Greetings all! 

It is an honor to offer this week’s NAWCAD Blog from sunny Orlando.  For those who don’t know me, I am CAPT Bill “Roto” Reuter, Commanding Officer of the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division (NAWCTSD) in Orlando.  I have been part of the NAVAIR family for nearly 20 years.  I most recently commanded VX-23 in 2004-2005 and served as lead Class Desk for CNAF before this exciting role at NAWCTSD.  I would love to discuss the great things we are working on here in a subsequent entry, but for now I will offer something that compliments the previous entry from RDML Mahr on leadership. 

We in NAVAIR are part of such an incredible organization.  We possess such tremendous intellect across so many disciplines.  Throughout NAVAIR and NAWCAD, we are proud of our "mental intelligence" and the tremendous accomplishments that result from the dedication of our highly skilled and educated team.  For example, we celebrate our “Fellows” for their monumental contributions to our technical “brain trust.”  What I am about to offer is not in any way intended to attenuate the phenomenal contributions all have made to our mission.  Today I'd like to explore another form of intelligence – "Emotional Intelligence" – that complements and balances our technical competence to make us balanced and effective in our professional and private lives.

I am a huge advocate of transformational leadership and Emotional Intelligence.  Dr. Stephen Covey outlined some research that suggested of all the four intelligences (Mental, Physical, Spiritual and Emotional), Emotional Intelligence, was a much stronger indicator of an influential leader.  At NAWCTSD, we address this challenge head on.  About a year ago, we engaged FranklinCovey to assist us with a more holistic approach to the development of our people. 

Although this began with a basic understanding of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, we followed up with much more.  The “bet” here was that although there were many things that plagued team performance, an improvement in the interpersonal acumen of our people would have the most far reaching impact on execution.  For those of you that say this is just common sense, I would argue it is far from common practice.  I offer that the mental strengths that make us technical "rock stars" are not typically aligned with those of exceptional Emotional Intelligence.  In my experience, more and more issues that were brought to me for resolution were grounded in communication and interpersonal issues rather than technical “tension.”  To date, we have trained more than 500 (48%) of our workforce in the basic Seven Habits, and nearly 200 in the "Four Disciplines of Execution," a philosophy that has been embraced in the corporate world and throughout DoD by organizations such as CVNs, FRCs and many others.  At NAWCTSD, we are working toward sustaining this capability organically.  Additionally we renewed our focus on mentorship which I believe has made a superb impact on the cohesion of the workforce.  We have more than quadrupled the percentage of participation in our vibrant mentorship program in the last year.

I could write much more on this but I will leave you with this.  Think for a second about how much our ability to effectively interact across our diverse disciplines, backgrounds and identities impacts our execution.  Our nation is getting even more diverse, and our workforce reflects that.  What are we doing to nurture this important attribute?  I submit it is one of our “big rocks.” 

With tremendous respect, Roto