How the Military Prepared Me to Lead

I grew up in a military family and knew I wanted to serve in the armed forces from a young age. When it came time to get my undergraduate degree, I won a military scholarship and showed up on my university campus a week early to be sworn into the United States Air Force.

Immediately, I was thrust into a mini-boot camp before classes started, where I learned about the things most of us associate with such a path: marching, saluting, and following orders. After four years as a cadet, I became an officer upon graduation and shipped off to California, where I worked in an intelligence organization that operated satellites in the waning days of the Cold War.

While serving as a military officer isn’t the only place to learn to be a leader, the stereotypes about it being a crucible of rapid leadership development are absolutely true. There are a few reasons for this:

• Officers are almost always put in charge of people who have more experience than they do.
• Youth doesn’t get in the way of making new officers responsible for lives and hardware worth millions of dollars (I was responsible for satellites worth billions at 24 years old).
• The stakes are almost always higher than in the private sector—it’s not hyperbolic to say that if you fail as a military leader, people can die (and, even if you succeed, they may still).

That said, virtually all the leadership lessons I learned in the military are transferable to jobs outside that setting. Below, I share four key leadership maxims the military taught me.

Leadership Lessons I Learned in the Military

1. Don’t Wear Your Rank on Your Sleeve

This is an old cliché that may seem inappropriate in a military context—after all, it’s one of the only vocations where you do wear your rank on your sleeve. But that’s why the lesson here is even more poignant.

When I arrived at my first military job, my boss, while pointing to the rank on my shoulders, said, “Patrick, everybody knows your rank; they can see it right here. There’s no need to remind them of it. If you do, you’ll have less power, not more.”

In my 30 years of leadership and management experience since that point, nothing has proven truer. Be the boss. Make decisions. But don’t go through extra effort to remind those around you that you’re the boss and make decisions. It fuels resentment and eye-rolling and makes it harder to do whatever it is you’re trying to do.

2. Use the Knowledge of Others

This gets back to how military officers almost always have people reporting to them who are older and more experienced and knowledgeable than they are. While this is rarer for young people in the private sector, the lesson that springs from this oddity is important: Ignoring or not using others’ unique knowledge and talents so you can be the smartest person in the room is a way to make yourself look like the dumbest person in the room.

Organizations exist to pool the collective talents of tens, hundreds, or thousands of individuals. If you don’t use those pooled talents, you’re committing a sort of leadership negligence.

3. Respect Others, but Call Them Out (Privately) When Necessary

While respecting others’ knowledge and opinions is important, certain norms should be followed when disagreements occur. If they’re not, the offender needs to be talked to.

About a year into my military career, I was involved in an operation with a team that included a particularly surly but knowledgeable man who reported to me. During a critical, time-sensitive activity, my surly friend openly challenged me in front of others in a way that questioned my authority. While I don’t mind dissent, the way he chose to express it—and the timing of it—was completely unacceptable.

When we finished the operation, I asked him to my office and, behind closed doors, told him he had acted inappropriately and it better not happen again. I added that it was fine if he was concerned about how I did things but, in the future, he should talk to me privately and not air his frustrations in front of others. After all, that was a courtesy I had extended to him.

Calling him to my office for a talk was an incredibly hard thing to do; he was 40 years my senior. As the saying goes, he’d already forgotten more than I knew about the very thing I oversaw—but talking to him was the right thing to do. And guess what? From that day forward, we had a mutual respect that made us a great team.

4. Plan, but Don’t Expect the Plan to Work

There’s a famous military adage: Battle plans never survive first contact with the enemy. I’ve found this to be a nugget of wisdom that transfers to the private sector. The world and the people in it are complex. All the research and analysis in the universe can’t predict with certainty what will happen when a course of action is decided.

While plans are valuable and certainly help minimize risk, the way a leader reacts when things don’t go as expected sets the tone for an entire organization. More than anything, it determines whether the original goal is still attainable.

Reacting well is a hard thing to do because it requires you to be many seemingly contradictory things at once: measured but decisive, calm but quick-thinking, and systematic but flexible. Mastering this balance takes practice that only comes with being put in situations where things don’t go as you thought they might. It’s as good a reason as any to stretch yourself in your job—find your limits and go there.

Learning to Lead with Practice and Patience

I’ve been a general manager and leader since that first military job many years ago. The lessons from my first assignment have lived with me and proven unbelievably durable through my time in startups, higher education, and manufacturing.

The four lessons here are, on their surface, not particularly earth-shattering. There are similar ideas in books and articles that fill our Baker Library here at Harvard Business School, as well as in HBS Online’s course Organizational Leadership—but that doesn’t make them easy to implement. It takes practice, patience, and hard work.

As you stretch beyond where you are today, keep these lessons in mind. I know you’ll find them as helpful as I have, even if you’ve never put on a military uniform.

Do you want to elevate your leadership skills? Explore Organizational Leadership and our other leadership and management courses to learn how you can prepare for the next phase of your leadership journey.