Thanks for some great comments last week.  My favorite was from a CMSgt who decided to retire early and said that it was because: “it’s tough to sell the company to our airman and senior airman, when our Senior Leaders are selling our souls to active duty!!”

I’ll be on leave next week so I’m sending this out early. Have a great weekend.

We like to think that our Air Force culture is pretty homogeneous.  That we all think alike, that because of our shared experiences, we share values and goals. But if you drill down a little, peel away the layers, you discover that there are very distinct “subcultures”.  Operators are different from aerialporters are different from loggies, are different from security forces and they are all different from maintainers.  Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with maintainers.  Some of my best friends are maintainers.  It’s just that they’re motivated by something much different than the rest of us.

When I first became an OG, one of the first classes I attended was something called SLMC.  It stands for Senior Leaders Maintenance Course.  Now, you’re probably asking the same question that I asked at the time:  Is there a SLOC (Senior Leaders Operators Course), SLLC (Senior Leaders Logistics Course), or SLSC (Senior Leaders Services Course)?  The answer is, of course, no.  For some reason the powers that be decided that everyone needed to be taught why maintainers are the way that they are.  Puzzling, until you attend the course.

The short answer is that maintainers, more than any other specialty, are totally driven by metrics.  They have an entire book of things by which they are measured. MC rates with NMC and PMC components, FSE, MSE, LDR, Commit Rate, USE, TNMCS, CANN Rate, DOP Rate, Air Abort Rate, RSP fill rate, IER, SER, BR, DDR, TRCT, R/R Rate, CWT, SOTMQTP/TD, I could go on.  Suffice it to say that, in the maintainer world, metrics drive everything.  So, what do the rest of us do with this information?  Well, knowledge is power.  And knowing what motivates someone gives us insight on how best to frame our relationship with them.

There I was, 2003, back in Germany.  We had been there with 15 crews and 10 airplanes for four months and had been kicking butt.  We had 9-10 airplanes tasked almost every day with a nearly 100% launch reliability rate.  On the other side of the field, the active duty squadron was plodding along with their tired E-models, but then they weren’t really pushing things either.  Too many, holidays, German holidays, and “Goal” days to enjoy to be too concerned with flying airplanes. Besides, we Delta guys had nothing better to do.

We had been running a stage operation through an unnamed Eastern European for two weeks and the active duty guys had actually had to go TDY for almost two weeks so when the stage ended, the active duty squadron commander came to me with an interesting request.  “My guys have been working really hard for the last two weeks”, he said “and I’d like to give them a break for a week so they can spend some time with their families.  Could Delta do all of the flying for a week?”  Interesting question.  We had been deployed 4 months.  We had been away from our families.  We were told to expect to be deployed for a year.  And they needed a week off to tour Europe with their families.  The answer was easy; “No problem, enjoy yourselves, we’ll handle it.”

So for the next week, we had a commit rate of 100%.  We flew every mission, from the spaghetti run to earthquake relief in Africa.  My sanity was questioned, but there’s always a method to my (and Tim Costa’s) madness.

The following week we attended the weekly Operations and Maintenance meeting chaired by the active duty, one-star, wing commander.  The maintainers presented their metrics via powerpoint and we all tried to stay awake until we got to the Launch Reliability slide.  Traditionally, long term trend, the number had been a steady state rate of about 78%.  It went up and down a little, but it pretty much stayed in the high 70s.  So when the slide came up and showed the previous weeks number at 99.7% (a Louisville crew stayed too long at breakfast) the WG/CC nearly jumped out of his seat.  “That’s phenomenal!  Have done any analysis to determine why things went so well last week?  We need to continue this trend and keep up this amazing rate.  How did you do it?”  The active duty guys across the table didn’t say a word. They looked at each other, fidgeted in their seats, pretended to take notes, but no one said a word for a painfully long time.  Finally, the O-7 asked.  “Hasn’t anyone figured this out?  Doesn’t anyone want to take credit?”  At that point, all eyes turned sheepishly to Tim and I, and the General’s followed.  “Why’s everyone looking at you guys?” he asked.  Tim and I then calmly explained the request that the AD C-130 commander had made.  We said that we were total force team players and we knew that our active duty brethren needed time off to recover from their 2 week ordeal and that we had done all of the flying for the past week.  “So”, the wing commander asked turning to the other side of the table, “when you present these launch reliability numbers every week, do you just combine the active duty numbers with the reserve numbers?”. The response was a less than enthusiastic, “Yes sir”.  “Well, from now on, I want to see the numbers broken out by “E” vs “H2””.  The General gave us a knowing smile and the meeting ended.

If you know what someones goal is, what it is that they’re trying to do, then helping them down that path will pay huge dividends to your working relationship.  I’m not saying that you should use it to leverage someone for future considerations, I’m saying understand everyone’s mission and where yours and theirs intersect make the best of the opportunity for the greater good.  Or, just take every opportunity to educate active duty, it’s a job that will never be complete.

Happy Father’s Day!!  I’ll always miss mine.