“Take care of the human, and the Airman will follow.”
For Staff Sgt. Briona Brown, that belief is more than leadership advice, it is a principle shaped by experience. “The biggest thing is always take care of the human,” Brown said. “The Airman will survive. Most of the time, the Airman will exceed if you really take care of the human.”
Now, Brown serves as the noncommissioned officer in charge of the Global Command and Control Systems with the 603rd Air Communications Squadron at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. In that role, she leads Airmen responsible for supporting secure communication and cyber capabilities that enable operations across the theater.
The perspective she brings to leadership was built long before she stepped into an NCO position. It began with a setback.
Brown entered the Air Force in 2020 with plans to become a Spanish linguist. She spent months training at the Defense Language Institute, completed her coursework and prepared for the final evaluation that would determine her future career field.
When the test came, she missed the passing score by three questions.
“It was rough,” Brown said. “To kind of succeed for months on end, and then all of a sudden one test changes everything.”
What followed was a period of uncertainty. Brown waited weeks to learn what career field she would retrain into, watching classmates move forward while her own path remained unclear.
“I found out that I failed in July, and I did not get a new job until probably right at the beginning of October,” she said.
During that time, distance added another layer of difficulty. Brown was navigating retraining and uncertainty while also managing time apart from the person who would later become her wife.
Still, she moved forward.
Eventually, Brown retrained into cyber operations, a career field she now says opened opportunities she had not originally imagined.
At her first duty station, Brown said one of the people who helped her reframe that experience was a senior noncommissioned officer who challenged her to stop viewing failure as final.
“She literally sat me down and was like, ‘Hey, you can do all of this,’” Brown said. “She was like, ‘You’re going to keep failing, but you’re going to learn from it, and it’s going to be okay.’”
Brown, by her own description, is an overachiever and perfectionist. Hearing that failure would happen again was not something she wanted to accept.
“I was like, ‘Nah, I refuse to keep failing,’” she said with a laugh.
Her mentor encouraged her to find an outlet for the frustration she had been carrying. Brown followed that advice reluctantly, trying kickboxing for the first time.
“She told me to try kickboxing and screaming,” Brown said. “I was like, ‘Are you insane?’ But sure enough, it worked.”
That leadership philosophy was put into practice when one of Brown’s Airmen began struggling with several personal and logistical challenges shortly after arriving at Ramstein.
As those issues compounded, Brown recognized that the situation required more than task management. “He had just built all this up in his head, and instead of doing it, he froze,” she said.
Brown approached the situation by first understanding the person behind the problem. She said she often begins with three questions: Why are you here? What motivates you? What do you want out of your time in service?
Once those answers were clear, they built a plan together.
“It took a while,” Brown said. “We had to revamp the roadmap a couple times. But once he got there, and once he got the help he needed, after that, he just took off.”
Today, the Airman is pursuing education, improving personally and professionally, and preparing for additional responsibilities within the work center.
“Staff Sgt. Brown has the natural ability to connect with and motivate her Airmen,” said Tech. Sgt. Jenico McMurrey, 603rd Air Communications Squadron non-commissioned officer in-charge. “She is the kind of engaged and inspired leader we need.”
Originally from Atlanta, Brown comes from a military family and said service felt like a natural calling. Several members of her family served, including her father and both grandfathers. Before enlisting, Brown attended Kennesaw State University in Georgia, where she earned a degree in linguistics and studied abroad, developing an interest in language and global cultures. After graduating in 2018, she spent a year working at Walt Disney World before deciding to pursue the Air Force path she had long considered, officially entering the service in 2020.
Though her career did not unfold exactly as she expected, those experiences helped shape the leadership philosophy guiding her work today.
“I’ll say it again, the biggest thing is always take care of the human,” Brown said. “The Airman will survive, if not thrive.”
That mindset continues to shape how Brown leads Airmen and supports the mission.