"Achieving milestones isn’t just the work of mastery-level leadership; it also relies on the rigor of setting—and sticking to—your goals."
Becky Halstead has had a historic career: A 1981 graduate of the United States Military Academy, she was the first female graduate of West Point to be promoted to general officer. She was the senior commanding general (equivalent to CEO) for logistics in Iraq and was the first female in U.S. history to command in combat at the strategic level. Halstead was responsible for leading over 200 multi‐disciplined units (20,000 military and 5,000 civilians) located across 55 different bases, providing supply, maintenance, transportation and distribution support to over 250,000 personnel serving in Iraq.
Halstead was one of the speakers at the Women Leader’s CONNECT masterclass event, hosted by Chief Executive Group, on December 10, 2025, diving deeper into the topic of goal setting.
She spoke ahead of the event to give some insight into how she approaches goal setting in a high-stakes environment, how to have follow-through and best practices for helping your team step up to the plate.
Chief Executive Group: You’ve led tens of thousands of people in high-stakes environments. How did you first develop your own discipline around setting and achieving goals?
Halstead: The single source of my success in setting and achieving goals is I’ve always written them down. I’ve always reviewed them. I’ve always tried to ask myself, “Do they make sense? Can I really achieve it?” I want it to be lofty, I don’t want it to be easy, but it has to be measurable in some way. And then setting the goal pushes me to set a higher goal.
I also share them. That’s a critical piece because when you tell someone your goal, the beauty of that is they help keep you accountable for it. Accountability is a pretty big piece of goal setting.
Chief Executive Group: How do you balance the need for those ambitious long-term goals with the reality of short-term constraints and unexpected challenges?
Halstead: It’s so easy to get caught up in the short-term and not really put a foot or a thought into the long term. But that’s not just with goal setting. That’s with everything we do. I was in combat for a year in Iraq, and so we were having operations that are happening every single day.
I had to tell myself to put one foot into the long-term mission. Because better planning out the future—setting the goal, defining the mission, resourcing the goal, training people to accomplish that goal—allows the present to go off much better.
What I did myself is I had a circle of leaders that I put in charge of my future operations. Future goals for our mission in combat. Now combat’s long-term is 96 hours. But if two days go by and I haven’t walked down to your office, you better have the intestinal fortitude to come up, get me and make me go down there. The ability to pay attention to short-term and long-term, you don’t want to depend on just yourself. Because if you depend on just yourself, you’re going to be mired in the short-term, the present.
Continue reading: How A Former Commanding General Sets Goals In A High-Stakes Environment – StrategicCHRO360
This article was originally published in October 2025, written by Emma Vorfeld, Assistant Editor of Chief Executive Group (publishers of StrategicCFO360, Chief Executive, Corporate Board Member and StrategicCHRO360).