3 Lessons I Learned About Influencing People As A Lieutenant And CEO

Much of what we know about management actually comes from the military.

For example: The U.S. went to great lengths to distribute millions of M&Ms to troops during World War II. Actually, M&Ms were reserved solely for the military and distributed in soldiers’ C-rations.

The army knew how this seemingly insignificant snack increased troops morale.

Throughout history, military leaders have organized and deployed thousands of people. There were no business organizations that rivaled the size and complexity of a military, even back to the times of Napoleon the Great.

It wasn’t a simple task in the past, and it isn’t one today.

These complex military campaigns have taught us a great deal about motivation, decision making, logistics, communications, and supply chains.

Even the smallest details affect attitudes or create chaos.

Looking back on my years in the army, I see similarities between my management as a Lieutenant and what I do now as a CEO. Many of the lessons I learned about influencing people in the military inform the way I currently lead my team.

Here are three of those lessons, and why they’re important for any leader.

Performance Is Not Improvement

It’s important to understand the different styles of work, and why they matter.

In the modern workplace, leaders spending 80–90% of their effort on execution. Maybe 10–20% on training.

In the army, it’s the opposite.

Military leaders spend huge amounts of time training people, because their team automatically falls back on training in a stressful situation.

It’s difficult to operate that way at work, because you’re constantly in performance mode. There aren’t many opportunities to simply improve without a definite objective in mind.

This is why there’s an almost unassailable competitive advantage in hiring people who want to improve and, more specifically, want to practice.

But most managers can’t help employees improve.

They can’t push their reports and design an environment where people improve. Typically, they’re only looking for a reliable output and are not encouraging employees to really excel.

As a leader, you can develop a different outlook.

Put a lot of emphasis on improvement instead of performance.

Encourage employees to find skills they need to be successful, design activities to improve those skills, and push them to practice.

Emphasize that mindset, because performance and improvement are two separate arenas. To improve your skills and get better at a job, you must have time to practice.

People Have Different Needs

I encountered an incredibly diverse group of people in the army, and I had to learn how to manage and care for all of them.

Most of us are sheltered in our day-to-day lives. Whether at work or school, we usually only interact with people in a certain socioeconomic bracket.

The army brings together a wide variety of people — many poor, many immigrants. You realize everyone is different. People have their own needs and interests.

But you have to find the right balance between caring for peoples’ interests while still pushing them to be better than they were yesterday.

That type of management holds true in both the military and the workplace. It takes a firm understanding of how individuals in an hierarchy relate to the group, what they need from the organization, and what they can contribute.

Teams Must Know Each Other

You spend a lot of time getting to know your team army and learning how to work effectively.

This helps you understand each individual’s capabilities, much like in a work environment.

I’ll give you an example:

There were nights we did field training exercises in the forest, and it was absolutely pouring. We could barely see anything in front of us. But one of our guys was incredible in these situations. He could maneuver through a pitch black jungle (in a downpour) as if it were a sunny day.

He majored in forestry and had been in these situations his whole life. He saw the world differently than we did. Ledges, tree formations, trails — he could easily navigate through the environment in any situation.

You want to know things like this about your employees, too.

What are their strengths and weaknesses?

What are they obsessed with?

How can you maximize their strengths?

You don’t have to join the military to learn these lessons, but you do have to think a bit differently. It’s essential to becoming a better leader and learning to manage people in a variety of situations.

You may not be shipping M&Ms around the world to boost morale, but you can develop the same people skills necessary to influence people in a modern corporate environment.

It just takes practice.