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Melissa Aarskaug (00:02.22)
Welcome to the executive connect podcast Today, I'm excited to speak with Damon Wells a career army officer with 28 years of service Thank you so much for your service Damon, and I'm excited to talk to you today about some of my favorite topics Leadership team building and strategies for success. Thank you so much for being here
Damon Wells (00:26.162)
My pleasure. Those sound like great topics.
Melissa Aarskaug (00:27.744)
I wanna jump right into talking a little bit about your background, including your time as a commander and working in high stakes environments. Can you share a little bit with our listeners?
Damon Wells (00:43.36)
Yeah, so I can go through just quickly through my background, joined in 1995, which really sounds like ages ago, which puts me almost at 30 years, which as you know, is mandatory retirement, which I'm actually looking forward to. Right now I'm in Schuchart, Germany. I'm the deputy chief of staff at Africa Command, the joint US command that oversees the continent of Africa.
Before that, I was a brigade commander at Fort Carson, Colorado, which is a beautiful post. I've been to, from Fort Sill, Oklahoma to what's now Fort Cavazos, which used to be called Fort Hood in Texas. Been on the East coast, been to the West coast, been to Iraq a couple of times, been to Afghanistan. Some time in Korea, the Baltics, and now Germany. So.
over the course of 30 years around the world a few times.
Melissa Aarskaug (01:45.346)
Well, that sounds amazing traveling all these different places and I imagine it must be challenging and to pick up and move. And I want to talk a little bit. One of the things, you know, having a father that was also in the military, I know a lot of times, you know, uncertain times happen in the military and you're like you mentioned, you change locations, you change ranks, you change roles.
You really have to pick up and start over and sometimes uncertain times. So I want to talk a little bit about what advice you would give to civilian leaders about maintaining calm and focus when their path isn't really clear and they have to pick up and lift to maybe a different job or a different state. And just a little bit about your experiences as you've navigated across the globe.
Damon Wells (02:43.43)
I actually love that question. you mentioned uncertainty and then changing ranks and then changing jobs, changing where you live. So to us, uncertainty and ambiguity comes with the territory. There's always a certain amount of information that you just can't know. As an example, as I get ready, as I'm looking for my new job or I'm waiting on the new assignment,
I'm pretty comfortable as are the people I work with with just not knowing. And I say that because my wife will always want to know, Hey, did you find out where we're going yet? You know, where we're going? She wants to know. and I just, I just know the answer. Not only is it going to come later than you want it, but it's never, it's never a hundred percent that that's, that's where you're going. It could always change at the last minute. So you have to become comfortable with ambiguity.
and have to know when certainty is important, when you need certainty. So there are certain things, you know, each rank comes with, you know, it's four or five years per pay grade, per rank that you hold in the military. And then there are certain jobs that you must do. There are key developmental jobs that you must do in order to get promoted to the next rank. So understanding when and where you're going to perform those jobs, know, the uncertainty
isn't great for that. You've to know, you've got to have a plan for that. And there are certain times when, you know, you're in environments, Iraq, Afghanistan, when there's, when you're given an operation, there's just a certain amount of that operation that you just can't know. And there are certain parts that you really have to know. You know, where are we going? Why are we doing this? What exactly are we trying to accomplish here?
The details along the way, sometimes they're just going to have to be ambiguous. What we do is we say, okay, this is a piece of information that I need to continue making my plan. I don't have that information. So I'm going to insert an assumption here. So between now and whatever that decision point is, I've got to look for details of information that helped me confirm or deny that assumption. And that that's a decision point that will tell me go either, you know, left or right.
Damon Wells (05:08.394)
So it's being comfortable in ambiguity and it's knowing what facts do you actually need and which ones can you make assumptions for.
Melissa Aarskaug (05:20.022)
Yeah, and I love, you know, I always say this to myself, worry is a negative goal setting. I think there's thousands of assumptions one can make in any given situation. And the more you worry and focus on what could or might go wrong, it really takes you off your course and off your mission. And you can't really focus on the actual facts that you have. And facts, I think of facts, like a puzzle.
Right? The more facts you have, the better you can put your puzzle together. And worry just distracts you. It's like a blindfold as you're putting your puzzle together. And so a lot of times in uncertain times, I like to say to people, focus on the facts. And anytime you have a worry that comes into your mind, replace it with a fact.
Damon Wells (05:50.88)
That's right.
Melissa Aarskaug (06:12.492)
because you can't make really strategic business decisions in your type of situations or in regular civilian life without all the facts, right? And so...
You know, we live in a very rapidly evolving and changing world as far as technology and global events. And so I want to talk a little bit about from your experience, how the military prepares leaders like you to be adaptable and flexible from going to Colorado to Africa, very different environments, very different cultures, very different weather. So let's talk a little bit about that.
Damon Wells (06:53.15)
Yeah. So again, be adaptable just comes to the territory. And I think in the military, because that is a prerequisite, if, especially if a leader, the first in your career, if you aren't adaptable at some point, you're going to get weeded out. So it, people that can't adapt to new situations and environments won't, won't function all that well. And I'll be honest, every, every organization I've been to does it differently.
because I went from Colorado to Germany. Huge, huge difference. So when you're to a new unit, there's things you're gonna wanna know, there's actually things you need to know. When you get to Germany, example, the German government, because we are in Germany, the German government is in charge of Germany. So when you get here, you have German rules you have to follow and you also have US rules you have to follow.
So what people like to say is, you know, for when you're in process and you have to go register your car and you have to do, you have to do a lot of things to make sure that you're, I guess, legal, have status of forces agreement. There's a lot of stuff out of bureaucracy you have to go through when you come to Germany as a US military service member.
And it's described as like the worst German bureaucracy combined with the worst of the US bureaucracy. It's just, it's a lot of, it's a lot of red tapes, a lot of, a lot of hassle. back to the original question, what, what should happen, like I said, every unit is different. So some, some units do this well, but
You have to be cognizant of the fact that everybody that's coming to you, nearly everybody is coming from somewhere else. So it's sort of incumbent on the unit that's there to help the people adapt to, you know, whatever the new things are. So if it's, if it's Germany, that's a huge adaptation. So what can we do in a unit for incoming personnel?
Damon Wells (09:02.986)
to ensure that they adapt, understand, because German laws are different, you have to get a special driver's license here, there's different regulations on the maintenance standards for your car, and if somebody doesn't help you understand all that, you're gonna have a lot of problems. So it's really incumbent on the unit to understand the problem you just asked, and it's ubiquitous throughout the Army that there's some process for that.
It's not always employed with a hundred percent efficiency because somebody's actually got to be the one who takes the new person and helps them through that process. it's just another simple example. When you go to Fort Carson, where I just came from Colorado, it's at 6,000 feet elevation. So running is much more challenging at Fort Carson, that is at, at sea level. So because of that, you're allotted a certain amount of time before you have to take your
physical test, your fitness test, because it's going to take you long to adapt. Kind of a small sort of physical example, but it's an acknowledged fact that everybody has to go through an adjustment period and if helped along that adjustment period, you'll adjust faster.
Melissa Aarskaug (10:20.052)
that I think we got to give ourselves times to adjust, right? So any new situation, whether you're taking a new job or moving to a different country, there's time, like you said, adjusting to the time zone, for example, seems pretty easy. But if your body's used to sleeping, you know, on Pacific Standard Time, and now you're
Damon Wells (10:34.999)
Yeah, exactly.
Melissa Aarskaug (10:41.794)
you know, X hours ahead in other countries, it takes some time for your circadian rhythm to reset so you can sleep correctly. And so I love kind of what you said, adjusting and really leaning into that and giving yourself time to work through that and let your body adjust to whatever the new challenge that you're in is. I want to talk a little bit about the P4
Damon Wells (11:07.188)
Yeah.
Melissa Aarskaug (11:11.936)
leadership model and talk a little bit about the trust, excellence, embracing your purpose. Can you share a little bit about that with our listeners?
Damon Wells (11:22.176)
Yeah, the P4 is obviously 4P, so people is the first P. Partnerships is the second P. Practice is the third and purpose is the fourth. So the most basic, and it's kind of based on complexity theory, a little bit of neuroscience, a little bit of game theory, but the most basic thing you have to understand about building a team is the people. So that's why people is first.
And then sort of the, the pinnacle of where you can get a team is that everyone has a very clear understanding of the team's purpose, which is why that's the last one. And just to kind of caveat it upfront, not every team gets that purpose domain, that echelon of team building. This is very hard. It's if you think of like special forces organizations,
They probably get there quicker because they have very rigid selection mechanism that sort of weeds out people until you get to a group of people who all kind of see the world the same way, who are all willing to sacrifice themselves because they believe in this thing that they tried really hard and seen their friends sort of fall by the wayside. They just put a lot of energy into getting into this organization.
So they tend to see the world the same. tend to share the same values already. So you kind of go through the first phases of P4 faster for that, but that's just an example. So in the real world, when you start with people, then if you're the new leader coming into an organization, you understand who am I leading. The first mechanism that you have to be aware of is trust. So trust is kind of the
the eight-way criteria to get to the next one. So what does that really mean? So I have to exhibit behaviors as quickly as possible because I want to reach a threshold of trust where I can say things and they believe that my motivations are benign and that my interests revolve around making the team better and making them better as individuals. And that sounds simple, but
Damon Wells (13:42.698)
You know, if you're, for example, if you're an introvert, then you won't be compelled to communicate that often. So what happens is people fill the gap in you talking with own assumptions about why you're not talking first of all, and then just have to try to use a very, many skills cues that you're giving them to understand you. So I'm kind of introvert myself. So I know I have to go out of my way to communicate, to talk.
to let people know that I want the organization to succeed and that's where my interests lie. So when you ask them to do something hard or uncomfortable, their immediate thought is, don't want to do that. I don't think this guy knows what he's doing. Their immediate thought should be, it's probably okay. I trust him. He knows what's best for the unit. I'll do the uncomfortable thing. So to me, that's like the most basic line between the two dots that are people in your organization.
Next is is partnership. So go ahead. I could talk about this for a long time. So if you if you want to chat.
Melissa Aarskaug (14:44.482)
Yeah.
No, no, no, no, sorry. Keep going. Yeah. No, I think I was just gonna say that like you were saying about trust, think, you I'm in the casino gaming industry and I think a trust like a slot machine, you gotta put a whole bunch of coins in that machine until you can take your prize, right? And I think a lot of times...
people assume very quickly that they have the trust and that people trust them. And it's easy to break it down too. Like you could spend 10 years building trust and it takes one situation to lose the trust. And so I think a lot of times trust is not given it's earned. And the only way you can earn trust is like you were saying is to communicate and to talk. And if you're not talking, it's very hard to build trust with body language and you
Damon Wells (15:15.392)
That's right.
Melissa Aarskaug (15:39.41)
So I just, think that's so spot on.
Damon Wells (15:42.976)
Yeah. And, but I imagine it's this way with every organization, but in the military, part of the implicit trust comes with the rank you wear. So I tend to just have baseline trust for someone who outranks me because I make assumptions about what they know got this far. so, so there is a little bit of implicit trust, but a lot of it is earned. A lot of it's, it's almost impossible again, through nonverbals and body language and
people just making assumptions out you. And you know, you can't, it is, does take a lot time to build. And, you know, I used to explain it this way, it's like, when I'm asking leaders that work for me, like, what are you doing to build trust and have to explain that it's, literally the aggregate of all your behaviors that add up to trust or not, because you can't just go to your team and say, okay, team, trust me. I want you to trust me. Did everybody trust me now? Just doesn't work like that.
It's an indirect mechanism. And I can move on to partnerships if you're ready.
Melissa Aarskaug (16:49.869)
Yeah, yeah,
Damon Wells (16:51.132)
Okay. So because I, because I needed a model that had all the same starting letters, partnerships, what I really mean is teams, right? So the, the milestone criteria for teams is cohesion. So you have the, two dots that are people with the link between them that's trust. Now you aggregate dots and you put more lines and which one is team cohesion. And what I mean by that is not only do I trust the people I work with,
that then have a, have this baseline, this threshold level of trust. What we also have is sort of a, we're beginning to congeal this unit identity, i.e. I see my own identity, but I also have this unit identity, you know, where the Barracudas or lands or whatever we are, my brain and I'll start to adjust to say, okay, identify with this team. Like these are my people. This is kind of like a family and
You'll start to put a little more energy into making the team better at your own discomfort because you feel a special bond to these people. Family is a good kind of metaphor for it, you've sort of crossed this boundary where now this team that you were new to at some point and you didn't know anybody, now you know people, now you know about their families. You can say, that's Joe.
Joe's really good at this. If we need this, then we'll go to Joe and he'll do it. Then you get this like, because you want the team to succeed, hey, Joe didn't show up today. Hey, we got to pull that little extra weight, do Joe's job. And nobody's really upset about that. Yeah, no big deal. Joe would do it for us. We'll just fill it in, right? So at this level, generally, of course these things don't always perfectly apply, but you can think of the transition from a very basic
team to really efficient team. At some point, the team has a very hierarchical leadership structure in which the leaders at the top, people at the bottom can be good, but they're always looking up for someone to kind of give them direction. And this is where it sort of transitions at that partnership stage is from a hierarchical leadership to what
Damon Wells (19:15.06)
been doing this. know how to do this. I want the team to succeed. If I go ask the boss, he's going to tell me to do this. I know this is what we do on Wednesdays. I'm just going to do it anyway without asking. And then people sort of build this, you know, this initiation mechanism that lets them just do what you're supposed to do without being told. And that's a huge threshold right there. And that's purpose. I'm sorry, that's partnerships.
Melissa Aarskaug (19:43.254)
Yeah, think it is. It's an interesting. I love the piece. First of all, that's great. I do think when I think of a, you know, a well, you know, cohesive working team, you know, sometimes one of your teammates are going to be down and the sum total of the group needs to pick up when let's say somebody sick, right? And you have a mission to get done or so I think when there's trust in a team.
and one person is not on their A game, the other team members pick up the slack. And I see this in sports, I see this in the military, in corporate America, but if you don't have the trust in the team, it's highly unlikely people are gonna wanna.
you know, do stately to do extra work if, you know, you're not well liked and you're not well trusted in that group. So you're spot on. It requires a lot of trust, communication, collaboration, understanding the vision and the purpose and why we're all here doing this together. And so I think those are great. Great. Any final thoughts on that before we I switch gears on you?
Damon Wells (20:57.182)
No, yeah, let's switch gears.
Melissa Aarskaug (21:00.654)
I want to talk a little bit when I about
you know, making decisions. think in the military, you're often, it's like a muscle. You're able to make quick decisions and you don't think about it. It's gut reaction. You do it right away without thinking. And in corporate America, I think a lot of times we do lot of humming and thinking and processing and going back to the drawing board. And sometimes decisions might take years in corporate America, which
effectively slows the business down from like you were saying their purpose. So I want to talk a little bit about how you can balance these quick decision making with fear of not making the right one, but still making sure that you're making the best decision for that time.
Damon Wells (21:54.72)
Yeah, that's a huge topic. So decision making in the military. So there's a couple of ways this happens and it's not necessarily quick. It depends on what the decision is. Cause I know there are times when I'm going to, I'm going to tell you do this right now. It's a high stress environment and you have to do it. And I have to think through, you know, was, you know, what's the decision? Somebody's got to do it. Go do it. For the most part.
Every service is different, but in the army, have a structure, a sort of framework called the military decision making process. And it's very rigid, very structured. First, understand all the variables that go along with this problem. That's where things like assumptions come in. Do I have all the facts I need to conduct this operation? Essentially what the way to describe the military decision making process is if you could put out
a theoretical dry erase word. Here's all the facts that I would need to know in order to flee, execute this mission. Some of those you do know, so you can kind of mark those off. Some of them you don't. If I don't know this, do I really need to know it? And if I really need to know it, then it becomes an assumption that I have to verify along the way before we execute, hopefully. And then you can...
You can build a plan and you can say, here, here was a big conceptual problem that we wanted to solve and the why. And here are the much smaller, more well-defined, less complicated problems that comprise that big problem. What you essentially do is you take this big ambiguous problem, like move, you know, 300 vehicles and 1200 people from Texas to California to conduct a
a big training rotation. You essentially whittle those problems down into command level problems at the very junior level. Okay, commander, you know, figure out how to get your people from your headquarters, this bus with, with this gear, and it even goes lower than that. Okay, squad leader, I need you to take your sub people, inspect your gear, make sure they have all their stuff, make sure it's searchable, and get to this point at this time and get on the bus. so
Damon Wells (24:20.138)
There's, there's different ways to look at decision making. That is the most deliberate, most sort of step action drill of decision making, but there are other times, like you said, when a decision needs to be made right now. So it's, it's one of those things where hopefully you have enough experience and context to be, to not just be at a decision point.
and have to make a decision in the absence of any other data. Usually what's going on is you're a situation's usually stressful, it's gotta be a quick decision. In the environment you're in, you're constantly watching for data. And as a commander, what you should be thinking about as a leader in general, but this is commanders really do is you're always thinking what can happen, what's next? Where am I accepting risk?
What's the worst thing that could happen right now? What would I have to do if that thing happens? And then, and you're always thinking what decisions might I have to make? In fact, you might say, Hey, look, the worst thing that can happen in this operation is something that's catastrophic. So before we go out, let's figure out what can we do to mitigate that risk? Cause it might be something on a road. Okay. Can we avoid that road that way? That decision point is just eliminated.
But it's kind of things like that. So it's not the absence of data, because you're constantly scanning for data. It's the ability to keep that data in front of your mind so that if there's a decision point, it's going to be quick. You can make it with as much data as you had access to at the time. And one of the things they kind of beat into is an 80 % solution right now.
is much better than 100 % solution that's too late. So, and that always made sense to me.
Melissa Aarskaug (26:24.384)
I love that. And I think the military really does help train leaders to make decisions. think, you going back to your example in the military, if, you know, your leader yells at you to do whatever the thing is, you do it. You don't overthink it. You don't, you do it, right? He's your leader or she's your leader. In corporate America, if...
You know, your leader, you know, yells at you to get something done. You're like, we get into the emotions a lot with things or overthinking it or, you know, in not just doing it, right? Because really, like you were saying at the beginning, the leader is, you know, made its way up to the CEO or whatever the rank is in the military. And, and they're the decision makers for whatever the mission is, whether it's, you know, military or corporate America. So I do.
I do like that saying about 80 % because, know, kind of going back to what I said before, I see people him and Hall over decisions all the time, you know, and sometimes it's just picking and going with the best decision with 80 % of the information is better than doing nothing because nothing is also a decision, a decision to
Damon Wells (27:36.416)
That's right.
Damon Wells (27:41.002)
Your mic cut out.
Melissa Aarskaug (27:58.193)
Can hear me now? That's really weird. have no idea what's going on. It's not done that. So I want to transition and talk a little bit about leadership principles and from the military's point of view, how do you think that those principles that you mentioned, some of them, any others, how they translate into civilian world and how you think they will transition for you?
Damon Wells (28:29.748)
Yeah, well, they're kind of ubiquitous. So they translate into everything. And I'm writing a book right now that starts with those and sort of drives down into some of the details, throws a couple other leadership models on top of them. And it kind of spits out the P4 model. And, you know, I spent some time when I was in the War College. Leadership has always been my passion. So I wanted to understand, you know,
leadership, army leadership doctrine in general, where does this come from? How, how well are we applying it? What does the army really say we're supposed to do? And the interesting thing is if you want to, take the army, get to the art principles here in a minute, but you can imagine there's a ton of army leadership doctrine. Like it's a leadership factory. we, you know, we, we are very, we prioritize leadership. We, we want to train people in leadership.
The funny thing is we don't really train specific leadership skills until the much, much higher, like not so you're, you've been in army for probably 15 years. Do you go to school that just kind of gives you leadership paradigm and talks through the intricacies of leadership writ large. You're just expected to go read the field manual that talks about leadership and apply it from, you know, knowledge from the book.
which I always found was interesting because leadership is one of the backbones of what we do. And in my opinion, if you can learn how to be good leader, you can fit all the other stuff in there because you're really good at getting people to do what's supposed to be done without, you know, without putting up too much of a fight. So there's a couple of things. So a vast amount of leadership doctrine that's
Melissa Aarskaug (30:22.417)
Mm-hmm.
Damon Wells (30:28.128)
that's not really trained in any of the Army schools a little bit, not too much less than you'd expect. And then you have things like, okay, if we're not gonna put it in the schools, then the assumption is they're gonna get, when they go to two organizations and at, you know, at the junior ranks, an organization will be responsible for training very young officers, lieutenants on lieutenant level tasks and.
They'll be responsible for training young commanders, company commanders, captains on specific skills for that rank and on and on. Which, which does happen. the problem is because it's not formalized at the army level, it is actually somewhat, it's just not enforced for the army level down to the unit level. So what happens is you get different versions of that everywhere you go. So you get some versions.
where none of that happens. And you get some versions of, you know, someone who really cares about leaders and understands how to train and convey information and get people to interact with stuff like that. It happens very well, but it's not standard. So it depends on the organization you go to. And you've seen the P4, like I'm so interested in it, I built my own model that's derivative from the Army model.
but there's just a lot of ways to do it now with army uses is what's called the army leadership requirements model. So these are roughly the principles and it's broken into sort of six facets. And there's three on top. There's three on bottom and the three on top are called attributes and the three on the bottom are called competencies. So the three attributes are things like character.
Presence, intellect. So these are the things a leader should be and know. So what we expect of leaders is that you have a strong character, that you're not going to break the laws or break the rules or demean people. We want people to have strong intellect, so the ability to solve problems, to understand human related problems as well as tactical related problems. And so...
Damon Wells (32:53.344)
I already forgot. Character, intellect, and presence. So presence is the third one. So we expect you to look and behave like a leader, i.e. you don't show up to work looking sloppy, enforce standards, you stay fit, things like that. Now the competencies are the things you should do. So that's things like just a simple category. It's called leads, right? There's another one that's called develops others.
There's a third one called, get back to that one a minute, cause I forgot that one too. So let's talk about leads. So leads is the simple competency of getting people to do the things that you need them to do, Which I'll say at the junior level.
Sounds like I know what to do. I say, do these things and people will do the things. But the longer you stay in the military, the more you realize it was certainly not that simple. so along the way you go from transactional leadership to, know, it would just be easier if they knew all the things and they were willing to do the things without me even telling them.
So you learned leadership techniques to evolve from you do this and then they do it to here's the plan, here's where we want to go as an organization. Here's the behaviors I expect. Here's the mission, here's the intent, here's why we exist. And then you want your subordinate leaders to do that kind of stuff, right? So the next one is DEVELOPS. And interestingly, DEVELOPS is the one do these surveys every couple of years.
develops others is actually one where most army, you know, in the aggregate army leaders score the lowest. In other words, this is our, of those six attributes and competencies that I'm explaining develops others is the one that's always read the lowest, meaning that.
Damon Wells (34:59.04)
What the respondents said was that develops others is not very high on their organization's priority list. And remember this develops others is part of how you build leaders because we don't do it in the schools. Organizations have to do this, but it's done very poorly, which is an interesting contrast. So it's very high. It's very low on the organization's priority list. mean, it's not being done all that well, and it's also not being done all that effectively. And it's not consistent across units.
Some you'll get a lot, some you'll get literally zero. So that's a big one. And that's to me, that's the most important one. That's where I love, especially once I was a battalion commander and a brigade commander, I really love spending time helping people wade through the complexities of what leadership is and explaining, basically telling them everything I know about it. I just have fun doing that. And then the third one is kind of the catch all called achieves. So.
You can be careful with that one and I'll explain why in a minute, but achieves, know, the, simple bumper sticker for that one is gets results. The problem with that is I can violate all of the, all the other five at beauty competencies to get results. But then it doesn't matter. Right. Cause I've basically destroyed my team. So yeah, I got results. I did the achieve, but now everybody hates the army and doesn't want to stay in the army.
because of how I treated them, because all my plans were terrible. So anyway, if I was going to boil down leadership principles, it's those attributes and competencies.
Melissa Aarskaug (36:40.485)
Yeah, and I think kind of what you were saying, leading people and developing people are, you know, here's the mission, do the thing and developing people to have the same skillsets is a tricky, tricky in corporate America, right? I think right now for fear of there's not enough for everyone mentality, like there can only be one.
of this rank so I can't train someone less ranked because I don't want them to take my job, right? So I think a lot of times, like you can't move up until you help somebody move behind you, right? And in some other industries, think in like multi-level marketing, they say, I don't make a dime until you make a dollar. And that is really, correlates back to leadership too, right?
to build and develop people, it takes time. And just like you develop your children, right? Your kids don't, you know, they're not born and they don't take care of themselves. They need to be developed and coached they make mistakes and you put them back on the yellow brick road and you teach them again. And I'll correlate it also to parenting. Like you want your kid to make a ton of mistakes.
while they're in your home because when they go out in the world and they have to make mistakes, if they don't make them with you, they're not going to understand in the world how to resolve them. And it's the same thing with leadership, right? You want, before people are leading people, you need them to make some of the mistakes with you to learn right from wrong and how to do things the way, you know, that the military wants it to be done. And I think, you know,
Talking a little bit about the future of leadership, I think leadership is changing a ton right now and what is a leader. Because a leader isn't just by rank and by title. A leader can be someone without a title, without a rank, that needs to step up in an uncertain situation and do things because maybe the leader's not present or something happened to the leader or they're not.
Melissa Aarskaug (38:54.233)
available to do what the mission is, those people need to step up and kind of like you were saying at the beginning, like that takes grit, determination, understanding the mission and being all in, right? And it correlates in all different industries. So I wanna get a little bit of your thoughts and your experience as it relates to resiliency too. And how do you cultivate
resiliencies and leadership when you're building your teams.
Damon Wells (39:29.79)
Yeah. So resilience kind of comes with the territory. And again, it's, you know, this is keep retreading the same ground, but there's a certain amount of resiliency required just, just based on the uncertainty of the military that if, if you're not, you know, if you don't have a certain level of resiliency, the army's not going to be for you because it's just, comes with the territory. artificial sort of filtering mechanism there, but
Resiliency is important. So there's a, there's a lot of things that can happen to you or around you in the military that are, emotionally traumatic or very stressful, that require you to be able to have the fortitude to kind of process, however long that takes, but process and then get back to what you have to do. so it's sort of, sort of a built in mechanism. I'll even point out that.
resilience was one of our taglines for what we were sort of in the heart of the Iraq, you know, global war on terrorism because servicemen were coming back and, you know, having emotional problems and we're having a hard time. We didn't have the structure, the institutional knowledge to process that. Now we do, but there was a time when having social, you know, people who could give care and have,
psychologists to help folks. It was there. It wasn't robust enough to service the needs of the service members coming back. So that got added to the military's sort of institutional structure. And we started enforcing on commanders to build resilience. And now we've got things like we've got classes that units do. We've got
There's actually a position in a lot of units now it's called a master resiliency trainer. And I always love the one of the modules they do. This is like a 40 hour block of instruction on how to be resilience, resilient. one of the first blocks they do is simply titled how to help the good stuff. So it just simply teaches you to understand your circumstances, see what's going on and understand that maybe your intervigan is bad.
Damon Wells (41:56.884)
may not, but you really need to understand what's going on. And somewhere in there is something that's good. You can reinforce, right? and the army is hard lifestyle in a lot of cases. I'm, I'm sort of suited for it and I'm institutionalized at this point. So I'm okay. But, but I know especially for folks transitioning, especially young folks transitioning from the civilian world, the military, it's a huge culture change. And so that comes with a lot of.
a lot of pressures, a lot of stress, lot of uncertainty. So it is incumbent on people like me, more senior folks to understand and to to do this, but to understand that, you know, anytime you go to a new organization, just being the new person in an organization is stressful, especially when you're young, even compounded more when this is your first unit ever, right? So much uncertainty.
so much of I don't know, you don't know the people, don't, you have no, you have no signs of safety. And that's really what you're looking for when you're stressed, right? I'm looking for something stable, know, indications or signatures of safety that I could sort of latch onto. So it's a big deal when people are new. I've always tried to do this, but when people are new, you have to go out of your way to make them feel comfortable. Cause that's really literally the first day that's sort of the
the signal are you building trust by helping them feel safe in this new environment or are you gonna play the game of you're the new guy I was stressed now you're gonna be stressed let's make it more stressful for you as sort of a test or even worse you're the new guy and I'm indifferent I don't care so just figure it out like everybody else did
So I that's real important for UNISU. I think it's important for senior leaders to understand that I can make that guy more valuable to the team. I can make him or her want to be on this team more simply by doing a few behaviors to indicate this is a safe place. We're going to take care of you're part of the family.
Melissa Aarskaug (44:09.913)
Yeah, and first impressions are everything. And how you leave people feeling is everything, because that is how they're going to leave feeling is how they think of you, right? And if you're making a first bad impression and you're angry and you're aggressive and you're yelling, that's not going to be the great first impression. So like you said, you got to go out of your way to make it right for them.
to get them in the right mindset to move them forward with the mission. And I love kind of what you were saying. I think it's spot on. And the other thing is discipline. I think resilience and discipline, you know, I kind of see them hand in hand, right? So when people come back from these really challenging missions, they need to have the discipline to take care of themselves, to process it, to work through it.
Just like staying in shape, right? Because a lot of times I think the more we bottle things and say, okay, I'm gonna bottle that, I'm gonna put it in a file folder on the back of my head. Before long, the file folder gets full of stuff that we haven't had the discipline to process and work through that it just spills out into your life. And so I love kind of what you were saying, but I think
you know, just kind of in closing, just final kind of closing thoughts and takeaways or anything, any key lessons that we maybe haven't talked about or thoughts you want to leave with our listeners before we close up.
Damon Wells (45:47.808)
So because leadership is my passion, I see the world through the lens of basically all the stuff we've already talked about. So I'm real cognizant of how a leader makes people feel. And you mentioned at one point that maybe it's not a leader who's making the decision. It's someone who's in the right position at the right time that has to do leadership things. I think that's very true because
It's not just a person that wears the highest rank that has to be the leader. think everybody has to be able to understand when the environment calls for them to be a leader and to be ready for that. And scanning the environment to understand, is this the time where I need to do a leadership thing? Nobody's called me leader, but the environment is indicating that I need to do this thing. I can do something simple as make someone feel comfortable in this environment.
help them understand what it is that we're supposed to be doing and just led that person. So for me, it's not just a corporate or a executive or a military leadership thing. It's a framework to see the world around you and to understand how you're interacting with the people, the most basic unit in the social system around you, interacting with the people in either.
making them more comfortable in the environment or helping them do something that makes them better.
Melissa Aarskaug (47:16.335)
Yeah, I love that. We have to unpack that. think you could be a fantastic leader. You can be the world's greatest leader. But if your culture and your environment isn't set up for success and it's.
toxic, it can be hard to lead in those kind of environments and getting everybody in the mission, right? So like the principles you were mentioning, if you achieve the mission, but you know, nobody trusts you, you've done, you know, you've taken things you've, you know, you've not been, you know, I would say the right leader. Is it really all worth it? Right? I think I hear a lot in corporate America.
You know, my culture is toxic, therefore I can't do what I need to do or lead the people the way I need to lead. And it becomes tricky, right? And I think I love all that you just said, because I think to be a really great leader, you have to have the support and the vision and clearly understand the mission that you're going for because it gets everybody going and pulling.
on the rope together versus against each other on opposite ends of the rope.
Damon Wells (48:35.476)
Yeah, if you've created an environment and you're the one who's technically in charge but you have a toxic environment and nobody will go out of their way to do the right thing unless you force them to, you're not the leader. Somebody else is, but it's not you. You're the person that owns the reins and you can tell people which direction to go and might do it, but you're not the leader. The leader's driving the organization and it's somewhere else in your organization, but it's not you.
Melissa Aarskaug (49:03.417)
Yes, that is so good. I really agree. Damon, thank you so much for being here and sharing your insights. cannot wait to read your book. I'm excited to hear all about the principles that we've talked today about. Follow Damon, read his book, we'll share all the details in the show notes and follow us. That's the executive connect.
Damon Wells (49:11.879)
integer.
Melissa Aarskaug (49:32.625)
podcast.