A Conversation About Mentoring With CQ Brown

Retired Gen. CQ Brown, Jr., formerly the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, is now an executive-in-residence at Duke with joint appointments in the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Pratt School of Engineering. He spoke with Maria LaMonaca Wisdom, assistant vice provost for faculty advancement, about his perspectives on mentoring.

Who was the best mentor you’ve ever had and what made them so effective for you?

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There are two who were most impactful, both within the same time frame. When I was a captain after eight years in the Air Force, I was selected to be aide to the chief of staff. As a junior officer in this role you basically carry bags. You make sure that the general gets to each place on time. You’re making sure he’s prepared. But you’re also a fly on the wall. You get to sit in a number of meetings that you wouldn’t normally get a chance to sit in. You get to listen to how decisions are made. 

I realized by doing that job, I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew. When I was selected, I was flying F-16s at the Air Force Weapons School and I knew a lot about the F-16, but not about the rest of the Air Force. 

General Fogleman sat down with me and gave me feedback. He was a four-star general, in the Air Force for over 30 years experience, talking to somebody who’s been in the Air Force for eight years. And he told me I would think differently when I leave this job, which is true.  

Once I finished school, I wanted to go back to flying, but I got assigned to staff tour [a non-flying assignment]. I asked General Fogleman why the staff tour. He says, ‘Well, I talked to the chief of Air Force personnel, and that’s what they recommended,’ and that was the end of the conversation. 

But I traveled with the chief of Air Force personnel. We were at a cocktail reception and I got enough courage to go over and talk to him and say, ‘I’m just kind of curious.’ And he said, ‘Come by my office on Monday morning and I’ll explain it to you.’ 

He pulled out a yellow legal pad. The first thing he did was map out my life. He mapped out that I was married. We had one son who was about 18 months old and my wife was pregnant with our second child. He mapped out, ‘Here’s when you can retire from the Air Force and here’s when your kids are going to be in college.’ And then he started talking to me about my career.

He laid out why I should go to a staff tour and not go back to flying. He said, at the end, ‘What’s your complaint?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to fly for five years.’ He says, ‘Don't worry about it.’ I took his advice and went on another staff tour to United States Central Command, which opened more doors for me.

If I had done what I wanted to do, I would not have progressed as I did. I did not fly for four years and 11 months, but I got so many other opportunities beyond that because it was about timing and the right jobs at the right time. 

Sometimes even the things you get from a mentor, you don’t always know how impactful it’s going to be until you get further into your career and you go, ‘I’m glad I listened,’ or in some cases, ‘I wish I had listened.’ 

What’s the most satisfying experience you’ve ever had as a mentor?

There’s one, from when I was the commandant of the Air Force Weapons School. It’s a very difficult school, and not everybody makes it through. People can learn, but you’ve got to do it on a certain timeline, and I would sit down with them right before they left. 

Many years later, a gentleman wrote me back in an e-mail that recalled how I told him that just getting selected to the school is a big deal, and that he should take what he’d learned and go out and continue to be successful. What I said got him to a path where he succeeded, and he wrote me to thank me.

You have a distinguished track record of senior leadership roles. What might leadership have in common with mentorship? And might there be value in a mentor thinking of themselves as a leader?  

Oh, for sure. You mentor by the way you carry yourself, and the examples you set are a key part of this because in some cases, based on your position or your time available, you may not have a chance — particularly as a faculty member — to sit down with every student in your class. But how you do things within a classroom environment, your students are watching. 

Also, just like leaders, mentors sometimes have to provide candid feedback that people don’t want to hear. You need to be able to say things that might make you unpopular. How you communicate is probably the most important piece of this — to make it so they can receive it and then act on it or at least think it through. 

They may be frustrated, the day of, but maybe they’ll come back later and go, ‘I have a few more questions now that I’ve thought about it.’ Maybe they talked to somebody else and got the same kind of feedback or advice, or a little more research, and now they see the bigger picture because this is the first time someone actually opened the door.

What advice do you have for graduate students — or anyone — who want more and better mentoring? 

Always ask for what you want. The worst you can be told is no, but you can’t be told yes if you don’t ask.  

If you’re looking for a mentor, sometimes you’ve got to reach out and ask. Identify someone that you respect or has gone down the path that you’re looking to pursue and just ask, ‘Do you have a few minutes to sit down and talk to me?’ 

And you might identify certain demographics where you’re one of few. For example, as a fighter pilot, typically I was the only African-American in my squadron. Find somebody who was in that position and ask them to talk, because they probably went through some of the same experiences you are having now. 

It’s also critical to ask for feedback. If you’re only looking for appreciation, you may be disappointed. Ask, ‘How am I doing? Is there something I could be doing better in this particular area?’ And look to your mentors to help you learn things. 

For example, I call myself a learning leader. Every day, my goal is to go to bed smarter than when I woke up. The more you know, you figure out the more you don’t know because you pull a string at the top and you go, ‘Let me learn more about that.’ Then it expands because you continue to pull a thread and things start to unravel and you start to see more. This is the part where mentors can help open your eyes to things that you hadn’t thought about.

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I encourage people to have as many mentors as possible. There may be a couple key people that you talk to, but depending on where you are in your life or in your career or your education, you may pick different mentors for different stages.

The key is to make yourself as well prepared as possible for whatever opportunity comes your way. I have a saying I’ve used, ‘When opportunity knocks, you want to be fully dressed.’ And it’s not, I believe, who you know, it’s who knows you. 

Leaders and mentors pick up on the people who seem like they have potential, and when an opportunity comes, someone will be putting your name in for something that you don’t even know about. You don’t ever know what’s going to come your way — maybe some things you didn’t fully expect. You may be going one way, but someone else might have an opportunity for you even bigger and better than you could imagine. 

Even in my transition from military service, I’m still getting new mentors and people talking to me about opportunities. We all need mentors.