How my military service helped me thrive in a corporate career

Transitioning to civilian life? You have more to offer than you think.

I decided to join the military during my second year of college, right after 9/11. I spent that summer working for the Bureau of Land Management, doing backcountry survey expeditions in Wyoming. I loved the physical challenge of spending my days with a heavy pack on my back and my lungs filled with fresh air, and began to wonder if the military might be more rewarding than chipping away aimlessly at an English literature degree.

So I joined the Marine Corps and after basic training, intel school and a year of advanced training at Quantico, found myself doing intelligence work for counterterrorism deployments around the world. I spent five years living and working in 15 countries, five states and two ships. But after a few years, I decided to settle down and have a ‘normal’ life, with a family, a mortgage and a corporate job. The problem was, I had no idea how my military skills would translate to civilian life.

I moved back to Colorado intent to figure it out and, luckily, had a childhood friend who gave me a shot as an executive recruiter. It wasn’t until years later that I understood the true value of the skills I gained in the military — skills I use now in my role leading Xero’s Talent Experience team in the Americas. So if you’re rejoining civilian life and feeling a little lost, please remember: you’re not alone, and you have some advantages over other job applicants — whether you realize it or not.

Trusting and respecting others

During my time in the military, I worked in some of the most austere conditions imaginable, in some of the most dangerous parts of the world. Lives were at stake and there were real consequences to the decisions we made — life and death consequences. In those moments, we had to carefully balance the demands of the mission du jour with the need to take care of our people.

People are usually either really good at taking care of others or they’re really good at getting a job done. It’s a special skill to do both simultaneously and effectively, but as a marine sergeant, it becomes second nature.

I was trained to stay hands-off in any given situation until I needed to step in, and these days I take the same approach (although in this case, the consequences aren’t life threatening). I can’t be completely out of touch with what’s going on in my team, but I also don’t want to be intimately involved in every detail of their work. Finding that balance is a matter of trust and respect. Organizations invest in hiring, training and developing their people to make sure they’re up to the task — then it’s our job to trust ourselves, our processes, and our people to get the job done.

No matter what role you’re applying for, you can use what you’ve learned about building trust, taking care of people, and balancing the needs of your work and your team in your corporate career.

Adapting to change

I served in the military during a period of huge transformation for national defense in the United States. After 9/11, there was recognition that a lot of our systems, processes and tactics were really antiquated. Many were legacies from the Cold War and Vietnam. So when I joined, everything was evolving and changing very rapidly. We were moving from a more traditional way of doing things to a much more sophisticated, asymmetrical way of working. Military leaders and business school professors like to call this new world ‘VUCA’ — volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.

The business world has experienced many parallel transformations over the past 20 years. Having served in a special operations unit during this period certainly impacted my worldview, and continues to affect the way I manage my work today. I learned to influence change and inform complex decisions. I learned to transform teams and tactics, moving people from the ways of working they used to know, to using new processes and technologies that help achieve our ‘mission.’ These lessons are quite relevant in my work at a global tech company, where decisions are made quickly and iteratively, and where change is constant.

Instead of springing into action, I know from my military training that the best way to adapt to change is to maintain a keen awareness of the strategy, the mission, the health and limitations of the team. I’m also a student of external drivers, forces and constraints.

In the military we called that understanding the ‘battle space’, but at Xero we might just call it ‘understanding the market’. Maintaining a strategic purview and being a student of our ‘space’ allows us to build the right interventions, keep people and systems aligned, and know what risks are worth taking. I can then feel confident that we make the right adjustments to respond to internal and external changes.

My military experience definitely made me comfortable with constant change. It drives my wife nuts but it’s a rather important skill in a VUCA economy!

Presenting your case

Believe it or not, my intelligence work wasn’t all secret missions in far flung parts of the world. A lot of it was quite administrative. We were constantly reading reports, debriefing missions, synthesizing and developing briefs, and presenting recommendations to senior leaders who used that information to make important tactical and operational decisions (no pressure, right?). When we were deployed, we would usually go through this cycle multiple times every day for months.

Being forced to synthesize complex information in high-stress situations, and then stand up and present cogent recommendations to senior leaders, was perhaps the most important skill I learned. It taught me to clearly communicate my ideas and articulate challenges. It taught me to speak truth to power, and manage the impact of having unpopular opinions (particularly useful in my HR work). It taught me to paint a picture with words and get comfortable answering questions diplomatically and extemporaneously.

The good news is that anyone can get better at this, and there are so many opportunities to present and communicate at companies like Xero. So much of corporate life is influencing small groups through storytelling, so it’s a valuable skill to have.

Coping with pressure

There’s pressure in every job, whether you’re in the middle of a war zone in the Middle East or working from home during lockdown in Colorado. The consequences may differ, but the feeling of it — the stress your body goes through to get the job done — is much the same. What the military taught me was emotional distance. I learned not to get so close to the work that I would lose myself in it.

Compartmentalization and focus are imperative to staying safe, taking care of people, and maintaining perspective on what’s essential (and what’s negotiable).

Of course, it’s easier said than done. I saw many friends in the military struggle in their personal lives because they couldn’t compartmentalize. Maintaining perspective is an aspiration and a journey for me, too. It’s easy to let work consume your life and your headspace — especially when your work and life are inextricably intertwined. It was a big part of my decision to leave the military after five years and two deployments.

Compared to the military, you may think a healthy work-life balance would be easy to find as a civilian. But I’ve found that Americans don’t really believe in balance, regardless of how consequential the work is. Xero is definitely the most balanced place I’ve ever worked. I don’t know whether that’s because of our New Zealand ethos or whether there’s just a uniquely healthy respect for people’s lives outside of work. Probably both.

But even when things are busy and people are stressed, I feel like I can maintain a healthy perspective. There are no bullets flying. No one is dying on the table. I have agency to make decisions and take risks and feel very supported by peers, leadership and our values. I would encourage other veterans to find environments that foster personal growth, boundaries and balance. Work is important but it doesn’t have to be emotional. It shouldn’t define our life.

Making people feel necessary

There’s a book by Sebastian Junger called Tribe. In it, Junger says that people don’t mind hardship, what they do mind is not feeling necessary. And modern society has perfected the art of making people feel unnecessary. I think it’s one of the chief causes for the high suicide rates among veterans (in the US alone, it’s around 22 veterans a day).

I’ve done a lot of work with US veteran service organizations and believe the best way to combat this is to help veterans find a sense of belonging in the working world — a workplace that makes them feel valued, respected, and heard.

I’ve certainly found that place at Xero. There’s a real sense of togetherness and purpose here that’s quite rare. I think we probably take it for granted. Yes, there are politics, but our values are real, and there’s little sense of ego or hierarchy in our daily work. My team plays an important role in a mission that’s bigger than us, and I feel connected to people across the organization and the strategy of the company. These might sound like small things, but they are extraordinary. To a veteran, I believe they are vital.

Your value as a veteran

Popular culture hasn’t done veterans many favors. In the absence of healthy narratives or success stories, people are left to create their own impressions of veterans based on biases, assumptions and unflattering media portrayals. In truth, most veterans I know are ambitious, accomplished, motivated, deeply compassionate, and highly intelligent people. They have so much to offer, but continue to be underrepresented in our corporate workforce, misunderstood by their colleagues, and misrepresented in our media.

Sebastian Junger once wrote, ‘human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do, they need to feel authentic in their lives, and they need to feel connected to others’.

The small-unit culture of the military has mastered those things, and it was extraordinarily hard to find it again as a civilian. At Xero, I feel safe bringing my whole self to work, I feel trust and cohesion with my team and the global Xero community, and I feel empowered to do the best work of my life. My hope is that as a veteran, you can also leverage the many valuable skills you’ve acquired during your service to find contentment and thrive in a corporate career.