Remaining cool under fire. Dealing with ambiguity. Taking on life-or-death responsibility at an early age. Learning how to give orders—and follow them. Ask a veteran what they learned about leadership from their time in uniform, and you hear all this, and more. After all, whether it was George Washington at Trenton, Ulysses Grant at Vicksburg or Dwight Eisenhower at Normandy, the U.S. military has produced some of the greatest leaders in world history—at war—and peace. It’s definitely doing something right.
Which begs the question: What do you learn about leadership in the U.S. military that’s different than anywhere else? And how do those lessons carry over to running a company? For Veteran’s Day, Chief Executive asked five CEOs to discuss lessons from their time in the service. They were in different branches, doing very different jobs, for a couple of years or for decades, and they now run businesses of very different sizes. But all of them share a sense of respect and responsibility for those that they lead—as well as a well-honed set of tools for keeping them focused and motivated. What follows are excerpts from those conversations, edited for length and clarity:
Nick Pinchuk, chairman and CEO, Snap-on Incorporated: An executive at the Kenosha, Wisconsin-based maker of high-end tools and equipment for transportation-industry technicians, Pinchuk served the U.S. Army as a Signal Corps engineer during the Vietnam War, from 1971 to 1972. He became CEO of Snap-on in 2007 and chairman in 2009.
The Army is a tremendous template for leadership in all walks of life. When I was in graduate school, I also was a high-school football coach, and over the years I’ve found similarities from sports teams, to corporations, to military commands. They are all collective social organisms in which people enlist to create a value or achieve a goal that they couldn’t accomplish individually.
So whatever company or organization you’re in, you want to spend time establishing goals and making them clear and compelling. At Snap-on, we see ourselves as people who enable the professionals who accomplish tasks that are critical, where the penalty for failure is high. We move the world forward by easing those critical tasks and giving people the means to shape lives of pride and dignity. That mission has worked well for us for almost a century.
Another lesson that I learned from the Army is that you need to focus on enlisting and energizing the middle. It’s easy to get effort from the high performers. And the low and sub-par players are also relatively easy to deal with, because people know if they’re underperforming, in the military or in a corporation. So you can get their attention in getting them up to the level of their colleagues; no one wants to fail.
But the challenge is people who are in the middle. Telling someone they’re average is neither motivating nor electrifying. You need to motivate them by convincing them that the goals are worthy of their energy—raising their performance by capturing their imagination. They’re the group that makes the difference in an organization; they deliver you from evil.
Another military lesson is how soldiers come from all over, and people are there for different reasons. In any collective organization you have that diversity and need to tailor things for each group. In a company, some are there for the compensation and some to be recognized, and that’s where their loyalty and energy come from. Others are there because they like the idea of shaping lives and creating opportunities for pride and dignity. Others are trying to build a career and are there for the experience.
So you have got to create appeal for these varying groups in different ways, and you can’t be deluded by the idea that one size fits all. I learned how to do this as a lieutenant watching senior officers in the Army.
Finally, it’s absolutely important for a business leader to express confidence in his or her own strategy and tactics. I saw this in Vietnam: When the proverbial debris hits the fan, people in an organization worry, question and wonder—and they look to their leaders to express the confidence that the path they’ve chosen is correct.
Do what you say you’re going to do. “Walk the talk” but also “talk the walk”—express confidence. Otherwise your people will lose faith.
I’m a guest lecturer at UCLA, and I tell MBA students that if it weren’t for the military, I wouldn’t be here today. Military leadership taught me discipline, how to show up on time, how to get engaged and how to work as part of a larger group.
An army can’t function when everyone does as they please, so you learn early about unit cohesiveness. You learn to work with people with a diverse set of backgrounds. The Army is a true melting pot. You learn to work as a team and how to put the needs of the collective ahead of the needs of the individual. You learn about sacrifice and serving others.
I’ve spent 20 years as a CEO of three different national service companies in three industries, and I learned that every individual has value—but it’s the same value. I don’t value myself higher than a janitor in a plant. Titles are how you organize your efforts, but at the human level, everyone adds value. And diversity is important.
So you put these things together, and you manage believing that collective goals and objectives are ahead of any individual’s. You inspire a vision and build common goals and get people to aspire to do more than they can on their own. All of those lessons I learned in the military.
In fact, I call myself a consensus leader. That may sound counterintuitive to military training. But sometimes you respect a person because of their rank—and other times not just because of their rank but because they’ve inspired you and earned that leadership and respect.
I also apply military lessons in smaller—but still significant—ways. There’s a lot of regimentation and discipline around what we do. So, for example, our employees have stripes on their shirts that indicate their level of expertise. And if they are a military veteran, they can put a veteran tab on their uniform and a veteran sticker on their vehicle. Also, like the military does, we hand out “challenge coins” that represent the core values of our company.
And it’s funny—when you’re in the service, you spend every day thinking about how long it is until you get out. Once you do, you spend the rest of your life looking back with some sense of pride, and the little hassles you endured go away. But you remember the friendships and the good part about service, and you spend the rest of your life being a proud veteran.
West Point is the greatest leadership school in the country. There, and in the Army in general, I learned at least five important things, which I saw played out again and again there—and which I see again and again in the civilian world.
First, when you’re in command, be in command—be the leader. That means you’re in charge, accountable for everything that happens. When you’re a leader, you’ve got to make a decision and execute it—or, as we said in the Army, think, decide and act. You think a problem through with the information at hand, make a decision, and then aggressively act on it. There are no perfect decisions. Once you make it, though, execute it violently. In the civilian world, that means aggressive execution of your decision.
For example, at one company where I was CEO, half the executive team wanted to implement a pretty significant price increase, and the other half didn’t. I had to make a decision to increase price. We built a plan of customer communication and executed the plan very aggressively. And it went very well, increasing the profitability of a product line that was old and tired, allowing us to invest more in a new product line, and helping the organization grow significantly. It had little impact on customers. The organization gained confidence in the management team and me that we could make tough decisions and execute them well.
Second, the commander’s intent is critical for people to know in the military and, in the civilian world, his or her vision and mission are critical to communicate. If you want to clear a building of the enemy, and you step off the helicopter and get killed, it is critical that everyone knows what the commander’s intent and plan was and to continue the mission. The military is full of stories where the leader gets killed and the next person picks up the task. In the business world, it’s also critical that people know what the organization is attempting to do and can make decisions toward accomplishing that mission.
Third, failure is not terminal. At West Point, they push you to the point where you are just going to fail. But today, in business and elsewhere, everyone gets a trophy and everyone is great. The real world isn’t like that.
Fourth, when you’re in charge and someone on your team does something great, your job is to make sure the sun shines on them, not on you. At the same time, when someone screws something up, your job is to put up an umbrella and make sure you take the criticism and don’t allow your person to get hammered by that. So you make sure people get credit, but also you protect them when they’ve made a bad decision or a mistake.
And fifth, in the military, we said that you make your decisions as close to your target as possible. The further away you get from where you’re actually engaging your target, the more mistakes you make. So in business, ultimately, you want to make decisions as close to the customer as possible, because your people there are the ones who really know what needs to be done.
Ice beverage brand, Hall is a third-generation U.S. military veteran. He served on the U.S. Navy nuclear submarines USS Pennsylvania and USS Georgia from 2000 to 2005. Hall became CEO of the Seattle-based company in 2018.
The most important thing I took away from my military service was the concept of teamwork. From the beginning of boot camp to the end, the military instills in you the team mentality. And on a submarine, you actually live together or die together. Every position pulls its own weight.
The submarine community is very small. There is a high level of trust. You only succeed if there is integrity, because you’re putting your life in other people’s hands in a boat that goes underwater. It’s a huge demonstration of teamwork. I have carried that with me. I’ve applied that principle to building our culture at Talking Rain. For us, those priorities come through in every decision. It’s company, first; team, second; and self, third.
In the U.S. Navy, we learned the pillars of honor, courage and commitment. So when I came up through the sales department of Talking Rain, I created leadership and management pillars that were similar. Only, I called them “curiosity,” “execution” and “forward-looking.”
When I became CEO, I carried forward the three-pillars idea to formulate the company “purpose,” “foundation” and “vision.” When you create a purpose and get everyone rallied behind it, it drives people. Purpose creates an environment of priorities for everyone. Every time you’re on a submarine, you have a mission, and that’s what a company must do.
In the business world, our purpose is to create value. At Talking Rain, I have worked closely with our president to create a group of value goals, and a group of value drivers. We had a group get together and identify key areas of the organization on which to focus our resources. This has been close to the concept of what your mission is on a sub.
Another important way I applied military principles was through the 100-day plan rolled out when I took over as CEO. When a new captain takes over a boat, he rolls out his agenda during the transition. So when I became CEO of Talking Rain, I communicated to the entire company what the plan was, what the deliverables were and what we were going to achieve in those first 100 days.
It’s not often put this way in the military, but it’s also difficult to overlook the importance of passion. When you know you have an important mission, an awesome team and the transparency of knowing what you want to accomplish, passion simply comes out of that. And without that passion and drive in business, it’s really tough for a company to stay relevant.
I had a number of learning experiences in the military, positive and negative—but all very useful. For instance, one superior who eventually retired as a four-star general made an effort to invite his 20 to 30 lieutenants to lunch every couple of months. He’d reserve a meeting space at the officers’ club and tell us we could say whatever we wanted, for a couple of hours. That was very effective: The lesson was to know your people and take an interest in them and listen to them.
Another thing I learned after I decided to wear the jump wings on my hat instead of air-assault wings. What you wore was voluntary, but the battalion commander wanted everyone to do the latter to encourage people to go to air-assault school. When I didn’t he told my immediate boss, a captain, that “Pritzker needs to fix that hat.” He didn’t scream at me. But I learned that if I’m supposed to be the leader of a few dozen soldiers, I need to set a good example and encourage them to be constantly improving themselves—by improving yourself.
Yet another time, a private in basic training lost his bolt group for his M-16—a series of parts that are critical to enabling the rifle to fire. The drill sergeant made all of us spend six hours in the barracks looking for that four-inch carrier, until two in the morning. I can’t remember if we ever found it, but it made a deep impression: You don’t want to be in a combat situation with a rifle that won’t shoot. You can get that lesson across to a large group in business: Make sure your team has the right tools to get the job done and is always prepared.
The Army has the famous intelligence-reporting acronym: SALUTE, which means Size, Activity, Location, Uniform, Time, Equipment. For myself, my troops and now my employees, I came up with the decision acronym SLEEP: Is something Safe, Legal, Ethical, Efficient and Cost Effective and Profitable? It’s a handy filter for all decisions because you’ll hit the main points to evaluate.
I’m also a big believer in the slogan that President Reagan used in his defense strategy: Trust, but verify. You need to be accountable for what you do and keep yourself informed, and help your people be informed. What you tell people must help them gain confidence and an understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish, why it’s worth doing, and how they fit into it.
I also learned in the military a lot about trust. For example, if you’re going to jump out of an airplane at night with 300 other people with rifles strapped to them, you’ve got to trust a lot of people. Everyone has to be aware of what they’re doing and contribute by doing it in a confident and timely manner. And no one has time to explain everything they’re doing to everyone on the aircraft.
In the same way, when you’re running a company, you have to trust everyone to do their job because all roles are important to success. This covers everyone from upper management to the cleaning staff. If the building isn’t cleaned well, for example, people are more likely to get sick and not be able to work at their full capacity.
Related: Chief Executives Need To Champion Military Veterans’ Initiatives
If organizational values on paper don't match up with employee's day-to-day experience, culture suffers. Here's…
Rockwell Automation strategy chief says manufacturing chiefs must focus on value and not fall in…
Companies greenlighting “all hat, no cattle” CAIO hires are making moves that are unlikely to…
In this edition of our Corporate Competitor Podcast, Kate Johnson, president and CEO of Lumen…