Building instead of burning bridges

  • Published
  • By Maj. Nam Shelton
  • 22nd Civil Engineer Squadron
MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, Kan. --  During my early days as a new missile combat crew commander, an astute NCO offered this advice to me: "pick your enemies wisely" and don't "burn any bridges." In the past 15 years, heeding this advice has been more difficult than I expected. Thank goodness I have made more allies than enemies. It is also ironic that this sage advice of "not burning any bridges" followed me again into this new chapter of being the 22nd Civil Engineer commander. 

Can you picture McConnell in 1986, and living your life with 500-plus Reserve Officers' Training Corps cadets all eager to learn what the "real" Air Force was all about? Six total weeks of "Boot Camp 101" and McConnell Air Force Base was the first location where I learned about not "burning your bridges." 

Each cadet was challenged to be a leader, but the main point we were all to learn is that we could only truly excel as a team.
Therefore, burning bridges and leaving your teammates behind guaranteed a zealous cadet an eventual defeat. 

Let's now move up in time by nine years, and it is now the summer of 1995. I return to McConnell - take two. As a brand new captain and new to the civil engineer career field, I thought I knew it all. Wrong! I was still relatively new to my duties and had to find a way to get smart - and quickly! I put myself back at the starting gate and set myself up for a long marathon vice a quick sprint. As a young officer, I did my best to look for mentorship from my senior officers, SNCOs and senior civilians. 

I swallowed my "captain's pride" and knew there were leadership challenges I had not yet experienced and would need help to be successful. I was fully aware that I was a leader by default as an officer, but I knew my experience level as a leader was almost non-existent in the CES world. Throughout my tour I took advantage of every opportunity presented to me, and continued to surround myself with people smarter than me to get the job done. 

We all meet people who need more help than others. I continued to take my role as a leader seriously and always tried to help people understand the task at hand rather than turn them away even more confused. 

Here's an example of what I'm talking about: Back in 1995, I came across a young squadron commander who needed some CES work accomplished but the AF Form 332, the CES Work Order request form, was not filled out correctly. 

Rather than telling this customer to go back and fill out the form before we could help (burning bridges), I took a couple of minutes to walk this customer through the process and filled out the AF Form 332 with her so she understood the process and ensured the CES work order process could start. This took just a short couple of minutes to take care of our customer and I did not burn a bridge with one of my Air Force teammates.

 What makes this story most interesting is that this young squadron commander is our current Wing Commander. People always tell me that the Air Force is a small world, so you never know when you will run into the person you had a good or bad experience with. 

As a final note, I know I can continue to have a great Air Force career by building bridges with people vice burning them. And yes, the construction pun is intended since I'm the CES commander.