What makes a good military leader? To be a scientist and an artist. The show’s guest in this episode is Mary Bell Ph.D., an associate professor at the National Defense University. Mary talks with Melanie Parish about how a good military leader not only needs to know the procedures. They also need to know how to step back and look at the bigger picture. Mary shares her thoughts on leadership in a hierarchy and where leadership in business and military overlap. Tune in, step back, and see the bigger picture!

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What Makes A Good Military Leader? With Mary Bell

I have been thinking about my leadership and how interesting it is for me that anyone who’s leading in any organization has something powerful to say. We are all grappling with the same challenges. The longer I grapple with these topics, the more I see how all roads lead to Rome. The questions in leadership are all the same no matter if the frameworks are different. I have been finding it fascinating to see how different paradigms all merge as leaders start to have a strong foundation in leadership.

I’m here with Mary Bell who has a PhD and is a retired Lieutenant Colonel. She is faculty for the Joint Advanced Warfighting School’s Operational Art and Campaign Planning Course. She’s also the faculty lead for an Elective on Cyberspace Intelligence Information and Space Considerations. She has a PhD in International Studies from Old Dominion University, a Master’s in International Relations from St Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas and a Bachelor’s in International Business from New Mexico State University. She has over twenty years of service with the US Army with experience in aviation and intelligence. She flew the Black Hawk Helicopter in South Korea, Hawaii throughout the US and Haiti in support of Operation Uphold Democracy. Dr. Bell earned her black belt in Chung Do Kwan, a form of Taekwondo. She’s a native of Las Cruces, New Mexico and is a proud parent of Jackson. She hosts the daughter of a former student from Kenya who attends a university in Norfolk.

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Mary, I am excited to have you on my show.

I’m excited to be here with you, Melanie.

In full transparency, we should say we have known each other for a long time. We went to high school together and we are friends, too. That’s not why I invited you to my show. I invited you here because I know that you have been a leader in the military and you are teaching leaders now. I thought it would be fun to get to talk to you. Not like in a friend way where we talk about the good old days. I want to learn more about you as a leader. I’m happy that you are here.

I’m thankful for the invitation to come and talk with you. We don’t follow each other professionally because we have been friends for so long. As we overlap and realize our worlds overlap a lot, we had this realization like, “I can learn something from her.” I’m excited to be here.

Tell me what you are up to in your life, your work and your leadership.

I am faculty at something called the Joint Advanced Warfighting School. That’s at the Joint Forces Staff College, which is part of the National Defense University in Washington DC. My college specifically is in Norfolk, Virginia. I have been teaching here at this college since 2010. I came here when I was still on active duty. I retired from active duty. I went to go earn my Doctorate, PhD, and I came back to teach after I did that. I have been doing this for a long time. What we do is we teach something here called Joint Professional Military Education Phase Two. It’s this idea of before each of the military people had their own service that they were in, whether it’s the Air Force, the Army, Marines, Navy and the Space Force. There was a problem with them working together.

They could do their air force things all day long but whenever they had to work with a Navy person, there was a problem. This school came out of that. There’s a reform that happened in 1986, an Act that came. This school is a derivative of the Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. We are here to teach these leaders at different levels. The school that I’m teaching in, it’s a little more senior. It’s what we say, O5. It’s the level five, lieutenant colonels or commanders, depending on what service you are in. We have O6 as well. Which is either Navy Captain Coast Guard Captains, or colonels for the other services. That’s generally who I teach and why I teach what I teach.

I’m fascinated. I feel like such a dork that I have never thought about how we skill up leaders in the military. There’s a school, learning and curriculum. It’s interesting to combine all the forces so they know how to play well together. I’m not even sure what exactly to ask. My brain is twisting and turning as I think about this. I always think of the military as following a clear hierarchy. It seems like there would be many parts that would be a foregone conclusion. How do you think about leadership in a hierarchy like that?

There are two things we need to distinguish here. One is there’s training and there’s education. A lot of what the military does is training. I’m a pilot. I was a pilot growing up. As I was going through flight school, that’s training. Whenever we label education, we are talking about, “I don’t need to know how to flip the switch, and then that switch and follow this checklist. I need to learn how to think. I need to figure out how to strategize.” There’s a big difference in education and training. As we think about leaders, we do go through series. There are lots of education gates depending on what service and what your specialty is that you go through over your career. It is important. If you think about our senior leaders, how do we prepare them to be in those positions? It’s all about National Security. Everything we are talking about is National Defense, National Security, and how do we protect our nations and our people. That is important. I’m not sure if I answered your question.

I’m not sure either but I’m fascinated by this idea that when I work on my leadership, it’s often with marketing or content development. The stakes aren’t quite high as National Defense. It’s super interesting to think of leadership and education and teaching people how to think with stakes that are high all the time.

Military Leader: If you misunderstand your problem, you’ll never get the solution.

It’s a different levity to what we do. We have scenarios where we learn. We do these scenarios where our students go through it. At the end of the day, in these scenarios that we do, there are people on the other end. We do have artificial scenarios that we have our students go through to learn how to apply all the things they learn in the application. It’s hard because sometimes students will get emotional about certain things. They have lost a soldier or a Marine in some type of combat event. The stakes are high not just on a personal level. You get back to the much higher level, the strategic level. If my students don’t come out of here prepared for the highest-level jobs, then I have failed. My students go out and they go to the combatant commands. If you have heard of CENTCOM, Central Command or EUCOM. We, the United States have divided the world into these geographic commands. There are functional commands. Those services, everything that we do to protect the nation. We are involved with allies and partners as well.

My students go out and they serve as those strategic thinkers working right for those high-level flag general and flag officers. They are the ones who have to help them think. Sometimes, whenever you are at those levels, you are so busy, it’s hard to stop and do all the thinking. That’s what my students go out to do. They write the strategies for Central Command, European Command, US Indo-Pacific Command, big things that they do. It’s a challenge. You have to think about it one day at a time. If you think about it too holistically, it becomes overwhelming quickly about these leaders, how much is put on their shoulders? It’s a lot. My job is to educate these people who go out and do these great things. Additionally, we have students from State Department from other nations come in. We have international fellows from nations all across the globe that come in. Our classes are pretty small. It’s a pretty elite course that we specifically teach here.

What do you think about as the orientation for a good leader in your environment?

I spent some time reading your book. There’s an incredible amount of overlap in how you go through the experimental leader and talk about the experimental leader. You outlined ways to think about approaching this. We use something very similar. We call it being an operational artist. I know that when people think about the military, they don’t think about art. They think it is more of a science. We say there’s a nexus. There is a nexus where art and science overlap. To be a good leader, you can’t just be a scientist. You have to be an artist. I don’t know if that’s inherently understood as I explain it. It’s one thing to understand the procedures and the processes. It’s another thing to be able to step back and look at the big picture. We are not talking big picture. I’m talking really big picture as we have already discussed at the levels we are talking about. The ability for people to step out of the process and step back and look at everything that’s happening is something some people do well and they do naturally but they still need help. Ergo you have a job and I have a job because if they didn’t need that help and they could do it on their own, they wouldn’t need us to help them along that way. It is a huge difference.

I managed this process as to now I have to think about a strategy or how do I change the environment. One of the things that I thought was interesting in the book, you had three questions. We use a similar process. In this process, we do it in what we call frames. We have three frames. It’s called the environmental frame, the problem frame and the solution frame. When you look at the environmental frame, you have to look at the current environment and the desired environment. Sounding familiar, where do we want to go and where are we now. That’s the desired environment in the current environment. You can look at it as a barrier in the middle, a lightning bolt. What is preventing us from this current environment and switching it and growing the environment to this desired environment that we want? That’s the problem. How do you define that? What happens a lot of times is people misunderstand the environment. Therefore, they misunderstand the problem.

No matter what actions you take, you were solving the wrong thing. Once you understand your environment, at least to the best you can, you understand the problem. We start looking at what’s called the approach. This is where the terminology differs a little bit from your book to how we teach leaders and how we educate leaders. It’s how do you approach this because it’s not direct solution. It is such a big thing that we are talking about. We are not talking about addressing a thing. It is systems of systems and how you impact that system.

That’s where you have the problem and how do you address it. That’s where you start getting into the solution frame. It’s a tricky thing but if you have your environment frame and your problem misunderstood, you are never going to get to a solution. You are never going to move the environment in the direction you want if you don’t understand those things. The last part of this is assessments. You can have all of these things and you can be doing all of these actions. If you aren’t understanding, you may be changing the environment. Maybe your actions are causing the exact wrong effect that you wanted to create. Therefore, you must always have assessments going on so that you can decide if the actions that you are taking are creating the effect you are wanting to create.

Mary, all that is fascinating. I love all the parallels you are seeing with. What you are talking about is the experiment Kata in my book, which I’ve got from Toyota and their improvement Kata. We all have these paths for asking questions. I’m loving it this moment that there’s this path that different people have discovered from different places and how the process has emerged from different places but the process still makes sense. This almost gives me more faith in the process that different people ask the same thing over and over again. It might be interesting to talk about Eliyahu Goldratt and the Theory of Constraints. The place is different than this. You might find this interesting for your work. This idea that we ask these questions about the current reality and the future reality. I call them the obstacles but you are calling them the problem. You look for the approach, mine is the experiment. Yours is the solution. It’s also interesting to talk about lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing applies this concept to everything so you can always improve any process.

Eliyahu Goldratt was an Israeli Physicist. He talked about the Theory of Constraints and working on bottlenecks. Instead of applying it in lean manufacturing to any process, he would say, “You always have the one thing you should be looking at.” What’s the bottleneck? Any time you clear a bottleneck because your solution, your experiment or whatever it works, then you have a new bottleneck. I always love talking about that. As I’m saying all of this out loud, I’m like, “In the military, can you focus on one bottleneck at a time? Where is it that there’s every bottleneck is urgently important because the stakes are high?” If you want to say something about that, that’s interesting to my brain.

We don’t visualize them the same way but conceptually, they are similar to how we look at them. Whenever we talk about systems of systems, the most visual way we look at them is cogs. You can have this system, whether it’s something cultural that’s happening that’s influencing or something that’s happening informationally. We think about interrelated cogs. As you look at those cogs in the military, at the levels we are talking about, there’s not a single problem. These are big. When we say problem, I don’t mean like, “How do we improve our bottom line from this widget that we are making?” It’s much bigger than that. We are trying to change the entire environment.

Sometimes, the things that we have to be cautious about are perhaps as doing nothing is the best thing. There are things you have to look at. You look at these systems of systems and you look at these cogs. This is the similarity with the bottlenecks, is where in this system do I interject some action that is going to affect the system in a positive way trending the way I want? That’s as good as we get. We don’t get to solve, “There’s this bottleneck. If I can figure out how to widen this one area or address this one area, then I have fixed that thing.” I don’t think we ever say there’s a fix. It’s an improvement. Maybe in some situations, if it’s a very specific threat, then maybe there is a way to address that. You could look at it in more of the bottleneck using that terminology and that thought process. Generally, what we are talking about is much bigger than that. That’s where the cogs, interwoven cogs, think about some smaller, some bigger and where you can interject some type of effort to create some type of effect to move the environment towards the desired environment is about as good as we get. There are a lot of overlap there. It’s just a little different way to think about that cognitively.

I often talk about every experiment is because you want a change to happen. Even within a business context, I’m not sure we ever solve a problem. They cycle but the bottleneck language allows you to decide it’s no longer the largest problem to focus on. That’s similar. I have never thought about it in quite that way. I’m not sure that we ever solve the marketing problem in business. We never solve a staffing problem in business. It’s interesting how you think of business in the military being different but when we distill it down to this leadership thinking, I’m not sure it is.

The Experimental Leader: Be a New Kind of Boss to Cultivate an Organization of Innovators

I don’t think so either. There are a lot of overlap. Frankly, even though we call it the three frames, the environmental frame, the problem frame and the solution frame, I do keep my students away from using the word solution or solving because you are not solving it. You are addressing it. Anytime they talk about that, I’m like, “Are you’re solving that? You are addressing it.” Maybe there’s another terminology. I prefer to address rather than solve. It’s rare. In my world, rarely is there a situation where like, “It’s completely done. I don’t ever have to think about that again.” It doesn’t happen.

In my world too. There are a lot of overlap.

I loved reading your book. The similarity is going off in my mind. I have been in the military effectively my entire adult life. It’s all I have ever done. I went to college but after college, I went right into the military. I’m retired from the military now but I have been working for the Department of Defense ever since. Whenever people talk about civilian processes, I have lived in the world. I have been to different stores. I have been the recipient of different types of marketing campaigns but it’s not the same. Whenever I see something at that level, like your book as you are describing at the highest levels, how to think about things, I’m like, “I can recognize that.” It was enjoyable and exciting for me.

It’s exciting when we talk about leadership. It’s not the individual processes. I realized a long time ago that it doesn’t matter. If someone is leading in the world, they could be leading anywhere. It’s interesting for me to talk about them on this show. It means if I see somebody who’s out there doing work around leadership, I don’t care what kind of leadership they are talking about. It will be interesting to talk about how they think about it. It’s why I invited you onto my show and already, it has been so fun. I do want to talk to you a little bit about being a woman in leadership, particularly in the military. It’s so topical as we talk about equity. I would love to know what you have to say about that at this stage. After you have been retired, what are the takeaways that you are left with after a full career in the military?

I entered the military in 1992 and I went to flight school and became a Black Hawk helicopter pilot. Whenever I went out to my first unit, for the most part, every unit I was in, depending on what level you are talking about of the unit, I was the only female in every unit I was in. It was challenging. My first duty station was also in the Republic of Korea, in South Korea. It was an old boys club. It was male-centric. It was hard there and figure out how to be myself as I’m learning. It’s my first assignment. I’m young. I’m a Second Lieutenant. I try to figure out who I am and how I fit in that. I have always been a very strong person. You would know that, growing up together.

You are super smart.

I was the 1st or 2nd female junior ever to be the drum major of our high school band. Our high school band, if I remember, was a little over 200 people. It was a big thing as a female junior that I was the first-ever female junior. This has been something that is part of who I am. I am a strong, independent person. I was never raised in a way to think that boys could do certain things and girls could do certain things. I was raised that you could do whatever you wanted. I was raised with horses. We competed. There was no distinguishing between what boys’ and girls’ events were at the level where I was competing. It was just you and your horse. However you performed, it was up to you and how you manage that situation. I never was raised with the idea that I couldn’t do something. As I go into these jobs, in this first assignment in Korea and being a woman, it was hard because you walk into a room and it goes silent because you are the only female, anywhere you go. That would happen frequently.

I had several situations where men negatively gave me unwanted attention. I will stop short of the word assault, probably getting close to that because I can see things out and I can see things as they are happening. Even though I can’t completely stop it, I can certainly keep it from getting worse or I’m fortunate that I never let myself get into a bad situation but it’s hard. I have had male leaders who had never worked with a female before. It has been interesting. As I learned and grew, perhaps the better I became at it, the better I became at being me. You wear different hats. I’m a straightforward, strong and tough person. I have always had a person who has high standards.

I know that you know this because you know me well. It’s not even just talking about it to someone who hasn’t seen that in me. That has served me well. I entered the military at a time where there were still not that many females. There’s still not a lot of females at least in Army aviation. I don’t know the exact numbers. As I grew and matured, I never ran into those situations again where at least I felt because I’m a female, I’m getting this negative treatment. What happened is because I was female, a unicorn and one of only, eyes were always on me, good or bad. It’s my choice what I do with that.

I have been given this glorious stage. It’s one way of looking at it if I kept my integrity, worked hard, made sure I had my knowledge, took care of people. On the stage, a man who’s doing equal things to me because people aren’t looking at him, he is performing just as well but he’s not getting the same credit. There are two sides to this. I’m on stage, whether you like it or not. What I do with it is up to me. In my case, it all turned out well. I worked hard. I have some intelligence there. I have integrity. It all turned out positively but you are always on that stage. You are never not on the stage.

I’m the only female to be hired into the program where I teach. It takes about 25 or 30 years in a career of making to be able to teach in the program that I’m in. If you didn’t start that back in the ‘90s, you are not going to be able to teach in a program like this. It’s the way it is. It has been challenging but if I wasn’t somebody who always had a spotlight on me, what I have excelled as much as I have? I don’t know the answer. Do I think that I always had to be extra careful? Did I know that all eyes were on me? If I made a huge mistake, it was going to be amplified. Whatever I did was amplified. That’s the best way to explain it. In my case, it has all turned out to be positive. I have had some negative situations. I had some difficult situations that I had to deal with. I walked out of all of those situations with my head up and feeling like at least I did the best I could in the situation with the tools and the resources that I had available to me at the time.

It’s interesting. Thank you for talking about all of that. It’s the idea of a stage that you have a platform, whether you want it or not. Being a woman leader, I work a lot in tech. Often, their platform is also visible as they try to figure that out for positive or negative. They are visible as they do work. How do you do self-care?

I work full-time. I work at a demanding job, as you know and as we have talked about, which I love, as you can tell. I love what I do. I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to do what I do. I’m a single mom. I have two people who live in my house, my son. I also have the daughter of a former student from Kenya in 2011. She’s here going to college. Not to take a second away from her parents but effectively I’m her mother. She lives far from her family. She moved here when she was nineteen and had never left Kenya ever before. I have taught her to drive. It has been a real experience.

Military Leader: Address a problem rather than solve it.

With that self-care, my time is pretty much all spoken for. For me, I don’t do things differently from my kids. If I’m not at work, it’s pretty much always related to my kids, I will admit. I find joy in those things. That’s my self-care. My son loves to do airsoft. Do you know what that is? It’s like paintball but you are shooting BBs at each other. He left to go do that. I will take them out. I have fun while I do that. Would I go without him? No. It’s not just, “I will go take you to do that.” I don’t allow myself to have that attitude. It’s like, “I’m going to go enjoy this.” Whenever I’m doing things with Frida. I call her my niece, my Kenyan niece.

I enjoy those things. I see the world through her eyes. Her joy becomes my joy. My son’s joy becomes my joy. Now, I’m not at a stage in my life where I can do a lot other than those things that are separate from my family and my work. It’s not my life. It’s a stage and I know that. There will be time whenever I can do more things. I love to travel. My son and I have a trip that we are going to go do to Ecuador and the Galápagos in July 2021. I’m super excited. I do drag them all over the world to do these trips. That is my passion. That’s what feeds me more than anything. I love people. That’s what it comes down to.

Things like this feed my soul, Melanie. This right here is a form of self-care. I love this interaction with you. What a joy it is. I work hard to find joy in everything if I can. If it is possible, I work hard to find. I know not all situations are that way. With the COVID year, it has been a hard year with the situation that we have all been through. I don’t mean to minimize that at all. I always work. I’m an optimist. I look to see the positive outcomes even in a bad situation.

It has been amazing to talk with you. Where could people find you, Mary?

I’m on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best way to find me. I’m LinkedIn with you, Melanie. If they are LinkedIn with you, they should be able to find me on LinkedIn and LinkedIn with me. That’s the best way to see me and connect with me. Thank you so much. It has been enjoyable talking with you. It has been a pleasure. It’s the highlight of my day.

It has been so fun to have you.

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I have been talking with Mary Bell. I’m fascinated how the processes they use in the military to train their leaders are so similar to the experiment Kata in my book. If you dive in there, you can look at what’s the current reality, what’s the desired future state and what are obstacles are in the way of reaching that desired future state. It has been amazing talking with Mary. She’s smart and passionate about leadership and what she does. Go experiment.

Important Links: 

• Joint Advanced Warfighting School
• Joint Forces Staff College
• Joint Professional Military Education Phase Two
• Book – The Experimental Leader
• Mary Bell – LinkedIn

About Mary Bell, Ph.D.

Mary Bell, Ph.D., is the faculty chair for the Joint Advanced Warfighting School’s (JAWS) Operational Art and Campaign Planning Course. She is also the faculty lead for an elective on cyberspace, intelligence, information, and space considerations. She has a Ph.D. in International Studies from Old Dominion University, an M.A. in International Relations from St. Mary’s University at San Antonio, Texas, and a B.A. in International Business from New Mexico State University. She has over 20 years of service in the U.S. Army with experience in Aviation and Intelligence. She flew the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter in South Korea, Hawaii, throughout the U.S.and in Haiti in support of Operation Uphold Democracy. She also flew the C-12 Huron and EO-5B/C Airborne Reconnaissance Low (ARL) in support of Operations Palmetto Ghost and Palmetto Shield, Counter Drug operations for U.S.Southern Command.

She flew missions as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom collecting real-time full-motion video for use by the Joint Special Operations Command. She then served as a Mission Commander for the Open Skies Treaty negotiating with diplomats from 33 nations including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Sweden, Georgia, Italy, and France. Besides operational and planning experience, she was an Assistant Professor of Military Strategic Studies at the Air Force Academy (2001 –2003) and military faculty and Assistant Professor at the Joint and Combined Warfighting School (2010 –2017). She has received many accolades from speaking to large organizations including the Ninety-Nines, an international organization of Women Pilots, service members of the U.S.Coast Guard Air Station at Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and U.S.Naval Atlantic Air Force Command. She was also the keynote speaker at Pennsylvania State University’s Veteran’s Day celebration. She has expertise in U.S. energy policy, as well as Euro-Atlantic relations. In 2017, Dr. Bell earned her blackbelt in ChungDoKwan form of TaeKwonDo. She is a native of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and is the proud parent of a twelve-year-old, Jaxson. She also hosts the daughter of a former student from Kenya, who attends university in Norfolk.

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