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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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[00:00:00.000] - John Berry
But the truth is, when you're a real leader, you want to hire everybody who's better than you, and you're not intimidated, and you're not scared. You want to seek out and find the absolute best. And if they're not better than you, you shouldn't hire them.
[00:00:18.560] - John Berry
Welcome to Veteran Led. I'm your host, John Berry. In this episode, I had the opportunity to visit with VFW Post 2503 on Veterans Day and sat down with two local Veterans who make a difference in the Omaha community. The first Veteran is Randy Norwood, who served 24 years in the Air Force. Randy is helping Veterans every day as the Omaha Chamber's associate vice President of Military Affairs and Strategic Partnership. We join my conversation with Randy as he recounts a specific eye-opening experience as an NCO that sent him on a leadership trajectory that defines who he is today.
[00:01:01.760] - Randy Norwood
One of the greatest lessons I think I learned during my time in the service was when I just made E6, so Technical Sergeant in the United States Air Force. I was looking up and looking at the leadership of my peers. I was like, wow, we have a long way to go. I have a founded belief that you do not have a right to complain about anything unless you're willing to take action to fix it. That drove me to become an NCO Academy instructor. While I was teaching my peers, fellow E6s, I really started to get this understanding and appreciation of priorities and resilience and leadership. Probably the biggest lesson from all of that really had to do with, it's team first, then my buddies, then me. To be able to take care of those and how that leads into what I'm doing now is just as I was an NCO academy instructor or first sergeant for seven years, it's taking care of service members and their families. All that experience to go and help. One of the greatest awards that we've received in our local area is the Great American Defense Community. I was just out in Orlando celebrating that.
[00:02:14.520] - Randy Norwood
Just to be able to take care of our service members, their families, help with employment, lots of different avenues.
[00:02:21.530] - John Berry
I know you have studied, and more than just studied, you've lived the leadership and team dynamics, and you've really figured out how it all ties together. What have you brought from the Air Force to this position now or to your life in general, after service, that leadership and team dynamics that you focus on?
[00:02:42.100] - Randy Norwood
What I learned from the military is, and I'll even tie in Stephen Covey, one of my favorite leadership principles. I'm going to butcher it, but it's better to understand before striving to be understood. I want to help people succeed, but first you have to hear their story. The reason to be able to hear their story, you have to listen, whether that be through reflective listening, just all sorts of different ways of listening, but really to understand where they're coming from. You mentioned my degree, aviation. I love aircraft. I love fixing things. Well, things break. People do not. That's really what drove me more towards the humanistic side, I'd say, to help them become better. It's their version of better. It's their version of success. That's what matters. As I'm going through in my current role, to take all those good quality leadership, resiliency, the discipline, you name it. There's just so many great things that the military instills in a person to be able to take that and apply it and hopefully make somebody's life better.
[00:03:54.530] - John Berry
You said that this shows some great insight. You talked about their version of success.
[00:03:59.190] - Randy Norwood
Absolutely.
[00:03:59.500] - John Berry
Too often we want to... When you think back to the military, we knew the standards. There was always the standards. You meet the standards. If you don't meet the standards, you don't change the standards. You change your actions. Then you become a civilian and you realize that everybody has their own definition of success. If you are going to lead them, you need to listen long enough to figure out their version of success. And this is why we have one mouth and two ears. And listening, for me, this is, I think, where I've really failed as a leader. It probably took me till I was about 40 years old to really understand that feedback is a gift and that we fail to hear what our team members say a lot. And we really have to be intentional about asking those questions because a lot of time, the first answer they give us is either the answer they think we want to hear or it's just the surface answer. And then we have to say, I want to take a step and dig back deeper.
[00:04:47.170] - John Berry
One of the exercises I did at Gerry Spence's Trial Lawyers College, where we would try to really get in the head of a witness to figure out what they're really trying to say was we'd have them sit in a chair and then we'd say, okay, answer the question. And then we'd put a chair behind them. Let's go one row back in your brain. Now, what do you really want to say? And they'd say something. Then we put another chair behind them and say, okay, we're going a little deeper, but let's really go super deep on this. And you tell me what it is, how it is you came to this answer, and what you really want to tell me. Sometimes that way we can hear what they're trying to say. Sometimes we hear what they're saying by what they don't say.
[00:05:25.110] - Randy Norwood
Absolutely.
[00:05:25.900] - John Berry
I'm horrible at that because I just want to go, go, go, and solve the problem. Sometimes it's as a leader sitting back and saying, wait a minute, they're not saying this. And why not? And then you ask, and you find out that you, as a leader, have missed the biggest piece of the entire conversation. It always feels like failure. Well, everything feels like failure in the middle. But then you get to the end, and you realize that it was a good conversation. And usually when you could admit that as a leader, you weren't exactly going down the right path to begin with, and maybe you need to adjust your azimuth or adjust fire, team members get it. I think that's how we help them. I know that you've had a lot of experience in that. How do you integrate the things you learned, like risk management and time management in your current role?
[00:06:11.650] - Randy Norwood
When you think about risk management, I'm almost looking at it from the other side to say, okay, Company X, they don't want to hire a Veteran, or they don't want to hire a spouse, or they don't want to do this out of the other thing. I'm trying to show them that risk is worth every second of it. It's more so, I think, for what I'm doing is on the flip side of assessing or trying to evaluate what a business thinks as a risk and trying to help them mitigate that.
[00:06:44.040] - John Berry
Yeah, the risk you're facing in hiring a Veteran or military spouse because you're worried that they may not be around or there may be other issues, that's insignificant compared to the risk you have of losing that opportunity to hire someone great who knows how to lead, who knows how to get through adversity, who knows how to get the job done and get it done as standard. Most employers I know are struggling today with the workforce. It's harder and harder to find people with the same values who want to go out and do something great every day and be part of a winning team. It seems that, once again, maybe this has happened for decades, but it seems to me that coming out of military service, I was always surprised at how many people wanted to get by with the minimum effort. You just don't see that in the Veteran community. The spouses understand as well that this is, hey, we're here to win. We have the most important job in the United States. We support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We, when we deploy, are charged with protecting America's sons and daughters, America's best, who volunteer for our force to go out and close with and destroy the enemy.
[00:07:56.190] - John Berry
It's our job to ensure that they're taken care of. We understand that doing the minimum is not acceptable because when we do the minimum, bad things happen.
[00:08:06.180] - Randy Norwood
Absolutely. When you start thinking about that, that in and of itself will scare some potential employer. They're missing that opportunity because we are hard chargers, we are hard workers. I'll bring up the resilience piece again. With the values that we bring in, if a job needs to be done, we do it. There are peers now that we're out who don't do that. Then they start thinking, what's this person trying to do is one up me or whatever? Then there becomes that cultural part of what does that look like? Because you do get that hard worker, we're critical thinkers. We bring a whole lot of ingenuity. You tell us to get something done, we're going to do it. Tell me to make you a cup of coffee right on. It's going to be the best doggone cup of coffee you've ever had in your life. But give me the freedom to do that. That's one of the things that I think is very important.
[00:09:12.880] - John Berry
Yeah, I think what a lot of employers don't understand is in the military mission statements, we tell the who, what, the when, where, and the why, we never give the how. The Soviet doctor, and they tell them exactly how they're going to do it. But the reason why we never tell our service members how to do something is because That is their job as leaders. We want them, the commander on the ground, the soldier or the airman, boots on the ground, that can see the whole picture to make the decision. We shouldn't be telling them how to do it. We expect them to know how to do it. When we get to some of the civilian leaders that I've met, they're intimidated by Veterans because Veterans are here for a bigger future. They're going to get stuff done. John Maxwell, one of his rules of leadership was that a leader will never follow a lesser leader. If you're a lesser leader, you don't want to hire that hard-charging Veteran because you're intimidated, you're scared. But the truth is, when you're a real leader, you want to hire everybody who's better than you, and you're not intimidated, you're not scared.
[00:10:11.710] - John Berry
You want to seek out and find the absolute best. If they're not better than you, you shouldn't hire them.
[00:10:18.230] - Randy Norwood
I could not agree more. When you start thinking about leadership and the values that we bring based off of our experiences, we're going to get it done. One of the things, it's the how. Let us figure that out. We'll provide a product or a result better than you could have possibly imagined, because that's what we do. The life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, we're behind it, we're going to defend it. When we're out, retired, home station, you start thinking about all the different values. You mentioned some of the different doctrines, some of the different military services and different things that they going on. One of the things that make the profession of ours a profession is that distinct subculture. With that subculture, you really can't explain it unless you've lived it.
[00:11:15.380] - John Berry
During my visit to VFW Post 2503, I also spoke with its previous Commander, Larry Quilliam, a Vietnam Veteran who was instrumental in overhauling the culture of the organization. During two of the three years that he was in command, VFW Post 2503 received the All-American Post Award, which is given to less than 10% of VFWs worldwide. We join my conversation with Larry as he describes how he transformed Nebraska's largest VFW post into one of the finest in the world.
[00:11:51.480] - Larry Quilliam
Leadership begins, in my opinion, with a mission that is of value to you personally and to your organization. So you work as a team, but you all get on board to that mission. So, my first objective here was to create a new mission for this post, and that was to be the friendliest, most open, welcoming post in all of Nebraska. First part of the mission. Second was to get as many younger Veterans as we possibly could from Iraq, Afghanistan, et cetera, involved in this post. And we have gained a lot more as a result of that. But their mission is to own this place. This is their place as much as it is mine, but they're the future of our VFW, so they have to take over and own it. Now that I'm no longer commander, most of those younger guys that I met a couple of years ago are now in charge of this post, and we're very proud of that.
[00:12:55.540] - John Berry
We look at today's all voluntary force, and we think, we're put in charge of someone who is great, someone who actually has a mission that is bigger than themselves, that they chose at a very young age, many of them 18 or younger, that they were going to serve their country. Then it's our job to say, we have somebody who's special, and we got to mold and develop them. When we did that, that was such a great opportunity. It was so rewarding. Now you get that opportunity as these Veterans come into 2503, and they see that hey, we want to get involved. We want to help. We want to keep serving. And so, you get to facilitate that. So that's going to be rewarding. How do you make sure that everybody in your organization follows that vision that you had for being the friendliest, most open?
[00:13:48.430] - Larry Quilliam
Well, how do you make sure that they follow it is maybe a little easier said than done, because sometimes when you're working with all volunteers, they're like, you're herding cats. But in the same, they have to buy into the mission, just like when you were in the service or I was in the service, they had to buy into the mission. You have to grow. You have younger people in this organization have different attitudes, different approaches to life. They're younger, and so you have to adapt to those goals and their desires. The mission remains the same, but the attitudes do change, and so that's important. But we don't serve by treating Veterans here. We serve by helping them by knowing where they can go to get more serious help. For example, Berry Law, prime example. But that's where we direct people, and it's here where they enjoy the camaraderie of being fellow members and having a mission from their past.
[00:14:54.330] - John Berry
In talking to a lot of the business owners here, it is nice to be able to come into an organization and there's somebody who knows how to do that. There's a professional that has the answer. One of the things that I really... When I was a commander, I really liked my chaplain and my jag officer, because if it was a problem that I couldn't solve, I knew that if it was a faith-based problem, I had sent it to the chaplain. If there were some family issues and stuff, and then if it was a legal problem, I could send it to the jag officer. I always felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. When I was helping these soldiers and obviously making sure that our team completed our mission and completed it to standard, and we did in a way that was the safest way we could do it to ensure that nobody got unnecessarily injured. I think back to how stressful that was when I didn't know the answer and who I could go to. When you come in an organization like this, there are professionals who served, who you know, like and trust, and they're out there and they're in the organization, and everybody knows somebody who can solve your problem.
[00:16:02.620] - John Berry
I think that's what's so great about communities like yours that are open. Because if every group, if the Vietnam Veterans have their own group and the OIF, OEF Veterans, and they're not talking and interacting, A lot of that expertise and experience is lost.
[00:16:17.420] - Larry Quilliam
No question about that. Yeah. The military experience when you combine two soldiers, five soldiers together, gets more and more multiplicative power by having more of those people working together. It's so easy to get things done around here when you have three or four people working together because they instantly go to work, and they get the mission done. In private life, it doesn't always work that easily together.
[00:16:47.920] - John Berry
Well, in the military, and we've probably learned this day one when we show up at basic training or boot camp or wherever, even for me, Infantry Officer Basic course, if the team messes up, everybody is doing pushups. Everybody is paying for it. One of my greatest fears as a leader, and probably just as a member of the military in general is I never wanted to let the team down.
[00:17:08.860] - Larry Quilliam
Absolutely.
[00:17:09.610] - John Berry
That was the fear, is I don't want the mission to fail because of me. I don't want someone to get killed because of me. I don't want someone to not be prepared because of me. When you set up your leadership team here, obviously, it's the same mentality. It's an all-volunteer group. All of your members have important lives. They're serving the community, they're serving their families, they're earning a living, they're doing all these other things, and yet they still make the time, and time is our most precious commodity, to come back here to complete the mission because they don't want to be the reason the mission failed.
[00:17:42.010] - Larry Quilliam
I'm proud to work with everyone who volunteers up here. If you walked around our post today, which is Veterans Day, we're going to serve over 400 people. It takes a lot of volunteers to be successful at that.
[00:18:00.950] - John Berry
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we pursue our mission of promoting Veteran leadership in business, strengthening the Veteran community, and getting Veterans all of the benefits that they earn. 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, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.