Leadership Lessons from the Air Force with Matthew Carey

INTRO: Helping community bankers grow themselves, their team and their profits. This is the Community Bank Podcast.

ERIK: Welcome to the Community Bank Podcast. I’m Erik Bagwell, director of sales and marketing for the Correspondent Division at SouthState Bank. And with me this week, again, as I imposed on Caleb a week ago, is Caleb Stevens, Caleb’s director of marketing. Does an awesome job with this podcast. Caleb, how are you?

CALEB: I’m good. It’s fall, doing some pumpkin carving tonight with the family. So, excited to have a little cooler weather here in Georgia. It’s been a brutal summer. So, excited that we got football, we got pumpkin carving, and things are good.

ERIK: And I know this will not be released this week, but I’ll go ahead and say this. Hopefully we’re celebrating a win of Georgia over Texas.

CALEB: Oh, gosh, yeah. Well, we have many clients in Texas, so we hope they’re happy at least if things don’t work out for the Dawgs.

ERIK: That’s right. Somebody will be happy. So, alright, so last session, or the last episode, we talked about having our Elevate Forum in Birmingham. The fact that you got with some of our speakers and interviewed them. This week, I’m kind of following up on that. We have a really cool speaker. Matt Carey came. He was gracious enough to come from Virginia. He is in the Air National Guard but was in the Air Force and still flies an F22 Raptor. And he came and talked all about what that entails and had some really cool information. You talked to him about leadership and some things how the military leadership, how that can actually work in a bank or any business. Talk about that real fast.

CALEB: Yeah, I just wanted to kind of get his story on how he got interested in flying, how he came to be in the military and just leadership lessons. I mean, there’s so much at stake when you’re in the military. We talk on the podcast about how if you and I make a mistake in the banking world, it could be costly, but it’s not nearly the life-or-death scenario that working in the military can be. And so, how do you lead when the stakes are so high? So, Matt gives some great lessons. You sat down with him at our conference for about an hour, and that was a great conversation. You all went through a lot more than we did in this podcast, but again—over the next, you know, couple of weeks here—we just want to give listeners a backstage look at some of the content from our conference.

ERIK: Yeah. And I think it’s interesting, when we talked to him, and I think y’all got into this some too, the detail that goes into, you know, he said maybe a 5-minute flight. You talked about it for six hours. So, I’m sure he’s got some really good information, really good advice that’s totally applicable to community banks. So, we will get to that interview right now and—

CALEB: Well, and just one more thing. It’s not in the podcast, but the story about him almost crashing his F22 Raptor trying to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Just things like that, that if you don’t ever get to hear, you know, firsthand from somebody in the military, it’s kind of fun to hear some of the stories.

ERIK: Yeah. He had some really good stories that you would had to have been there. I don’t know if … y’all probably didn’t talk about them in your interview, but it’s an exciting life for sure.

CALEB: Which is why folks, our next conference, wherever it is, whenever it is, we want you to come.

ERIK: Absolutely. So. Alright, let’s get to that interview right now.

CALEB: Well, welcome everybody to a special edition of the Community Bank Podcast. I’m sitting here in Birmingham, Alabama, at the Ross Bridge Resort. We are in the middle of our conference that we’re hosting for community bankers, and we’re between sessions right now. And we’re joined by tonight’s keynote speaker. We’re recording this around, I don’t know, 2:00 in the afternoon, but tonight, we are going to have Matt Carey, retired from the US Air Force now and the Air National Guard, as our speaker. So, Matt, welcome to the Community Bank Podcast.

MATT: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. This is beautiful, by the way. It’s a pretty nice setting.

CALEB: Yeah, my first time here. We appreciate you coming. I think that folks are going to really enjoy what they hear from you tonight, and we want to give our podcast listeners who couldn’t be here at the conference just a little preview of some of the content that you’re going to share with our bankers tonight. So, no pun intended, give us a quick fly over of your career. And where did you grow up? How did you wind up having a passion for flying and for serving our country? And just tell us a bit about yourself.

MATT: Yeah, so, I grew up as a military brat moving all over the country. I went to school at University of Colorado with no intention of joining the military. Ironically, I went to school for aerospace engineering and looked through the classes and was like, “This is terrible. I don’t want to do this.” Switched to finance and then after about a year and a half decided. I kept my degree in finance but ended up joining ROTC, and I got a pilot slot, went to pilot training at Columbus, Mississippi. Out of there, I got—

CALEB: Columbus, Mississippi. That sounds like a remote place.

MATT: It is a small town. There’s not a lot going on in Columbus other than flying, but it’s in the heart of SCC country. So, you got Mississippi State is 30 minutes away. Alabama at Tuscaloosa is about an hour, hour-fifteen. You got Ole Miss, LSU, Auburn … are all within driving distance. And so, that’s where I met my wife. She was at grad school in Alabama.

CALEB: Roll tide. Family.

MATT: Yeah, I was raised to hate the SCC, but now I’m married into it.

CALEB: You drank the Kool-Aid.

MATT: Right. That’s right. It hurt me a little bit when Alabama lost last week. But out of pilot training—I was called the first-time instructor pilot—so I taught pilot training for about 3 1/2 years in Columbus, and then got picked up to fly the F22 Raptor. From there, went to the Schoolhouse, which is about 6 to 9 more months of training in the F22. Then I went to Virginia and then Alaska, flying the F22 for another about seven years. And then actually, so I haven’t retired. I’ve just separated and went from active to the guard to just get some more stability.

CALEB: Okay, gotcha.

MATT: And then, but for my whole 12-year career has been flying. But over the last about three years or so, I started working nontraditional lines of effort with focusing on the Pacific area of responsibility. Thinking like trying to challenges, and then also working with Defense Tech fellowships and startups and venture capital and defense tech. So, thinking like early startup, Series A, Series B types of firms that are trying to bring capability to the Department of Defense. And that has been super interesting. And you see how with the backdrop of the Ukraine War, how small efforts are able to create immediate impact to military capability.

CALEB: As you’ve met like other pilots, whether in the Air Force or just pilots in general, do you find that there’s a certain set of characteristics or qualities that they all kind of have in common. Is there a common thread or story that you hear for why they got into flying? Or maybe not? I’m just kind of curious.

MATT: So, one of my really good buddies says that, and I guess I’ll speak to the fighter pilot side of the house since that’s what I know, but I said there’s two types of fighter pilots. And I think it’s pretty accurate. There’s the people that just love flying. Just have a love of aviation. And then there’s competitive people. He is for sure one of those people that just loves flying. He grew up flying, all he wants to do is fly. He wants to fly for the rest of his life and then me: I enjoy it as long a lot of other guys that it’s the most challenging thing I think I could go find to do and try to, you know, do better every day, challenge yourself every day.

MATT, continued: It’s a very competitive job, and I feel like it’s pretty split across—like obviously I love flying, but there’s been times in my life where I had some medical stuff happen where I didn’t think I was going to fly again. It was more scared about health stuff, not that I wasn’t gonna fly again. And it’s like, “Alright, well, what else out there is challenging?” And so, I think those are the two kind of delineators between the types of people. At least, again, the fighters. But across the board, everyone that does this job wants to be there. There’s nobody that finds themselves—I haven’t found one yet that gets to the point where they’re qualified in a fighter jet, and they go, “This stinks. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

CALEB: Yeah. Are you allowed to have like, if you have a contact prescription, does that automatically disqualify you?

MATT: Nope, I’m wearing contacts right now.

CALEB: Okay. I don’t know where I heard that. Maybe it was a long time ago.

MATT: It used to be.

CALEB: Okay, that’s right. My grandfather, I think he was going to go into the Air Force in World War 2, ended up in the Navy. And I think part of it was maybe his vision. I can’t remember what the story was.

MATT: The Navy doesn’t need to see well.

CALEB: Yeah.

MATT: I don’t know it when it happened. It probably, I don’t know, probably sometime in the 2000s, when they realized. Or maybe the 90s. They were cutting out a significant portion of the population, that you could just fix.

CALEB: Yeah, maybe we’re gotta widen our talent pool.

MATT: Yeah, they maxed out the talent pool of 20-20 vision. So, I would say, I mean it’s probably half the squadron has glasses, contacts, or have done PRK or something. I used to fly with glasses and, I realized I had to stop that when I got to the F22 because it fogs up so much because you’re working till you’re sweating. I was like, I cannot fight BFM or dog fighting in this.

CALEB: So, the F22. That came after—is it the F15 that was around for a long time prior? It’s known as like the greatest fighter of all time.

MATT: Yep. So, the F15 is still around. They’re retiring it out. There’s 2 models of the F15. The F15C model, which is air-to-air, and the F15E, which is the strike eagle, which can do both air-to-air and air-to-ground. TheF22 Raptor was designed to replace the F15C model as an air superiority fighter. And so, I became operational early 2000s to basically phase out the 4th gen air-to-air dominance. So, like most of the older fighter pilots in the F22 community are prior F15 pilots.

MATT, continued: There’s a few F16 pilots. But the F15C was air-to-air focus. And it has, I forget, I think it’s 102 air kills, I think. I can Google it. Someone’s going to Google it and say, “It’s 103 or something.” It has never been shot down and has a lot of air-to-air kills. The Raptors shot down a balloon. That’s all we’ve done so far. But, I think part of that’s because there hasn’t been major conflict at the sense that you’d be using air-to-air.

CALEB: So, I was at a banking conference about a year and a half ago in Colorado Springs—funny enough. And our keynote for that conference was the head, I think, of the Air Forces Center for Leadership and Character, I want to say. You maybe know who he is. I don’t remember his name. But he told a story, and this is why I asked about the F22, he told a story that I’ve never forgotten. And I think it’s a good leadership principle here. He said when the F22 first came out, to even be qualified to fly, you had to have so many hours with the F15. And he said over time as we needed more and more pilots, we kept dropping the hour requirement to fly the F22, to the point that you needed no-hour requirement to start on the 22. And you start with it fresh and never even had to touch the F15. And he said, remarkably, the students that had no experience with the F15 picked up the 22 faster than the people that had a lot of experience on the F15.

CALEB, continued: And it was like the principle was, I think he called it something like “don’t be encumbered by prior knowledge.” In other words, you get so used to patterns and the way you do things on a 15 that when you start with the 22, we assume that just because you have a lot of experience doing one thing, that you’ll be great at another thing, when in fact the newer kids on the 22s, picked it up really fast. I’m not sure if you have any insight into that or just the principle there or if we sort of assume, “This person’s done this for 10 years, they’re going to be amazing at this thing,” but sometimes it doesn’t work that way.

MATT: Yeah, I think there’s a blend of that, right? Where some experience is definitely valuable, right? Off the street, when I first showed up, I didn’t understand basic things about air combat, where someone else had more experience. Already knew it, and they didn’t have to learn that piece. But depending on how long they’ve spent in another platform, it can definitely be difficult for that person to now learn a new system. Forget old habits, if you will. Where a young guy or gal, brand new, they have a fresh set of eyes. There’s definitely a balance, but as we look at new technologies, even something as simple as like virtual reality for our training systems. About a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, I was working on a project to create a new synthetic or digital training center. That was this huge facility, and one of the things we’re using it [for] was virtual reality. And one of the older pilots who’s incredibly smart, high-level tactician.

MATT, continued: We’re gonna go check out all the virtual reality, and he said, “If you’re not under the age of 30, I don’t want your opinion on virtual reality, myself included.” You know, he’s like all the old guys are just going to complain about how it hurts their eyes, or they don’t like the way it feels on their head. And as we start talking about, you know, touch screens in the cockpits versus other things. Again, same kind of consideration where, you know, just because that’s not the way we’ve always done it. It’s a new fresh set of eyes of someone who doesn’t have, you know, maybe some bias that a person with more experience brings to the table. And so, I think you have to be aware of it where, you know, in this example, that experienced fighter pilot, he was self-aware enough to know that he understands tactics, and he understands operational challenges. But he also understands that he has biases, and he’s on the other side of 40. And so, as he’s looking at future technology for things are going to be in the next 10, 20 years, he’s like, “My opinion shouldn’t matter. It should be the young guys.”

CALEB: Yeah, that’s a great way to look at things. So, what’s fascinating to me about leadership is it’s needed in every industry, every sector of the economy. However, depending on what industry you’re in, the stakes are higher. So, in my line of work, I’m a banker and you know, I want to do a good job. My wife is a nurse, and so when she’s taking care of a patient, the stakes are higher. She makes a mistake, that could be lethal. If I make a mistake, I mean, I guess in theory we could lose money, which is not good either. But somebody’s life is probably not on the line. And the military, in your line of work, serving our country. The stakes, I don’t know if they could get any bigger in some situations. So, I would just love to hear from you, as you’ve observed the great leaders that you’ve been able to work with in the military, what are some common themes of how they lead when the stakes are so high? What makes a good leader in the military?

MATT: Yeah, I’ve been very fortunate. I have had phenomenal commanders and leaders almost throughout my entire career, with very rare exception. I’ve been blessed. It’s been great. The common themes are all of those leaders have empowered and enabled their people to go do whatever that mission said is. And so, the way they’ve, I found that they’ve succeeded is, they make sure everyone understands the goal. The intent, the philosophy. They go, “This is what we’re trying to do. This is the objective. Here are your left and right bounds.” And they usually make them pretty wide, and if they are tighter bounds, they will loosen them as the team kind of proves themselves, it gets more experience. And they make sure everyone understands, “This is where we’re going. Here’s your bounds. Here are your tool sets. If you don’t have the tools that you need to go do that, let me know, and I’ll get you the tools for your job, but I’m not going to do your job.”

MATT, continued: And so, by giving people responsibility, giving people ownership, people take ownership. And they’ll go work for that human being. And then I think the other piece is acknowledging that people make mistakes. And your team’s not going to be perfect, right? And when they cross those bounds, those left or right bounds, identifying: Was it an error of skill or was it an error of will? Meaning, did you have the skill set to succeed, or did I put you in a place where you didn’t have the skill set to succeed? Or did you choose to do the wrong thing, right? And so, I remember when I was a brand-new wingman, our director of operations, said very clearly to the room, “Everyone’s going to make mistakes. I expect you to make mistakes.” You know, when you see these inspections or government inspections and everything’s perfect scores and like, somebody’s lying somewhere, right? Because nobody’s perfect. You have 100% across the board? Something’s wrong.

MATT, continued: That should be a red flag. You know people messing up is normal. And so, if you, you know, own up say, “Hey, I messed something up. But it was an area of skill. I was unsure how to handle situation. I was unsure what I was supposed to do, or I wasn’t able to keep up with the jet, and I made—something happened.” He goes, “That’s on us. We didn’t put you in a position to win. We didn’t put you in a position to succeed. And we’re going to get you the training or whatever to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

CALEB: Yeah.

MATT: But if you come to me and you broke the law, or you decided to, you know, fly and whether that was illegal to fly in or do something, you know, go across borders, which people have done right, right? You chose to do that, and he goes, “I will not protect you. I will be the first one to tell you.” And so, I think making sure those are understood and then giving the team the power and the trust and letting them go make those mistakes. You feel free to and empowered. Those teams were the ones where you know, have been either the top fighter squadron in the in the Air Force, or competing for it. So, there have been trends.

CALEB: That’s a helpful delineation for all leaders. This person that is reporting to you, when they make a mistake, is it a problem of character or will or just flat out negligence? Is it on them, or did the leader not equip them, train them, develop them, put them in a position to, you know, to be successful? And certainly, that person has to want to be equipped. They got they have to want. It’s not a one-way street, it’s a two-way street. But I think that’s a common pitfall for leaders, as it can be easy to sort of take the blame off ourselves when really we could have done a better job of equipping our people to be successful.

MATT: Yeah. And I found that if you, as the leader, aren’t aware of the differences there, and you’re quick to criticize or take—I don’t want to say like administrative action—but not helpful action, right? Punishment, if you will. Your people are going to be less and less, and you don’t understand the differences between will and skill, your people are going to be way less likely to communicate when they’re having skill issues. And then, inevitably, they’re going to start creating will issues where they’re intentionally hiding things intentionally, like starting to cover stuff up. And it could be a downhill spiral. So, having that trust there and how to make how to make it better. And then, one thing that we do that is, I mean, every organization does debrief. Like how, you know, how do we get better? Our community really focuses in on, will spend hours, for example, on—we call it BFM for dog fighting. Probably fighting for like maybe 5 to 6 minutes in an entire sorting. But you’ll go debrief that for four or five hours. And it’s a lot, but it’s how you strive for perfection, and not saying everyone needs to do that, but the key pieces of that are: when you sit down with some like, “Hey, something went wrong with this plan, this mission, or this meeting, or this project we had going on.” Agreeing, identifying that there was an error that happened and then proving that it happened and then understanding why did that breakdown.

MATT, continued: And it usually breaks down to three things. It’s perception, decision, or execution. Did you perceive the situation appropriately? And if you didn’t, then you were destined for failure, because you didn’t fully understand the situation. If you did perceive it, did you make the right decision given the correct perception? And then if you didn’t, okay, so why did you make the incorrect decision? Did you think that, you know, did you misunderstand what the goal was? Did you misunderstand what you were allowed to do? And then if you did make the right decision, but we still messed up where in execution did it fail? And often, in the execution piece, it’s just training, right? That person is usually probably a younger person and needs to understand on how to execute whatever you guys are trying to achieve together, but it usually breaks out of those three things. Is it perception, decision, or execution?

CALEB: I heard a leader say one time, he said, “Experience. I really don’t care about experience. I care about it evaluated experience. You can have done something for 30 years, but if you’ve done it poorly, and you’ve never evaluated that experience and how to improve upon it, the experience in and of itself isn’t that valuable. It’s the ability to evaluate it and improve upon it.” That sounds like what you’re saying.

MATT: Yeah, absolutely. It’s very easy to be like, “I’ve been doing something for however long, but if no one has evaluated or hasn’t been tested, right? And then you look into it, you go, “Oh, you’re not actually really that good. Have you assessed yourself? Have you assessed? Every high-performing team I’ve worked on in the military or otherwise, is constant self-assessment and constant, honest self-assessment. Of not just of your own self, but of your team doing self-assessment and acknowledging, “Hey, we weren’t perfect. How do we get to perfect?” Knowing you’ll never be perfect, but striving for that and grading yourself, because again, to your point, if you don’t, you can expect, “Yeah, we’ve been doing it.” You’ve been coasting.

CALEB: I had a family member who was deployed a number of years ago. He’s in the military, and I always wondered, like, near the military, there’s so much that is top secret. And even at his level, there’s probably a limit to what he knows that’s being talked about layers and layers above him. And there’s a similar parallel. If you’re a CEO of a bank, there’s a limit to what is appropriate to share with your team. Certainly you want to be honest. You want to be candid, clear, transparent. You want to cast an exciting and compelling vision. But there will always be certain things, for whatever reason, that it’s not wise or prudent or appropriate to share as you go down the rungs of the organization. So, I’m just sort of curious, as a leader in the military, knowing that there probably is stuff going on above me that I don’t see the full picture on: how does a leader sort of give their team the clarity that they can offer? Knowing that there’s confidential stuff, life or death. I mean, we can’t share a lot of classified things as well. But how do you help people still understand the bigger purpose for why we’re going on this mission, or what we’re doing, or whatever it is?

MATT: I think part of it goes back to trust, right? And you have to have built enough credibility with your team and your people so that when you say, “Hey, I can’t give you all the information, but this is what we’re going to go do, and this is why we care about it.” So, I think trust and the why. A good example I have is when we were in the desert. Some of our aircrew flight equipment folks who—They’re the ones who make sure your G-suit and your all your oxygen systems and your harness and your ejection, all your ejection systems. So, the things that are going to keep you alive while you’re in the jet and if you, God forbid, eject. And so, very important, but they have very limited clearances because they’re not actually going on any of the missions, they’re not in the jet. And so, their relative security clearance is much lower than the guys that are in the jet fighting.

MATT, continued: And we had one instance where one of the—they had multiple shifts, and one shift had a couple of younger people—and they had a few times where they were just late to get the stuff ready. And so, we were late to take off, and it had mission impacts. And we couldn’t tell them all of the reasons. But to get the buy-in of like, “Hey, I know you’re you know, you’re month 4, month 5 of deployment. It’s, you know, Groundhog Day. I appreciate how you’re ready to go home.” But we brought them in to a secure space and showed them, you know, we brought down the classification, took some stuff off, but showed them the whole picture of how being late by a few minutes 1,000 miles away ends up affecting special operations forces in northern Syria. And they’re like, you know, cause like, if you’re late here, you’re making me late here. If I miss the tanker, and then it compiles, right? And if we’re start out the get go on minute one, we’re already 5 minutes or 10 minutes or 20 minutes late. You have huge impacts and there’s all these people waiting for us and then, you know, eyes kind of get big and they go, “Oh, I get it.” It clicks, right? And so, again, probably a little bit of an issue of will and skill there. But it was probably a fail—it was a failure on us that we didn’t make sure they had that buy-in, right? They didn’t understand the full picture. Like here’s the intent, right? Here’s what we’re trying to do. And so, the fact that that person, because they don’t understand it, it’s like, “Well, it doesn’t really matter if I’m 15 minutes late.” They, you know, they haven’t been told otherwise. Should you be late? No. But once they understood the full picture, we never had the issue ever again.

CALEB: And that builds trust overtime.

MATT: Absolutely. And there was no, like, you know, there’s no yelling. There’s no punishment. It’s like, “Hey, brother. You’re killing me, and you know you’re having huge impact later on that you’re not tracking. Let me show you what the impacts are.” And then it’s like, “Oh, I’m all in.”

CALEB: Well, you mentioned it earlier, but catch us up on what you’re doing these days. I know you’re doing some speaking now. Folks want to connect with you, learn more about what you’re up to. How can they find you?

MATT: Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn under Matt Carey. I think my LinkedIn is actually the name is “Joust” Carey, which is my call sign.

CALEB: I was going to ask you because I think in our program we have Matthew “Joust” Carey. I was curious where the nickname came from.

MATT: Yeah. So, normally it costs you a beer.

CALEB: I’ll take you up on that.

MATT: It’s a long story, but short story is I, as a young wingman, I panicked about gas when I didn’t need to panic about it at all, and I got roasted for it. Or you can e-mail me at matt@mcareyconsultants.com. It’s probably the two easiest ways to reach out to me.

CALEB: Fantastic. Well, Matt, we appreciate what you’ve done to serve our country. We appreciate the insights into life in the Air Force and the National Guard. And we hope that folks will check out more of what you’re doing. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

MATT: Thanks, man. Appreciate you.