Episode 39: Inclusive Leadership: Lessons from Master Sergeant Terrance Cooley

In this episode, we're joined by Master Sergeant Terrance Cooley, a trailblazing leader within the United States Air Force, to explore the nuances of inclusive leadership. From his early days as a wireless system specialist to his current role as Chief People Officer, Terrance shares his insights on creating an environment of psychological safety, fostering diversity and equity, and empowering individuals to contribute their unique talents to the mission. Drawing from his extensive experience as a foster parent, Terrance emphasizes the importance of empathy, understanding, and creating opportunities for all, both within the Air Force and beyond.

Chris Riback: Terrence, thanks so much for joining us. We're really looking forward to the conversation.

Terrance Cooley: Thanks for having me. Glad to continue able to make some time to be here.

Chris Riback: So you have a number of different titles associated with you. Your military rank I understand is master Sergeant, but for purposes of this conversation, you are chief people officer and executive vice president of special projects for the United States Air Force. What is the chief People officer in the Air Force? Can you explain the role for us?

Terrance Cooley: Sure. So there are a number of chief people officer roles, depends on where you're sitting in our very complex hierarchy. So where I sit is at the Air Forces and I'm going to just, this is a long title, so bear with me. I sit at the Air Force's Joint All Domain Command and Control Research and Development Center. It's responsible for developing next generation technologies, fussing legacy platforms with future stake equipment and building the information super highway, so to speak, to connect those two different things so that we can kind of bridge that gap between fully autonomous technologies.

Chris Riback: So that seems like a technology functional role. Is that a chief people officer role? Do you double hat or you're just saying that you're located at the location where the technology function is occurring, but you are executing a function of chief people officer?

Terrance Cooley: So I operate out of the technology function, but my job responsibilities are the health welfare and the culture development of our organization, including our talent management, our compensation, A lot of our HR policies and strategies come from where I sit. In addition, I'm responsible for what we call special projects. So those things that fall outside of another department's specific role I jump into and say, Hey, here's how we're going to fuse all these things together, bring it into a targeted strategy, and then develop the roadmap that gets us there that brings it into someone's shop function.

Chris Riback: Got it. And Alex, I'm certain has an actual question of substance. I have one more point of clarification question. So HR policy for a layperson civilian like myself, I would assume that the US Air Force has HR policies that have been written for 50 years or a hundred years or 25 years and they come out of either Washington DC or Colorado Springs and there's a playbook and everyone just follows the playbook and it sounds like you do something a little bit more dynamic than that. So before Alex asks you questions of actual meaning and substance, can you just help me understand how does that type of function work in what, again, to an outsider would seem to be a very well baked

Terrance Cooley: Historical playbook? No, that's a great question. So while there are senior leaders who have developed and curated a number of strategies, policies and procedures and regulations from which I derive my authorities in order to act, the specific execution on the ground of how we do it in our specific organization has been given a lot more freedom, flexibility, and latitude because of the unique strategic nature of our mission. So I have what is unique among military organizations is the ability to do direct hiring of military individuals where traditionally they would just be dropped into your organization. You have a certain number of, we call them billets, but basically your position plan that says here are all the specialties you can have in the organization. And I get to tailor that to what exactly we need at any given time on the fly. So I can provide those just in time solutions. If I need someone who's got a background in cybersecurity, I'm able to flip our billets so to speak, to bring in that personnel direct, hire them right off the street, so to speak, and bring them into our organization and get them spun up and then they stay here for about four years.

Dr. Alexandria White: Amazing. So as I listened to you, you're responsible for a lot of people managing culture, attraction, retention. Tell me about your background that has helped you prepare for what you do now.

Terrance Cooley: This is like, alright, bear for me a second. So I started as a wireless systems specialist, so I'm an IT person. When I came in the military in 2011 and I was almost medically disqualified from the Air force and during that time I was asking, Hey, what can I do? What can I help to expand my skillset? How can I still be useful here? So they pulled me into a global IT manager position as a very junior person because I was so insistent that I want to be able to participate, I don't want to leave and get kicked out and I flourish in that role. It was one of those examples of someone taking a bet on you and you rising to the challenge. And in that position I was given the opportunity to see what it's like to be given a task that is by definition impossible and finding the steps to get there by working with people to solve it.

So I had to outreach, I had to ask questions, I had to be vulnerable and that has been a foundation for how I lead and how I develop programs. After that, I decided I've done this IT thing. It was really interesting. I like this program management, but I want to try something different. So what we call reclassified into a cyber threat. Hunter and I became responsible for maneuvering through our networks to discover and counter infiltrate adversaries within our networks. That was really cool and I got to lead one of my first teams as that effort of bringing disparate teams together and solve this really unique breach that wound up vindicating 265,000 systems across the network. It's really cool. There's a lot of forensics. I remember we were try to describe how we were pursuing these adversaries over 116 million lines of data and all of the skills you learn in negotiating, communicating and problem solving in a complex environment kind of came together in that moment.

Then I got a job offer for here where they're saying we're looking for someone to be in charge of our information security team and develop the entire program from the ground up. Essentially the way they pitched it to me was we're looking for a 10 year subject matter expert who can solve cyber. I'm like, I don't know if I'm your guy, but I'm willing to give it a shot. So I came out here and through all of those experiences of working with people, taking on management in different aspects, leading programs, what I wound up happening is we had a CEO change and she was trying to get a sense of all the people in the environment trying to get a sense of what every function is bringing to the table. And a lot of folks because of our last CEO, were nervous to tell the truth and I was as candid as I could be.

Here's where we're strong, here's where we're weak, here's where we need your advocacy, here's where people are really struggling because they don't understand the mission that they are really finding it difficult to connect with the requirements because when I first got here it was very laissez-faire from the leadership perspective and we were hired to just solve the problem using our expertise with no clear vision on what the end result was. So that's kind of how I got plucked into the chief people officer role. And I was initially dual hatted as the chief people and information security officer, so I was doing both cybersecurity and hr. I've since hired a replacement for the cybersecurity portion and now I focus pretty much exclusively on the HR portion for this part of my career.

Dr. Alexandria White: Well you said something and this is where it really piqued my interest in regard. You said the previous person, people were afraid to say something.

Terrance Cooley: Yes,

Dr. Alexandria White: Psychological safety and what you said that you stepped in and you were able to add that, ask those curious questions, those powerful questions. What do you see in regards of creating culture in the Air Force in regards to that? What can you tell the leaders that are listening right now? How can they create that culture where people feel comfortable saying, Hey, let's revisit this, let's unpack this and this isn't working. What would you tell them?

Terrance Cooley: I'd tell 'em, you have to one, be willing to listen to differing perspectives on what is actually happening on the ground. Because what I've seen sitting at this level is there are the things that people tell you and there are the things that are actually happening. So you have to be willing to walk around the organization, listen to the conversations, and engage your team and solve the problems that they're bringing up. So that does come up a certain amount of courage, but the willingness to just listen and have people realize that they are being heard is like the ground floor, the bare minimum. And then when someone comes to you with a problem and says, Hey, here's what I think the solution might be, and you implement this solution, now they know they can trust you and they'll come to you with more problems. But if you tell them that's not really a problem, that's not really a priority, they will now shut down and they'll do the bare minimum for you and as soon as they get the first opportunity to leave, they're out.

Chris Riback: Why was being part of the Air force so important to you?

Terrance Cooley: Oh, I'm going to be perfectly honest. Originally it wasn't. I was going through community college back in 2006 and three degree changes and two academic probations and I was further and poorer from progress than when I started. I realized I needed a change and joining the Air force had been something that was on my mind as a kid. I used to love F fifteens, I had little toys and I was like, I don't really want to be a pilot, but I know they do other things. So if nothing else, I can join the military because my stepdad was a marine, my mom was a forensic scientist for the Department of Defense and my biological father was also in the Air Force. So I didn't learn that until much later in my life. So military life, I grew up as a military bratt. I always knew that that was an option for me and everyone always talked me about the air force as the better standard of living pro tip it does.

So when I joined, it was mostly out of a failure to succeed academically at a time of life where I did not have drive or purpose in where I was trying to take my education, what I was trying to solve, who I wanted to even be. And a lot of people go to college to find that out and I found out that that environment wasn't for me, but I did want to learn. So when I joined the Air Force, again, it was mostly out of expediency and my early leadership opportunities exposed me to things like volunteering, things like when there's a problem being willing to step up. I took over a brigadier general's drum and bugle courts, like a marching band, and they had about 14 people there and I helped raise it to a hundred person organization over six months just by being to listen to what the people wanted, what was important to people. And from there, just being involved gave me this opportunity to feel like, oh, I'm a part of something bigger than myself and I get to actually make changes and see differences. So from there it grew into being a part of my lifestyle of just solving problem complex problems and being a part of a larger picture that you can actually change the world. And many of my professional exploits have had world level influence and I'm very proud of that.

Dr. Alexandria White:    Amazing. There is something that I read in your bio that really spoke to me. Yes, we are a podcast about calling people in navigating cancel culture, giving leadership skills, but leadership skills just don't happen during business hours, right? Being aware of culture just doesn't happen during business hours. And so what sparked my interest in your bio is that you have an affinity to a foster parent. Can you tell us a little bit about how foster parenting, is there any correlation to what you do? Is there any skills that you use in your work life as well as being a foster parent in that regard?

Terrance Cooley: Oh, absolutely. So I became a foster parent in 2017 in the state of Illinois. I remember when I started and I got my training, the first kid I had was 14 inner city youth out of St. Louis and I was not prepared. Being a full-time parent is a little different than mentoring kids. I had done some youth mentoring, but what was important to me was like, how do I help someone reach their full potential? It's like, let me try this. And turns out kids have their own agenda. They hear specific things that they're interested in hearing, but they also have unique struggles and traumas that mirrors a lot of what we see later in adult life. And so as I was helping him through his anger management problems, I was helping him understand how to connect and trust with people. I certainness see corollaries between when he's asking for something, he expects certain responses and he'll try to manipulate certain responses, but he'll talk to me in ways that he's seen I've consistently answered.

So if he's like, I want to hang out with my friends and he sees that I have allowed him to hang out over a certain group of friends, he's more likely to ask me if he can hang out with those group of friends. He can expect that I will say yes. So what I learned is consistency is important and I try to be as consistent as possible with anything I'm doing. When he's asking for difficult things and he doesn't know how to articulate, I sit down and ask him questions to try to get to what it is he's actually trying to get to so that I have an understanding and he can better communicate with me in a way that I understand, I can communicate in a way that he understands. I teach and learn a lot about negotiation because there's times when I have been wrong in what I've tried to say and I've got to, all right, here's what you want, here's what I want, let's work this out.

And in those skills, they seem simple because your thing is just the kids are smart. And every kid I have fostered has been really smart because they've been forced to survive. They've been forced to look at everything around them as an opportunity to get something that they want or need. And you have to reconnect them and reattach them to what it means to be a person in some regards because they take certain things for granted because they've been wronged so many times they can't trust. So that's been really important is how do I develop a culture of trust? How do I develop a culture of curiosity, how to develop a culture of excellence? And it all comes through communication, all comes through listening, it all comes through being willing to say I was wrong.

Dr. Alexandria White: Wow. Those are three things that you can use in your professional life and your personal life as well. Excellent.

Chris Riback: And it's certainly clear that when somebody says to you, thank you for your service, that can carry a lot of meaning. The amount of time that you've given to fostering is extraordinary. So you're a military guy, thank you for that service, but that other work that you do and effort and energy that you do and give, thank you for that. That's really exceptional effort, meaningful effort. Terence, I'm curious about something that you said to Alex earlier resonated with me, the importance and power of listening, which obviously you just demonstrated as well in your fostering work. The culture of the Air Force, and again, I'm asking these questions as a civilian, as a lay person, as a person who almost everything I know about the military comes from things that I've read, not having served myself the ability to listen, I would think also means being able to encourage the space and opportunity to question.

And is that part of the culture that already exists within the Air Force that yes, we are a military service? Yes, we have discipline. Yes. As you just said a moment ago, we have heightened incredible consistency because that's how we stay professional and that's how we are able to execute our duties. And yet at the same time, we are human beings. We must question, we must have ideas, we must innovate, things happen. What part of your role generate to activate the listening that you say is so important? To what extent do you have to work on a culture of questioning or did you luck into an environment where creating that culture is not a problem?

Terrance Cooley: This is actually, I don't want to say it's a tough question. I love tough questions, but this is one of those questions where I have to give a little bit of a, I got to go a little bit in the background. So I explain a little bit about how military culture in there of course works because thank you. Questioning is built in. It's baked in, but it's hard to just say that. So the perception of the military is that we're like soulless automatons who if you are told an order, you must follow it. But there are a lot of rules and authorities that go with following an order. For example, if a junior airman E two is charged with defending an armory and a colonel oh six walks in and says, Hey, I want to be in that airman is within their right to tell that Colonel, no sir, you are not allowed to be in because you have not provided your credentials.

And if the officer refuses to provide the credentials, that airman can then call security forces to have that person removed. Despite the rank disparity, there is an authority that allows that airman to act in the professional capacity in order to defend the asset that they've been told to protect. It is an understanding of what authorities are legal, what are our rules of engagement, what are the specific behaviors and patterns of thought that allow us to execute our mission in a legal sound way that guides all of our decisions. So if a order is illegal or unlawful, we will not follow it. It is that simple. So when we are being provided guidance and directions, it's always from the presentable of does this person have the authority to give me that order formally or informally? And is it a valid legal order? And if it isn't or if there's question or if it's in gray space, it should be immediately clear to ask questions.

Why are we doing that? What is the benefit? What is the end result? Because it's such a complex organization, people have had different experiences for me in terms of what that's like. In more maintenance career fairs, you'll find that there's more by the book stuff. And if it isn't by the book or if it isn't in a checklist, there's a lot less room for wiggle room because now we're talking about planes, we're talking about parachutes, we're talking about lifesaving or high impact equipment. Whereas in more knowledge base work, there's a lot more flexibility because the authorities often intertwine and sometimes often compete. So from where I sit, my responsibility to my team is to understand the authorities that we have, the authorities that exist, make sure the team that they have on their right and left bound are providing them guidance and vision. They don't ask us permission. They're only asking for clarity because if we give them an unlawful order, they will question us. They will pause, they'll ask, can you clarify that? Because they don't want to be wrong. We don't want to be wrong. And so we've created this culture in this environment based on those principles. Know your A authorities and if you don't know, ask for the authority.

Dr. Alexandria White:    Excellent, excellent. We're going to pivot just a little bit. So we've talked about culture, we've talked about psychological safety, we've talked about giving people the autonomy to trust you, to want to ask you things. Those are all aspects of diversity, equity, inclusion. So tell us a little bit about the perspective of diversity, equity, inclusion within the Air Force and then be ready for my follow-up question on what has the current climate changed in regards to that? So first, what's the perspective of DEI with the United States Air Force? And then we'll follow on with what do you think about the backlash according to those?

Terrance Cooley: Sure. So first I'm going to have to say that these are my personal opinions based on how things work. Legal disclaimer. So our previous chief staff of the Air Force General CQ Brown, made a very compelling statement. He put out a 32nd or 30 clip called helmet down, and his diversity policy is when I put my helmet on, the only thing our adversaries see is the helmet and the missile streaking towards them. Our diversity policy is based on the fact that everyone is inclusive. We are a melting pot of American society. It is incumbent upon us to be able to create the environment that includes everyone because when we are in the room together, this is a merit-based organization. So your ability to succeed, to be trained and equipped and work as a team is dependent upon being able to trust each other, dependent upon everyone feeling like they have a voice.

I'm going to be honest, we are not always successful at this across the board. It always depends on where you work. It depends on who your leadership is, depends on what life stressors that they have. So everyone has had a very different experience, but the general goals is that when you bring a person into their team, it should not matter where they came from other than how that affects the innovation of the team and the team cohesion. So at a more micro scale for where we work, I've hired three transgender individuals. I have in our front office directly working with our CEO self-proclaimed L-G-B-T-Q individuals. We previously had a black flying officer as our commander, we have probably the most diverse organization across the majority of the military. And it isn't an accident. We're not deliberately hiring individuals, but when I'm pulling someone in and they say, here's a characteristic about me, I'm immediately thinking, how can that benefit our team? Because we do a lot of innovation here. So the different backgrounds you come from, the different geographies you come from, how you were raised, what your interests are, change how you think about a problem. And so it is core to our success that people come from different backgrounds. It's core to our success that people don't look the same. And as core to our success that we brought people from so many different specialties, put 'em in a room and said, here's the problem, let's go.

Dr. Alexandria White: I love that me and my business partner, Diane Fla and reboot Excel, we often go into companies and they often say, well, who's going to be a good fit here? And we want people in companies just like what you said, what's a good ad? What's a good cultural ad? Diversity of thought, diversity of religion, socioeconomic status, geographic location. And so when you were saying that, I am just smiling ear to ear because you need different voices at the table for that cultural ad in whatever space that you're in. So kudos to you and what the Air Force is doing in that regards.

Chris Riback: And Terrence, what about the second half to Alex's question, the pushback, the blowback on DEI, how's that affecting? What are your thoughts on that?

Terrance Cooley: I think that I personally think that a lot of this backlash comes from a misunderstanding of what DEI is. There are a lot of social justice parts of DEI. There is a racial divide, there is inequality in the system. These are factual statements. And it is very important that people understand that the military is a nonpartisan entity. So when we're looking at this, we're looking at just from the facts. Diversity just means people who are different. Literally this country was founded on being different. Inclusion just means being sure that everyone has a piece of the pie on the table.

Everyone comes with a different skill set, different background, a different idea. And being able to make sure that from the most junior person to the most senior person can say what they need to say means we are more effective organization. That's how you can trust that something comes from the bottom of the chain to the top of the chain is trusted information and people don't feel trusted. They will uphold that information and you'll be less effective as a leader. Equity just means making sure everyone has an opportunity to the same opportunities or equal access to the same opportunities. And then belonging, probably the most important piece. If I am handing someone a rifle and they do not feel like they belong, they will turn that rifle on their fellows who feel like they have wronged them. We have seen multiple times where we've had active shooter events.

That is because from a lack of belonging, from a lack of leadership, taking the hard stance to say, Hey, there's a cultural problem here. How do we fix it? And I'm not going to criticize any individual leaders or anyone as a culture. We have addressed this and we are continuing to address this because it is serious. But making sure that from the micro level, from the lowest person they understand that they belong as part of a team is a leader's number one job. And if they walk out of that organization having not achieved that or people feel like they can't tell them and you don't solve the core problems, you have not achieved success as a leader. We actually have metrics for this. So my feeling of the backlash is probably best summarized by, I don't remember his name off the top of my head, but the JP Morgan Chase bank, CEO actually just talked about this where he says, I don't hire people because of their diversity, but I do want to understand why diversity isn't being hired in the organization.

And he asked the tough questions, what are the metrics across the board? What does it mean when you tell me that some people don't have a platform and how do I give them a platform? So he challenges his team to make sure that all of those aspects are brought in. We're doing something similar. It is just a little different because the military has a more structured hiring process that it's more merit-based. You have to pass a test early in your career before you get to a point where you're boarded by who knows you. So you can make it very far in the military just by knowing things.

Dr. Alexandria White: I have to go back to metrics. Metrics is a key part of diversity. Dashboards, OKRs, KPIs, all of that. Tell us a little bit about the metrics that you use or that you're comfortable sharing with us.

Terrance Cooley: Absolutely. So we have a human resource information system that is fairly antiquated. I think it was commissioned back in the sixties. It's just been slapped, dashed together to continue working. But it does do a good job of outlining of a number of key metrics, generally self-reported. But it does give us things like how old people are when they join the service, how long they've held those specialty, what their backgrounds are ethnic wise. And what I've actually tasked one of my HR generalists to do. She's working on her data analytics master's degree. I said, can you give me a snapshot of in the year 2022, what the metrics look like for who was getting awards in our organization? She put together a little dashboard, she put together the information, pulled in all that data. And when I looked at it, I immediately sent it up to our wing chief showing hey or one of our senior leaders saying, Hey, here's how we're doing on our metrics.

What do you think? And what they showed was that pretty much on curve, the percentage of our African-Americans are people of color were equivalent to their white counterparts. Our enlisted members proportionally were winning the same amount of awards as our officer counterparts. So we were hitting our benchmarks with everyone has equal opportunity. Success, though there were some outliers where some people were more successful than others. So some of the feedback we're getting is making sure that we're spreading out the opportunities, but no one's not being promoted or being advocated for because of what they look like. It is entirely based on what did they bring to the table and if people aren't being provided the opportunities to bring up the table, why? And then we go right back into that cycle.

Chris Riback:                 Terrence, what's next?

Terrance Cooley:           That is a fantastic question. I have reached 12 years in the military and I have two years left of my contract. And the way I always look at it is I am willing to stay as long as I have the next cool opportunity, but I actually really like it out here in California, I adopted my son here. He's 16, so he'll be graduating pretty soon and I have a long history at it. I'm loving the HR thing as well. So I'm always balancing, do I go back? Do I continue doing the HR route? But I have some friends out at LinkedIn, I have some friends out at Deloitte, and I'm always wondering what would be like on the civilian side as well. So I'm going to give you the answer is a non-answer. What's next is what comes when an opportunity comes. I'm willing to jump on it, but it's probably going to be staying here in California. There's not many opportunities left for me in the military, so to stay here in California, so probably civilian life, but the military surprised me about making a job for me once they might do it again,

Chris Riback: I am sure they will be highly incentivized to do it again. And I'm going to stand aside because I think the line of civilian companies that would fight to have somebody like you on their team, there's going to be violence out there and I'm going to save and stay away. Master Sergeant Terrence Cooley. Thank you. Thank you for the conversation. Thank you of course for your service in the Air Force, but I really got to come back as well to the fostering and it sounds like you've adopted as well. Thank you for what you do in the rest of your life as well. There are a lot of lessons for the rest of us. I'll let Alex, I'm sure, wants to thank you as well. But thank you from me.

Terrance Cooley: Thanks Chris.

Dr. Alexandria White: I concur with Chris on that and it's so good to see some people that really just want to give back to their country, to the community and change lives. So thank you for that. And thank you for sharing this space with us.

Terrance Cooley: Absolutely. Thank you for inviting me and the reason for my service is because everyone in this country is worth it.