March 24, 2015 Practice personal safety, security With more information than ever available in the public realm, everyone has the responsibility to safeguard sensitive information, both on the job and at home. Information that may seem harmless by itself can be pieced together with other information to form a more complete and sometimes harmful
March 9, 2015 Taking care of those things that really matter Every day I am faced with challenges I must conquer and decisions I must make. These can and will happen in every area of our lives; at home and at work. Often these challenges will add pressures to my life that I have to deal with. When this happens it is vital I take care of the things that
March 3, 2015 Micromanagement vs. micro-information A leadership concern I've heard throughout my career is that bosses can be "micromanagers." I understand the concern and have wrestled with it myself. I wonder, however, if at some point leaders who are responsible for a mission, objective or task have an inherent right (I did not say "necessity")
Feb. 18, 2015 Staying away from ethical cliffs I remember hearing a story when I was a boy that went something like this - A man was looking to hire a wagon team that could haul his goods through steep mountain cliffs. He interviewed three different drivers. The first said he could drive the wagon within one foot of the road's edge. The second
Jan. 26, 2015 Learning from our K-9 counterparts It's a bad guy's worst nightmare. An 85-pound "blur of black and gray fur" running after him at 35 mph and closing fast. When the bad guy looks back, he sees two big green eyes fixated on him and only him, and then notices the sharp teeth extending from black lips to take a bite out of the slowest
Jan. 21, 2015 Second chances I believe in second chances - professionally, personally. Without second chances, where would most of us be today? I was given more than one second chance during the last 16 years and I constantly ask myself why that is. What was the common thread with my bosses and leadership, which allowed them
Jan. 12, 2015 Mission effectiveness relies on equal treatment of all Over the past 20 days I have been shadowing the 341st Missile Wing Equal Opportunity office as a potential retrainee. During this time I have learned a plethora of things, but the most important is how unit cohesion has a direct impact on the Air Force mission. Also, I have learned that things that
Jan. 7, 2015 A call to serve – mission verses job When I joined the Air Force as an airman basic in May of 1982, it never occurred to me that I would still be serving on active duty nearly 33 years later! I separated from the Air Force at the end of my four year enlistment in May of 1986 and by December of that year my income had nearly tripled
Dec. 15, 2014 Comprehensive Airman Fitness After 26 years as a civil servant working for the Air Force, I became the Malmstrom Air Force Base Community Support Coordinator in January 2013. This was a new position within the Air Force, so it left a lot of people wondering and asking "what is it that you do?"I suddenly found myself in a
Dec. 8, 2014 Impacting the people around us When a stone is tossed in a pond, one can see the ripples it produces extend hundreds of times the diameter of the stone. Our day to day interactions with our peers and subordinates can have the same sort of effect, without our even realizing it. A decade ago, one of my Airman experienced a tragic