A Strong Team With the Right Players

General T. Michael Moseley (retired) and Renee Richardson sat down with NCMA CEO Kraig Conrad to share lessons learned on how to form a team ready to drive mission success.

Two things remained constant during General T. Michael Moseley’s (retired) nearly four decades of uniformed service for the United States Air Force: his vision of excellence for the Air Force’s future and his love for his county. 

 Beginning his military career as a student in undergraduate pilot training while earning his degree at Texas A&M University, General Moseley quickly rose through the ranks, serving a mix of operational, joint, and personnel duties, including: Director for Legislative Liaison for the Secretary of the Air Force, Commander of the 9th Air Force and U.S. Central Command Air Forces, and Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force. Under President George W. Bush’s administration, the General led the Air Force as the 18th Chief of Staff.

General Moseley has continued to support the Air Force mission in an unofficial capacity following his retirement from official duty in 2008, utilizing the prudence from his triumphs and defeats that few others have weathered. If you know anything about him, you know the General will take top-level responsibility even, and especially, when the stakes are at their highest. After all, he is used to being in a war room, making decisions that impact lives in real time. 

Over the years, General Moseley has been increasingly vocal about the essential role the acquisition team plays in driving mission results. This is what ultimately drove him to reach out to Renee Richardson for her assistance on his current project – to provide the U.S. military with reliable, resilient communications that is not dependent on satellites.

Renee Richardson has always been a leader of innovative acquisitions. After 30 years of excellence in military Intelligence and Acquisition, she retired from Active Duty and was selected as a member of the Senior Executive Service. 

In 2017 she was appointed as Executive Director of the Air Force Installation Contracting Agency, where she leveraged her expertise in strategic sourcing to reduce contracting costs by over $1 billion. Today Richardson is an independent consultant, sharing her contracting wisdom as a Senior Acquisition Subject Matter Expert with various companies.

When General Moseley needed to bring in a consultant with a strong background in contracting to complete his acquisition team, her successes and reputation for excellence made her an obvious candidate. 

With General Moseley’s experience, the existing skillset of his team, and Richardson’s perspective of both an operating and a senior contracting officer, they’ve aligned their efforts to overcome the initial barriers to the project and work toward achieving their mission.

Recognizing the potential of their valuable insights, NCMA invited them to the forefront of the conversation on acquisition teams. In January 2024, they sat down together with NCMA CEO Kraig Conrad, CAE, CTP, to share their team’s story, team building process, and lessons learned in how to form a team ready to drive mission success. 

Their candid conversation began by sharing perspectives on what makes teams strong, how to build the right team, how to set clear priorities, achieving continuous improvement, and building trust.

 This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

“Know the mission and know your craft”

Kraig Conrad: What are the most important elements needed to build a strong acquisition team?

Renee Richardson: The first thing is knowing your craft from an acquisition standpoint. We do not raise anyone in the services or in industry who is an expert in building requirements. Who we raise are experts in their craft. So, when I am building an aircraft, and I have a maintainer and a pilot on the team, they do not necessarily overlap for their knowledge of what needs to be built into that requirement, but they both have critical components of it. 

The second thing is knowing the mission. The first thing I did when I started was to pull out the National Defense Strategy (NDS), which lays out where we are all going in the Department of Defense (DoD). So, if you are working for DoD – or if you are working for another organization, even a civilian company, and you have some guiding strategy – I recommend you pick it up and study it until you know it and breathe it.

 General Moseley: I think defining the mission as you understand it is step one in creating a team. Everybody needs to be clear: What is it we are here to do? And then everybody pulls on that same rope. Renee’s right: know the mission and know your craft. 

And then, as a commander, I would also say that you listen. Day to day, week to week, things change. So, you listen to people. Mike Tyson famously said, “Everybody’s got a plan until you get punched in the mouth.” There is a lot of truth to that.

You are adapting along the way, but everyone, from logistics to contracting to maintenance, understands why we’re here and what we’re doing. And in my experience, the contracting side of this is particularly important. The technical warfare part is important, but the sustaining piece, whether it is a comptroller or whether it is contracting, is that those communities are very important within the team. And as a commander, you listen to them.

“The team that you inherit may not be the team that you need”

 Conrad: You mentioned everyone pulling on the same rope. What were some of the challenges in getting people to step up to that rope, agree it’s the right rope, and agree it’s the right direction to pull? And how did you overcome those challenges?

 Richardson: We did lose some team members. Sometimes individuals that are part of the team are not ready to sign up for that mission or willing to do the work, and at some point, some of those team members need to go their own way, and either you do without them, or you replace them. Because the overarching mission is more important.

 Gen Moseley: There was failure on the part of some people to acknowledge that the mission had become refined along the way. The people that went away were those that did not want to adapt to the new mission – in particular the compliance requirements that went along with it. I am not saying that people were looking to break the law, they just felt that we did not need to follow all of the processes. They thought somehow, someone along the way would sprinkle fairy dust and call our project special. And my experience is it does not – and should not – work that way, especially when the stakes are high.

 Richardson: I think realizing that the team that you inherit may not be the team that you need, and some of the individuals on that team may not be able or willing to pull the rope, is key. You cannot keep individuals on the team who are destroying the work that is being done. It creates frustration, and it makes it almost impossible to get anything done.

“There is a need for prioritization”

Conrad: The need for speed in fulfilling mission goals has been a frequent challenge in the acquisition process, whether because of too many requirements or because the team lacks an awareness of those requirements. Drawing on your experiences, what are the ways that we can get teams up to speed so that we can reach mission goals faster?

 Gen Moseley: There are two worlds that I would define. In one world you are in combat. You are in a theater, you’ve been given a set of mission tasks, you’ve been issued forces, you’ve been issued personnel, and you’ve been given specific guidance by either the President or the Secretary of Defense. That’s a different world than the normal staff function at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on acquisition of a commodity or a service. The expediency in the theater combat side has never been a problem; I cannot remember a time when someone at a staff meeting said, “Commander, we have to slow down.”

Richardson: I once got a requirement for reefer trucks (also known as refrigerated trucks) while dealing with a Dining Facilities Administration Center (DFAC) at the same time. The truck specifics went from eight flavors of ice cream to six flavors of ice cream, or something like that. And I was a little frustrated that the customer, the war fighter, was asking me to put aside my other really important work – supplying water to the troops, supplying bedding, and all the rest of it – for reefer trucks, until I picked up the phone and I talked to the customer. They needed the reefer trucks because they were going to do an offensive movement and they were concerned about bodies being out in the Iraqi sun.

So, sir, I agree with you that in the theater there is a different level of immediacy. But I still think that even in the theater, there are times when you may not totally understand the mission that your customer, the war fighter, is actually pursuing. And at those times – as you said before, sir – listening becomes your most important skill. Having been there and been the outsider, I think there is still a need for prioritization even in the theater. And that prioritization has to come from the answer to the question, “What is our mission and what does this do for our mission?”

From an acquisition standpoint, if you just tell me, “Go get reefer vans,” and I’ve got a list of priorities – “Okay, I need to feed the troops; the troops need water” – if you don’t communicate as a warfighter and customer, you may get frustrated with the response you get from your acquisition team.

 Gen Moseley: That’s true. From a commander’s perspective, I have always thought that people fail either because I did not provide clear enough guidance, clear enough training, or the right equipment. And Renee, I agree with you 100% – I think between the commander, vice commander, and the heads of the various departments around the table, there must be a clear understanding of what we are doing because priorities will change. 

When the Army/Marine Corps, the land component, steps off across the line of departure, you can begin to expect more casualties and more fatalities. So, you cannot wait until all that happens and then ask, what do we do now? That is part of the art of command and war fighting – to be ready. 

But Renee’s right. In the case she gave, it was probably less-than-clear guidance on what we need these things for. It is not just for storing lettuce, ice cream and cold milk. It’s because we may have to put a young American’s remains in there before we can get them home. That is a very big deal.

“That continuous process improvement mindset”

Conrad: We’re still talking about the fact that there are many different functional areas that are coming together from acquisition to make this happen. Is there a story you can tell where you had to really draw on this powerful connection across the team that allowed you to support the mission, or serve the mission, and communicate the goals incredibly effectively?

 Gen Moseley: It is your desire as the commander that you trust the team and the team trusts you. You do not have time to check everybody’s homework. I’m making real-time decisions. If I need something, I’m going to tell my team what I need and trust them to figure it out. I have tried to run the multiple staffs that I had that way. We start with an issue, have a specific discussion of the mission and the objective, and spend a little time figuring out how we can mutually support each other. Then we will meet to keep each other updated – you all go and do your job. If you need me, find me.

Richardson: I actually have an experience. It was stateside, not fighting a war, but maybe a little bit more relatable to the folks that are going to be reading this. It had to do with an island in the Pacific where we had a huge base, and they had been doing ground maintenance on that base for 30 years. And for 30 years they had put out the request for proposal, received one bid, and called it competitive. 

 They came in and said, “Hey, we are going to do this acquisition again. We are going to do it competitively.” I said, “Are you going to do it the same way you’ve done it for 30 years?” They replied, “Yep, we’re going to do it the same way.” 

And I said, “No. Go back to the drawing board. Figure out how you can actually use competition.” And this team, with a phenomenal commander, spent about three months breaking up that whole landmass into three parts, and based on market research they let it be competitive, and they wound up saving around 70% merely by breaking it up and letting vendors bid for either one, two, or three pieces of it. And the service got better. 

So, I think sometimes as a leader, settling for status quo, especially when it comes to writing requirements, is the easy answer. The harder answer is that continuous process improvement mindset of “All right, that’s what we’ve done, let’s take some lessons learned and let’s improve it.” And that seemed to work.

“A team you trust”

Conrad: How do we draw on our teams? How do we build them, reinforce them, energize them so that they can hopefully find a faster way to get things done within the existing frame?

 Richardson: I appreciate that when you, General Moseley, built your team, you got the right players. And the hard part is that usually the right players are those people who are already super busy. Sometimes the guy that is sitting in the corner doing nothing is the easy pick, because they are sitting in the corner doing nothing, but you put them on the team and then wonder why the team is not progressing. 

The person that is going to all the meetings, that is super busy, that is doing all the critical stuff, is the right pick. But they are also the hard pick. Building requirements should not be an additional duty. If I look at services, for example, as an additional duty, soon my mission’s being done by my service contractor, and they are not doing it great, and I have no way to hold them accountable. 

So, picking the right players, and being aware that the right players are the hard players for that team, is critically important. Then, if you decide that you do not have all the players, calling in augmentation to get the whole picture of what you are doing, making sure that they are integrating things, is really important so that at the end you do not get a Frankenstein of a requirement. You get an integrated requirement that is going to meet your mission.

 Gen Moseley: Let’s just say I clicked my ruby slippers together and we had those best people in the world. How would we keep them? Because Boeing and Lockheed, Ford and General Motors, and Apple and Google, they’re all going to go after our people. So how do we incentivize them? How do we set the stage so that when they come to work, they’re excited, because they’re a part of building something that supports the mission and creates opportunities that defend the freedom and justice of our nation. 

So how do you build the trust and the absolute faith that your team has got it? You educate them, you let them fail, you mentor them, you bring them back up. And then pretty soon you’ve got a bunch of Renees. They can be in a theater combat, or they can be in Washington, D.C.

 Richardson: Our civil servants are also in our career field. They’re critical to supporting our warfighters and achieving mission success. They tend to stay in places longer, so when you talk about this long timeline as the military is rotating in and out, a lot of those civilians are providing our steadfast capability. It’s the total force approach. I think that’s powerful and is going to help us move faster.

 Gen Moseley: Let me offer a last thought. I think the United States Air Force, in my tenure with 700,000 people, built a pretty good airplane. I’m going to offer just a touch of history here. When we came out of Southeast Asia, Secretary Robert McNamara under President Lyndon Johnson issued us a joint program with the Navy called the F-111, the F-4, and the A-7. With the F-111, we went through five or six versions before we could get the thing that we could fly. The F-4, we went through the B, the C, the D, the E, the hard wing E, and the soft wing E. The A-7, we went through two or three versions of that. And then we were allowed to build our own airplanes: the F-15, F-16, and A-10. Look how successful those were. The F-15 has a 105-to-zero kill ratio. To zero.

 Somewhere along the way, our processes have gotten more complicated, and even with the right people at the table it takes us longer to do things we know how to do. The only way we move forward at the speed required is to have a team you trust that all understand the mission – whatever career field they live in. The entire team needs to know that they that they are airmen, and the mission is to deliver decisive effects from the atmosphere or from space. We all should be pulling on that rope. CM