Leadership Lessons from TOPGUN Instructor and Author Dave Berke | Buffini Podcast
As a child, Dave Berke used to watch the Marine fighter jets flying over his El Toro, CA neighborhood. Years later, he realized his dream of becoming a Marine pilot himself.
As a F/A-18 pilot, he deployed twice from the USS John C Stennis in support of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spent three years as an Instructor Pilot at TOPGUN, where he served as the Training Officer and the senior staff pilot responsible for the conduct of the TOPGUN course.
He was the only Marine selected to fly the F-22 Raptor, having served as an exchange officer at the Air Force’s 422nd Test and Evaluation Squadron as the Division Commander. He became the first operational pilot ever to fly and be qualified in the F-35B, serving as the Commanding Officer of the Marine Corps’ first F-35 squadron from 2012-2014.
Now retired from the Marines, he is the Chief Development Officer at Echelon Front, a leadership development, consulting, and training firm. He is also the bestselling author of The Need to Lead.
In a recent podcast episode of It’s a Good Life, host Brian Buffini spoke with Dave about the real-world leadership lessons he has learned throughout his career and how others can use them to achieve their own goals.
Dave’s Leadership Lessons:
Success Requires Personal Responsibility
Opportunities and pathways matter, but ultimately, he said, “the responsibility and the burden (to achieve success) falls on your shoulders.”
Confidence Grows Through Adversity
Early in Marine officer candidate school, he felt outmatched and considered quitting. But seeing others quit, especially those who seemed stronger, inspired him not to.
“Either you follow that path or you say, ‘There’s no way I’m going to let that happen,’” Dave said. “My confidence started to grow from there and it really took me from a place of insecurity to, ‘I think I can do this.’ And it made staying on the path a lot easier.”
Persistence Matters More Than Pedigree
The Marine Corps doesn’t care about background or elite credentials. What matters is meeting the standard, finishing the requirements, and proving you can perform.
When Dave was selected for flight school, he was up against 250 others vying for the two open pilot slots.
“The odds are really, really slim,” he said. “In the end, you have to really want to be a pilot. You have to have a ground commission. You have to pass an aviation test and a flight physical. So it really whittles down.”
Training to fly an F-18 itself then took approximately two years, he added. In a surprising twist, he was then stationed back where he had watched the pilots as a child — in El Toro.
Teamwork and Humility Drive Leadership
Even elite fighter pilots rely on thousands of people to do their jobs. Experiences like serving on an aircraft carrier and attending TOPGUN reinforced that success is about the team, not individual ego.
“The aircraft carrier brings 5,000 people together — the most disparate, unique and individual personalities — and forms them into a team. In an F-18 by myself, I literally couldn’t do it right,” Dave said. “I couldn’t even start my airplane. Forget taking off and landing without the support of literally thousands and thousands of often anonymous, unsung, unknown, hardworking people doing all sorts of things.”
“I learned, it’s not about you, it’s the team,” he added.
That humility was also a component of TOPGUN training, he added — a factor not always made clear in Hollywood films.
“You see the instructors and you think, ‘These guys are perfect. They’re doing everything right.’ And they’re not. They’re making more mistakes than anybody, but the mistakes are so tiny and so refined, and they’re so willing to identify even the tiniest deviation,” he said.
The goal, he added, is not to think you are better than anyone else by pointing out an error, but rather to learn from it.
“And all of a sudden, you’re spending five, six, seven hours talking about things you did wrong. It strips away the veneer that it’s all about ego and arrogance.”
Listen to the full episode here.
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