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Workplace Transformation
A Navy SEAL needs to be nimble, conquer chaos, and successfully manage unexpected challenges.
In many respects, business leaders do too because the ability to adapt and be resilient in the face of rapidly changing market conditions is what helps businesses stay competitive, grow, and succeed.
How can we think more like a Navy SEAL to make workplace transformation stick? We’re about to find out, because today’s guest Marty Strong IS a former Navy SEAL.
What You’ll Discover About Workplace Transformation:
* How the lack of investing in employees hinders workplace transformation
* The leadership mindset change needed to facilitate workplace transformation
* How to break down silos that hinder workplace transformation
* The mission critical role of senior leadership in sustaining workplace transformation
* And much more
Guest: Marty Strong
Marty Strong is a retired Navy SEAL combat veteran, CEO, and serves on two corporate boards.
He is a creativity and leadership consultant, motivational speaker, and the author of nine novels and two business leadership books; Be Nimble: How the Creative Navy SEAL Mindset Wins on the Battlefield and in Business released in January 2022 and Be Visionary: Strategic Leadership in the Age of Optimization, released January 2023.
Marty’s suffered the loss of his oldest son, beat cancer twice, and has been shot at in a few exotic countries.
He’s spent a lifetime meeting challenges head on, succeeding in three professions, anticipating crisis, and leading through chaos.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Leadership and Management episodes.
Contact Marty and connect with him on LinkedIn.
Be sure to check out his website, and his books:
Be Nimble: How the Creative Navy SEAL Mindset Wins on the Battlefield and in Business
Be Visionary: Strategic Leadership in the Age of Optimization
Be Different: How Navy SEALs Bend, Break or Ignore Rules to Get Results! (soon to be released)
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Conquer Chaos, Achieve Workplace Transformation: Lessons From a Navy SEAL
A Navy SEAL needs to be nimble and successfully manage unexpected challenges. In many respects, business leaders do, too, because the ability to adapt and be resilient in the face of rapidly changing market conditions is what helps them stay competitive, grow, and succeed. How can we think more like a Navy SEAL to make the workplace transformations stick? We’re about to find out because today’s guest, Marty Strong, is a former Navy SEAL. Stay tuned.
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line.
I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner and I have an amazing guest for you today. He’s Marty Strong. He’s the author of several business leadership books: Be Nimble: How the Creative Navy SEAL Mindset Wins on the Battlefield, Be Visionary: Strategic Leadership in the Age of Optimization, and his soon-to-be-released Be Different: How Navy SEALs Bend, Break, or Ignore Rules to Get Results. That was going to be due out in the summer of 2024.
Now, Marty was a member of the elite Navy SEAL teams for 20 years, leading combat missions and helping to design and test new special operations capabilities. If you’re listening from outside the United States and are unfamiliar with Navy SEALs, please know that they’re an elite special operations force that’s more exclusive and harder to get into than the US Marines.
They’re highly skilled and disciplined, and known for their special methods of operation that allow them to conduct missions against targets that larger forces wouldn’t be able to approach undetected. They’re the best of the best.
Today, Marty has brought his Navy SEAL skill set into the business world. He’s an accomplished leader and active corporate CEO and chief strategist, coaching and mentoring organizations in the area of strategy, organizational design, leadership, crisis management, and coping with the dynamic nature of market disruption. It is a great privilege to have him here with us today.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Marty.
Thanks for having me, Hanna.
First of all, I’d like to thank you for your service to our country. Transitioning from the military into the private sector can be a culture shock for a lot of people, and I’m curious to know what surprised you most about business leadership.
I think – and it will sound almost like a cliche statement, but when you’re in the military, any unit, your focus is on the mission and the men and the people around you. So, what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to prepare for war. You don’t know when that’s going to happen. The adage when I was in was, when that phone rings, you go with what you got. So, there are a lot of involvement and investment in each other.
And leadership was maintaining that culture and maintaining that preparation and readiness for the minute that that phone call came. So, it’s a little bit more altruistic. It’s more about God, country, and the warriors beside you, and then you get out into the commercial world and there’s none of that.
It’s very difficult to find leaders that are investing in their people, that are mentoring, coaching their people in a sustained way. I’m talking beyond an onboarding event when they’re first hired, and even as they’re promoted, a lot of times they’re promoted, they get a title, they get a pay raise. The next day, the sun comes up and they don’t know what they’re supposed to do next, and nobody’s really showing them the way.
So, that is probably the biggest disconnect between the experience that I had in the military and what I’ve seen in the civilian side, commercial side, in business.
What do you think that people need to do better on the business side in order to have more preparedness and readiness?
The outcomes, the consequences of bad business aren’t anywhere near as terrible as the outcomes of bad warfare, but I think it makes everybody’s job easier if the culture of an organization is kind of infused with a team feeling, an empathy for each other, regardless of whether you’re in different technical disciplines. If the accountants could care less about sales and sales could care less about marketing, and vice-versa, or production doesn’t really care about the strategy.
What you basically have is you’ve got all these little clans within an organization, and the org chart makes them look like they’re all organized and coordinating because there’s little lines going to boxes, but in reality, they’re not coordinated, they’re not talking to each other, and they’re not really aware of what the other groups are doing.
So, I think leaders in business can make a huge impact and create kind of common empathy and then common teamwork and project-related point of view. “I’ll help you. I don’t care, I’m going to lift a bucket filled with water and run to the fire, even though it’s your fire and not my fire.”
You can get that mindset, you can get that cultural viewpoint if a leader is committed to doing that, and it has to be sustained and it has to be something that you hire for. You want to hire for characteristics, for people willing to be helpful beyond their resumé, and to jump in and maybe have to work late or work on a weekend to get a project across the finish line, not just drive off on a Friday afternoon and leave the five people that are “responsible” up there burning the midnight oil, just trying to get this thing solved all by themselves.
And if you do that, essentially, in military terms, it’s a force multiplier. What you’ve done is you’ve turned everybody into more than just one employee with one capability. They’re now capable of doing it. They can run out and pick something up from the copier to save somebody steps. There’s almost anything and everything you can do to assist your teammates if that’s the mindset that the organization has put in place.
Well, that makes a lot of sense, Marty. But for those organizations that don’t have that mindset, that are a bit siloed, as you referred to, they look good on an org chart, but in reality, they’re individual fiefdoms that may have a board meeting every once in a while to confer with the most senior ranks of the organization, and then they go back to their little boxes and do their thing. Any recommendations for how to snap them out of that mindset?
It’s difficult to do it at the rebellious rabble at the bottom-left corner of the org chart. I mean, you can influence as a small-scale leader of a division or a department. You can influence and do all the things I just said and accomplish those things in a small scale, but then you have to interact with the rest of the company. And so it’s kind of “My team’s come up with this solution, and they worked for 24 hours, 48 hours, and they accomplished it. It was an amazing thing. It was a miracle we got it done.”
And then you go to the next department and it’s like lining up at the DMV to wait for somebody to pay attention. So, you can still be stymied by the rest of the organization not being empathetic and not being essentially a team-aware participant in what the company is trying to achieve. So, that’s one way.
The other way is that it has to be top-down, and it’s not a fire-and-forget proposition. You can’t have somebody say, “I come in as a CEO and I give a speech,” kind of along the lines of what we’re talking about right now, “to my direct reports,” and they cheer, high five, they walk out of the room and then they don’t do anything. And I don’t do anything because I figured message transmitted, message delivered, and I go on for the next six months not realizing that nobody did anything to change anything regarding what I said my policy was and my approach to things.
So, if you’re going to do it, you as a CEO or a business owner, you have to start at the top. You have to make it a part of your hiring process, onboarding, I guess information, and training, and indoctrination. You have to make it part of your individual leader, and then for them, the individual employee reviews, whether it’s periodic or if it’s just an annual review. It has to be a part of the measurement system, the report card for the whole organization.
And from the top down, you’ve got the authority and the power to make it happen, but you also have to have the energy, and the conviction, and the discipline to make it continually happen. I’ve seen organizations do that, and then in two years, they turn the whole thing around, and then the person at the top moves on to another job and the next person comes in and restructures it, kind of like a bunch of pipes, and people stop talking to each other because that’s just what they’re comfortable with.
So, it’s not guaranteed that one leader puts it in place, the next leader is going to come along and it’s just going to sustain itself. It takes nurturing and attention from the top down.
Nurturing and attention. You mentioned something earlier about developing common empathy. Can you explain a little bit more about what you mean by that?
Sure. So, I’m getting ready to transition right now to be a CEO solely of a healthcare company. If the people in the health care company say they’re working on sales, but they don’t understand that what they’re doing isn’t having a positive effect on the numbers, and they’re disconnected from that reality, and the people in accounting and finance that are trying to reconcile what the salespeople are spending, but there’s no return on what they’re spending, and they’re raising all kinds of Cain because somebody in management needs to pay attention to this.
The salespeople are spending all this money, they’re on the road, they’re doing all this, and they’re not selling anything, and we’re kind of burning money for no good reason. And the salespeople aren’t aware; they think they’re doing the best they can. They have been taught, or trained, or introduced to the people that are counting positive or negative effects of their behaviors.
So, when you get them in the same room and you kind of expose them to each other, suddenly the salespeople say, “It’s a long sales cycle. It’s a four-month sales cycle and I’ve got to do a lot of road trips and a lot of running around, a lot of meet-and-greets and spend a lot of money on dinners, and lunches, and coffee to get this thing through about a five- or six- or 10-step sales process.”
Because when it does go cha-ching at the end of that process, it’s a big dollar amount, but you’re not going to see a tit-for-tat like accountants and finance people would want to see if the sales are spending $4,000.00 a month on lodging and travel expenses and they’re not bringing in $4,500.00 a month. From an accounting and finance standpoint, that looks like the salespeople are doing something that’s not helping. You see what I mean? So, you have to get them in the same room and show them the dynamics on both sides.
And then all of a sudden, the finance and accounting people are like, “Oh, okay, so this is like an investment, like a sunk cost into the long-term process of closing this deal.” And then you have to take what’s the accumulated expectation of those dollars being spent for, say, four months to close the deal, and when you close the deal, if the company makes a profit of, say $75,000.00 – so you’re selling yachts or something. They make $75,000.00 and it cost them $9,000.00 in sales expenses to get the $75,000.00.
Now they have their ROI, their return on investment, and now they see it as an investment, not a waste of money and a waste of time. The salespeople also get to find out that there’s somebody back there counting pennies. Somebody’s paying attention to what they’re doing, and they’re being surveilled, and they get to hear why: because the company needs to know they’re making money, and if they don’t do their job well, well, maybe they’re going to get some training or they’re going to get replaced. So, that all makes everybody a little bit more aware and empathetic.
And I don’t mean empathetic to the point of like crying and hugging each other and all, but I mean empathetic from a professional standpoint. “Oh, I see what kind of skin you have in this game, and here’s what I’ve got going on, and now we’ve got a common interest because we’re in the same company.” And now the finance people really want the salespeople to win, and the salespeople really want to show the finance people that they’re winners. You know what I mean?
Yes, I understand what you mean. That sounds like the ideal world, but sometimes egos get in the way, and some people say, “I don’t care about your costs. This is what I have to do.” Boom, boom, boom, and there’s still a disconnect in the way that they’re communicating. It’s not just all factual.
True, and this is the reason why in my book, starting with Be Nimble, I focus more on the leadership skills than management. I make a definition, a distinction that is my personal definition of management as somebody who’s been put in charge of maintaining the processes, and systems, and the technical resources, basically by the specs in their resumé, on a steady state. If something goes wrong of any minor nature, essentially they go to the instruction book, they go to the system, the vendor, they go to the process, and/or they go to the individual.
But if there’s something catastrophic, if there’s something that’s disruptive and unseen, like COVID or a supply chain incident where it’s not written in stone, it’s not written down, it’s not in a process, not in the system, most managers that are “professional managers,” and the way business schools teach managers the same thing, they are managing. They’re the operator of the of the platform.
But when something hits that platform externally, or somebody internally, say, quits and the whole thing starts to fall apart, they haven’t really been taught how to deal with that particular crisis, how to jump in and kind of restructure the processes and maybe realign the individual talent and start a training program of cross-training to fill the gap until we get a replacement for the key person that just walked out, or key people. They’re kind of at a loss for that because that’s not what they’ve been taught and trained to do.
They’ve been taught to maintain what’s been approved. So, when I focus on leadership in the context of your question or your observation, a leader would have to get in the room and facilitate the conversation that would end up achieving some level of empathy between different parties.
And it’s in the leader’s interest to get everybody to see eye-to-eye and to understand what everybody’s risks are and what everybody’s reward system is, and it also kind of tamps down the “us versus them” kind of common social phenomena. So, it’s harder to point your finger at somebody when you’ve been fully informed and you’ve met them, than it is when you’re completely ignorant of what the other party is actually doing.
That’s a great point, especially when you’ve met them. That person-to-person contact is really very valuable, but it seems to me that in today’s world, with so many people working remotely, that’s going to be harder and harder to come by. Do you have any suggestions on that front?
I’m not sure I have any suggestions, and part of the problem is it’s kind of the human psychology of this. Everybody has a different personality and a point of view, and everybody’s got a different perspective based on their experience or where they’re coming from.
So, you could get a leader that basically has one way of defining the universe. Even if they’re doing a leader function the way I’ve defined it, they may have a problem because they’re too parochial, their view is too narrow, and they’re not really paying attention to learning what their subordinate leaders’ and what their employees’ point of view and perspective is. So, it can become much, much more complicated.
And a really good leader is always trying to understand the people reporting to them, and then the next level has got to do the same thing, and maybe – what I’ve described as the achieving empathy example,
maybe it’s got to be done in a different way. Maybe it’s got to be done in a couple of steps. Maybe the leader has to meet with one group to warm them up to the bigger picture aspects, and then turn around and go to the other group and warm them up to the bigger picture aspects, and then maybe give them both some information, actual education on things that they don’t understand, and then bring them together. So, it’s hard to have like one answer to every human scenario, because human beings can be so different.
That’s a fair point, absolutely. What’s the most important thing you’d want business leaders to know about making workplace transformations stick? Because you made an observation that a lot of organizations really don’t have the kind of cross-functional communication or empathy that would make them more successful, like a Navy SEAL team.
Well, the advantage of a Navy SEAL team, a SEAL unit, which is usually anywhere from 16 to 20 guys, the advantage there is small numbers, and the other advantage is we’re all stamped out of the same material. And that’s something that a business doesn’t really have going for it.
So, to give you an example, if the Navy wants a particular kind of warrior, say, a SEAL, they set up a screening and selection process and there’s all kinds of different attributes that are being measured and tested: IQ, obviously physical capabilities, and then deep background checks to make sure you can get the highest-level clearances, all these things.
So, you call out a whole group of people, and now you’ve got – at least you’ve assembled about 120 people for a training class, and then they have to go through that training class. So, they’ve gone through maybe seven or eight different kinds of filters to get to the training class, and the training classes start at 120-ish, and ever since 1962, the attrition has been 75%. So, in my class we started with 126, we ended up with 13 originals six months later.
So, now you’re down to 13 originals and then they show up at a SEAL team who is the repository of the same process. So, everybody that you’re looking at is essentially the byproduct of the original 5 or 600 candidates that are trying to get into that class, and then the 100 and so members of that class down to the 13 to 20 graduates of that class.
But you’re all pretty much same kind of DNA and you have the same kind of profile. You’re all self-starters, you’re all very energized by both your personal and team success, you’re altruistic in that you’ll do all kinds of things for other causes or other people, put yourself in harm’s way, etc. and you’re extremely creative and you’re extremely intelligent, and you put all that together, plus you’re like a college-level athlete.
That’s an easy organization to motivate because you don’t really have to do anything. And as much as SEALs will argue with each other about tactics and weaponry and all kinds of things – it’s kind of fun – they do it like brothers. They can get emotional. but at the end of that argument, whatever they’re going to do, whatever they’re going to do for each other, and that commitment has not wavered because they’ve had an emotional conversation.
When you get to the commercial market, like, if I take over a company, I’ve got a mixed bag in every division. I’ve got a mixed bag of accountants, let’s say, that came from all these different backgrounds and experiences, and the same thing in sales, marketing, production, whatever it is that you’re doing, and I can’t – there’s no assumed DNA.
There’s no assumed fountainhead that produced these people with the same kind of outlook on life or the same kind of motivations. The other part of this is what happens at the end of the day. At 5:00, 99% of American workers, they go to the parking lot and get in their car and drive home.
And if you’re a SEAL or a special ops kind of person, you don’t leave until the job’s done and you don’t leave until the job’s done right. So, you may have to undo and redo and undo until you get it to the level of perfection that you feel is appropriate, or somebody else has told you is appropriate, and there’s a commitment to that. Nobody’s complaining that they want to leave early or anything.
So, there’s a huge kind of difference between the two groups. So, when you lead an organization like a normal business, kind of back to what I said earlier, you really have to kind of go in there and start to meet as many people as you can, and first the layers of people you’re going to interact with. but then some of the key players in the different groups, divisions and departments. You want to get a feel for the mood, you want to get a feel for the morale.
You want to kind of swim through there and you may take one or two months and get a feel for what the organization is all about. And you can find out very quickly if the organization that you’re in charge of is stovepipe, or if there’s a particular block to communications, which happens a lot of times, like down at a certain level, everybody’s all interacting and helping each other and all that,
but then there’s a choke point. It could be the operations officer, director, COO, it could be the finance officer. Every good idea dies on the finance officer – the CFO’s desk. You’ll find these things out if you look for these things, and you’ve got to be patient and absorb it. So, back to – you can’t really have a cookie-cutter answer because every collection of these kind of disparate personalities that have been thrown together by fate is completely different.
Even if they’re in the same industry, they’re completely different than a company doing the same exact thing across the street. To me, it’s a very interesting dynamic. It was odd when I first got into commercial business. I didn’t get it, I didn’t understand it because I’d been – I spent 20 years with that other mindset.
You’ve made a number of interesting points here, Marty. The level of professionalism that you’ve experienced with your brothers, the fact that you call them brothers and not in a pejorative way, but in a genuine way, reflects the amount of esteem that you have for each other, which isn’t always the case in the private sector.
So, you’re right, there are a lot of obstacles that business leaders need to overcome, but it also seems like one big choke point is the hiring process, and just as the SEALs may have an extremely rigorous process, businesses sometimes don’t even have the criteria identified for what the success factors are in a particular role.
Sometimes it’s just, “Oh, they have a warm pulse? You can start tomorrow? Okay, you’re hired,” thinking that they’ll figure it out as they go along, and of course, that leads to – sometimes it works, but a lot of times it doesn’t and it causes all kinds of friction and problems. So, you’ve hit on a number of really excellent points, Marty, about different ways that business owners can conquer chaos and really achieve more workplace transformation, and I thank you for that.
Before we close, is there anything else that you’d really want them to know that we haven’t covered?
No, but I think just a follow-up on what you just said, I’m a big proponent of that measure twice, cut once on the hiring input side, and you get the culture you want by starting there. And I’ve been in organizations where – and this happens a lot of times. You’re a small business and you start scaling and you start to become successful, and you decide or you think that you need to hand over and delegate hiring to a professional HR team.
And what they tend to do is they hire the resumé, not the person, which is kind of what you were saying. And if they’re not thinking about the person and the fit of that person in the culture that you either have stated, or you’ve created, or you’re trying to create, you have a mismatch. You have a square peg in a round hole, and you have people that are 9-to-5 in a company that is “Get the job done, it doesn’t matter what day or night, or time of night it is.” So, I have seen that in person.
I’ve seen a company that was 170 million go to a billion a year in revenue, and at some point we handed it over to a professional HR people, and one day I walked into a sea of cubicles filled with accountants and everything. And I was a senior vice-president and I was asked; I was challenged why I was there and they didn’t know who I was, and I had to get an appointment to go talk to one of the accountants.
And I said – basically, I walked out of there and I went to the president and I said, “Do you know what’s going on here?” And he was unaware, and I said, “While we were paying attention to the strategy, everything, something happened. We scaled right into something that we never anticipated becoming.” And so, yeah, look at all those critical things, the front end, who you’re letting in, how you’re screening, how you’re selecting, and how you’re matching them to the culture is a real critical start.
Absolutely. Thank you, Marty. This has really been great. I appreciate your time and your perspective. I think it’s a fresh look at things that some people take for granted or really aren’t aware of, and I think that’s half the battle.
So, if you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Marty Strong, his work and his books, Be Nimble, Be Visionary and the soon to be released Be Different, that information, as well as a transcript of this interview, can be found in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com.
Appreciate your listening. Be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review.
We’ll be back next week with another information packed episode of Business Confidential Now.
So until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
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