The deepest thing I can say about General David Petraeus is this: I trusted him and he trusted me. He was my commander in Iraq and again in Afghanistan. That trust made all the difference.
To understand what that meant to me, you have to understand what it feels like to carry responsibility downrange. You make decisions knowing that other men will live with the consequences. Sometimes they will die with them. You look at a target, a road, a village, a gathering of men and you have to decide what you believe is happening. You never have all the information you want. You have the information you have, the men beside you and the judgment you have spent your life developing.
Then you act.
Somewhere above you is a commander who cannot stand where you stand or see everything you see. Yet his decisions shape what you can do. Your decisions shape what he must answer for. The distance between those two positions can become dangerous. Trust allows you to work across it.
With General Petraeus, I felt that connection.
His trust mattered because I could carry it into a situation where he was absent and the situation was unclear and dangerous. I could make a decision with the understanding that he trusted my judgment. That affected how I thought, how I moved and how much of myself I was willing to bring to the mission.
When a commander you respect trusts you, that trust becomes a responsibility inside you. You want your judgment to deserve it. You examine your reasons. You ask yourself whether you are acting for the mission, for your men, for the people whose lives are entangled with yours – – – or for yourself. Being trusted by someone who carries that much responsibility gives you another reason to be honest with yourself.
I wanted to be worthy of his trust.
My trust in him mattered just as much. I needed to believe that the man above me understood the weight of what he was asking. I needed to believe that what I saw and reported from the ground could matter to him. That my judgment had a place in his understanding of the war. I trusted him enough to commit myself.
That is a profound thing between a commander and a man he sends into battle. Orders establish what must be done. Trust reaches further into the person who must do it. It touches his willingness, his initiative, his ability to keep going when circumstances become confusing and the original plan no longer fits the ground beneath his feet.
I knew what it meant to ask men to follow me. I had looked into their faces before we moved. I had carried the knowledge that my decisions could cost them everything. Because I knew that responsibility from below, I understood something of the responsibility Petraeus carried above me.
We occupied different places in the same burden.
That gave our relationship depth. I trusted a man who was responsible for far more than I could see or understand. He trusted a man operating in circumstances he could not fully see. Each of us had to depend on the other’s judgment.
And in Afghanistanon my last deployment, where so much depended on human relationships, that dependence had particular meaning for me. The work required time with people. It required listening long enough to begin understanding what a man feared, what he valued, whom he trusted and what he would risk. It required making commitments that had to survive beyond the conversation in which they were made. I could feel how much credibility depended on keeping faith with people.
The trust I had with my commander helped me carry that responsibility. It gave me a foundation from which to build relationships on the ground. I could bring more of myself to the work because I believed in the relationship above me.
That is one of the things leadership can do at its best: give another person the confidence and will to exercise judgment and the obligation to exercise it well.
I also understand now that trust must have room for hard truth. The person closest to the situation has a responsibility to speak clearly about what he sees. The person with greater authority has a responsibility to hear it seriously and decide. A relationship loses its usefulness when either man begins protecting the other from information he needs.
The deeper the trust, the greater the obligation to tell the truth.
That is why this relationship stays with me. It speaks to something I have spent much of my life seeking and trying to give other men: the experience of being trusted with consequential work by someone you trust in return.
There is vulnerability in that. You put part of your life into another man’s hands. He puts part of his responsibility into yours. Neither of you can guarantee the outcome. You can commit yourselves to the work and to dealing honestly with one another as the reality unfolds.
War makes that dependence impossible to ignore. Civilian life can hide it beneath titles, meetings and careful language. But people still need to know whether they can trust the person leading them. Leaders still need people who will bring them the truth, exercise judgment and carry responsibility without waiting to be directed through every difficult moment.
I carry my relationship with General Petraeus into the work I do now at Built to Lead because I remember what his trust called forth in me. It made me want to rise to the responsibility. It helped me commit. It gave me something solid to carry when the circumstances around me were uncertain.
And I remember that I trusted him, too.
He was my commander. I trusted him. He trusted me. That relationship became part of how I led.
