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You don’t get to be a four-star general, responsible for defending North American airspace from attack, by surrounding yourself with shy subordinates. Throughout her career Lori J. Robinson, who retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2018 and now serves on corporate boards and think tanks, invited brutally honest feedback. “Everybody wants to tell the boss the good,” says Robinson. “Nobody wants to tell the bad and the ugly. At the end of the day, what really is needed is the bad and the ugly.”
Her methods fueled her rise. Robinson is one of a handful of women to reach the four-star rank, and when she served, she was the senior-most woman in the entire Department of Defense. Robinson most recently served as commander of both the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command during a tense period when North Korea launched 23 ballistic missiles in a period of 24 months, some with the potential to hit the mainland U.S. In addition to her board work, she is a senior fellow with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she is an expert on leadership and international security. She recently joined TIME for a conversation on leadership lessons from the military, building diverse teams and the need to push back on the boss.
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(This interview with retired general Lori J. Robinson has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
As a general, you have led diverse teams with people from a wide range of backgrounds. What is the best way to unify a team or a squad or a country, and what lessons from your Air Force background would you share with the country at this point, when there is so much division?
I contemplate all the things that we in the military have done over time. We bring together all these different cultures, and we all focus on a single goal: supporting and defending the Constitution. I was part of something bigger than myself, and I poured my heart into making the institution better.
There is tremendous anxiety in the country now and worry about how divided the nation is. Do you think the country is going to be O.K.?
I’m an eternal optimist. Our democracy is messy. It’s a work in progress. But thank heavens we are in a democratic society. I don’t want to get into politics, but we really do have to talk to each other. And we have to not just talk. More importantly, we have…
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