Lessons in Teamwork & Standardization from Paratrooper John McGlothlin

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dan Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 Group, and today I have John McGlothlin joining me. John has some cool titles, so former army paratrooper, you can't not start there. Writer, adjunct professor, author. So John's doing a lot of cool stuff and his latest book, How to Deal with Damn Near Anything. I knew I'd messed that up.

John McGlothlin: That's fine.

Dane Groeneveld: It's pretty cool. So I'm excited to share that with the listeners. Welcome to the show, John.

John McGlothlin: Well thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to chatting.

Dane Groeneveld: Excellent. So maybe tell us a little bit more about how an army paratrooper navigates their way to be a writer and author and adjunct professor in this field that's exciting you.

John McGlothlin: Certainly. So again, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. The genesis of the book honestly was when I left the full- time military, I was in the full- time military for about 10 years and I left in part because the US passed this law, the GI Bill, which gives education benefits, enormous education benefits to soldiers. And I thought I should take advantage of that. I can still be in the military part- time. I didn't want to leave entirely. After I left, I met a lot of people who were smart, who were good natured, good socially talented people, but who were struggling. And I was shocked, honestly. They had all the tools necessary to be successful and in a lot of ways they were successful but weren't always efficiently successful. And that may sound a little cold, but weren't always happy. They weren't always reaching what I thought was their potential. And I thought why? Well, it didn't make sense to me at first. And it took me honestly a few years to figure out that a lot of the lessons I had learned in the military that I took for granted because everyone around me was learning them or at least had the chance to learn them weren't available elsewhere. And I'd never planned to write a book there. It's kind of a joke, especially among certain parts of the military that writing a book is, it's a cliche, but a lot of those books... yeah, I was in Iraq, I was in Afghanistan. Those are experiences I'll carry with me forever, but they're not the ones I use every day now. And most of the stories about the military understandably, are about combat. But I thought, hey, there's another set of stories to be told, something I eventually called the hidden side of the military that teaches lessons that are more applicable of the day- to- day life. So after a couple of years of realizing A, how useful these lessons were and B, how relatively rare and the military's not the only place to learn these things, but it's far more common than any other place I've seen or heard of. Realizing how rare these lessons were, I thought, okay, there's reason to write these things down and to get them out there because they might be useful to other folks.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's really cool. And I've always been fascinated by people that have military backgrounds and not because of the combat stories. I'm always fascinated by the fact that the military organizations have all of this knowledge, this process and more importantly they've got this time to practice. It's not all live fire and most teams in businesses don't get time to practice. So I'm really intrigued to hear a little bit more about this hidden side of the military. Where does that get started? Is that bootcamp or is that just in day- to- day progression through your career? How does it get going?

John McGlothlin: It really does get started from the start. And you've already identified one of the things that makes it the most unique is the vast majority of soldiers. And a lot of this stuff is true for in the military, but having been in the army, that's my background. Good luck to everyone that's on a boat as long as people in the Navy are, I'm sure you have lessons to teach you. You can write your own book, I'm having a try. But the vast majority of soldiers spend the vast majority of time not deployed. Now there was a stretch there where it was about 50:50 for a lot of us, which is an unsustainable high tempo to spend half your time deployed. You just don't get time to train, spend time with your family, rest, all the things you need to do. So you're right that we spend most of our time training. And that does happen from the very start. Now obviously basic training bootcamp goes by a few different names is unique in some ways, but it is the groundwork for everything that comes afterward. And one of the things that's most important for folks to know, and one of the things first things I discussed in the book is the part of your military career where you are just taking orders where your job is to listen, and that's about it, is very, very short. And it does exist. There is a phase where drill sergeants tell you what to do and then you do it. And that's just how that works. But that's incredibly short. Basic training, it can change from time to time, but it's somewhere 9 to 12 weeks long. That's it. And from the moment you leave, then there's at least some expectation you're not going to be treated as some sort of king, but there's some expectation that you will be able to be self- sufficient at least on the set of tasks that you're supposed to know. And you are not going to... obviously any organization as large as the military is going to have some bad leaders in it. But by and large, if you can do what you're supposed to do, you're not going to be micromanaged, you're not going to be all that. So from the very beginning, autonomy is rewarded even when it's not expected necessarily yet. And you have the ability to develop and you're expected to develop. It's one of those things where the progression is built in to how we do things. In fact, depending on where you're at, if you stay a certain rank too long, you can get the heat, like ho you're supposed to be, it's up or out. Now, not always true, but in a lot of places is seen as unusual and definitely not inevitable for you to move forward organizationally, not just to move forward as an individual and to learn and grow, all of which is important, but to actually get a new job, new job description, new set of people you work for and work with that is built in from the start. So you're right that it starts in basic training and it's something that continues through the rest of your career.

Dane Groeneveld: That's very cool. And I'm not going to go too deep'cause I really want to come back into some of the core tenets of the book, but this concept of autonomy is rewarded. You're not being micromanaged even from a fairly early stage in a career in a big organization dealing with some dangerous sharp and pointy, fast moving things, whatever else. Jumping out of planes, all of that good stuff. Autonomy is something that we've seen in teams in the corporate world as sometimes frowned upon. I mean people are very task driven in a lot of teams and businesses is follow the book, get it done, report back when it's done. And then when you see these teams that are in these high velocity, high churn type roles, you can almost start to see some group correction of the autonomous innovative thinker. So how does that play out? Early in the military career you've got a soldier, a professional depending on their role that is being autonomous, that's taking initiative, that's doing things. Does the rest of the team applaud and followed? Is there conflict around some of those moments? I'm intrigued by that.

John McGlothlin: While there can be conflict, if you've got a good reason and you've got other people with you. There's a joke, speaking of basic training, there's a joke where if you're going to be wrong, be wrong together, and the idea is that at least you're making a coordinated effort at your level to do a certain thing.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that.

John McGlothlin: And what that encourages is is a lot of times in the military you will not have the instruction you need because you'll deal with a challenge that's unexpected. You may not have time or ability to contact one level, two levels higher and you need to make a decision sooner than you're going to hear from above. So it is you get your people around, you huddle, you make a decision, you move forward and you let the higher ups know and if it turned out to be wrong and they'll tell you. And you can do it differently next time. But it's important for people to know that they have the ability to make a decision as long as they can explain it later. And if it was the wrong decision, then you can make a different decision next time. And one of the things I think is most useful from what we do in the military to people in small businesses or HR professionals is we're developing the person. We're not just trying to accomplish at the task. And I understand the hesitancy from a business perspective where you might lose this person tomorrow and whether you're literally paying for them to be trained or you're just spending time and energy on training them when you may lose that, I understand that. But the alternative is not improving your people. And it's hard to embrace the risk that people will leave. But one of the things that is constant in the military is people leaving. People generally take new assignments every... they're trying to make it longer so people can have more stable logistics in their lives every three, four years. Which means that the people you're in charge of, the people who are in charge of you, your peers, people you just deal with incidentally in your job are going to be constantly rotating. And you have to invest in those people long term because you have to trust that whoever elsewhere was, was investing in their people and then they're going to send those people to you ready to go. And I think the same process is increasingly playing out in the civilian world because people are more and more willing to change jobs. In some ways it's a trust system because you're going to lose people. And the ironic thing is almost like a relationship, the more concerned you act with losing people, the more likely you are to lose them. Whereas if you're willing to invest in them despite the fact they can leave, it makes them less likely to do so.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's both sides too. I love that point, John, because if you're developing the person and you're not developing the person in role, because that's more about the business outcomes than the person. And if you're truly investing in them and if you're telling them, " look, we're investing in you so you can work in this team, the next team, the next role", then you're going to get better people on performance. But also they're going to be more change tolerant, change ready as well. And this actually came up at this conference I was at Transform in Vegas this week. You know, People& Culture HR Conference and one of the ladies in the audience, we were talking about restructuring. Because there's been a lot of riffs lately. And we were saying, Hey, if you tell your people that these jobs are not permanent, it's a full- time role, but it's not a permanent job, then maybe they're also signing up with the organization to train and improve themselves and be ready to look for opportunities within the organization as well as without. So you're actually energizing the team around what the very first thing you said, which is developing the person first.

John McGlothlin: Exactly. It's funny you mentioned that one of the experiences that led to the book was a conference I went to South by Southwest, being in the military, I had a wonderful experience, but you're often living in the middle of nowhere. So less than a month after I got out of the full- time military, a friend of mine in Austin is like, you want to come to South by Southwest? I was like, absolutely. So I go there and I go to the film and music part, but I also go to the tech week part and one of the workshops caught my eye. It was called How to Manage... and I'm mangling the exact name, but something like How to manage superstars, is it worth it. And I go to the conference and they're talking about all these different ways and all the questions about that subject and I stand up and I raise my hand. I was actually part of an interesting controlled experiment where instead of deciding who you hired or not, people just show up and they work for you. And people look at me confused. I was in the army. And what happens is, you do not decide who your next subordinate's going to be unless you are at the very, very top levels or in a very, very specialized job. The army as a whole because they have to manage all these moving pieces, they just send you somebody. So you have to adjust to that. And one of the things that's beneficial about that is talking about developing this whole person is you don't know necessarily who your stars are going to. And this is where people who aren't extroverted can lose out. And I say that as an extrovert who benefits from this type of stereotype, but you don't know who they're going to be. So by developing everyone and by developing them as broadly as possible, you're setting the table for people to emerge in ways that you wouldn't have predicted. And everyone has these inherent biases when they can look at somebody, whether it's an extrovert, whether it's somebody with previous experience that fits the mold that has been successful before, et cetera, et cetera. We all have these sort of presumptions. And if you can think more broadly about how you develop people, you're going to allow the hidden gems to emerge and you're really going to benefit in ways that you hadn't expected.

Dane Groeneveld: That's very cool. I love that statement. I didn't get to choose who comes to work for me, they just turn up. So that brings me back to the core tents of the book. So we were talking before the show about some of these skills for white collar workers that aren't really taught in schools and some of them seem to be originating from this environment of just people turning up and having to work together and moving on and working with a new team. So can you tell me a little bit more about what it is that you've really found and are focusing on through the book that helps these people to deal with near anything?

John McGlothlin: Certainly. So I picked out five traits and I don't do capital F, capital T five traits, you can't buy a mug. I mean somewhere if you really want one, it says five traits on it. But obviously you have to narrow down a broad field into something a little more accessible. So I picked out five traits that I thought the military was unusually good at. And being a paratrooper specifically was unusually good at developing. And one of them was self- awareness. Now the challenge of doing any book like this is it's going to be unusual for you to tell people for the very first time that they should be a thing. Most people, it's like telling someone they should work out. Everybody knows they should work out. People do not fail to work out because they don't know they're supposed to. So what can you offer people besides a broad suggestion to do a thing that somewhere in the background they already know they're supposed to? So the route I took was giving some concrete examples of how there's a gap that schools and workplaces leave, not because they don't care, but because they're not necessarily built to do these things that the military is built to do. So when it comes to self- awareness, self- awareness is built in the military for a few different reasons. One of which is we spend a lot of time around each other. I know at least one of the previous episodes you did was discussing spending time around peers and that being something that CEOs in particular don't necessarily get a chance to do. And in the military you spend an enormous amount of time around people. And one of the many effects that has is we all are encouraged, not necessarily wrongly to be our best selves. That one question you answer in the classroom, that one moment you speak during a meeting, you really want it to just crystallize how great you are. But even if people are at their best, it's not necessarily going to be a healthy environment because the amount of pressure that's put on them, it's definitely not going to be representative good, bad, or in the middle if you only hear from people a certain sliver of the time. In the military, we hear from people all the time, so it's almost impossible to create a fake version of yourself now. People still do it. We still see guys with bumper stickers on their cars for marathons they didn't run. It's like we all know you got injured and didn't run to that marathon and you bought the bumper sticker anyway, what you think we didn't notice, but we're around each other so much, we spend so much time around each other and our peers that people are encouraged to be genuine and they're encouraged to get honest feedback. To loop it back to what we're saying about the people around you changing. One of the things that was important to me in the book was using as much research as possible, not just because I'm an adjunct professor and I value that academic side of things, but because I didn't just want to riff for 200 pages, I would like to thank I've collected enough anecdotes for them to be as good as anecdotal data could be, but still anecdotes. And one of the things that constantly came up was this phenomenon, what's called pro- social lying, which is when people who care about you won't be honest with you because they want to spare your feelings. In the military, it's not like everyone is just jerks to each other. But because we don't go back with as wide a range of people for 5, 10, 20 years, we're more likely to be honest with each other. And that is such an important thing for self- awareness and such an important thing for development that can be hard to find otherwise. Which is one of the reasons why I put self- awareness as the first trait because it's hard to develop if you don't know what you're actually supposed to be developing. And the military does a great job of putting you around people who are more likely to be honest with you and putting you around your peers for a greater percentage of time.

Dane Groeneveld: Interesting. When do you say you spend a lot of time around your peers? Can I just clarify one thing? Are they peers that are on your team doing what you do or are they just peers that are on other teams that you are training alongside and then going back to teams? Is it both? I'm intrigued.

John McGlothlin: It's both. So it could be, for example, One of the unique things about how the military trains is often everyone does everything. So for example, at airborne School where you learn to jump out of planes, you don't see one person do a thing in a presentation and then you get a manual and off you go. Everybody tries the thing. It starts with jumping out of a fake doorway, a fake airplane doorway. It's like three inches off the ground and progresses to taller and taller thing until you're actually jumping out of a plane. So for something like airborne school, you're around people who have one common task, you're at a similar transient point, temporary training in your career, and then you're all going to go to different units. And I could be next to the most hardcore infantry guy, seen it all done at all. And then the next person lying behind me could be an admin clerk who is never going to do anything more dangerous than the plane they're just about to jump out of. So it can vary. Sometimes you're around people who do your job and sometimes you're just around people who are learning something that you are learning.

Dane Groeneveld: That's interesting. So if there's an admin clerk who's never going to need to jump out of a plane in battle, why are they learning how to jump out of a plane?

John McGlothlin: Well, two things. One, they may need to go in battle. They're not going to be the first people out. I tell you what, and I will take... it depends on the environment but a 10 out of 10 admin person, this is probably not news to anyone outside the military, but it's true in the military also. It's worth their weight in gold. You want to talk about something that slows down. One of the things that's useful about the military, there's another trait in the book called efficiency, which again, people are familiar with. The military is a very practical organization. And it's funny, the most overweight soldier I've ever seen in my life was an admin ninja. And somehow the paperwork to get rid of them just kept getting lost. Funny how that works. And they were way beyond, they're way beyond the maximum. I mean, their uniform, the buttons were threatening to kill somebody every time that uniform got put on. But you know what, every everybody managed to look the other way somehow. Funny how it works.

Dane Groeneveld: We need the admin ninja on the team.

John McGlothlin: Exactly. But no, so those admin people can end up jumping out of a plane and airborne school leads in two directions. One, you become a paratrooper and do it regularly, or at least as part of your job description, you're around other paratroopers in an airborne unit. But then for certain people in certain jobs, it's a developmental thing. Young officers being the biggest category for that where they go, and it's something you have to prove you're able and willing to do and then you may or may not end up doing it later. So it serves dual purposes.

Dane Groeneveld: Very cool. All right. Thank you for that. For people, for listeners on the show that are thinking about, well we do training for the accountants and we do training for the salespeople. It does make you start to question, are there common core trainings that it's good for everyone to do, to have better awareness of an understanding of each other there too?

John McGlothlin: Yeah. At least have an exposure to it. I mean, you may not be able to spare a whole day or a whole week, but giving a block of training, giving a snippet, 5, 10 minute video just so you can have some idea of what... and it gives more of an appreciation sometimes because one of the things I joked about with law students, because I went to law school after being a full- time soldier, law students thought they were the only people on campus working hard. And I was like, you realize everyone here, and not everyone, but almost every program here has people who are stressed, who have a ton going on. Yeah. Med students, business students, undergrads, people with double majors, people with family commitments, but you would've thought they were the only people working hard. And the people who got past that, who had enough perspective to both appreciate what other people were doing better and to do what they were doing better because they didn't get lost in their silo, were the ones that at least had occasional exposure to other teams and the challenges they faced. Even if it means just being exposed like, hey, so- and- so Susie won an award in sales because she did this really cool thing or overcame this really difficult challenge. Even just that glimpse can be incredibly valuable.

Dane Groeneveld: Excellent. I like that. So that makes a lot of sense around self- awareness. And we're not teaching in schools, there's no doubt.

John McGlothlin: I mean schools are designed tell to teach you this thing to give you a professional certification and they layer on as much above that as they can. And then jobs, obviously workplaces are designed to execute whatever task that workplace has, whether it's to sell something, to make something, both. And they don't always have the time or the resources or most importantly the institutional knowledge to develop you as a person. So one of the main themes of the book is it's really on you. There's a phrase in the military which surprises a lot of non- military people when they hear it. The phrase is, " it's your career". And that's what said to you in the military. Like" Hey, you want this cool thing? Well, it's your career". You have to show the initiative to get it. It's not just going to be... the military will send you somewhere if you don't say anything about where you want to go. But it's not the kind of thing, it is not so structured and so formal that there isn't a significant central role for individual initiatives. So it's really a balance of both things.

Dane Groeneveld: Cool. Very cool. So self- awareness is one, what was two?

John McGlothlin: Number two is initiative. And one of the stories involved with that actually involves jumping out of a plane. So the very first time I did that, I'm sitting on the plane and it's loud and there's a certain vibe that you would expect in a plane full of people who are jumping out of one for, at least almost all of us the first time. So at least in most training environments, you leave 10 people at a time. So we're sitting there and the person across the aisle from me... and you're sitting on this sort of netting and they look really nervous, which is fine. And they keep counting in front of them, the people in front of them. And I'm kind of chilling. I'm a more of an under worrier than an over worrier, which has its own set of pitfalls, don't get me wrong. So I'm like, why is this purchasing counting? And then I realize they're counting and they realize they're the 11th person in line and they offer to switch. They plead with me to switch with me. And I'm like, that's fine. Sure, I'll go first. So we switch roles and we get up and we hook up a cable that runs from our parachutes to this steel wire that goes across the length of the aircraft and we shuffle up to the door and I'm first now and I get a view of everything that's happening out the door of the aircraft. And I wait and I get the signal and I jump and later I learn that the safest place to be on a jumping out of an aircraft that is first. Because a lot of the safety issues that can happen, and they're rare, but they do happen when people aren't paying attention is because somebody in front of you screwed something up. If you're first out, bye everyone, good luck back then. Do the right thing. But the reward for showing that initiative for being willing to go first is that you have a cleaner path in front and you certainly can face challenges from being the first person, but there are certainly benefits to showing that initiative as well. So the next trait in the book after self- awareness is initiative.

Dane Groeneveld: I love that. Well, early in my career I moved jobs a lot and it wasn't in the military. They weren't sending me, I was changing organizations. And one thing that I always liked was being the first person to open a desk. I was opening this market or this discipline. And the cool thing about it at the time was I didn't have to follow anyone else's bad behaviors or anyone else's bad relationships. I was in fresh ground and I never thought about it. That's just what I like to do. But I never thought about it in that sense of go first. You take initiative, you've got a little bit more control on where you're taking your project, goal, career, whatever it might be.

John McGlothlin: You really do. And circumstances may not always allow that, but when they do, it is worth showing initiative on whatever level you can show it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That's important too. Very cool. And then what follows initiative?

John McGlothlin: Efficiency. So one of the things that the military values is not doing things just to do them. We are not immune to that. Don't get me wrong. Anyone who's been to a senior officer's promotion ceremony has seen a dog in pony show. All right? It happens. There's a place for pomp and circumstance, but it is less often than other places I've seen. And it's funny because people were terrified when I said I was going to join the military. So I joined right after undergrad. I did not become an officer'cause I wanted to learn a language. I was an Arabic linguist. It was my first job in military. So I went to Arabic language training for year, year and a half. But people were terrified, people, my friends, family, because I was known as a raging individual. Nobody had ever seen me and thought of there's someone who fits into a very formal organization. But the reason it ended up working out so well was because I was focused on getting stuff done. And one thing I sometimes had to tell soldiers that would work for me was, don't worry about inflating the importance of any particular moment or task. The best way to succeed efficiently is to keep making progress. All progress is good progress. That was my mantra. It could seem like a little bit, but people will, and it's understandable that people think this is the presentation, the report, the project, the meeting, the big deal. But you never know who is watching. And I've seen time after time, people's successes come from something they didn't realize was going to be important to someone else. Could be a report that somebody read six months later, could be a presentation where they thought it was just a bunch of mid- level people showing up and all of a sudden somebody more important decides to show up'cause they happen to be in the office that day. And it is the best way to be efficient is to handle each task one step at a time, which can sound like generic athlete advice, like we're focused on the next game. But they actually are focused on the next game. And it can be hard to push aside all the temporary stresses and influences and circumstances in order to maintain that focus on the underlying task. And the military's very, very good at keeping you focused on the practical task at hand.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that. I would imagine that also creates a lot more learning opportunity because when people go and do a complex series of tasks as a team, they don't really know what created the advantage or the disadvantage when they all sit down and debrief on it or who did the real work. But I would imagine that real focus of this is the task in front of me, let's do it. Well, let's learn from it. That must be a positive.

John McGlothlin: It is. And one, somewhat simplistic, but I think useful example hopefully is I did two deployments, one to Iraq, one to Afghanistan. After that I broke my elbow in training and did not go on the next deployment my unit did. So I was back. You keep a skeleton crew back at the unit when everybody else is gone somewhere. And one of the things you do when you're on that skeleton crew is you have a, at least our unit, you had a little community party to celebrate the fact that deployment was halfway over and everybody's families would come out. And it was a way to say, Hey, our loved ones that are in the military are going to be back. It's all downhill from here hopefully. And so I've got a crew of soldiers that are working the event for me and I've got one guy on the grill and he's like the grill master, the person who's doing that since he was all enough to reach a grill, he spends all day sweating. It's a hot day, it's a ton of people to feed. And he's just spent it all day working his butt off. And I got other people doing other things. End of the day comes, it's time to clean up, time to put everything away, do all that. It's been a long day. And I got two guys that come over to me and they say, Hey, why isn't private Smith helping out? I look at him and I say, you don't worry about private Smith. You need to focus on what you're doing and don't get caught up in the competitive aspect and the comparative aspect of things. Stay focused on what you're doing. And they kept giving him a evil eye a little bit. And I pulled him over and I let him have it. I said like I said to you, it's like 90 degrees outside. He's been behind a grill all day. 50% more people showed up to this thing than we thought. So he had to make more food than anyone planned. He ran it longer than he had to. And you know what he's doing right now, he's sitting on his inaudible he's not doing anything and he's not going to do anything for the rest of the day. He's going to sit there fanning himself some sort of renaissance lady, like he's not going to work the rest of the day. So shut inaudible up and stop worrying about it. And obviously the military allows me a broader array of language in the professional workplace and some other people might get access to. But the lesson was don't get caught up in that comparative, competitive aspect of things. Just stay focused on what you're going to do. And if you are consistently able to knock out what you need to knock out, it's that tortoise in the hair thing, you're going to end up a lot closer to the finish line a lot faster than you expected.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's a great cat not getting caught up in the politics and the nonsense, focusing on your task and that noise that hurts teams in a big way. So it is, it's a good example of being able to shut down the noise.

John McGlothlin: You really have two options or two possibilities. One, you're right and you're being treated, misfairly. Okay, you address that however you can, but in that moment there's probably not a good non- confrontational way to do so. You can tuck it in your back pocket for later, and if it happens three or four times, you can go to somebody and say, Hey, there's a consistent pattern of X, Y, Z. So you're either going to be wrong and you have incomplete information because you're not in a position to know what everyone's doing or the work that everyone put in and you're wrong, or B, you're not wrong and complaining about it's not going to get you anywhere. So it is very rarely worth being so focused on the paths of others.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, no, I like that. All right, so efficiencies three and number four?

John McGlothlin: Adaptability. And one of the story in the book that is, I think the most illustrative of this is we mentioned basic training bootcamp a few times, and there was this famous moment, probably the best known where at the beginning of bootcamp all the drill sergeants, because normally you have one drill sergeant for 20 shoulders, maybe two. So, one doesn't have to be there all day, every day. And all the drill starts come in and they just start yelling at everybody. It's an established dominance type of thing. And it's emblematic. You see it in the movies, you see it in clips on TV shows, that sort of thing. The military, the army on its own without any... there was no scandal. Nobody inaudible obviously you have many scandals when people do unethical things, but there was no systemic problem and no outside pressure to change this. But on their own, they got rid of it. Not doing it anymore because what they realized was people were leaving the military without saying anything. It wasn't people that were getting hurt, people had medical issues, people who complained or felt they were mistreated. It was people who were just looking on saying, this isn't for me. We were losing good people. So what the military did was showed the ability to be adaptable without being forced to be by external circumstances. And there was some pushback originally because everyone who makes it to the top of an organization benefited from that organization's current way of doing things. So it's really hard for somebody to look back and say that they were the product of a process, but yet that process can be improved because if you're coming at it from the wrong mindset, it's an implicit criticism, but it doesn't have to be. So, everybody who stays around the military obviously didn't choose to leave and thrived on some level if they're at the point where they're making decisions for other people about how the training pipeline, how the onboarding pipeline, which is what it is, how that works. But they showed the adaptability to say, Hey, it's a different ethos. And it turns out, you know where that came from. That little drill sergeant thing, came from Vietnam because people were told either they could go to jail or join the military. So you had some genuinely dangerous people joining the military, and that was a way for the cadre that was in charge then. The mid- level leaders that were in charge then to establish their authority immediately so that they weren't going to be questioned and they could get obedience from people who didn't necessarily want to be there. That is not analogous to businesses, schools, or the modern military either. It's an all volunteer force now. Everybody's there chooses to be there. But this thing had survived in part because of inertia. And that's true everywhere. And in part because on a surface level, it did represent something that was renowned about the institution, but that doesn't mean that there weren't better ways to do it. So that's why I've chose adaptability because in addition to the other things we mentioned about change, people cycling in and out of jobs frequently, people dealing with unexpected challenges and having to build a team around that and make a decision at a low level, there was the adaptability to change a valued emblematic thing when they didn't have to change it.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that makes a lot of sense. It's interesting you read that. I've always enjoyed reading military literature of different campaigns, and you read how often the methods of the earlier campaigns, like cavalry at some stage, they still kept writing the cavalry out even though military warfare had changed and that wasn't efficient anymore. So I guess adaptability is a big one, and you tie it into a business, whether it's training or the way you operate, that whole concept of path dependence, what got you here isn't what will get you there. That that's a big one at an individual and a team's level.

John McGlothlin: I joke with my friends, and I did this in the military, like just because you stood in that grocery store line long doesn't mean it's the line that's going to get you out of the grocery store the fastest that you feel invested. Because you stood there looking at the snacks in the magazines for 10 minutes. But if they open up a new line, and even though there's a couple people there, go to the new line, but it's easy to feel invested in something and that investment is real in a non joking way. You have put a lot of time into an onboarding or training process if you're an academic into the course that you've developed, you put a lot of time into these things. And that investment's real. But you have to be willing, and this is where creative fields can have an advantage sometimes you have to be willing to kill your darlings and you have to be willing to recognize when your investment was real, the product was good, but there's better ways to do it still.

Dane Groeneveld: And that's for a lot of individuals out there. I would imagine that that chapter of the book's going to be very relevant because ChatGPT's just come out, we're already moving in an accelerated digital way. There's a lot of people today who are sitting in jobs where their certifications, credentials, capabilities of the last 5, 10, 15 years are not going to let them see out their career. They're going to need to reskill, they're going to need to embrace a little discomfort and grow and learn and try different jobs.

John McGlothlin: And one of the things the military values, both informally and formally, if you get high enough up in the pyramid, is a variety of assignments. And you cannot take the fact you're good at something as an invitation to only do that thing forever. You can mainly do that thing. Doesn't mean if you're great at sales, you have to all of a sudden try to be an engineer or vice versa. But you want to, at least... to get back to what we were talking about earlier, be exposed to these other areas and other challenges in a way that you can appreciate what other people go through when they're dealing with them every day. Because being adaptable doesn't necessarily mean having to master everything, but it means having to strive to develop a working knowledge of how these things within your organization work so that you can be a useful teammate or supervisor or a coordinator with those people, even if you couldn't necessarily do their job. And it wouldn't be worth the time to invest to get as good as they are because that's why they exist.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool. And that's a good tip for individuals that are thinking and for teams that are thinking about adaptability, just trying, you see it in some large corporations where they rotate people through departments or through products. But even like you said earlier with the training examples, that small snippet of sales training, just creating that culture of adaptability is big.

John McGlothlin: Yeah, it's something that we rely on, honestly, it's something that if you can't demonstrate that within the military, it's going to be a significant handicap to being successful.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I like that a lot. And then number five?

John McGlothlin: The last trait, and the one I think that is probably the most, not unique, but the most associated with the military is what I call insistence. And insistence means the ability to set boundaries and enforce standards. And one of the things I mentioned earlier was is it was very important to me to ensure that what I put in the book was backed by research. It wasn't just me shooting from the hip. And there's been an increasing appreciation of... to talk about that south by southwest panel that came up earlier, that jerk superstars aren't worth it. And there was a certain phase, especially in the tech industry where they were seen as if you were transcended to enough talent, you could be as toxic as you wanted and it was fine. And research has consistently shown that's just not true unless you are a noble level, truly savant- ish talent. And even then, how about we just train you to not be a jerk. That was the thing about the panel that struck me the most is they assumed that people always were going to be who they were. And one of the important things about standards and boundaries is that you can hem people in when you need to. Not in a way that's restrictive in a negative sense, but in a way that allows them to coexist with those to the side and above and below them. And it allows you to be not unduly influenced by temporary circumstances. So here's one nugget, the end of basic training, I get pulled into the drill sergeant tent, which is not a place I'd ever expected to be. It's like it's getting an audience with the Pope. This is not a thing. So I go in there and he tells me he has nominated me for the honor graduate, and there's four platoons as we call them. So there's going to be four competitors, four nominees for this award. And he looks at me dead in the eye and he says, he called me Neo. This is one of those original matrix.

Dane Groeneveld: I see it. I see it.

John McGlothlin: Well, thank you. Thank you was a good, he gave some less positive nicknames. So the whole, I was totally fine with it, even if the first time he said, I didn't realize he was talking to me and almost got in a lot of trouble for ignoring him. And he looks at me, he goes, Neo, you're not competing with those other soldiers. You're competing with the standard. And he just leaves, the mic drop, leaves. He was very cinematic as a guy. And my immediate thought when he leaves is I am now in the drill sergeant tent alone, and that's not allowed. And do I just leave? What do I do? But as years, literal years went by, I realized that was probably the most valuable thing I learned was you may get first, second, third place. You know what? You go into a golf tournament and you do great, and Tiger Woods is there. You're not winning and that's fine. But all you can do is worry about your performance and worry about reaching the standard that you've set for yourself. So it's the idea of embracing standards both ways as limiting people when they, when they decide to be, as Dave Chappelle calls them habitual line steppers, right? People who attempt to establish their authority through showing that the rules don't have to always apply to them, and you have to be willing to apply the rules to them. And research has shown that people will change their behavior even after the first time a standard is enforced, it sends an actual effective signal to other people who are considering violating a social war. Now, can you swing too far in that direction? Of course, you get a little too collective thinking with your behavior. And then we get to what you were saying earlier, when nobody wants to take initiative. We're not talking about showing initiatives in a I have a new idea way. We're talking about talking over other people in meetings. We're talking about being overly aggressive in a way that forces other people out of the conversation or forces other people out of participating. So the military does an excellent job. There's a standard for everything. Are those standards flexible? Sometimes, yes. I mentioned earlier the soldier who was not anywhere within the weight standard, but somehow managed to never get the paperwork through for that. So it's not that these standards aren't flexible, but you have to be willing to embrace or at least tolerate short- term awkwardness of calling someone out, not necessarily public or around other people. You have to acknowledge the necessity of short- term awkwardness for medium and long- term gain by enforcing a standard and not just letting behavior pass because calling someone out on it would be unpleasant for those in the moment.

Dane Groeneveld: That's interesting. And that is a gap when you think about schools, I guess debate teams do it, but it is more of a game than real life, rebuttal, isn't it? It just doesn't happen, does it? For young people coming?

John McGlothlin: And it's a balance. At one point, one of my soldiers was pulled for what we call a detail, a temporary duty to help out somebody, say we need five people to clean up something or organize something, whatever, like the thing I mentioned with the park. And one of my soldiers gets pulled for it. So she's off, Hey, I'll be gone this afternoon, this thing. All right, got it. And I'm leaving the building just coincidentally, and I see her getting yelled at by somebody who is in temporarily in charge of her, and this person is yelling at her in front of a bunch of people in an unnecessary, aggressive way saying, " Hey, I had you for a detail last time and you were lazy and didn't do what you needed to do and blah, blah, blah". And I show up and I'm like, let's talk for a minute. We go around a literal corner to the other side of this building and I say, listen, I wasn't there this last time. So you may be 100% right about my soldier having been lazy. You do not call them out in front of everyone like that. That is not the way to... so I was both. And she was trying to enforce a standard, but she was doing so in a way that violated a more important, you don't call people out in a way that makes them feel personally attacked, even if they're 100% wrong. It takes an exceptional circumstance to do that sort of thing. So the military allows you a greater level of intrapersonal directness, because that's the norm there in a way that you couldn't do it in an office. But the underlying lesson, the standard being you hold people accountable, but not in a way that's overtly showy or aggressive. It combines those two things. And it goes back to the efficiency thing. You have to be able to recognize that... it's like to close the loop on the efficiency thing briefly in a way that also speaks to insistence. If you try to punch somebody, you don't try to punch them as hard as you can, right? It's kind of like trying to, you don't open your fridge door as hard as you can, you use the appropriate amount of force. There's standards for these things, and you need to make sure you're taking into account the whole picture when you're deciding how to execute that kind of task.

Dane Groeneveld: And the military does a good job of documenting and training on standards. I wouldn't say that a lot of organizations or even local sports clubs do. So is there a piece of that insistence where either as an individual or as an organization or a team, you need to spend a bit of time actually setting those standards?

John McGlothlin: A thousand percent. Because what happens is if you have a standard and you allow people to just verbally declare with no paperwork or no... and you obviously don't want to create some sort of giant administrative burden, but it can't be nothing, right? It doesn't need to be a Russian novel's worth of text about how somebody made a mistake or did something great. But you also need to have some sort of documentation. In fact, my current work involves evaluating whistleblower complaints and deciding people have, whether they've been wronged or not. And one of the things that we require as if you're going to discipline someone, you're going to say, you failed to meet the standard. You can't just magically make that appear. And sometimes you'll see people who say, " oh, I gave this person a demotion because eight months ago they did this thing wrong" even though they also demoted them a week after they complained of some sort of-

Dane Groeneveld: It's retaliatory.

John McGlothlin: Yeah, exactly. So you're going to tell me this thing that they did eight months ago was so bad that you need to demote them, but for the last eight months you're just kind of reflecting on it and mulling it. And then only when they decided to do something specific to you, you whip out this card and throw it on the desk. So no, you're a hundred percent. And that you have to ensure that a little bit of upfront record keeping happens when it will save you an enormous amount of medium and long- term hassle. And that's something that in the military, at least the parts of it that I'm in, paratrooper type units, paperwork is not the goal, right? It only happens when it needs to happen, but sometimes it needs to happen. And that's something that I've tried to instill, whether I've talked to HR and small business folks, people who are either... everybody's pressed for time. If you're in a giant organization, it's because it's a giant one and you've got so many people to deal with. If it's a small one, it's because you don't have a lot of help. There's always a reason why you're pressed. But identifying places, if you're going to enforce standards, it can't just be informally. There's a role for that. But especially if it's the type of process or the type of standard that has potentially serious consequences, letting someone go, moving someone, demoting someone, moving someone from one assignment to another, then it becomes even more important. That standard is documented appropriately.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that's neat. So I've got a much better understanding now of How to Deal with Damn Near Anything. I love the way you bring the paratroopers guide to life, the stories from the military, because we learn so much through story. So some of these anecdotes and stories are great, and naturally backing them up with some good science there too. So five trades, self- awareness, initiative, efficiency, adaptability, and insistence. I love insistence. I think that's a really good one, and they all tie in neatly together. When you take those five and you think about the book, obviously individuals can take a lot away from it in terms of how they own their career and move forwards, but how does it sort of shape your hope for the future of teams if we look into teams of workforces in the next 5, 10 years?

John McGlothlin: My goal is I kind of think of the five traits as Olympic rings that they're interlocked, but they're not overlapping entirely. And I think that my hope is that organizations will take a look at the military at this, what I call the hidden side of the military, that's more applicable to their day- to- day work. And they will find ways to develop people in areas that they had previously thought were outside the scope of what a workplace does. Not in the sense they're going to show up at 6: 00 AM to your house, like a drill sergeant would show up to a barracks room and start making noise, be a better person. No, not in that stereotypical sense, but in the way that there's a lot of low hanging fruit, frankly. Because this isn't something that that's done very often and that they will see that there's ways to build and solidify teams that the military uses day to day that can be borrowed from liberally at relatively low cost and a relatively low effort that will allow some of that culture of training and development, self- improvement to be implemented anywhere.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I love that. And actually, something that I feel very strongly about having worked in human capital workforce management for 20 odd years is military transition, veteran unemployment. I mean, it's high on this country. And I think another piece of your work indirectly is encouraging people not only to look at the best practices coming from the military, but actually start looking at some of that talent. Because you said at the very beginning, you're out with the GI Bill, you're seeing these great people that just aren't self- actualizing,, they're not experiencing their full potential. So I think there's a big call to action for any listeners on the show that are looking at how they tackle a talent crisis too.

John McGlothlin: And I appreciate that America loves its veterans. It doesn't always understand its veterans, which is inevitable. Both the good thing and the bad thing is that it's a different way of doing things. It allows me to write a book. There's enough material there to do that, but the reason the book needs to exist is because these lessons aren't inherently understood elsewhere. So, I appreciate that there is a lot that can be brought to the table from one environment to the other, and I think there's a lot of opportunities on an individual level to do that as well.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that's awesome. So thanks for doing the great work you do, John. If any of our listeners want to reach out, find the book, learn how they could maybe start deploying some of these five traits. How do they best find you or the book?

John McGlothlin: The best way to find the book is to look on Amazon. Nothing too into your niche there, again, called How to Deal with Damn Near Anything: The Paratrooper's Guide to Life, and I can be found at johnmcglothlin.com. And I know that last name, I debated coming up with a clever nickname partially out of family-

Dane Groeneveld: Neo. Just go neo. com

John McGlothlin: That's probably taken, but I'm sure there's some offshoot as well. But no, if you Google John Paratrooper book, I should be up there near the top. But yes, johnmcglothlin. com. If the people are willing to look at the name spelling and the episode title, they'll be able to find me that way.

Dane Groeneveld: Cool. Well, we'll add some links, but I really appreciate your time today, John. It's been a fun conversation and really impactful stuff.

John McGlothlin: Well, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this stuff. It was a good time.

Dane Groeneveld: It was great. Thanks.