks, Woody. I'm so excited to be on your podcast. Congrats to you on what's turning in to be a really successful storytelling that you're doing, the guests that you keep having on you. Quite a few of my friends have showed up here. So it's just exciting to see what you're working through and the narratives and the stories that you're telling. So it's awesome. But you're right. I was a little kid growing up in Miami, Florida, and always wanted to be a fighter pilot. And it took me a long time, but I found my way there. And after an exciting and awesome and rewarding run in the military, I really kind of got to the point where I wanted to try my hand at the private sector. I wanted to see if I could go out and compete and be successful and maybe take some of the lessons learned I had through all the different jobs that you mentioned there and go do something in the private world. COVID hit right when I was retiring. So it took me a little bit to kind of land on my feet. I wound up consulting for a wide variety of great little businesses and small companies, all trying to do business in the defense and aerospace kind of ecosystem. And I was fortunate to help a few of them get their feet going and get their products into the right places. And then after a couple of years of doing that, Boeing gave me a call. And I had such a great time at Boeing. I grew up, just like you said, as an F-15 pilot. So initially hired to help sell F-15s across the globe and had an amazing team. It was just awesome. And did that for a couple of years, had a great time, got involved in F-47 as well. As that was just about, you know, kind of hit the street towards the end of my tenure there at Boeing. And then Carbon Aerospace gave me a call and offered me an opportunity for a vertical move and a huge, a huge level of responsibility, to be honest. And it was actually that it was that it was that huge level of scope and responsibility that really got me excited about making the job change. And so I'm the vice president of ops across the United States, and I'm the general manager of our flagship plant, which is just south of Dallas in Red Oak, Texas. Carbon Aerospace has got three major manufacturing sites. There's one in Georgia, and then there's one in Thailand as well. And you know, what's interesting is most people haven't heard of us, but we've we trace our lineage all the way back to about 1917 to block aerospace. So uh we were one of the original, you know, defense aerospace manufacturers over 180 years ago, 109 years ago. So we've been in this space for a long time. And uh I get to run this huge manufacturing complex, engineering, quality, manufacturing. My industrial engineers help with me. We've got about seven major programs just in Red Oak, Texas alone, from helping Boeing build uh the T7A trainer for the United States Air Force and hopefully more customers to the Virgin Galactic Delta 1 spacecraft. So we're kind of we've got the whole gamut of modern uh new equipment, spacecraft, and uh everything in between. It's just amazing. So tell me, what are you guys building for the T7? What component? I'd say, you know, I don't have the exact number. And we've had a couple of meetings with volume trying to get the exact number. We build about 65% of the entire aircraft. So we build the forward fuselage for Boeing, we build the wings, we build the horizontal stabilators, and we build the verticals. Saab comes in with the aft section of the fuselage, and we wind up shipping those parts that I mentioned, not the aft, that comes from Saab, and we ship the rest of those parts to St. Louis where they pull it all together, install the major components, they do all the heavy testing, and then fly it away and sell it to the customers. We do a lot, the T7. It's exciting.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

That's awesome. I love the T7, I love the way it looks. My biggest complaint with the T7 is the timeline. Come on, how long is it taking us to feel it? But yeah, I'm not gonna get critical of Boeing. If I'm gonna be critical anyway, it's gonna be Air Force Materiel Command and how long it takes to accept and and move through milestones of a product. I know D7 was flying back in, was it 2018, the first ones, the prototypes were flying in 2018?

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Yeah, that sounds about that sounds about right. I mean, you know, any major defense acquisition having been on as a supplier now, as an OEM before, as an acquirer, I was uh one of my first jobs as a young brigadier general was I was a deputy 589 at Air Combat Command. And for your audience, that's the requirements, the future planners, the budget folks at our major warfighting command. And you got to get the requirements stabilized, those those tend to change a lot, and that drives you know perturbations in the system. It's and we're building really exquisite stuff. I'll tell you what either. It's hard business, it's incredibly rewarding. And we're anyway, we're we're excited to be on that platform and a bunch of other ones as well.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

No, I'm excited for you. And I hope it goes well. I'd love to be on a flight. So I think I may have missed my opportunity to do that by being born about 20 years too soon, but I I think people enjoy flying it. It looks like it'd be a fun plane to fly. So shifting gears back to fighter pilot decision making. You know, when you first went through your initial qualification in the Eagle, and I know that you learned how to fly the aircraft. Can I take off? Can I lay in, do instruments, those basic things that the necessary evils of flying a fighter aircraft? And they start teaching you basic fighter maneuvers of how to maneuver in relation to another aircraft and the little hundreds of decisions you're making in a matter of minutes to stay alive, to be able to maneuver against the enemy, to position your aircraft properly, to max perform the aircraft, and to position yourself in a position to where you can employ weapons against or not get shot by the weapons. And all the decisions that are required in that, it's it's really amazing. You know, I think back my time flying in A-10, how quickly you were having to make decisions on and pretty impactful decisions. And you translate that into leadership roles, you know, managing your aircraft, managing multiple aircraft, and then man, and then being in leadership roles where you're managing a squadron, making in some cases split-second decisions to that are going to be very impactful to people's lives, people's livelihoods, and the direction of the organization that you're in. I wanted to say how does that translate into what you're doing as a general manager of a manufacturing plant, which to me seems like the coolest job in the world. You actually get to build tangible things and you get to work with people that are doing it and be around a lot of cool equipment. There's a lot of decisions that have to be made and there are going to be mistakes. And how do you manage all that? How does fighter pilot decision making help you having zero experience and that kind of background to step into a role like this?

SPEAKER_02 7:43

Yeah, I think Sweden. I think you paint the picture pretty correctly, right? I mean, uh, of course, from the fighter pilot perspective, with all of your experience and accolades and doing that. You know, I was reflecting on maybe that question as I was coming home from work today. And I I guess, you know, when we were young, we took for granted how much responsibility was put on your shoulders. For us, it came fairly natural, right? If you went to the range, flying a hawk, go out to the training range, fly to the eagle, you were making decisions for two or four people. You evaluated the environment, you made a decision on how you were going to fight, how you're going to detect the target. You made the decision, you communicated the decision after gathering relevant facts. Sometimes, sometimes you consult with your junior flight leads or you talk to the range control team, but you make a decision, you go out and execute. And then, of course, in our culture, you know, we go back and we dissect it in the debrief of, you know, did we make the right decision? Did we have all the right available information? And what was the result? I'll tell you, as a general manager or vice president, you know, make a decision every day. And some of those are really small and you don't know it. And some of those are more substantive. But our process is incredibly the same. First of all, I think have have been a fire pilot, you know, we coming into the manufacturing space, the things that I think completely translate are first and foremost, when it's time to make a decision, we make a decision. That's not to be that's not to be, I think, undervalued, right? I tell my team now, if I've got more time to make a decision, is say, let's say I don't have to make a decision until Friday. I tell my team generally, I'll probably wait until Friday to make the decision. And the reason I tell them to that is there's more facts are going to become available. You know, from the fighter pilot perspective, there's more intelligence I'm gonna get. I'm gonna get a few more sweeps of the radar. I'm gonna get another look at the target through the targeting pod. The JTAC may come in and give me a little bit more additional data. But when it's time to make a decision, we make a decision and we move out. Then I think making a bad decision is uh obviously has consequences, but the absence of making the decision has consequences too. So first and foremost, when it's time to make a decision, I think I've learned how to make one and move forward. The the structure of that decision, I think, also comes from our legacy of at you know, our background of having flown fighter gists, which is the ability to take in a lot of data and bring it together and fuse it into some kind of coherent fashion that supports what we think the overall objective is very quickly. I think we're also good at using our wingmen. So I have a great staff of amazing leaders, and some of them see the picture differently than I do, and some of them have a significantly different background than I do from the manufacturing perspective. And our wingmen in the fighter pilot world, they may have a different radar picture, they may have a different radar look, they may have different roles and responsibility in the cast stack, for example, in a hawk world. And being able to listen to them and query them and hear the right data and bring that into your decision formulation, I think is something that we learned when we were very young, and it pays dividends now for sure. And then I think once all of that is done, I did this today. One of our meetings today was debriefing an event that we did last week. And for me, what I've learned is truly holding accountability in the debrief. Okay, who did what? What was the right way to do it? Why did you do it that way? What were the information you had? What do the rules say? And then what are we going to do differently next time? A lot of times, unfortunate, the people I'm working with, the debrief leads to just improvements. You know, fortunately, they're nothing dumb, dangerous, or different like we used to say. But how do we do this better, faster next time? How do we communicate better? How do we codify a procedure that streamlines a process that makes it better? The debrief is, I tell you, I find in the private sector, the debrief is not something we do a lot of. But then again, listen, it when we're in the military, we had lots of A9 shops or you know, lessons learned that we used to call the lessons observed. Places we didn't really learn them. The private industry doesn't have the the corner of the market there, but how do we debrief that so that next time I have to make a decision, it's more informed and it leads to better results? That that definitely translates, I think.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Yeah, that's good to hear. I thought my full-on question was going to be how do you teach fighter pilot decision making? They're like, here we're gonna how do you teach fighter pot decision making? How do you teach somebody who's never been exposed to that, that the rapid uh decision-making process, OODA loop, and how do you get them to embrace it and get them to use it when they've never been exposed to it? So you're teaching people right now, you people on your staff, that don't know anything about BFM. They don't know anything about area engagements or or uh working with a JTAC again. And yet you want them to be able to make decisions in their realm just as effectively as you did as a fighter pilot.

SPEAKER_02 12:29

I think one thing that that you know, when you and I were young fighter pilots that maybe we took for granted is how empowered we were. When you start the jet, you take off and you go to airspace, it's on you. There's no more, you're not gonna phone home to the duty desk for the most part. You're leading your flight. So the first thing I try to teach is just really empowering down to the lowest level those things that I believe belong at their level. Any organization that gets scared or any organization that gets on hard times is going to have a tendency to coalesce decision making higher and higher. And so, and I think the decision making can lead in that direction, right? And and so I find in our organization we're we're pretty good at at moving decisions down, but there's still decisions that me I'm comfortable pushing down and challenging young leaders to to make a decision. Number one, to make a good decision, you know, would come from encouraging them to form the group, encouraging them to seek outside counsel, encouraging them to understand the space a little differently. I definitely try to share the big picture at the lowest level so that when they're making a decision, it's framed in order to achieve those objectives. I think that that also helps a lot. And then I think the last thing, so I think empowerment, how to structure decision making. You mentioned the ODA loop, you know, observe, orient, decide, and then act clearly. I've used that structure before about how I kind of, you know, the void theory of making decisions, uh definitely influence the debrief thing. So making that a learning organization. The last part is when you push all those decisions down, you've got to be ready for people to make bad decisions from time to time. And as, you know, I like to tell people, we're gonna learn through this, we're gonna get through it. I can't expect to empower decisions and then completely crush people when they make bad decisions, assuming they're not immoral, unethical, or illegal. But if they're gonna make a bad decision, as long as we're in the debrief process, we take our rank off per se, like I'm sure you've talked to your viewers about, that will hopefully encourage them to make a better decision next time, or you know, and so that whole cycle of training and replacements, empowerment, decision orientation, and how to make a good decision, and then pushing accountability down. And I'll understand that people are gonna make some decisions you don't agree with, sometimes you've got to just let that happen so they can learn the consequences of their decision and then debrief it. And sometimes the boss is kind of step in and maybe do something different. But how how do you balance that fine line so that people feel like they can make some decisions going forward in the future?

SPEAKER_01 14:52

I like that. You said something at the end there about letting them make a decision that you don't necessarily agree with. I think I was just involved in an organizational challenge, if you will, where the lead supervisor, he became very directive. And so I said, hmm, and I made a recommendation to him. I said, How about you let the team figure it out? How about I know what your answer is. I'm not gonna share it with them, but how about you let me let the team figure out what their right answer is and and to where that way they're gonna own it. And if if they make a mistake, it's their mistake, not the boss's idea was stupid. And they'll learn a lot more from it and they'll embrace a lot more because it's their their own idea. So I really like what you said about trusting them to make it when it's not necessarily your decision or the choice that you would make.

SPEAKER_02 15:43

Those are the mo I love it when um our younger leaders come to me with a plan. I have a great war story about this, right? So I'll when they come to you with a plan and they've made the decision, they've done the analysis, and then they buy it. Uh, I find the results are really they do a lot of follow-through. And I'll I'll tell you this silly little, it's not really a war story, but I was a squadron commander in Okinawa, and a bunch of young captains had come to me and said, hey, they want to take a eight ship of F-15s, and they talked to their friends across the ramp at the KC-135 tanker squadron. They said, Hey, we're gonna take these eight F-15s, these tankers, we're gonna, we're gonna fly to Guam from Okinawa. It's about three hours away. The Navy was steaming through with an aircraft carrier. They'd connected and they were gonna do some dissimilar training for like a week and a half. I said, it's a great plan. And they came up with the plan and they they got the PowerPoint thing together and they go, they're putting together the list of of who's going. And so I'm the squadron commander, they put me on the list. And they come to give me the brief that they're about to take to the wing commander. I'm like, oh, oh no, no, no, I'm not going on this deployment, right? And I said, as a matter of fact, nobody above the rank of captain is allowed to go on this deployment, which for your audience, that's those are younger junior officers. And you know, the look was a little crazy. I knew I was taking a risk, uh, challenging these young leaders to step up, but I also knew that if I wanted the squadron to be where I wanted it to be in 18 months, I had to get buy-in and I had to get young leaders making decisions and taking authority and accountability. And I said, here's your strategic guidance, you know, just call home every night and tell me how the people are and how the jets are. But you can always call if you need help because you can't solve it on your lip. Bring everything home, right? And nobody goes to jail. And so they had 100 main, yeah, you know, they had 100 maintainers and they took off. And I'm telling you, buddy, they set records. These young leaders set records. They brought the jets all home in pretty great shape. Nobody got in trouble, at least none that they told the boss about. So it didn't make it, it wasn't an international incident, but they flew, they flew their tails off. They set all the records. The training they got was exceptional. What was cool was to see how they really delivered and how they really stepped up because they were finally in power. And I tell you what, they were bought in um for the next 18 months. I got a lot more out of those folks going forward because they knew I could trust them and push push the decision making down to the lowest level. So they they came with the idea and they owned it. And there were some things they did. I wasn't super like I would have done things maybe a little bit differently, but they kind of learned it on their own. And none of it was illegal, immoral, unethical, or dangerous. And they went out and they did great. And I look back on that, it was a really fun, really fun point time in the squadron to watch them rise to the occasion.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

That's awesome. You know, when it was a young co-pilot flying uh airlift aircraft, flying C W 30s. I had aircraft commander, he said he said something about the left seat squat switch. He was when you're sitting in the right seat and you're watching the aircraft commander make decisions, like, well, why isn't he doing this? Why aren't we going this direction? Why are we so slow? And then you move over to the left seat where it's all on you, where you kidding, no kidding, you're making the decisions, and your brain slows down because you feel the weight of that responsibility. And when you're the wingman, when you're just helping, like if if you had sent a major out there, those captives are like, oh, it's on the major, it's on the higher ranking person, and we'll help out as we want. But because they felt the full weight of the responsibility and the guidance that you gave them, they thought better and they learned more from it and they became better officers because of that. Totally agree.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

And you know, this is kind of how we opened the podcast with, which was applying that challenging, pushing those decisions all the way down is definitely you gotta you gotta to learn how to make better decisions, you gotta make decisions, right? And so, you know, in the military, we do a good job of pushing those decisions down at a lower level. And I think growing up as an aviator, we made decisions all the time, and we just didn't it just was the natural course of business. So I think by the time we got more senior in rank used to making decisions, doesn't necessarily mean you're not gonna make bad decisions, and it doesn't mean you're gonna be the right leader. But that that I think has really helped me translate over to the private sector, which is having been a fighter pilot, been in those situations, and seen the environment and communicating and making a decision, and then coming back around afterwards and not being afraid to say that was a bad decision, and I need to do better, and this is how I do it better with the debrief construct. I think has set us, I think everybody in the private sector would find value.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

I love that I remember I flew C C 130s for a while, then I went to C-17. It was a big aircraft. We didn't have very many in the Air Force, everybody cared about every single tail, and so every decision was scrutinized. And so when you became an aircraft commander, you had to go through this operational mission evaluation, but C-130 guys didn't have to do that. And I asked my boss, I said, Why don't C-130 guys have to take an operational mission evaluation with this aircraft that's just as valuable with them in the scene as with somebody else? And his answer was because nobody cares about five pilots. Like, what are you? And then I thought it's because when you were a C-130 aircraft commander and a crew, you go out in the system, like nobody cared about you except the end user. Nobody cared about the decisions you're making unless you bent something, unless you broke the aircraft. And so the entire mission was on the crew to do it right, and you were completely left to your own devices. Whereas the bigger aircraft, the crews are kind of handled a little more because they were higher value assets. And that makes me think of when we have a big decision to make when it when there's of major consequence. If you buy high-value decisions, do we molecottle our people or do we over-supervise them as opposed to fully trusting them? And I mean, you're building components that can be very consequential if a whole batch of them is bad, then uh the entire fleet is late. Or if they're mismanufactured, then you bend airplanes or you break airplanes and you hurt people. You know, so how do you how do you handle that?

SPEAKER_02 21:34

Yeah, you're exactly right. I'm gonna say, first of all, sm small things do matter, right? That doesn't mean lions chase mice. That's what I like to say, right? So small things matter. And so once you get those things flowing and working, definitely obviously the consequence of the decisions generally gets higher visibility moving forward. But to your question, for me, the way I'm attacking this role is quality is is first and forward. So I think if you bought a car and you got in the car and you started and the check engine light was on, you would immediately have issues with that product. Without a doubt, you're not taking it off the line. You're giving right back to the dealer. Conversely, if you got the phone call and said, Hey, your car movie's gonna be ready tomorrow versus today, you would be very upset and that might have significant consequences. But you might take the car. And maybe this is a terrible metaphor, you know what I mean? So for me, quality is number one. I've got to produce a product exactly the way my customer wants it. No quality escapes, in accordance with the work instructions, off the factory, ready to go. The second component of that is I gotta deliver it in a relevant manner, timely enough, that it's it's valuable by customer. So if my customer on the car scenario, if everything's working and I said, hey, I'm sorry you can't have a Tuesday, you can have a Wednesday, but you needed a Tuesday to drive to your daughter's graduation, you have a massive impact on the customer, right? And so quality first, schedule second. Not, and by the way, those are not, we're not running those in serial, those are running at parallel. But as far, you know what I mean. If I had one more minute to spend in the day, I would probably spend it on improving the quality, make sure it's absolutely perfect. Um, schedule. And of course, what I like to say is the foundation of all this is built upon a safe um manufacturing environment, ecosystem, facility processes. You know, if somebody gets hurt, it's all stop, right? If somebody does something and destroys a piece of tooling or equipment, it's probably all stop. My quality is going to be impacted, my schedule is going to be impacted. So I have to run all three of those, my quality, my schedule, and my safety kind of in parallel at all times. I'm fortunate that I have great bosses that are trust in trusting me to do that. And I'm trying to empower decisions down to the lowest level leads and supervisors and ship supervisors and my director of operations and stuff like that. They know that there's decisions that are gonna probably they're gonna want the bosses bite on because they're big muscle movements. And generally I'll either make it and say, Hey, thanks for letting me take a bite of the apple, or you know, I immediately go, What do you recommend? You know, and hopefully they so far so good. I've been like, I like your decision, go for it, put it back on them and make them.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Something that that you said earlier that kind of spurred my thinking about delaying a decision until Friday. If you can make that decision, I think that's a key talent to know when you can delay a decision. I did some writing a while back. I think I wrote an article about um winning the fight at 20 degrees per second. You make a decision, but your standard fighter, depending on what it is, is gonna turn it anywhere between 10 and 22 degrees per second. The eagle's probably a lot higher turn rate than that. Your standard reaction time, a person's reaction time is gonna be two, two and a half seconds. If that aircraft is turning at 20 degrees per second, you just and you make the decision faster than that individual, 40 degrees around the turn, farther than they are. You do that two or three times, and you beat them. And so when to know when it's consequential to make that decision right now, versus I can put that one on the back burner, I can I know it's an important decision, but I can wait on that. But when I was teaching young kids air to air, you had your standard set up and your standard, how we're gonna approach the fight, and they knew what the canned, you know, entries and exits looked like, and I would do something completely different because I knew that they would go, what's he doing? And and delay, like the A10 does not go for well, as you know that. And so I would use as much vertical as I was allowed to with the laws of physics, and every time they go, What's he doing? And I could invariably beat them, you know, I wasn't as grave a pilot sometimes as they were, because I was making decisions faster than they were with put them behind. How do you make that decision of this is time critical right now versus I can let this one sit for a little while?

SPEAKER_02 25:44

You know, I think I agree with you. What do you think? It's incredibly gray. Sometimes it's black and white. There's a suspense, this is a due date, I got to turn it in. And so you got to make a decision and meet a timeline. In business, of course, there are consumed resources between that moment you're in and when a decision makes, because I'm either burning cash to await a decision, I've got people in the payroll while I'm awaiting a decision, I may miss uh a strategic market opportunity because I've waited too long for a decision. So all of that becomes that gray area and really understanding how much time do you really have, right? I've I have found that, and I'll be honest with you, sometimes a decision comes to you. No. So I think the decisions of whether you proceed or not, those are ones where if I have a moment to collect more data, I have a moment to seek an additional opinion, I have a moment to let maybe this one thing take a little bit more traction. Those are real nuanced approaches, and and I wish I I don't know if I have a good answer for you, other than if you have the time presented to you and the conditions allow it, without sacrificing valuable turning room to use our firepower thing, right? Without giving up turning room or without getting too far behind the target, if you can wait one more minute to get another piece of data, that might help you make a more informed decision. However, if you wait too long, obviously that could come with consequences. And if you make the wrong decision, that comes with consequences. I'm sure all your listeners appreciate that. That's intuitive. But it's just one of those nuanced things. I don't know if I have a good answer for you. I think we see the good people who do it.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

Here's what I will say is you've talked around it. You've talked around how it can be consequential to make it now or consequential to be premature on that decision. And uh, I think it all comes down to experience. And you get that experience by making decisions and making them over and over again to where you kind of start seeing the rhythm of when it matters, when it doesn't matter, when do I really have to act now versus when I can delay a decision on something like that? I know that I can be sometimes premature in my decision because I want to get something done. I look at my desk and I'm like, I gotta clear my desk. And so I don't want any decision sitting in my inbox. And more times than I care to admit, I'll make a decision. Like, I should have waited on that one. I should have let the situation develop a little bit and not be premature on that decision. There's like deeply for it.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

Yeah, yeah. No, I was gonna say, I think your attitude on that is is we all have a propensity to action without a doubt. And we'd like to scratch it off our to-do list. I have found that if you can create a really collaborative environment, then sitting around the table, what I'll do is I'll throw out an idea or I'll throw out, hey, we're we may go this direction. I'm fortunate right now that uh people are speaking up. And so I think the environment's coming along, the culture's in a good place. And when people are giving me ideas or where I said, hey, here's a thought, prove me wrong, and people are willing to have that academic discussion on hey, we should do it this way or do it that way. That's a good way to use time before you make a decision for sure and to collect data. I've got I've had great teams both at Carbon Aerospace, I've got great, had a great team at Boeing, where what was unique at Boeing is we were chasing business internationally on our F-15 portfolio. And uh I think when I first started, I had a propensity to kind of keep the decision making tight in our US group. And I failed initially to kind of look out and see like I had these amazing, talented Boeing teammates that were in these countries, in our targeted countries. And so the more we brought them in, the more nuanced the information was, the way we were able to alter the marketing campaign. So that I think having that collaborative environment, and then if you have the time available to you with a culture that provides that kind of input, that's definitely one that at least help you shape a better decision when you have to make it.

SPEAKER_01 29:38

As the big debrief for myself, as I have that bias for action, like you talk about, and sometimes it's premature bias for action, is asking myself, what is the target? What am I trying to accomplish by it? And if I delay, what is the purpose behind delaying? Am I trying to collect more information? Am I trying to let the situation develop into something that may be very different than what it is right now? Just seeing if it's gonna do that. What is the purpose in delaying? What is the purpose of making that decision right now? If I have that objective in mind and then the overall objective, I'm still not great at it, but I'm better if I sit back and do that. Totally agree. Well, I'm gonna give you a chance to give any parting shots. Talk about your company, talk about your parting leadership ideas before we wrap this up. So I'll turn it over to you. Sure.

SPEAKER_02 30:24

Thanks. Well, thanks again, Woody, for letting me be on there. Um super proud that to work for Carbon Aerospace. It's been short. I'm a rookie. I've been there for about three and a half months or so. We're really, we're really getting our long-term strategy in place. I think we want to be a strategic defense partner for all of our customers and for the Department of War. And we see ourselves as a real competitor, as a tier one supplier. We're working on some incredible growth opportunities, and we're working on some amazing talent that we're bringing into the team. So I think we're putting all the right pieces together. Our leadership team is really solid. I'm blessed to be in those rooms and help provide my advice and listen to these guys make decisions. That's that's super fun. That's rewarding, and that's really exciting. I think by parting leadership shots. Well, first of all, I would say I don't know how many of your viewers or or your audience are new leaders. I have a little piece of advice I give to new leaders. New leaders, the bet the best thing you can do is listen and squint with your ears right off the bat. My advice would be find some small things and make a decision and fix it. Find splinter in the system, a rock in the shoe, something small, make a decision, go get that fixed. And I think if you're if you're getting that information, you're collecting, you're hearing that those are problems and you can get those small things fixed right away. I think people will immediately see you as a leader who listens and a leader with that bias for action, like you mentioned. So don't don't be the young leader that walks in and thinks I have to redesign the structure. I have to completely reorganize the organization. You know, that you have to believe that the people that were before you had common sense and were trying to do the very best they could with the information they had at the moment they were making decisions. So I I've seen some leaders come into organizations and decide, I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'm gonna blow the whole place up because everything the last guy or gal was doing was wrong. I find that that creates a massive amount of strife and turmoil. And I say that because I know I was one of those guys when I was a young leader. I thought I had to come in and prove that I could lead and I could make decisions and all that stuff. That took me, you know, just a few months and I learned that that was the wrong approach. Squint with your gears, find small things to fix quickly while you're gathering long-term data about the organization. If you have the time available, form a good team of culture that listens, and then be able to move towards making the decisions that are going to make your company or your organization better. And the last thing is don't jump on to the next thing. See how that decision matures, see how it ripens, and then what are the consequences of that? And then you got to bring the team together and debrief it, even if it's 30 minutes. Just the act of bringing people together to talk about how you made a decision, what you made it happen, will immediately frame in their mind, maybe you can't fix what you just did, but you may frame in their mind for the next decision that they all have to make to consider things you didn't consider on the last one. So I think the debrief is absolutely critical. It doesn't have to be five hours long, you know, like Woody, like you and I probably spent a few, we've got a couple out, dozens of hours, probably hundreds of hours of our lives in the debrief. But make sure you come back and revisit to see if you make a good decision or not, and and what can you do to improve it on the next time around? That would definitely be my get off the stage advice.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

I love that. And I love your comment about making decisions, picking the small ones first. And I think the the other value of that is people they gain confidence in their decision making when they have little wins. And if you go for a big project and you fail, you're like, oh, I suck. Whereas if you can focus on the small events, the small requirements, and you have little successes, you gain momentum, all while staying in the observation phase for the big projects, for the big problems. Totally. And after doing those small ones, to your point, you may shift your mindset of maybe I don't need to fix that big thing like I thought it did, as I've I've been in the organization, I've made some smaller changes. And I say that everybody's a leader. If nothing else, you're a leader of yourself. And so learning how to make decisions for yourself and then whatever you're responsible for will pay big dividends the long term. Leonard, thanks for being on the show with me. And thanks for your advice and for your perspective. I love it. And I I really am. I'm jealous about your job. I think that would be so cool to make aircraft parts to be able to see a T7 and other aircraft in the future. Go, yeah, I made that. I made part of that. Come to Texas. Come to Texas. They got good brisket here, and we'll show you some really cool stuff.

SPEAKER_03 34:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 34:43

Sounds good. Thanks for joining us to talk about finer pilot decision making and how those really, whatever it is that you do, finer pilot decision making really applies to anything that you do. And I hope you got something out of this. If you have any questions for myself or for Blender, reach out to astericnow.com and we'll have a direct conversation about it. Subscribe and follow us, and we'll see you next time. See ya.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

So that's it for today's episode of Commander's Intent Podcast. Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will be entered in a grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 private exclusive leadership coaching package with Derek Oaks himself. So head on over to CommandersIntent Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Derek's Leadership Guide and join us on the next episode.