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A Conversation with Major General Robert Mixon
Introduction
Hello again everyone. You know, if you’re in a leadership role, you’re on a journey. And if you haven’t figured that out yet, we’re going to give you some ideas to help you today. My guest is Major General Robert Mixon. He is retired. And he’s also got a track record in some corporate situations after his military retirement. But he’s going to explain all that to you in just a moment here. But first let me say, Robert, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Doug. It’s great to be here and share some thoughts with you about leadership.
Meet the Guest: Major General Robert Mixon
Now, you were, I’ll call it, baptized in leadership at an early age. You were a cadet at the military academy. Is that correct?
I was. I don’t think I was the world’s best cadet by any stretch, but I managed to get through it, largely with the help of some wonderful young men who, many of whom remain my closest friends in my class.
The pride of the Corps. In 1974, we went into West Point at a time of great turmoil in the country. The war in Vietnam was very unpopular among many people my age, our age, and there was a lot of dissension and chaos that exists today in many ways. So I started in the crucible of leadership in an environment of chaos. And today I operate as an advocate for adaptive leadership in a world of chaos.
Leading Through VUCA: Chaos Is the New Normal
There is a popular acronym that did originate in the Pentagon. Once upon a long time ago, the acronym VUCA — volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And I agree with you. The chaos we’re experiencing in our world can be summed up, but not limited to those four aspects. And being a leader in that environment is a huge challenge.
One of the things I talk about frequently here on the show and with my clients — often leaders in the modern business world are moved up the management chain, seemingly by accident. They demonstrate capability as an individual contributor, and they get recognized for being the sharpest knife in the drawer, and they get designated a team leader.
Yeah, they get kicked upstairs.
And they might make that promotion leap 2 or 3 more times before somebody says, you know, we ought to get this person some training.
Yep. That’s a sad fact, Doug, that leadership development tends to be an afterthought in many professions and businesses in the country, and I think we need to relook that notion.
The Military’s Leadership Edge: Development as a System
I agree. And as I reflect back on my own military experience, I often think about the military’s got the right idea. We start training leaders of authority at early ages, whether it’s the commissioned officer ranks or the non-commissioned officers, our sergeants. We expose them to incremental training for each step in that journey of advancement.
Yeah, we do. And that’s one of the great strengths of the military — it has a pathway. It has a career path that’s clearly defined. And it has steps along the way where you are prepared for your next level of responsibility in most cases before you’re put into it.
And that’s a powerful asset for the military. And I can understand to some extent why in companies and organizations it’s less common. Part of that reason is, you know, it’s expensive — time, money, energy to do that. The military has to be effective. They don’t always have to be efficient. That is not true in the corporate world. Efficiency is one of the coins of the realm, if you will.
Leadership Is a Journey: The Six Principles of Adaptive Leadership
Right, right. Robert, we talked about so many things in the green room as we were coming online here. And I’m perplexed at where to start, but what I will start with is a key tenet I think you teach and represent. And that is what I said in the tease: leadership is a journey. So give us your version of that.
Well, I think that adaptive leadership is indeed a journey, and we’re on it. We’re on that journey. Those of us who are willing to accept responsibility for the well-being of others.
That journey is not a destination, and we have to consider every day as another opportunity for us to learn and grow. And I use six principles to guide the leadership journey for myself and those I’m privileged to work with. And those six principles are:
- Set the azimuth — that is your true north, your cardinal direction.
- Listen — listen with the intent to understand, as Stephen Covey says.
- Trust and empower.
- Do the right thing when no one’s looking.
- When in charge, take charge.
- Balance — balance the personal and professional.
So those six principles guide my thinking on the journey — with no summit — is what I call the pathway of adaptive leadership.
Finding Your True North as a Leader
Yeah, I think those are all powerful. Your first one there — set the azimuth, determine your own true north. I find that interesting in my work. In fact, I’m getting ready to release my next book that I have named Steady the Leadership Framework.
What I often do with clients — I challenge them to define the leader they think they want to be. And it’s amazing how many have not yet done that. And that’s at all levels of organizations. And again, I reflect on that statement: I made the promotion almost by accident, leader by accident. And they’re out there doing the work, trying to take their best shot. But they’ve never really thought about that key question. You know, what is your definition of a true north as a leader? And there’s thousands of books that have leadership frameworks and it’s all good material. But at the end of the day, you got to pick your own.
Well, I talk about it quite a bit in The Power of Being All In, my most recent book. I think the personal leadership philosophy is the touchstone upon which your journey should begin. And, you know, how do you build a personal philosophy? Well, I think first you have to have a personal mission statement. You know, who am I? What do I do? Why do I do it? And I help leaders develop this personal mission statement in my executive coaching, in my workshops — both virtual and in person — to develop that personal mission statement and then cascade it into a philosophy which is no more than one page long.
Building a Personal Leadership Philosophy
And basically it says, who am I and what do I represent? Have the mission statement at the top, and then your values, your operating principles, your way of doing things, your expectations that you have of yourself and of others. And then I believe that one of the most powerful elements of that philosophy is to sign it and date it. And I put a copy of mine in the book so that people could see that.
You don’t write it in one draft. You have to write it a series of iterations and process the thinking, because now you’re going to put it out there and people are going to hold you accountable to it. So there’s a level of commitment to the philosophy. But I really believe, as General Becky Halstead says so well — the first person you have to lead is you.
Right. Right. And I think that is often a big challenge. Again, people that have been moved into management positions and given titles of authority — there’s a misunderstanding of what may come with that.
And I think it’s a challenge to lock that in and do the work to make that happen. And then we also touched on the fact that now that you had that, it can and should become that iterative process — the journey you’re on. As Marshall Goldsmith famously cites in his book titled What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.
Very true, Doug.
Very true. There’s a kind of a realization as you go to the next level, that everything you thought was your gold standard might need to be adjusted.
Well, you certainly have to be, again, adaptive. I go back to that term. I think adaptive leadership is that ability to learn and grow — hopefully slightly ahead of the team and the environment that you’re in. We won’t have that privilege all the time. But that would be the ideal framework — that you’re prepared for the next step before you take it. I think leadership development and executive coaching should be fundamental parts of every organization, just as we talked about the military’s powerful framework there.
Growing Leaders From Within: Coaching and Development as Culture
But in some cases, it’s not as maybe elegant or specific as the military’s framework of noncommissioned officer and officer development, but it can be very, very substantial. I think executive coaching of high potential leaders is one of the essential elements of preparing him or her for that next level of responsibility. And in the work that you and I both do — we’re coaching high potential leaders. It’s a revealing process to have them discover — help them discover — who they are and what they represent and what they want to be when they grow up.
The second component, the leadership development program, is more focused on teams, in my experience, than necessarily the individual. But there’s a right hand, left hand that contribute here. Leadership development programs should be a systemic part of every organization’s way of doing things. Whether you do it internally or you get external help to do it — make the commitment to growing leaders.
And I think that will become part of your culture again — that ecosystem we talked about, Doug. In terms of culture, I talk about in my first book, We’re All In — the development of your ecosystem is a key part of finding, keeping and growing the best of the best.
Building a Culture That Permeates the Whole Organization
Yeah, I agree with you totally. And we also talked in the green room — the culture, the whole concept. People speak of it, but maybe don’t even understand how to grow one and develop one. But in many ways it’s not as difficult as some people want to make it be. And I think it is a proactive look at fundamentally how you want to operate. How do you want to treat each other? How do you want to treat your customers, your suppliers? And start there anyway.
And yes, you should have an understanding of why you’re doing it — the why, how and what. What I’ve observed — it’s interesting that often the top level of organizations, let’s call it the Fortune 500 top level — might define that and do a pretty good job of putting letters in a binder up on the wall in the corporate headquarters, but it’s not really disseminated and encouraged at lower levels of the organization. And particularly when the company operates in multiple sites like production plants and facilities of all kinds, it’s hard to permeate that.
And if the people who get promoted up to lead those sites have never been to corporate, they don’t get exposed to the meaning and the purpose of some of those messages.
Well, it’s a slow process in many ways. You know, cultural evolution takes time and most of us want it — boom. You know, we want it in a week or 30 days. We want to have instant culture. You just add water and sugar and stir it up and it becomes a healthy culture. That’s not how it goes. It takes a couple of years to impact a culture in a meaningful way, particularly in larger organizations.
But what that really means is that the most junior person in the organization shares the same sense of purpose as many of the most senior members of the organization. That is a tremendous achievement when you can do that. And I’ve seen it on a couple of occasions, and it’s just a wonderful sense of belonging that exists in an organization and exists in multiple parts of the organization.
A Real-World Example: Culture That Reaches Every Plant
I work with a company now that I’ve been with several years and they have plants all over the country — a manufacturing company, a glass company. And throughout their plants, they have a sense of independence in each plant, but they also have a sense of belonging and belonging to that greater good — to that sense of purpose that we’re going to thrill our customers with the experience of being with us. We’re going to take care of each other. Safety is not just a term. It’s a way of life.
But it’s taking years for them to achieve that sense of belonging, that sense of well-being in their culture. But they don’t take it for granted. Their leadership development programs are extensive and intensive, because they want to make sure that their leaders continually learn and grow on their journey, and the culture remains viable.
Walking the Talk: Values in Action
Yeah, there are so many examples of that. I think pro and con. One client company I worked with like a year or two ago — the fact that their company values have been imprinted on the back of their security cards, you know, their access cards. And that’s smart.
But the real key is — so what? And what does that mean? But what was explained to me in many different ways is that the people out in the field knew it worked, because when senior people would show up and they would be having a discussion, it was not uncommon for those seniors to pull up their badge and review the list before they made the decision.
And then they would explain that the decision they make is either going to violate one of the principles — so they say, no, we’re not going to do this — or yes, it’s consistent with everything we’re about, so let’s do it. And it’s that kind of modeling, as simple as it sounds, is powerful and really reinforces the idea to everyone around them that we need to live this way.
Well, this is setting the example. You know, you’re walking the talk, as we used to say. And I think when senior leaders are out there in the field, or in the plant, or in the offices — and they are physically interacting with people where possible, but certainly virtually interacting with them in a deliberate way — I really like the one-on-one conversations as being the best indicators of the health of your culture, of your ecosystem.
The Story That Changed How He Sees Culture
One of my favorite stories about how you can see the impact of a healthy culture — I worked with a couple of different automotive companies in their leadership teams. In one case, one of them said, you know, I had a chance to really experience the health of my culture in a dealership one day.
He shared with us that he walked out as general manager of the dealership through the service bays to his vehicle when he came to work and returned home — so he would be visible to people coming in and going out so that he lived reasonable hours. It wasn’t the old adage about being the last in the parking lot.
He walked out to his service bay one afternoon. A young technician was cleaning up the bay after having done a number of work orders, and he stopped and asked him, you know, what did you achieve today? And he expected him to say, I did 14 work orders and sold some parts — that kind of response.
And the young person said, “Well, today I made nine families’ lives safer.”
I was just blown away by that story because, to me, that is a cultural yardstick that’s very, very hard to replicate. And yet when you see it and feel it, it’s got to make you, as a leader, feel as though you are — as we say in the army — be all you can be.
Yeah. Thinking as a service tech that, you know, you’re just doing the work order, you’re just replacing the part or whatever. But thinking deeper about the significance of that — maybe it was a brake job, maybe it was a lighting fix or whatever. But the whole idea of the purpose was to make a family safe. That’s deep. And getting that deep thinking about the purpose of the work — I agree with you — that is a true hallmark of adopting a culture.
Very interesting. One of my favorite stories.
Bringing Junior People Into the Circle of Leadership
You know, I also like the idea of bringing junior people into your headquarters, into your corporate circle for a day. I had a command. I had several command sergeant majors — senior noncommissioned officers — who were just brilliant people in many ways, primarily because they had so much common sense.
One of them, when I was a division commander, recommended to me that I bring a young soldier up into my office for a day. He or she would go with me wherever I went — whether I was flying off in helicopters or in a vehicle or in a meeting or sitting in my office trying to figure out what right looks like.
I started the program the next month with a young soldier from one of the units who came up and spent the day with me. And every month I would bring another soldier in. And when there were conversations, I’d get asked some really powerful questions — like, “General, do you really need to have this meeting?”
And I went, oh my goodness, I’m being called out here. This 19-year-old kid is calling me out. And he is absolutely right. I don’t need to have this meeting. And God bless him for having that courage to say that — to speak truth to power. But that’s a tool you can put in your toolbox and it will have enormous value.
Because when the soldier goes back to his or her unit, they’re going to share stories about, hey, what that old guy did today. You know what? He had a conversation with so-and-so. And boy, this is a hard problem we’re talking about here — he’s not just making up stuff for us to do. And so I think it gives you that connectivity across the organization when you use a tool like that to promote greater awareness of the upper echelons to the ones with boots on the ground who are doing real work.
Coaching as a Core Competency of Adaptive Leadership
Right. You know, that touches into an area I’d like to ask you about. I’ve observed in the last couple of years, a lot of companies are starting to talk about managers needing to coach their people. The leader as a coach — it’s a growing phenomenon. And I can think of several companies I’ve worked with where they’ve actually baked that into the annual review process. You know, when they’re evaluating leaders: how are you doing coaching up your people?
It often — on one end of the spectrum — leaders hear that and they go, oh God, another thing I’ve got to worry about doing.
True.
True. And others take it a little more earnestly, because somewhere in their image of what it means to be in their role, they appreciate the idea of developing future leaders. And then some even call it — I need to train my replacement. You know, that kind of thinking?
Yeah. To me, coaching is a core competency of adaptive leadership.
The culture we were talking about earlier — it was demonstrated by the young technician, for example. That’s a culture of what I call a culture of commitment. I grew up in a culture of compliance. You did what you were told to do when you were told to do it, and a lot of the leadership activity was transactional. Now, we can’t afford to live in that world. We have to create cultures of commitment.
And the way we create those cultures of commitment has a coaching component to it. That coaching component is a transfer of energy from the leaders to those who are responsible for leading and influencing. That transfer of energy has to be a positive transfer. It has to be based on listening with the intent to understand. It has to be based on asking power questions — not how is it going? or what’s up? — but what’s the biggest challenge you’re facing this week? What’s one resource that you don’t have now, but if you did have, you could accomplish even more than you’re being asked to do?
That kind of active transfer of energy — in power questions and in listening with the intent to understand — is part of what makes a coaching process so powerful. You connect with your players and they feel that energy and that transfer of energy, and it encourages them to be all they could be and to work together as a team for the greater good. And that is a key component of adaptive leadership and the culture of commitment that we need to take on today.
Bridging the Generational Gap
Yeah. Again, I couldn’t have said it better. I totally agree with what you’re describing there. A thought came across my mind. I know you experienced it in probably the later years of your military and also now in your corporate exposure. A hot topic a lot of people are talking about is the generational differences in the workplace and the challenges that people are seeing and feeling.
What’s your take? How do you typically coach people when that challenge comes up?
Yeah. And it does come up, Doug. And essentially what I encourage leaders to consider is that the generational characteristics — 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s — are not something that’s revolutionary. They were in existence when we were 20 and 30 and 40. Now it’s more pronounced in some ways because the information age has transformed us. We can share so much more now, faster — and in many cases, inaccurately.
Misinformation and disinformation across the generations is so quick that it’s affected some of our perceptions of what our roles and responsibilities are in organizations. And that’s because we as leaders haven’t made it clear. We haven’t set the azimuth for our teams and organizations in a very deliberate way. And so people then make up their own idea of what is our mission and what’s our intent.
I like intent better than vision because I think it’s more precise — what are our values? What do we believe in? What are our cultural behaviors? How do we expect people to act to manifest those beliefs? If you don’t do that deliberately as a team, then people are going to make up stuff.
And when I talk to executive leaders, one of the first questions I ask when they start down the pathway of the generational gap is — are you bridging that gap with discussions on your azimuth? Are you building it as a team? Are you holding each other accountable to the azimuth you’ve set? Or are you just putting out emails and memos and using hope as a method?
And I can tell you, I’ve tried hope as a method of leadership. And it’s terrible. As my father, the Marine, said — it sucks real good. So we don’t need to use hope as a method. We need to achieve clarity with our teams and our people. And that will cause a lot of generational gaps to narrow, because we’re all in — to quote a semi-famous author. They begin to buy in because they have ownership of what our culture is and should be.
Yeah, I love that. And I use that in a lot of my coaching as well. I encourage leaders that clarity for your team is so vitally important. And you know, can you set that clarity picture as a team sport, a team exercise? Yes, sure you can. But you got to do it so that people are motivated.
And the generational thing — I’m translating what you said into something I say that sounds like you and I are pretty much in alignment. This whole generational thing is nothing new. It’s just more pronounced because of the communication media. And often I’ll read a text to someone and say, what is this? Who wrote this and where did it come from? And people will say, well, it sounds like the Gen Z manifesto or the Millennial Manifesto or something like that. And I show them the reference. No — it was Henry David Thoreau in 1863.
Yeah. Sometimes we could go to Aristotle. I mean, you know, we could use some of the correspondence and communications of centuries ago and show other people — and they think it was like last week.
It’s human nature. And that evolution of thinking.
Are the Six Principles Ranked? Not Quite.
But one other thing. Out of your six principles in your leadership framework — is there any one that’s more vital than the others?
It’s hard for me to rank order them, because, Doug, I believe they’re so interdependent. You know, setting the azimuth, listening, trusting, doing the right thing, when in charge being in charge, and balancing your personal and professional life — they’re all nested in one another. And I don’t think you can cherry pick them.
I think you’ve got to go all in on the concept of those six principles being interdependent in your journey, and they help guide your actions and the actions that you believe — what right looks like with everybody on your team.
Yeah, I think that’s so true about leadership in general. There are so many elements and they all overlap and they all integrate and impact one another.
So it is incumbent on the individual who’s wanting to pursue better leadership — they’ve got to do that work kind of in concert and simultaneously in many ways. And yes, you can work on one particular aspect, give it some focus and try to strengthen it, get some coaching, get some mentoring, and strengthen it in your tool bag. But one thing inevitably leads to another, and that’s just the way it is.
How the Six Principles Connect in Practice
Yeah, it’s a journey we talked about. I focus on each of the six principles in separate workshops with leadership teams — normally 2 to 3 hours, like a morning or an afternoon. And we’ll focus on one of them. But one of the contextual highlights of each workshop is how they are connected to the others.
So if we’re talking about setting the azimuth with your mission intent, your values, and your behavioral culture, I’m also going to discuss how that cascades into all the other five principles. If you’re not going to listen with the intent to understand, then you’re not going to have much luck in developing an azimuth, a true north for your organization that other people are part of.
You know, if you simply put out an edict that this is our azimuth, then you’re the only one that’s going to own it. So you’ve got to create that buy-in through participation and listening. Through trusting and empowering. Having a value-based leadership framework where people are expected to do the right thing. All that connectivity has to be part of each of the principles as you learn them and share them with each other. And then expect your team members to walk the talk.
Give Teams Clarity — They’ll Climb Mountains
Yeah. I tell leaders that if you’ve assembled a reasonably good team — and I know that’s a fuzzy definition, but most people can say they’ve got that — you’ve got to give those people the clear picture of where to go and what to do next. What is the next right thing. If you can give them that, they’re going to climb mountains.
Absolutely. And go back to clarity. You and I talked about that before. The assessment process is really a process of establishing clarity.
You know, what’s our mission? What’s our intent? And the intent has three components: What’s our end state — usually a 2 to 3 year time frame? What does success look like? What are the key tasks we have to perform to get to that end state? Why are we doing this — what’s our purpose?
The values and the behaviors are established, but normally they don’t change a whole lot. But the mission and the intent will — they’re more changeable because of the dynamic framework we’re living in and the course of business, of course — of thrilling our customers with the experience.
So I think it’s important to have that touchstone — the personal leadership philosophy. You also have the touchstone of the azimuth of the organization. And you revisit it regularly. Most of the outstanding companies I’ve had the privilege of working with — they’re having an azimuth review on a quarterly basis. They bring up the azimuth and they say, okay, are we doing what we said we were going to do? Have we established metrics with our intent so that we’re not using hope as a method — we’re achieving measurable outcomes.
And people are accountable for their share or their role in the accomplishment of those objectives. And I think that’s where great companies live, Doug.
Closing Thoughts
Well, Robert, we’re about up on time for today, sir. I really appreciate you sitting in. Tell people the best way to get in touch with you.
Sure. My email address is Robert at levelFiveAssociates.com. Spell out the five. My website is www.levelFiveAssociates.com. You can reach me there. You can also reach me on my Substack platform — it’s RobertMixon altogether on Substack. And I look forward to hearing from you. Share some of your ideas. And we can work together to build that all-in adaptive leadership culture in your organization.
Great, great, great. Well, as always, folks, we’re going to have those links in the show notes and look forward to getting that out there for you. I do want to remind you, we have a video version of this show over on YouTube channel by the same name — Leadership Powered by Common Sense.
Check out the archives, give us a comment. Let us know if you’ve got an idea or a topic that we should be hitting on, or a guest recommendation you might have for me. Looking forward to hearing from you. With that, for now, we’re going to sign off, say goodbye — go out there and make it a great day.
Yeah. Thanks, Doug.
Meet Our Guest – MG (Ret) Robert Mixon
Major General Robert W. Mixon, Jr. (U.S. Army, Ret.) is a leadership expert, former commander of the 7th Infantry Division, and bestselling author of The Power of Being All In. After his Army career, he led both manufacturing and nonprofit organizations, giving him practical insight into leading through uncertainty and transformation. He now advises businesses nationwide and teaches executive leadership at Washington University and SMU’s Cox School of Business.
Links:
https://www.levelfiveassociates.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertmixon
https://www.facebook.com/LevelFiveAssociates
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClp-MK0vsoRaI0yvMdZTs1A
https://substack.com/@robertwmixonjr
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