People First! with Morag Barrett

Welcome to this week's episode of People First. My guest this week is my friend and colleague Karen Gibson. Karen served for thirty three years in the US Army and has led thousands of military service members and civilians in conducting complex operations around the globe, including Iraq, Korea, Afghanistan, East Africa and across the Middle East. Eventually attaining the rank of Lieutenant General. Oh, now I'm going English American. Karen, is it Lieutenant or Lieutenant General? We say Lieutenant. We say Lieutenant. Lieutenant. Either way, those listening would have kept up with me. And if you're unsure, as I obviously was in that moment, that is three stars. When she retired from the army, she swore she was done with full time work. But when approached about becoming the sergeant at arms of the US Senate after the January six attack on the Capitol, she felt she couldn't say no. She served in that role for four years, rebuilding the team and restoring faith in the Senate security institutions. She is now semi-retired again and provides consulting services for a wide variety of firms and businesses. Karen, welcome to People First. Well, thanks, Morag. I really appreciate you having me on. I've watched several of your podcasts and I gained something from every one of them. I kind of binged over the weekend and I loved the concepts of ambition disruption or life quakes. I think we've all experienced those. I have. The freedom to be yourself, authenticity, that's really important. Maybe we'll talk about that. Head trash, your relationship with Martin Goldsmith, professional relationship. I really got a lot out of every single one of your podcasts. But I have to say, unlike your other folks that you've interviewed. You know, I don't have a framework. I love how they cite research and science and present some really concrete rules to follow, but I really consider myself more of a practitioner and a student, a lifelong student of leadership and people first. I just really, really think that fundamentally that's where we have to go. Well, good news, Karen. That is exactly why you are here. So for those watching, Karen and I have gone through a year-long program together through Heroic Public Speaking, which has helped us to improve our platform skills. But what really piqued my curiosity as we were working together was just what you described, the practitioner side of leading in times of uncertainty where emotions are raised and there's no one clear answer. And for those listening, you'll have heard in the introduction, thirty plus years as a woman in the army working in war zone areas, you have taken on the mantle of Sergeant of Arms at the Capitol Building. And now you consult on geopolitical perspectives in the finance world globally. And so that just pricked up my ears in so many ways. So let's start with relationships then. Relationships at work. What role have they played in your success in the various incarnations of your career? At the end of the day, everything is about human relationships. And so I think I'd share two things. First, when I started in the Army, it was back in the eighties and it was in Alaska. I started in Alaska the first five years and it was a lot in a light infantry division. this was very low tech it was literally sleep on the ground pee in the woods you know um uh you had a rifle a radio it wasn't a lot of equipment and in that harsh in those harsh conditions you know the work was all about sustaining inspiring motivating human morale in a very difficult circumstances It was all about human capacity and what you could do with people. And as my career progressed, they introduced all kinds of technology. I remember the first time I was a captain, I'd been in the army about five years. One of my warrant officers mentioned a LAN, a local area network. And I said, what is that? This was like ninety one or ninety two. And he said, a local area network is when computers can talk to each other. And I said, About what? I mean, it was just inconceivable to me. I didn't know about the internet yet. We didn't have cell phones. And as time went on, I became very involved in highly technical intelligence collection, exquisite sensors from space, cyber operations. I stood up the Army's first offensive cyber organization, the Cyber Commands Joint Operations Center. And then at the end of my career, I had the national portfolio for the intelligence communities cyber and space. And I would tell folks, I say, you think this is ones and zeros. but it remains a fundamentally human endeavor. And as we look at how artificial intelligence is changing the work that we do, at its heart, it remains a fundamentally human endeavor. And so understanding relationships and how to get the most out of people and how to support people in what they're trying to do, regardless of what technology we're applying, still is critically important. The second thing, I would share one, I guess, a learning experience from very early in my career that really helped me understand the importance of humanity in leadership. That sounds like it should be so obvious. But in the late eighties, and particularly in this unit in Alaska, it was a very harsh leadership environment. My first commander, a battalion commander, would routinely, he would yell, he would cuss, he would spit, you know, he would abuse and demean people. He put a hole in the wall in a training meeting. And I thought this was normal because as I looked down the street, my buddies in infantry or artillery units, you know, there was a commander that would stand on the conference room table to berate his staff. And I didn't know better. I didn't know a lot about the military. I really only knew there was this movie that had come out called Private Benjamin. You may never have seen it as a Brit, but Goldie Hawn and she's like low crawling through the mud with the rifle under barbed wire and it's raining. And I just kind of thought that's what the army was. Like people just yell at you all the time. And we really despised this commander. And he would get you all fired up and you would go work really hard to get something done just to prove him wrong. You know, I'm not using all the words that we applied to this guy, but he was just really... A jerk, okay? But this was the norm. And then one day, I failed an arms room inspection. And I had to go report to my battalion XO. He was just a major. I was a second lieutenant. I'm only twenty-three, twenty-four years old. And I thought that my career was over. I slunk down to the headquarters. He called me into his office. And in such contrast with the commander, who was just a flaming... He never raised his voice. He used no profanity. And he quietly told me how professionally embarrassing this was. And I slunk out of his office feeling one inch tall. And that's, I had this epiphany that the way to lead and inspire people is to be someone who that they admire and respect. That when people admire and respect you as a leader, when they want to meet the goals that you've established, when they feel bad that they have disappointed you, that's far more powerful than being someone who thinks they're inspiring through fear or anger or whatever. And again, this was very early in my career. I think I'd been in the army maybe a year, but it really, really helped me understand the nature of true leadership. So it's interesting because I listened to that and you cite, I do remember Private Benjamin and that Goldie Hawn movie. But if that was your understanding of what the army was going to be like, and I realise a little bit of a generalisation here. Yes. What was the catalyst for joining? And were you living in Alaska already? And at middle school, were you sitting there and the teacher going, Karen, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to join the army. So what was the catalyst? Well, as for many people, college. I wanted to be an engineer. I applied to and was accepted at Purdue University. I'm very proud of my degree from Purdue. I have a degree in industrial engineering. But I was from Montana, and it's a state school in Indiana, a great engineering school, but it's a state school in Indiana. And my father said, that's terrific. How are you going to pay that out-of-state tuition? And he encouraged me to consider ROTC, the Reserve Officer Training Program, which is A program by which military services pay for all your college, your tuition, your fees for your four years to get a degree. And then in return, you owe them four years of active duty on the end. And that's all I was going to do. And the sooner I could get out of it, the better. I had no idea I would fall in love with being a soldier. And really, at heart, it was about being a leader. The things I enjoyed about it, I resisted mentally. It took me about a year to be like, whoa, this is kind of cool. It was physically challenging, mentally challenging, emotionally challenged. But the opportunity to lead teams of men and women in accomplishing things together That really, really floats my boat. And in leading teams and building teams to perform, you know, what I always thought of as a worthy mission was really the draw for me and what kept me in for thirty three years. Thirty three. Wow. So as you reflect on that career, if you were to summarize your leadership style and philosophy. What comes to mind? Yeah. So I think, you know, one, there's competence, which is a little separate, you know, you have to be competent in whatever it is you're being asked to do. But from a leadership perspective, I think it was interesting as I was about to become a battalion commander at the twenty year mark and someone said, Have you established, you know, what do you think your leadership philosophy is going to be? I thought, I think I kind of sorted that out early on. It's, you know, the basic fundamentals of how you interact with other people did not change for me in my career. There are other aspects of leadership that do, particularly the larger the organization gets and, you know, strategic forethought and organizational design become important. But fundamentally, it's about mutual respect. Being level-headed, common sense, honesty, integrity, a sense of ethics, transparency, authenticity, consistency, and selflessness. People can tell when you are doing something that at heart is about furthering your own goals and career. And of course, we all want to get promoted. You know, most of us do. Probably everyone listening to the podcast does. You want to succeed personally. But there's a difference between someone who's doing it for purely or primarily selfish motives versus someone who is doing these things because together as a team, you want to accomplish something important. And the people who work for you can tell the difference. People above you can't always, they'll just look at the results perhaps, but the people who work for you can tell when it's about us, as opposed to about you. So what piqued my curiosity as I listened to how our keynotes unfolded over this year was that whole leading in the gray. And so for me, leading in the gray is times of uncertainty, maybe head to head disagreeing, but opinions differ, emotions are raised. There is no one clear right next step, but the world around is going frantic. And you have to lead with calm and clarity. So it would appear from the stories I've heard, your keynote, that you have a natural knack for this. So where does that come from? And then let's get to the advice for leaders in a corporate world who might find themselves leading through the gray. Sure. Well, thanks for the question, Morag. That's actually what my keynote that I was working on at Heroic was about leading in times of uncertainty. And I cite examples from, you know, combat zones, evacuating an entire headquarters for Hurricane Irma in Florida. or responding to emergencies at the US Capitol. And I kind of lay out ten tenets uh for leadership but the first one is to recognize that there's a crisis to begin with and and to understand that there's a decision to be made it's also i think important to triage to understand what's most critical what's most important and to let the rest go or to put it aside or to delegate it to someone else to focus on what is most important in that moment and your question about you know how did i arrive at these things i think really as we were speaking you know before the recording began it comes through experience and practice and in a careful assessment after a crisis or emergency of what went well what went wrong for me a big part of being a student of leadership was always looking at the people around and above me and saying i want to be like that i would never do that i think that works i was always studying the people who were filling the roles that i one day wanted to have and everybody has things that they do well and areas to improve but i would kind of look at the folks above me and decide who i wanted to emulate um so that's a big part of of where it came from but we talked about recognizing the crisis understanding what's most important triage and focusing on that either compartmentalizing, setting aside for later, or delegating those other things. It's important to communicate with key stakeholders, with the folks you work for, and especially for your own team. There's, you know, we could talk about that all day. There is a very much a people side. Oh, I've just lost you. Can you still hear me? I'm talking now to see if you can hear me. No, no, no, no. I haven't done anything different on this side. I haven't done anything different on this side. Let's see. Can you hear me now? Hang on. Speak to me again. Can you hear me now? I can. Maybe it was my headphones. So I am going to have to edit this bit out. Where did you lose me? So I heard you as far as saying communication. Okay. Okay. Back up a little bit and you can maybe splice. Say that again. Okay. So I'm going to pretend I'm going to like take a beat. Yeah. Okay. So communication is key, not only with the people that you work for, your key stakeholders, possibly the public or the media, but in particular, your own team. They need to know what we're doing, what comes next, what we know, what we don't know. That really is important to reassure them. And I think one area in particular that I see new leaders or even more experienced leaders struggle with in a crisis is you have to be comfortable making a decision without all the information. Sometimes if you wait until you know everything, it's too late to do anything. The decision is made for you. And it's kind of the same with communication. I see people who delay in communicating in a crisis because they're trying to get all the facts. They want to get the words just right. They've got a message queued in their email. Double check, triple check. Let's confirm this. And if you wait until you know everything, you're never going to say anything. So those are really, I think, skills that people can work on. I would, in the spirit of people first, like to touch on what I consider my tenth tenet of the ten things to consider in a crisis. And I don't hear a lot of people talk about this. Once it's over, you may hear people who talk about crisis management, they'll talk about an after action review. Let's identify what went well that we want to institutionalize. Let's identify what went wrong that we want to mitigate in the future. What new resources do we need? But nobody talks about the emotional aftermath of a crisis because once it is over, it is natural for your team, perhaps they're feeling tremendous stress and trauma even while it's going on and may not realize it, especially if they're very mission focused. But then once it's over, that can have a very long tail. And in particular, I experienced this at the US Capitol. And this isn't a political statement. You know, there are a lot of range of opinions about what happened on January six, twenty twenty one. But I can tell you that for my staff, it was a deeply emotional, traumatic event and people may feel shame, guilt, remorse, regardless of their role in the organization. They may feel that there's something they should have done or could have done to prevent it from happening. They may feel that they didn't do enough. And so I think leaders need to be prepared. after something happens, a business crisis, a major cyber breach, you know, some kind of failure, that their team is going to experience an emotional aftermath and you should be prepared for that and make sure that there are resources available to them. It's human to feel these kinds of things. That said, there comes a day when you also have to kind of pick up and move on. One of my first town halls as the Senate Sergeant at Arms, I think I was It was my second. So I'd been there about six months because I would do this every ninety days. I banned the F word. I said, we will no longer speak of failure because I was tired of hearing people say we failed on January six. You know, and so leaders need to in the aftermath of something bad that has happened, you need to seize small wins, bolster confidence, celebrate progress and find ways to rebuild morale. So that's interesting. I love the fact that you're focusing on both the head, the logic of what worked, what didn't, but also the heart, the emotional rollercoaster that people will have gone through both during and to your point afterwards. And to what extent then vulnerability as a leader is I think it's important, you know, and we could define vulnerability in many ways. Like, say you had a, you know, you're having marital troubles. You don't want to come to work and sob at your desk in front of everyone. That's vulnerable, but not appropriate, right? But I think it is important to be vulnerable, to be human, not to seek ways to be like, it's not on your to-do list. Let's see, how am I going to be vulnerable today? What am I going to divulge about how I feel? It needs to be part of your, I think it's tied to being authentic, to being your authentic self. You know, like many leadership attributes, there are so many intangibles, I find this hard to pin down exactly, but I do think it's important. part of being your authentic self. I was stationed in Korea during nine eleven and there was a tremendous overreaction. I shouldn't say that. I mean, we again back to making decisions without perfect information, but a lot of things happened in the immediate aftermath of nine eleven and As it happened, there was a conference in the United States where all the key leaders from the intelligence organizations in Korea were attending. So that meant all the number two folks were in charge, which was another crisis that I wasn't looking for. And a tremendous overreaction on the part of, you know, we're going to close all the gates, we're going to not let people on. And the entire team was looking to me for reassurance and direction. And I wasn't used to being the person in charge. And I gave some remarks, and I talked about what we're going to do and what our focus is. And I didn't feel like, oh, let's make this vulnerable. But I had people approach me later and said, I appreciated your honesty in talking about your feelings about it's still very traumatic. I mean, we're talking, you know, twenty four, thirty six, forty eight hours after after the strikes in the United States. i don't feel like i'm really answering your question about vulnerability i just know that being part of your authentic self means that there are times when you will be vulnerable and that that makes you in many ways a more reliable leader and i think it's part of the mutual respect that we show for each other is by being authentic Well, I think the stories that you share in those ten points within your keynote are so powerful. And just so that people know, there are opportunities to laugh along the way, too. It truly is a powerful experience for leaders at all levels. And I think the challenge is that the size and scale and complexity of the challenges that you've navigated, for example, they literally are front page news. And How does one get ahead of that curve? Because there is the learning and the training, the preparation that goes into a front page news crisis. One doesn't want to wait for the crisis to hit in order to start that practice. So what advice do you have for leaders listening for how they can get ahead of the game? Sure. Well, I would say I wasn't handling first page crises when I was twenty three. when i was twenty three years old i was put in charge of thirty people i was a platoon leader that's a very typical job for a brand new army officer all but one of them were men that shouldn't matter but it kind of did especially in that harsh physical environment of alaska um all but one of them were older than me And even the nineteen year old had more experience in the army than I did. And it felt tremendously awkward. How can I be in charge of these people? And I remember the first time I was probably four to six weeks into this role and someone had really mucked up. He was a sergeant first class. He was so old. I felt like I was chastising my grandfather. He was probably thirty five. You're twenty three. That was so and it was so awkward. And I thought, how can I correct this man? Sit down and tell him what he'd done wrong and what we're going to do differently in the future. And and what I love about leadership is that it is a skill like playing a musical instrument. speaking a language, tennis or a golf swing that you can work on your entire life and should. And the more you practice it, the easier it gets. So that was my first uncomfortable conversation. But I find that the more you have them, the less uncomfortable, uncomfortable conversations become. And there's an expression to choose the hard right over the easy wrong. And the more you choose the thing that's hard to do but is right, the less hard it gets. And so, you know, again, I wasn't dealing with front page news as a young officer. I was, you know, chastising a thirty five year old man about something he'd done wrong. And over time and through observation and practice, I became a better leader. But again, it was a commitment to lifelong improvement, to observation and to study and to working on myself. Cool. So the work you're doing at the moment is advising global and national financial institutions on geopolitical implications for their world. What is most surprising for you in the conversations that you have with leaders in that industry? Well, it's fascinating to me because I never got to work in finance or the private sector, really. For thirty seven years, I was a government gal. And so I learned a lot. about those industries. Whenever I go to a large corporation, I feel like I have so many questions about how they operate and how they view security and risk. But the fundamentals of assessing security, of identifying risk to a strategy or opportunities are very similar. um i i think you know not to turn this into a geopolitical podcast but clearly um we are at significant inflection points uh you know socially politically globally frankly you know you could look at climate change as another inflection point and and the rate of change and uncertainty are really unprecedented in my lifetime i think you know the last time something so significant happened so quickly was probably the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, you know, and we are entering a world that will be very different and we'll have different relationships and institutions and technologies than the ones that we've been using for the last, you know, well, from an institutional perspective and relationships, you know, perhaps the last eighty years certainly technology is always changing. And so I think in the face of all that change, again, I celebrate Morag, your podcast, people first, human relationships, that doesn't change. And that will be foundational for shepherding teams and organizations and families through this time of change is having solid human relationships. I just really, I can't say enough about the work that you're doing and the folks that you bring on to talk about things that are very relevant to that. Well, Karen, I have loved our conversation. I've loved getting to know you over the last year, and I'm looking forward to future conversations. I'm grateful for our connection. How can people learn more about the work you're doing, your keynote, and essentially follow you? Yeah, well, I don't have a website yet, but I will. Reach out to me on LinkedIn and Morag. When I publish my book, you'll be the first to know. Well, let me know if you need an endorsement. I'd be happy to do that. Karen Gibson, thank you very much for joining me on People First. Thanks, Lorraine.