Lessons on Development from an AF Reunion
Earlier this month we traveled to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for a reunion of the In-Flight Refueling Association. My husband enjoyed reconnecting with boom operators he had not seen for thirty years, and we both enjoyed meeting new friends. We also toured the National Museum of the US Air Force and the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center in Dayton. From the tales told in the opening IFR reception to the museum exhibits and official speeches, we heard and red stories of innovation and resilience. One story led to the next, from experimenting in the early days of aviation, to developing the boomer’s controls in the KC-10 to testing new fighter jets.
Over the course of the week I took away insights and anecdotes that reinforced core operations principles. One idea repeated throughout the week: mentor ship. When explaining how they had grown into greater responsibility, enlisted members and officers from different bases, including those who retired after more than twenty years in the Air Force, and those who served four years and then moved to the private sector, said some variation of “I was lucky to have good mentors.” It didn’t sound as though they had sought a formal relationship either. More often they had encountered someone who shared experience, offered guidance, or opened an opportunity. I was impressed by how often I heard about mentorship. It was part of the story for people irrespective of rank: flag officers, noncoms and airmen.
Creating the Conditions for Effective Mentorship
While these were only anecdotes from one week, mentorship appeared often enough that I asked my trusty AI research assistant to find the institutional context for mentorship in any USAF policy documents. Roxie (my ChatGPT research aide) surfaced a manual on the Air Force Coaching and Mentoring Program.
The manual is not written for a select group. It applies to the entire Department of the Air Force: uniform and civilian, commissioned officers and airmen, active duty and reserve/guard, and it explicitly states that coaching and mentoring promote development at every echelon. Mentoring may be supervisory, which the manual calls an inherent responsibility of leadership, or it may occur between peers; it can be formal or informal, and participation is voluntary. Leaders are expected to ensure that people have these opportunities, and managers and supervisors must provide time during regular duty hours, so that mentoring is not squeezed into lunch, personal leave, or time after work.
Taken together, these provisions place development with individuals as well as with the organization: people have agency over the relationship, and leaders are expected to make room for it. Now a manual cannot prove that a culture exists, but the unsolicited stories I heard suggest that the expectation had often become practice.
My experience in Ohio was reinforced the following week as I listened to the McKinsey Management podcast - the episode was about the “collective-action problems” found in stalled transformations and where CEO’s can make the difference.
The Trustworthy Few
In the podcast Matthew Lee describes what he calls the trustworthy few: the ten to twenty people everyone likes and trusts in whom every project of consequence goes. That arrangement limits execution to those people and misses the opportunity to build capability deeper in the organization. It also creates bottlenecks because others wait for that small group to approve or weigh in before they will move forward.
Kurt Strovink proposed changing the question from whom leaders trust to execute today to whom they are developing into the next generation of people they can trust. Trust determines who receives consequential work, and it is built through experience, which people cannot gain without the opportunity.
Mentoring can follow the same pattern. When it’s directed mainly to executives and their reports, development concentrates among the people the organization already trusts, while the supervisors, specialists, and frontline employees who carry most of the daily work are left to find mentors by chance.
From Ownership to Stewardship
Kurt Strovink described a distinction one CEO had made with him: less emphasis on ownership, more on stewardship. To be sure he was not arguing against initiative or accountability; he wanted proactivity and responsibility. But at the same time, the CEO saw the need for department leaders to get away from “policing the perimeter of their control and authority.” Matthew Lee added that when people speak of their own team, local success may be taking precedence over the enterprise. Striving went on to describe coaching people throughout the organization to understand that they hold their positions for a short time relative to the life of the company, and that they are responsible for caring for it well. In that description stewardship is something to develop at every level, and it is not reserved for the C-suite.
Ownership is often a positive word in business as it pertains to accepting responsibility. A problem can arise when ownership becomes territorial, and a team, a process, or a body of knowledge becomes something to guard. Stewardship keeps the accountability and drops the possessiveness. A steward understands that a role or capacity has been entrusted to their care, and that the responsibility is to leave it stronger for whoever comes next.
Mentoring is one way stewardship becomes visible. A mentor who passes along judgment, context, and opportunity treats knowledge as entrusted to them for the benefit of another person and the larger mission, and the supervisor coaching someone through a decision is building that person’s and the organization’s capability. The connection is especially natural in a military setting, where people rotate among bases, specializations, and roles, and capability must pass from one person to another for the mission to continue.
Stewardship Needs the Right Conditions
An organization cannot create stewardship simply by asking people to behave like stewards. People at every level need enough context to understand what has been entrusted to them, and enough authority to act on that understanding. This aligns with General Stanley McChrystal’s concepts of shared consciousness and empowered execution, and McChrystal is explicit that the two depend on each other. “Empowered execution without shared consciousness is dangerous.” Authority given to people who lack context produces poor decisions, and context given to people without authority leaves them waiting for permission. Stewardship adds the expectation that people use that context and authority on behalf of something larger than their own role.
AI is an immediate test
Artificial intelligence gives operations leaders an immediate test of whether development runs throughout the organization. Employees who fear losing their standing, or their jobs, have reason to protect what they know. If an employee who shares a better way of using AI receives only a higher quota, or watches a colleague’s position disappear, the organization has taught everyone else to keep what they learn to themselves.
Frontline employees must still produce the output for which they are responsible, and that work remains important. They are also closest to customers, exceptions, and downstream consequences, so they are often the first to see where an AI tool helps and where it falls short. Someone handling customer requests may notice that a tool consistently misreads one type of inquiry, or that an answer is technically correct but wrong for the customer in front of them. Acting on that observation is stewardship, and it requires both the authority to question, adjust, or escalate and the understanding that doing so is part of the job.
The Air Force manual recognizes reverse mentoring, in which a more junior person shares knowledge with someone more senior, and it gives information technology as an example. On a team using AI, an experienced employee may understand the customers, the exceptions, and the operational consequences, while a newer employee may be more practiced with the technology. Each holds knowledge the other needs, and that exchange cannot occur where development is assumed to flow only downward from the executive team.
Executives must steward the conditions, and everyone can help steward the capability.
Strengthening Stewardship and Mentorship
Do you allow for mentoring opportunities across the organization? Are you cultivating the stewardship mindset? Consider these four areas:
1. Look at who is being developed. Identify where mentoring and the use of coaching skills currently happen in your operation, and where they do not. I they concentrate among the trusted few, consider where you can extend those opportunities to expand the pool of trusted performers.
2. Define stewardship at every level. What does stewardship mean for the executives, managers, individual contributors, and frontline employees? Is it an expectation or merely aspirational? People should understand what they are responsible for preserving, improving, sharing, and passing forward.
3. Grant bounded authority. Do employees know what they have agency to change or decide vs what they need to escalate or where they need to collaborate?
4. Make time for development and count it as work. This is as simple as debriefing an unexpected result, documenting an error, teaching a colleague, improving a shared guidance document, as well as mentoring/coaching sessions. Mentoring is not an outside of work activity. If employees are waiting until lunch or after work for mentoring, then it’s not a priority. Mentoring does not always require a formal setting, but it does require contacts, time, trust and an expectation that useful knowledge will not stop with one person.
My husband just received a group photo of the boom operators at the reunion, and I think about more than the careers, aircraft, and missions represented. I think about all the people who helped those Airmen become capable of carrying significant responsibility, and how many others they likely helped in turn. Capability survives a change in assignment, title, or technology because someone chooses to pass it forward. Someone makes that choice because the organization has created the conditions to be a learning enterprise.
Bearing Check
Who in your operation is being developed on purpose, and who is relying on such to find a mentor? How will you create the conditions for mentorship to drive continuous learning and continuous improvement?
Sources and further reading
Department of the Air Force Manual 36-2643, Coaching and Mentoring Program (12 September 2023, incorporating Change 1, 23 July 2025)
“Why transformations stall—and where only CEOs make the difference,” Inside the Strategy Room, with Kurt Strovink, Mathew Lee, and Lucia Rahilly
Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams