Art delaCruz of Team Rubicon: Lessons I Learned From My Military Experience about How To Survive And Thrive During A Time Of Crisis

As a business leader, you are probably negligent in your duties if you don’t always consider the possibility of a crisis. I work against the backdrop of always assuming a crisis will strike, but I always analyze what it is I can uniquely control because that allows me to act swiftly when the time comes. Things you can influence make a difference, but you must always understand what might go wrong.

In this interview series, we are exploring the subject of dealing with crises and how to adapt and overcome them. Crisis management is one characteristic that many successful leaders share in common, and in many cases, it is the most important trait necessary to survive and thrive in today’s complex market. I had the pleasure of interviewing Art delaCruz, President & Chief Executive Officer of Team Rubicon.

Art delaCruz served honorably for over 22 years in the United States Navy and enjoyed a career that included a broad range of assignments. Art commanded a Navy strike-fighter squadron, spent one year with McKinsey & Co. as a Secretary of Defense Corporate Fellow, and served as a TopGun instructor, making six combat deployments. After retiring, he spent two and a half years in the aerospace and defense sector in the roles of business development and strategy and planning. He maintains a honed “quick reaction” capability by attempting to keep up with his wife, four kids, golden retriever and labrador retriever puppy. Before becoming Chief Executive Officer of Team Rubicon in July 2021, Art served as Team Rubicon’s President & Chief Operating Officer.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood “backstory”?

I’m a Midwestern kid who grew up in Minnesota as the son of Filipino immigrants. I had four siblings, and we grew up the Midwestern way, which meant in a small town, working in the summers, playing sports every season of the year, and being a part of a welcoming community. As a cul-de-sac kid, I felt like I was part of multiple families. You never knew where you would eat at night, what you would do, or which other kids would be at your house for dinner, but you always knew you had family and friends around you. It was centered on purpose. I’m thankful for having that as my backdrop growing up.

And what are you doing today? Can you share a story that exemplifies the unique work that you are doing?

I’m fortunate enough to be the Chief Executive Officer of Team Rubicon, a veteran-led humanitarian organization that helps communities before, during, and after disasters and crises across the globe. It’s been busy — there is much to do between the pandemic, Afghan resettlement, and natural disasters. The work of our 150,000 volunteers across the country and throughout the world is helping people on their worst days.

This purpose is manifested in places like Kentucky, where our volunteers, which we call ‘Greyshirts,’ are helping people whose homes have been impacted by unprecedented flooding. We also have teams in Ukraine that are helping to train medical technicians so they can serve the people displaced during the conflict and help the injured people — and, going further, delivering medical services to places like Guatemala or Honduras. We have responded to natural disasters — floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and fires — over 1,000 times since our founding. And we have served a domestic humanitarian crisis — for the past year, around the country, our volunteers have been helping to resettle Afghan refugees.

In my role, I’m lucky enough to inspire and unlock a community of people doing what I call the right thing in the world. Ultimately, in our mission, we want to alleviate and eliminate suffering in a way that sustains the well-being of people worldwide. I’m grateful to have been able to transition from a life of service in the military to a life of service as a humanitarian.

Can you tell us a bit about your military background?

I began school at the United States Naval Academy in 1987 and was commissioned as a military officer in the Navy in 1991. I retired in 2013 after serving for 22 years, and during that time, I’d made seven deployments and was stationed around the world.

In my role, I was lucky enough to lead sailors from all different backgrounds, with varying levels of responsibility, and fly airplanes as a weapon system officer, F-14s, and F/A-18s from U.S. military aircraft carriers.

Across those 22 years, I also spent a significant amount of time outside the cockpit with the responsibility of supporting the men and women volunteers that joined the U.S. Navy — ensuring they could do their roles in human resource and training functions.

On one notable tour, I was lucky enough to be selected and serve as a TOPGUN instructor.

Can you share the most interesting story that you experienced during your military career? What “takeaway” did you learn from that story?

As I look back on 22 years of service, being on the USS Enterprise on 9/11 when the aircraft struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon is a moment that I will never forget.

When my squadron mates and I saw the first tower hit, we thought it was a sightseeing aircraft that had crashed into one of the Twin towers. But then we saw the second tower hit by another airliner. Shortly after that, we heard about the Pentagon and the hijacked airplane in Pennsylvania.

At that moment, all 5,000 sailors on the Enterprise understood that something significant was happening, and the ship’s captain reinforced that. Coming on the 1-MC, which was essentially the communication system that could reach every sailor on that aircraft carrier, he said: “We are now awaiting orders from the President.”

The magnitude of that statement was indescribable. To understand you were awaiting orders from the President of the United States is not an insignificant moment in anyone’s life. This moment unlocked the events that would transpire from 2001 until last year in Afghanistan.

This storyline continued 20 years after that moment, in August 2021, as Team Rubicon began resettling Afghan allies in communities across the country. Our volunteers continue that work.

My takeaway from this moment is that you never know how long the story will last.

You certainly have no idea of the impact that any one event can have on your life for decades or the impact of the decisions you will make and the acts you will perform across that storyline. But now, I understand that the events in my life and my choices will become woven into the storyline of my life.

We are interested in fleshing out what a hero is. Did you experience or hear about a story of heroism, during your military experience? Can you share that story with us? Feel free to be as elaborate as you’d like.

I made six deployments, five during combat. There are so many acts of heroism that they can’t be categorized. Many are overlooked.

One of the stories I always think of is when my wingman and I were flying close air support. We were two airplanes tasked to protect and support troops in a firefight on the ground in Afghanistan.

We were talking to the forward air controller, the one person in that unit who could speak to the people in the airplanes, giving us a description of where everyone was on the ground, trying to tell us what was happening and what they needed.

This person was waiting for approval for us to be able to deploy our weapons, and you could hear every time he keyed the mic, gunshots firing.

In the interim, as we were waiting for approval, he asked a question that was seemingly out of the blue. He asked me over the radio if we had ice cream on the aircraft carrier.

In this moment of incredible stress and conflict, he’s wondering if we have ice cream. This is a Marine or a soldier that’s been on the ground for months. They’re under continual threat.

And he was asking me if we had ice cream. I say that is heroic because I don’t believe he thought he was a hero. He was ultimately protecting everyone on the ground and performing a crucial role, but to him, he was just doing his job.

And I see it now here at Team Rubicon. I’m always amazed to see people drop what they are doing after a natural disaster and volunteer their time and effort to do often unglamorous jobs. The only compensation they get is knowing they have made a difference to somebody at a critical time.

When fleshing out the definition of a hero, often, nobody involved recognizes at that moment what they’re doing is significant. It doesn’t meet the stereotypical definition of heroism: sacrifice, determination, courage, or gallantry.

It’s just what you do at that moment.

Based on that story, how would you define what a “hero” is? Can you explain?

To me, a true hero doesn’t know or consider themselves a hero in the moment. Heroes act on something they didn’t plan for and use their best judgment to act the right way. I don’t view heroes as the stereotypical ‘caped crusader’ leaping out of a telephone booth.

I think in these cases, the definition of a hero is someone who’s able to act with conviction, purpose, and professionalism to get the job done in times of stress.

Do you think your experience in the military helped prepare you for business or leadership? Can you explain?

The military has helped me prepare for business and a leadership role in two ways. It gave me unique experiences that have served me well and left some gaps.

The military provides young individuals with leadership opportunities. Even at my most junior rank, I led several people and was responsible for overseeing many missions. And many were inherently dangerous. These opportunities led me to understand risk in a unique manner. When you’re talking about performing a mission, keeping people safe, and maintaining equipment worth millions of dollars — you become very attuned to understanding risk management.

The military also offers a sense of resilience and a different type of pressure that tests and tempers your ability to lead. It was unpredictable in times of conflict, and factors beyond your control often changed your plans.

I think the military also presented lessons on how to be unsuccessful in business and leadership. You could learn things that worked in uniform but might be liabilities once out.

Some people could lead only with rank and still be successful, but it would come at a tremendous cost to those around them. With rank, your orders weren’t up for debate. With rank, you could make business decisions that were not sound and could essentially create different taxes on individuals in the unit and might take away time from their families.

I was lucky enough to understand that some of what I learned was great, and some of it was not so great. So, I was very deliberate about defining my skill spikes — the things I could do well — like leading people, making decisions under stress, and achieving results with limited resources. I also thought about my skill “troughs,” which things I didn’t know. Recognizing what the military taught me, but also defining liabilities and curiosities that were not fulfilled in the military, such as business strategy, profit and loss, and budgeting — helped me to use what I knew and learn the things that would make me successful in a business setting.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

You run across thousands of people in your life who shape who you are and what you do. One standout was my second commanding officer, a gentleman by the name of Dan Cloyd.

What was unique about Commander Cloyd — Traps was his call sign — was that he embodied everything I wanted to achieve. I saw him successfully lead a squadron and earn the respect of his Sailors. He was professional and capable, and he was present in every conversation. Those are the things I thought were incredibly valuable.

There is enormous value in the ability to form genuine connections with those around you. Dan had almost an encyclopedic ability to memorize a person’s face and story. He would remember their origins and little tidbits about their story years later. That allowed him to be present in everyone’s lives and build meaningful connections. He was everyone’s partner and an incredibly effective leader. Dan always left people with the sense and understanding that he was there to help and contribute.

Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. We would like to explore and flesh out how to survive and thrive in crisis. How would you define a crisis?

To put it succinctly, a crisis is a time of intense difficulty for an organization or a person where a crucial decision must be made.

Before a crisis strikes, what should business owners and leaders think about and how should they plan?

As a business leader, you are probably negligent in your duties if you don’t always consider the possibility of a crisis. I work against the backdrop of always assuming a crisis will strike, but I always analyze what it is I can uniquely control because that allows me to act swiftly when the time comes. Things you can influence make a difference, but you must always understand what might go wrong.

Business leaders must also be accustomed to making decisions not built on an end state but built on the presence of leading indicators that will get you to your end goal. You should think about what should happen, how it should happen, and when.

There are opportunities to make the best of every situation and it’s usually based on how you frame it. In your opinion or experience, what’s the first thing people should do when they first realize they are in a crisis situation? What should they do next?

One of the things I took away from my military experience was a three-word mantra for any time there was an emergency flying in an airplane: aviate, navigate, and communicate.

What they taught us to do and what has served me well, even since leaving the cockpit, is in any crisis, the first action is to aviate — do what needs to be done at that moment. In the jet, it meant don’t be so centered on the crisis that you crash the airplane; make sure that the airplane continues to fly. In the business context, it means ensuring you understand what’s happening and how to keep the organization running.

The second step is to navigate. One of the conscious decisions you could make is to make no decision, which is a business failure. You must actively navigate and point the organization in the right direction, just as you’d do an aircraft. Or point your company towards a plan, a sequence of things you will do to reach your destination.

The final piece is to communicate. You are never alone. You need to be able to tell your wingman or your business partners the state of the situation and what’s required to keep moving forward. In addition, you need to tell the rest of your leadership and their teams where you are going, why you are going there, and how you’re going to get there.

Aviate, navigate and communicate. A great approach to handling crises.

What do you believe are the characteristics or traits needed to survive a crisis?

Well, the first one is calmness, which isn’t just something that happens. It’s something that is a byproduct of planning ahead. It’s a byproduct of considering the possibility of being in a crisis. It’s a thoughtful act of preparation everyone should go through and embodies itself. It shows itself at that moment as calm. Calmness is contagious.

Hand in hand with calmness, you develop a trait where you are not easily overwhelmed. And when I say not overwhelmed, it means that you understand what you can and can’t control — understanding how to measure where you’re at and what you’re going to do to get to where you need to be.

You also need a willingness to act. Inaction is a decision, and it’s generally not the right one. You must be willing to point the ship in the general direction you believe it needs to travel. And to ensure that you’re beginning to make progress toward that destination.

The final one is this understanding that the first correction is probably not the right one. The ability to continually assess where you’re going and make subsequent decisions ensures that you’re doing what you need to get to the final destination.

When you think of those traits, which person comes to mind? Can you explain why you chose that person?

I can’t put a name to it, but when I think of these traits, I always think of the amazing people I flew with across my career. In military airplanes, you can imagine fighters transiting at supersonic speeds. Often, in combat situations where you’re making critical decisions, the amazing, effective, and inspiring people are calm in those moments.

They can adjust, communicate, and ultimately perform the mission professionally, exhibit their success with humility, and always understand they serve a greater purpose.

Did you have a time in your life where you had one of your greatest setbacks, but you bounced back from it stronger than ever? Can you share that story with us?

That’s an easy one. Early in my tour at TOPGUN, I was involved in a training exercise in an F-14 in the desert of Fallon, Nevada. The aircraft had a mechanical failure, went into a flat spin, and ended up ejecting out of a $40+ million jet over the desert.

Thankfully, we survived. But it set into motion an investigation, as is completed for every U.S. Navy aircraft mishap, to find fault and make the adjustments required to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

It was possible that I would never fly again.

Ultimately, that board of inquiry found we were not at fault. There were some things we could have done better, but they had the vote of confidence that allowed me to continue flying for the rest of my career. This experience made me incredibly strong. Throughout my remaining time in the Navy, that story became a window of vulnerability as a leader. I’d share what I could have done better and what I learned from the accident. It became an incredible superpower to stand in front of people with that story and teach, mentor, and expose people to the realm of possibility.

Here is the main question of our discussion. Crises not only have the potential to jeopardize and infiltrate your work, but they also threaten your emotional stability and relationships. Based on your military experience, what are 5 steps that someone can take to survive and thrive in these situations? Please share a story or an example for each.

If I were to boil down the five most important steps in a crisis that I learned in the military:

First, acknowledge and communicate that you are in a crisis. Bad news ages poorly. Simply acknowledging that you believe the situation requires dire action.

A crisis is significant because it levels the playing field for everyone around you. Everyone knows that something important is happening, and everyone knows that it has your attention, and you intend to do something about it.

2) Second, build a team around you to address that situation.

For example, when the pandemic hit in 2020, Team Rubicon acknowledged that we had to make drastic organizational changes. Every employee would work from home. We didn’t just build a crisis team; we restructured the entire organization into simpler and condensed teams to ensure that we were doing what we could uniquely do. So, you build the team.

3) Ensure that you have resources dedicated to understanding the crisis. Get the data, get the insights, and observe and orient the organization in understanding the situation.

4) With all of this information, you create a plan.

5) The final piece is you must measure and refine whether that plan is working.

I like to think of that as: How do you build the team? How do you tell that team what you believe is happening and then combine that with their insights, perceptions, and understanding?

You need to get to a place where you can begin to develop and execute a plan and then understand how that plan works. Understand if the measurements for success were there or absent, and then decide what you must do to get back on track. As we like to say, be in a state of winning instead of losing.

Ok. We are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

At Team Rubicon, we often say that if everyone treated each other like they do after a disaster, the world would be a fantastic place.

We treat each other with graciousness, compassion, and empathy. We act with concern for individuals, families, and community members. And I think if we could do that every day, it wouldn’t require a disaster to trigger this response.

If I could start a simple movement, its mission would be to get people thinking daily about how their actions, contributions, time, and energy impact the “we,” that greater collection of people, instead of just “me.” This is how I try to live my life.

If we can inspire people to act to benefit others, they’ll also find their lives get better.

We are blessed that some very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them.

I would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with President Obama.

I believe that life is a journey of events, situations, and intersections with people and organizations. And to think of the perspective that a President who served for eight years would have would be simply amazing.

I would be incredibly excited to sit down with President Obama, not just to understand his journey over the eight years but also to understand his journey across his life story arc as the first black President.

I’d like to understand what he’s doing now and his initiatives — how he’s using this context and the benefits of being a President to make the world a better place. He is a person that I would absolutely love to sit across the table from to just listen and learn from that perspective.

Thank you so much for these amazing insights. This was truly uplifting.