Gen. James Conway leads with discipline and determination

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Gen. James Conway is a retired United States Marine Corps four-star general.

Conway is a graduate of Southeast Missouri State University, where he was a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity.

After graduating, Conway was commissioned as an infantry officer in 1970, which would mark the beginning of an impressive career for him in the Marine Corps. Eventually, Conway was named the 34th commandant of the Marine Corps and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Nov. 13, 2006. After 40 years of serving the United States in the Marine Corps, he retired on Nov. 1, 2010.

How does a graduate from Southeast become commandant of the Marine Corps?

It's a long and arduous task, and I joke that I finally figured out that if you stay around long enough, they have to make you commandant. So perseverance and endurance is a part of that, but I'm kidding of course. As in any profession, as in any job, you take it a step at a time, you value your people and you get the most out of whatever unit you're in command of or happen to be a part of. I advise young commanders -- always keep your head down. I'm not a very good golfer, but I know if I look up after a shot all I'm going to see is a bad shot. The same is true about progressing in a career, I think. If you start thinking 'I'm pretty good at this' and you start looking up at your next move, whatever that might be, you lose focus on what's really important, and that's your people and your mission and making the best unit that you can. If you do that, people will notice, and you'll continue to be promoted and things will go well.

How do you grow as a leader on a daily basis?

Well I think first of all the Marine Corps will give you a value system that is expected as a part of the organization. Hopefully everybody that we recruit, be it enlisted or officer, comes with a similar set of values. I would offer that it's the implementation, the execution of those values on a daily basis. Now in a profession, in a career, you're going to have successes, you're going to have failures, so there's a great deal of observation and application that needs to take place. But I would also suggest that you need to learn from every mistake you make and not repeat it and be a better person for it on the far side. So to me that's sort of your day-to-day application of your skills and talents.

Who was the person who impacted you the most during your time at Southeast?

You know, it's hard to say there was a single person. I think it was a collaborative, if you will. I did have the same college roommate for four years. We were athletes together in high school and decided when we came down as freshmen we were going to live together. It worked. We were very different people, therefore we had to make adjustments over a four-year period to learn to live together, and I think there's lessons in life for all of that.

I also ... was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, eventually the president, and I learned from every one of my fraternity brothers. I mean again, each one a different kind of character. Each one required a different kind of tweaking to get the best from them or get a good decision from them. I learned a great deal from those folks. There was a Dean Walker on the campus, dean of students when I was here at that time, and I learned sort of the value of standards from Dean Walker. My fraternity spent a lot of time on and off probation -- we always had a reason, he would say a rationalization -- but to the dean, the standard was the standard. You violate the standard and you're in trouble. So he and I had a lot of interaction, and I admired him immensely for the work he did and I think for that lesson that he taught me, that the standard is the standard.

How have your experiences in the Marine Corps shaped you to be the person you are today?

Well, you know, you'd like to think that you are the person you are when you leave the corps that you were when you went in, but undeniably, 40 years of experience is going to have certain impacts on you. Again, there's a great value system that the corps has. You learn the true definition of integrity. I've had people say under my tutelage and leadership that 'Integrity is not ratting on your buddies.' Not at all. Integrity is that you don't lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do. And that creates a loyalty to the institution. A military officer of any service, but particularly a marine, has to live this life of integrity. There is necessarily a great deal of discipline. You take care of your personal appearance, your condition, those types of things. So if I look at who I am now, four years into retirement, I think all of those things still play on my day-to-day lifestyle.

Was it difficult to hold yourself to a higher standard when others did not?

No, you adapt. You adapt [and] as any leader would tell you, you know who you can depend on. A lot of people would say that the success of a leader is surrounding yourself with good people. You'll invariably come across folks that aren't as capable as the next guy or gal, but you come in time to understand those talents, and you try to make best use of them. I will say, if a person continually disappoints you, at some point they've got to go away. But there's also a very logical and appropriate process there, where a person is brought in and counseled, and made aware of what the standard is. And contrarily to what they're doing vis-ŕ-vis that standard, you give them chances to correct and if they don't again, at some point you have to part company.

What was the biggest challenge that came with being commandant, and how did you overcome it?

As commandant, I think my biggest challenge was not what I would say was a vertical challenge in that you overcome it and move on, it was a horizontal challenge. I was what they call a war-time commandant, where our country was engaged in conflicts both in Iraq and Afghanistan '06 through '10, which is when I was the commandant. My biggest challenge during that period was to make sure my marines had the equipment they needed to succeed and enough of us to make for an appropriate what we call 'deployment to dwell.' That means that in the case of the marines, we were in theater, in Iraq or Afghanistan, for seven months, but we really wanted to be home for about 14 months. Try to maintain some reasonable lifestyle with the family but also get ready to go again. And to be able to do that deployment to dwell, we thought we needed about 27,000 additional marines. So that took some convincing, people are a very expensive proposition. But in the end, Secretary Gates, who was the Secretary of Defense when I was commandant the last two years, agreed, and helped us to grow to those numbers. Those things, and it almost always comes down to people and money. People to do the right thing when a nation's in a conflict and the money to give them the right equipment were the challenges that I dealt with every day as the commandant.

To read the full interview, go to southeastArrow.com/qa.

Who has been your biggest influence as a leader throughout your career?

Well my wife was the easy answer, I suppose. But beyond that, once again it is sort of a collaborative effort. I counted the other day for another interview that I was doing, in 40 years I had 24 different assignments and 36 different bosses. In every one of those moves or reassignments or whatever, you come up against an entirely different person for the most part. I mean again, imbued with our values and trying to be the best leader he or she can, but I think as a subordinate I took away something from every one of those folks and every one of those assignments. That's how you shape yourself, that's how you learn from your mistakes, that's how you take the best in terms of leadership principles from a really good leader and resolve that you will not follow some of the bad leadership characteristics that you may see in another and try to make yourself better along the way. I would say, though, in some form or fashion, every one of those people influenced me in some way.

How do you advise young marines to be good leaders

There's a number of things. One is that you have to understand what your leadership style is. The people that have studied it over the decades, I'll say centuries, have said that there's probably five different styles of leadership. There's the authoritarian that says we're going to do it my way or it's the highway. The democratic style of leader, which wants to take into account the best ideas from his people and then decided on what is the best course of action. You have a laissez-faire type of leader, which means let alone tell your people what you expect of them and just stand back and let them do it. Works sometimes, not always. Narcissistic and caustic are also leadership styles.

Now in the U.S. military, I would suggest that the first three are OK styles of leadership. We encourage our people to be democratic. You've got brilliant people working for you, take advantage of their thoughts and you'll come away with a better product. But at the same time, you probably weave in and out of those leadership styles. If you've got a lieutenant leading a platoon into a hot landing zone, that's not the time to establish your democratic leadership style, at that point they want you to be authoritarian, and they want you to get them out of the danger that they're in. So we teach them that those three leadership styles are acceptable, but there are also some factors there that are at work. One, I think to be a good leader you've got to be a good follower. Everybody works for somebody, to include the President of the United States. You've got to be able to take orders that you may or may not agree with, that you may or may not think are the right thing to do and execute them to the absolute best of your ability. If you whine or complain or find fault, you've just given your subordinates the authority to do the same thing with your commands or instructions. Secondly, you've got to want to do it. Leadership is kind of tough. It requires extra time, it requires you getting to know your people, but then also I think demonstrating to every one of those people that you care about them. So you've got to go to the hospitals and you've got to go to the weddings and you've got to go to the funerals and you've got to do things that aren't always enjoyable but that are necessary I think on the part of the leader.

I've met people in life that have signed off and said "You know I just -- there's other things I want to spend my time doing." So I think you've inherently got to want to lead if you're going to be a good leader. Then there's the mental, the moral and the physical capabilities, qualities that go along with being a good leader. And you've got to take care of those things, you know. We teach our young lieutenants, "Not all of you may be sort of emotionally inclined to be a good military leader, but what we want from you from the mental leadership qualification is the more severe or intense the situation gets, the more you've got to be relaxed." Because your people will watch you, they will read you, and if the lieutenant is uptight and he's talking fast and his eyes are that big, they know they're in trouble. If on the other hand the lieutenant is calm and collected as best he can be, even though he may be turning over on the inside, they'll gain confidence from that and he'll get them through it.

What are the biggest challenges faced by today's leaders?

You know I think the answer would be different for a military leader as opposed to a political leader as opposed to an academic leader, for instance, a business leader. But one thing that I do honestly believe is that we live in an information age, and there is such volumes of information coming at all leaders, regardless of your chosen field, that somewhere in all of that there's a task to separate intelligence or necessary information from just the data. I saw it as a commander in Iraq, I saw it as commandant. I'll give you an example, you know, the commander of the marine forces in Beirut, when they were hit with the suicide bomber in the early 1980s, '83 I believe it was, would say "I had that, I had that caution in the intelligence that a suicide bomber could attack us. Not exactly the details of the truck and the building, but intelligence said that was a possibility, but there were reams of other types of intelligence coming in and I didn't seize on that golden morsel that might have protected my marines." He felt very badly about that, but it also spoke to the issue, the problem that we've got, of such huge amounts of data anymore and for the leader to be able to tell what's critically important to him as he goes about his leadership functions. ... There's so much left on the cutting room floor that you don't think is important at the time but might be that morsel that you missed that would have made a difference.

What do you think it takes to be an effective leader?

... I think it's a combination of things, again a strong value system. We didn't talk in detail about sort of the moral aspect of the leadership. You've got to be honest and forthcoming with your people and as we talked about, if you have a person who maybe isn't living up to the same standard as the others, sometimes you've got to sit that person down and I think one of the toughest things that a person does is sit down another human being and tell them that "You're not measuring up. I know what you think you're doing and what your aspirations are, but let me tell you right now, it's just not happening, and these are the things I want you to do." You give them that opportunity, you hope they succeed. But if there comes a time for that next occasion when you've got to look them in the eye and say "I'm sorry but you've got to go, you're fired. You have failed in this tasking." That takes a certain amount of moral courage, and again, people being people will avoid that if you let them have the opportunity to do so.

Another really important factor, and I stressed it this morning with some of your military types here on the campus, is that you've got to be able to communicate. You've got to school yourself. You've got to take every opportunity to stand in front of audiences because that's what you're going to do as a leader. The more effective you are at that, the more effective the organization is going to be. And it transcends just a spoken word, you've got to be able to write well, clear and concise. You've got to be able to lay out your vision, not only in terms of writing it down, but you've got to be able to talk to it. It goes against the human dimension.

If we have time, there was an interesting story that came out of Vietnam. The Navy put a psychologist aboard the carrier USS Oriskany during the Vietnam War, and they put heat monitors on their attack pilots, the guys that were flying the [A-6 Intruders] and they found that the heart monitors really got active when these guys took off the carriers, that's an e-ticket ride, if you will, getting shot off a carrier. The heart rate went up when they went over their targets, which in their case was Haiphong Harbor in North Vietnam. They were being shot at and this was the real deal, but it was actually higher when they came back and landed on the carrier because by that time it was normally nightfall, the carrier might or might not be in rough seas and you've got to smack a landing if you're going to get caught and have a dinner and a wardroom that night. It was absolutely highest, however, when they had to brief their mission to their fellow pilots. So what that tells you is standing in front of a group of peers, a group of fellow human beings, is tougher than flying an airplane in combat. So you've got to overcome that, you've got to do it repeatedly. You'll make mistakes, you'll forget, you'll do whatever, but you've got to be able to communicate, communicate effectively if you're going to be an effective leader.

What does it mean to you to have two sons and a son-in-law following in your footsteps as marine commanders?

They're all commanders at this point, my oldest son just finished command and he's now at what we call top-level school. So they're all doing very well. It makes you incredibly proud for a couple of reasons. One, they all have chosen to serve their country, they've paid their citizenship dues and they've all been deployed in combat, and all have been rewarded for heroism, quite frankly. I'm just immensely proud of them. The other thing is that it sort of validates our lifestyle. I moved one time when I was growing up and it was hard. Both my sons went to three high schools in four years. They were very good athletes, and that actually aided in the process, but we kept jerking them out of schools time after time and putting them in a situation where they had to adapt to new environments. They would say today that it forced them to be extroverts as opposed to going into a shell of some sort. I guess I would say that it validated to some degree that lifestyle that we put them through because they chose it then for themselves, and they're very happy and very successful in it. My wife and I say simply that we're blessed -- that conditions could have been very different, but in the end it's worked out very well and they'll serve now for as long as they want to.

As a person with an extensive list of accomplishments,

what would you say you are most proud of?

Probably two things, Logan. When I became commandant, we again were in the middle of a fairly intensive fight at that point. We were getting lots of casualties back, and I sat down with some of those casualties and said "OK guys, tell me what you're really experiencing here." In discussions with them it became abundantly clear to me that we had lots of people trying to do lots of good things for lots of people that needed it, but there was no organization to it. So I created what we call the Wounded Warrior Regiment that then had headquarters on the east coast in and around Washington, D.C., but had battalions on both coasts and companies at [Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center 29 Palms] and at our bases and stations in Hawaii. So our wounded would come in, we'd get them the best possible treatment, whatever that entailed, but then they'd very quickly be assigned to these units, ideally close to home station. It gave them a real sense of purpose, a real sense of belonging. They were still part of a structure, as opposed to just being out there on their own, wondering if somebody was going to call and all that was associated with sort of that independent operation that was there before the Wounded Warrior Regiment. It's just really worked for us. I mean, within a fortnight the Army had said they were going to have a Wounded Warrior Brigade. They liked the concept a lot although their treatment regimen was different. But it has really given me a sense of satisfaction, and it's really been good for us as a service that these people come back and they have a way to get back on their feet and be provided for, be sent out into the workplace. Down at Camp Lejeune for instance, there's a mobile squad that can get around, and they're sent out to the schools every day and they serve as teacher assistants before they come back that night and bed down and have their meal and get ready to do it the next day. It really helps them, again, to sort of re-assimilate themselves into the community.

The other thing had to do with when we got back from Iraq, and I was not the commandant at this point, I was a three-star force commander and the mayor of Oceanside called, that was the town nearest our base. He said "I want to put on a parade for you guys and we'll get 80,000 people on the streets of Oceanside, two weeks hence on Saturday morning if you'll fall out your marines and march." He asked for 20,000 and I said "I want to give you 25,000 because I want people to come in from 29 Palms and from Miramar Air Station," you know, guys who had fought with us in Iraq, I wanted them all to have that sort of great experience. The mayor also asked if I would do a speech then after the parade at an amphitheater down on the beach there at Oceanside, and I agreed to do that. So here we are the night before the parade, and I'm sitting home sort of drafting my comments and I'm going to contrast the reception that we're getting from 70,000, 80,000 southern Californians to what the guys coming home from Vietnam received and the fact that there is no comparison, they were just not nearly as well-received. They came back individually, they came back unappreciated I think in a lot of ways. So I thought to myself, "Don't talk about it, do something about it." So I called up my chief of staff and said "OK I want the largest banner you can make in about a 12-hour period that says 'Vietnam veterans.'" And he did. The next morning we put a squad on either side of the sidewalk, policed up, probably 250 Vietnam-era vets and they were wearing jackets and red ball caps and there were some in wheelchairs, there were some in coat and tie. But about 250 of them and that parade kicked off with me and my staff, the band and the next group are the Vietnam veterans, and the crowd got it. They understood what we were trying to do, and I think those guys got the largest applause of anybody in the whole parade and they were very appreciative, and that was just a good day.

Do you have any other favorite memories from your career?

There's so many. I tell people, young leaders, old leaders, keep your sense of humor because there's just so much of it in the military and I guess there is throughout American life. One of the things I've discovered with all the travel opportunities I've had is that people are essentially the same the world over. They'll all laugh at essentially the same thing, and then they all try to find humor in what we do. But it's especially true in the military, I think. That's just day in and day out, to try to find the light side, to try to minimize crisis through humor, all those types of things. I can't call to mind any specific events that I would highlight to you as being, I guess, that special. Probably if I were to do so I'd get back to family again and talk about commissioning dates and birthdates of grandchildren and those types of things that come immediately to mind, and just the joy of being a military family and all the great things that happened to us over the course of those 40 years.