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Veterans know how to lead. The lessons we learned in the military form the foundation for bigger successes in business, entrepreneurship and community.
Host John S Berry, CEO of Berry Law, served as an active-duty Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army, finishing his military career with two deployments and retiring as a Battalion Commander in the National Guard. Today, his veteran led team at Berry Law, helps their clients fight some of the most important battles of their lives. Leading successful teams in the courtroom, the boardroom, and beyond, veteran leadership drives the firm’s rapid growth and business excellence.
Whether building teams, synchronizing operations, or refining tactics, we share our experiences, good and bad, to help you survive, thrive and dominate.
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Welcome fellow veterans. From the tip of the spear to in the rear with the gear, I went from active-duty Infantry to reserve-component logistician. I'm your host, CEO, entrepreneur, trial lawyer, and Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) John Berry. The military lessons that I learned helped me grow an eight-figure business that has maintained consistent annual double-digit growth, landing on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America every year for the past seven years and has allowed me to continue to serve America's heroes.
From field problems to real problems. You probably remember the term field problem from your time in service, the field training exercise where officers would sit down and try to solve problems. If you were on the staff, you would have to look at the problem and use a process called MDMP, the Military Decision-Making Process. And usually during that process you'd come up with three courses of action, you'd brief the commander, and the commander may choose one of those courses to solve the problem, or the commander may choose his own course of action.
When we got into theater, for those of us that deployed, there were things that would happen quickly, and we usually did not have that long, methodical process to make decisions. We didn't go through MDMP, we reacted quickly and sometimes to our benefit. I can remember the first time that IDF was coming into our base, and we heard the rounds coming in and the sirens went off and everybody wanted to get in full kit and run to the bunkers and get accountability and do everything that we were supposed to do as per our SOP. But as the deployment went on, we realized that most of those rounds were hitting the airfield, weren't getting that close to us, and so when the rounds started hitting, the attitude changed where people were less excited about getting to the bunker and the attitude became more like, ”Oh great, now we've got to get accountability, we got to stop what we're doing, got to get accountability.”
And we know that complacency kills and that's a bad attitude to have, but on the other hand, it does allow us to think through the problem more methodically. Instead of rushing to the bunker and everybody's high adrenaline, now we've slowed it down, we understand what's happening, we understand where the attack is coming from, and we can address it in a much more thoughtful and methodical manner.
Now, in business, I will tell you that unfortunately, when those problems come in, the adrenaline kicks in the same way and it feels like we all want to run to the bunker and get accountability when in fact, the threat that we see may not be as great as we perceive. That being said, if you're in business, you will have problems. You will always have problems.
And one of my biggest mistakes early on was that I thought that I was the only one that had problems, that other businesses didn't have problems, that somehow, I was a failure because I was facing all of these challenges. But the truth is, most businesses face the exact same problems. I love going to leadership conferences or even industry-specific conferences, and I'll find 10 or 20 people who have the exact same problems I have now and 10 or 20 additional people who already had those problems, solved those problems, and can talk me through a resolution. If you run any type of an organization, you will have problems. That is the norm.
Now, I can tell you that when I initially started experiencing problems as a civilian leader, I almost treated it more like the eight steps of evaluating a casualty. Do you remember that? We’d look for breathing, pulse, bleeding, shock, fractures, burn, and then concussions or head injuries. And as we evaluate the casualty, we would figure out the quickest way to treat the casualty so we can evacuate the casualty in a way that didn't make the casualty's problems worse.
In business that’s how it felt, as soon as that problem would hit, I would have all this adrenaline, I’d want to get it fixed as soon as possible, and I wouldn't really assess it methodically. Instead, I assessed it like we were trained to assess the casualty, go very quickly and do what you can to fix the problem now. And I will tell you that many times I came up with the wrong solution because I was so hurried to fix the problem because it was Whac-A-Mole. As soon as one problem pops up, here comes another and another and another, and you cannot solve all the problems.
When I think back to the most serious problems I was facing three years ago, and this, journal, diary, write these big problems down, because I'll tell you, you’ll have the same experience I did. I look at things that happened three years ago and I look back through what was bothering me most. Now, they don't even register as a threat. I don't lose sleep over them at night. It isn't that big of a deal because I've developed better systems, I have more experience, and I have more resilient leaders on my team who will solve those problems. But that doesn't mean that I don't deal with the big problems every day. The bigger your organization grows, the more serious the problems get. And what I thought was a catastrophic problem three years ago is not a catastrophic problem today.
Generally, when I look at problems, I usually put in one of three categories. Number 1: Catastrophic. Catastrophic is, I'm going to lose the business or the company to a major problem like bankruptcy, or someone broke the law or regulation, and there's going to be either severe fines or irreparable professional or reputational damage. Now, the second layer below that is the serious problem where I may lose a key client, or I lose a key team member on my leadership team. Those are serious problems that need to be addressed immediately. And then there are the routine problems, and these are the ones that you have to deal with, but you generally will have enough time to deal with them before you bleed out, before they become a huge problem.
The first is a cash flow problem. The second is broken systems and procedures. If you know you have a cash flow problem and you have four weeks to resolve it, that's a lot of time to fix the problem. Now, sometimes it can be a systemic problem where by the time you figure it out, it's too late, but most of the time, if you're on top of your numbers, you're on top of your business, you can foresee or forecast that cash flow problem coming. And this is the routine problem that you're going to have to deal with from time to time.
Similarly, broken systems and procedures. You will outgrow systems; you will outgrow procedures. The things you do today will prevent you from getting to the next level tomorrow. And that's okay. Those systems and procedures will break, you have to fix them, but those are routine, those are things that you should expect to happen, and you should have a plan for them.
I've also noticed that when you have these problems, not only do you have to triage the problem, but your team needs to be able to understand how to triage the problem. Your team should know what constitutes a catastrophic problem, what is a problem that is defined as serious, and what is a routine problem. So that they're not freaking out and waking you up in the middle night for problems that maybe don't need to be solved right away.
But when you do triage that problem and you figure out which problems you're going to address first, you need to make sure you assign the right team. As soon as you have the problem, what should pop in your head is, who can help me? Nobody does it by themselves. Nobody wins a battle by themselves. Nobody solves the problem by themselves. A lot of times any problem you have in the organization will touch almost every area of the organization. Your job as a leader is to figure out who is affected the most and who can help you solve the problem. So you have to assign the right team to solving that problem.
The next thing you have to do is get your resources aligned. If you have a business, you're going to have resources and generally resources solve the problem. Some of the best advice I received is, if you have a problem and you have enough money to solve the problem, you don't have a problem. But that doesn't mean you don't need to align your resources to make sure that problem gets solved and get solved efficiently and effectively.
And the third thing you have to do is solve the problem. You've aligned the right team, you've got your resources aligned, now you sit down with the team, and you solve the problem. And when you have time to do this, you have to look at the origin of the problem, because sometimes the origin is something you can't do a whole lot about, or the origin is what is going to generate the opportunities. For example, if the origin is the economy, the answer is suck it up and look for opportunities. If the origin of the problem is your industry, then suck it up and look for opportunities because everyone else in your economy and in your industry is facing the same problems.
Now, it may be a leadership issue. It may be as you as you go back, and you slow down, and you think about the origin of the problem, it may be a bottleneck which becomes an operational issue, which you as a leader must solve. It could be a communication issue which you as a leader must solve. Go back to the origin, where did the communication breakdown happen? How do we fix it? And sometimes it's a leadership problem because you or your team decided to implement the wrong strategy supported by the wrong tactics. And in that case, you want to go back through all of your documentation, figure out how do we how do we come to this decision? Let's make sure we understand why we decided on the strategy or why we decided on these tactics before we dismantle this. Because once you do that, then you can narrowly define the problem, and once you have it defined, then the team can work to solve it. The most challenging part of all of this is that if you do not define the problem, you may spend a lot of time solving the problem that isn't. In other words, you develop an ineffective solution because you are trying to solve the wrong problem and, in the process, you only create additional problems.
In conclusion, if you run an organization, you will have problems. In the military, you dealt with problems all the time. There were times when you could sit down and methodically fix the problem, like through the Military Decision-Making Process, but there were other times when you had to react quickly and resolve the problem immediately and any action was better than no action. The reality is, in the business world, when we see the problems and we get hit with the problems, we feel that rush of adrenaline, we feel like we have to fix it right away. But it’s those moments that we really need to slow down and look at the resources we have to fix the problem, the people we have on the team, and then clearly define that problem so that we can come up with a resolution that will fix it and fix it for good until the next problem pops up.
And yes, as a leader, they're going to pop up just like Whac-A-Mole. A problem here, a problem there, a problem there. And you're going to be solving many problems every day. You're going to be solving many problems at different levels of the organization and that's just part of the struggle. The good news is this, is that when you have a great team, you may hear about problems and then the problems just disappear. Why? Because a team member stepped up, took the initiative, did their job, and solved the problem for the organization. And that's why you want to hire veterans and hire people with high initial levels because the problems are going to keep coming. And as you grow, they get more complex, and the team gets more confused. But if you have leaders on the team, they can simplify the complex. They will take those problems and they will run with them and solve them. And that's what leaders want. Leaders want the opportunity to solve problems.
After Action Review:
1. Every organization has its problems, and they don't stop coming.
2. The bigger the organization, the bigger the problems.
3. As a leader, it's your responsibility to triage the problems and figure out who can best solve the problem and what resources you are willing to give them to solve that problem.
Three Down:
1. Problems teach lessons and grow leaders. But there is a cost, and some lessons are more expensive than others.
2. Not every problem is catastrophic. As a leader, you shouldn't be running around like a chicken with your head cut off. Understand that if there's a problem, another problem is going to come, and you must work at a pace where you don't kill the team trying to solve routine problems. There will be catastrophic problems and you will have to act quickly, and it will take everything you’ve got to fix it, but not every problem is catastrophic and if you treat every problem as catastrophic, then the saying goes, “If everything’s an emergency, nothing is an emergency. And it’s your job as a leader to prioritize.
3. Take time to assess and evaluate the problem. Your job as a leader is to keep a cool head and to keep those around you cool, to let them know that you're in charge, and that you've got this, and that together, as a team, we will get through this.
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Lead, where we pursue our mission of promoting veteran leadership in business, strengthening the veteran community, and getting veterans all of the benefits that they earned. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching @veteranled on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your industry or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.