Episode 11: NCO Business: Trust as the Foundation of Team Excellence

Description

Trusting your team — it may sound obvious, but it is essential to effective collaboration. In this episode of Veteran Led, John Berry shares stories from his experience interacting with NCO’s on the military base, and how they taught him the significance of trust within your unit. He’ll explain how this sense of trust is crucial when working alongside subordinate leaders and supervisors in work settings. By fostering an environment of trust and empowering individuals to take ownership of their roles, teams can achieve greater productivity, cohesion, and synergy.

Transcript

John Berry
Welcome to episode 11, NCO business. Let your sergeants lead and get out of their way.

John Berry
Sir, this is NCO business. You’ve probably heard this. Some of you have even said it. It took me a while as a lieutenant meant to figure out what NCO business meant. But I do know this, that if your NCOs, your noncommissioned officers, your sergeants, or in the civilian world, your subordinate leaders, can’t be trusted, you will fail. And we have to trust our subordinates when they tell us that they’re going to take care of something. So, the first time I heard this word, I can remember I went back to the platoon cages. And for those of you that don’t know, back in the company area, if you go to the way back, there are cages that each platoon occupies, and generally, the NCOs hang out there during the day after training.

John Berry
When I went back to the cages, the NCOs looked at me, gave me a strange look. I said, Is there anything I can help with? They said, Sir, we’re conducting NCO business. I didn’t say, Oh, what’s NCO business? I just turned around and walked out. In fact, they said, Sir, we’re conducting NCO business. Why don’t you get a haircut? And since I always wore my hair pretty long, I mean, I never had a high and tight. I didn’t look the way that most of the infantry soldiers looked. I just I figured they were right. I was probably a couple of weeks overdue a haircut, so I was going to go do it. Then my first deployment rolled around. In 1999, I’m in Bosnia, and we have a mission the next morning. I go to the Platoon Sergeant’s Connex, and knock on the Connex door, and no response. I see the lights on. I can hear some talking. So I push the door open, and there’s the Platoon Sergeant with all of the squad leaders and the team leaders, and they’re talking about something. And nobody got up to call the room to attention or call me sir.

John Berry
It wasn’t like the movies. Just one NCO looked up at me, stared me and said, NCO business. So I shut the door, and I left. Now, the next day, we had a little makeshift gym, and I’m in there working out with Sergeant Ski, and I said, Hey, Ski, what is NCO business? He’s like, Sir, NCO business is what we do. It’s something you don’t need to worry about. You know everything you need to know to run this platoon. We know everything else. And if we need your help, which is highly unlikely, we will ask. And I thought, well, but shouldn’t I know everything that goes on in the platoon? And he said, Sir, your job is to plan, to lead, to set the example. Our job is to make sure everything else happens. And you know why lieutenants fail? It’s because they try to do our job. And they spend 80% of their time trying to do stuff they can’t do because we do it better than them. And then they fail to do their job. And then you know what happens in the platoon? The platoon fails because nobody’s leading and you’re trying to do our job and you can’t do our job and nobody’s in charge.

John Berry
And he was right. And so I learned pretty quickly that NCO business meant that the noncommissioned officers were going to take care of it. And it could be anything. What it was, was something I didn’t need to worry about because they, as professionals, would take care of it. And if you’re a leader in the civilian world, you need those individuals who will tell you that it’s NCO business, that you, as the leader, don’t need to take care of it because they’ve got it, and you have to be able to trust them. I’ve seen this happen to several officers where they had phenomenal noncommissioned officers, and even though they were duds as leaders, their teams were excellent. On the other hand, I have seen highly talented, proficient officers fail because they had incompetent noncommissioned officers. That their subordinate leaders simply could not get the job done, and so they failed. And that’s the reality of life, that there is a certain amount of luck to it, that if you do not draw good subordinate leaders in the military, you’re set up to fail. Now, the good thing about the civilian world is you get to choose.

John Berry
If you do not have great subordinate leaders, fire them, fire them or develop them. But most of the time, if you look at the world like I do, which is we have great noncommissioned officers as subordinate leaders who get stuff done, and I learn from them, why would I hire someone that needs to be trained who I am calling a subordinate leader? That being said, I think back to what the NCO really meant to me. And for those of us that served as officers, we know the NCOs meant everything. If you’re a junior soldier, you also know that. The NCOs in the military were gods. And there’s this term, right? It’s called apotheosis, where man turns into God. It’s elevation to divine status. It’s deification, right? And that is when soldiers turn into sergeants, whatever your branch is. They turn into noncommissioned officers. And the thing about sergeants is the military has to build them. You can’t buy them. And it takes experience, mentoring and training. And finally, after two to four years, the gods of war smile down on that soldier and promote them to noncommissioned officer. And then they become these omniscient omnipotent beings that we all follow and trust.

John Berry
And I think one of the biggest questions to us as business owners today is, well, how do we know when we hire someone, whether they have the potential to be that sergeant in a couple of years? Right now, as I said before, I don’t like to hire leaders that can’t already lead, that don’t come with what Dan Sullivan would say, batteries included, that I can’t just plug and play and get them going. But if I’m going to hire team members that I want to develop, right? Those E1s that are going to come through the system and hopefully become an E5, E6, E7, maybe even E9, I want to make sure that I’m choosing the right people. And I think back to, well, what were the two factors that made a difference in that private becoming a sergeant? And I talked to several of my NCOs, and they said, most of them said it comes down to one of these two things, either desire or attitude. And I think it comes down to both. Look, the soldier had to want to become a sergeant and not just want the rank but want the burden of leading others. And attitude,

John Berry
they had to be able to soak up knowledge like a sponge, work like a dog, and be completely devoid of ego, but yet full of gratitude. As my grandfather would say, never happy with the job that they did, but always grateful for the job that they had, always wanting to be better for the team. You have those two in combination, you’ve got a future NCO. And they seem to have this desire to serve and an impenetrable positive attitude. They would sing the company song, and they had this Teflon coating to which negativity would not stick. They were always positive in the field and the worst situations; those great NCOs just carry the team through. And when you have someone like that on your civilian team, you can do anything. Now, that being said, there’s the downside, and we’ve all experienced this with a lot of deployments over the past couple of decades, and that is the fallen angels, right? Those great NCOs that all of a sudden something happens. Now, for most of our NCOs, they have a bad day, and they’ll tell us they had a bad day, and we’re thinking, Wait, you were great today, right?

John Berry
Because their standard is so high, they really get ruthless about their own behaviors and their own decisions, which is great. But every now and then, we see a superstar plummet to become a super slug. So that invincible, the unstoppable, the incorruptible sergeant stumbles and he doesn’t get back up. And that may be because of bad off-duty decisions. And other times it’s because we, as leaders, unknowingly, drag them into hell. And I’ll talk a little about that. But first, the bad decisions that they might make, the drinking problems, the financial problems, the relationships problems, the legal problems. And a lot of times that all comes from them failing to confront mental health issues. And so as leaders, when we see that, we have to step forward. And look, we have all had people under our charge as leaders where they needed help, and we have to convince them that they need help. And that’s a tough situation to be in. But as a leader, it’s an obligation, a responsibility. And it’s one of those difficult conversations that you have to have if you want to get that star performer back up to star status when they fall.

John Berry
Now, as leaders, we all have to have the strength to overcome our own demons. And I think one of the challenges is that sometimes what we see in our NCOs is that they can overcome their own demons, and then they find themselves helping somebody who can’t overcome their demons, and they get sucked in. And maybe that’s a spouse or like we would say, the dependa. And in the end, the sergeant just gets destroyed. And as leaders, all we can do is offer our support. And as we do in the military, we make fun of them. And then finally, we have this heart to heart, we say, look, this is your career. This is where it’s going. How can I convince you that you need to make a change here? And let’s face it, sometimes we can’t. And it’s so heartbreaking to see those fallen angels when our heroes fail, and we can’t help them back up. And then as leaders, we feel like failures, right? When I have that great sergeant who was doing everything great, and he made some bad choices, and now I can’t get them back up, that is just heartbreaking.

John Berry
As a leader, that is the worst feeling. When you know you have a team member who has great potential to take the team to the next level, and you’re so happy for their success, and they start failing and failing. And you’re seeing the train wreck happen, and you can’t stop it. And it is soul-crushing. But as leaders, we have to do what we can to help. And sometimes, like I said, sometimes it’s getting all the other NCOs around and making poking fun about it until they’re willing to talk about it and make a change. Now, once again, I’m not a counselor. I don’t profess that anything is psychologically sound what we did back in those days. But if you serve in the military, you know what you’re talking about. Sometimes a little bit of razzing goes a long way in helping someone change their behavior, or at least getting a little humor into the situation to help them really see the light. If you can laugh about it, you can talk about it. Now, I want to talk about the other way that our angels fall, that the NCOs who are great become less than great.

John Berry
And that is when we, as leaders, drag them into hell. We fail to set the example. We micromanage them, stripping them of their authority. To a noncommissioned officer, micromanagement is kryptonite. Once you start micromanaging them and telling them how to do their job, you’re destroying them. And I’ve learned that in the civilian world where I’ve had great team members, where I start to tell them how to do their job, and they get annoyed, they get frustrated. I mean, it’s like for those of you that are in relationships, that significant other, you do the dishes, you think they’re great, and then they start telling you you’re doing the dishes wrong. That’s okay. They’re dishes and they’re done and they look clean. How am I doing the dishes wrong? And I think that once again, as a leader, if you’re doing that to your team, that’s kryptonite. That is micromanagement. If you have someone who can get the task done to standard, don’t tell them how to do it. NCOs hated that. They knew how to do it. They knew how to do it to standard, and they sure as hell did not need some second lieutenant telling them how to di it. I was commissioned at College of William Mary.

John Berry
I was commissioned as an infantry officer, and I learned through ROTC, and I learned some really inaccurate things about noncommissioned officers. So I want to make sure I address those here. The first one was you really have to watch your NCOs. They might pull the wool over your eyes, and they could do some stuff that could really hurt you and your career. That is the worst advice ever, because the truth is, as I said before, if your NCOs are trash, you will fail. You’re not going to succeed. I don’t care how great of a lawyer you are. If you don’t have those noncommissioned officers to support you or those subordinate leaders on your team who can do the job and can do it well, you will fail. That is life. So that first piece of advice that you need to check up on your NCOs is make sure they’re doing the right thing. That was garbage. The second thing was always clean your own weapon. Now, I learned this the second time I went to the field. We come back from a 30-day field problem, and I’m sitting in the in the hallway, cleaning my rifle.

John Berry
The first sergeant walks up, and he says, Sir, I’m going to take your M4, and Martinez’s over there is going to clean it. You need to go to the battalion AAR. And I said, Hey, first sergeant, it’s my weapon. It’s my responsibility. I am going to clean this rifle. He said, Sir, you need to go to the ARR right now, and they’re not allowing you to take your weapon in there, and you’re not going to clean it during the ARR, so Martinez’s is going to clean it. And at that time, look, I was a pretty big guy. I was about 220 pounds. I did a lifting contest. Bench pressed 400 pounds at the time. I think I was in pretty good shape. I thought I could scrap. First, I said, Sir, I’m taking this weapon because if all the soldiers in this company have to wait for you to be dismissed to see their families, you won’t make it to the parking lot. They will beat the life out of you. And he was right. I mean, I think I could have taken a couple, right? But the reality was, it didn’t matter how big or strong I was, you get a bunch of Joes who want to go home, who’ve been in a field problem for 30 days, and you’re the reason why they’re not going because you, the selfish lieutenant, wanted to take time to clean your own weapon, right?

John Berry
No, that was unacceptable. So the first sergeant snatched the weapon away, and I went to the ARR, and I came back, and it was clean. I went to the arms room, looked at it, looked great, and everybody was dismissed. And I didn’t get beat up that night. The other one is it’s famous because Simon Sinek, who I don’t believe served in the military, wrote a book called Leaders Eat Last. He talked about leaders eating last. So that’s what I believe because they teach us that in ROTC. Well, during another time when we’re out in the field, we were getting a hot meal out in the field, A-Rats. And so instead of MREs for dinner, we were actually getting a hot meal. And so I’m making sure all my soldiers eat first. And there’s an operations, Company Operations order coming up. And I think it was one of my squad leaders come to me and said, Sir, get in the front line, get your chow, and eat. You got to the op order. And I said, No, I’m going to let the soldiers eat first. And then the first sergeant walked in and said, What did you say, Lieutenant?

John Berry
I said, Hey, first sergeant, I want to make sure all my soldiers eat before I eat. He said, Oh, sir, who runs the logistics around here? I said, Well, first sergeant, I guess it’s you or the ex-co. He’s like, I do. And let me tell you something. There will never, ever be a shortage of food in alpha company. This is my job. And are you telling me that you don’t think I can do my job so you’re going to eat last? No, first sergeant. Then you get in that line. Company commander is going to tear you apart if you’re late for that operations order and you need to eat. And we know how you get when you don’t eat. It’s true. I would get a little hangry or cranky when I didn’t eat. I mean, ranger school didn’t help me with that. It actually made me even more aware that when I don’t eat, I make bad decisions. So I thought I was doing the right thing by waiting till the end. They said, No, you as a leader need to be highly productive. You need to be thinking through the problem. You can’t be standing in line hanging out like you’re a Joe.

John Berry
You got to eat your food and get going, sir. And I learned that lesson the hard way. So leaders don’t always eat last. Now, the first sergeant told me this, he said, You know what leaders do? Leaders make sure there’s enough food for everybody. And this is my job. And you don’t come in here and tell me that you think that you got to eat last because there might not be enough food. That’s insulting to me. You know how long I’ve been a first sergeant? You know how long I’ve been in the army? You think I would ever let one of my soldiers go hungry? Okay, got it, first sergeant. And so, yeah, leaders, ideally, if there’s not enough food, leaders eat last and leaders don’t eat. But if you’ve got a good first sergeant, you don’t have that problem.

John Berry
All right, let’s go into the AAR, After Action Review. Number one, trust your subordinate leaders to do their job. Number two, give them space. Number three, don’t try to do their jobs for them. Three down, micromanagement is kryptonite. Number two, good leaders need a leader worth following. Number three, stay out of their way.

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 earned. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching @veteranled on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your industry or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.