Ex-military managers: Battlezone to boardroom

Leadership styles / 01 April 2010

Leaving the military for a management career can be an uphill battle, as many employers struggle to see how skills can be transferred. But ex-service personnel have experience and knowledge that can be invaluable to business, reports Cath Janes

Most midlife career moves involve a new role, developing a business or embarking on a degree. But what does it feel like when a change in career means swapping the battlefield for the boardroom?

 

They also have a far lower level of sickness absence and less of a clock-watching approach to their work. These are characteristics that employers depend on to outperform competition in a demanding market

Jim Docherty, senior manager, CBSbutler

Leaving the military for civvy street is one thing, but leaving the military for a life in management is quite another. Can fighting for your country prepare you for a fight on the shop floor? And are managers who hire ex-military personnel doing the right thing for their business?

There are few career transitions more demanding than leaving the Army, Royal Navy or Royal Air Force. It’s a change of job, lifestyle, culture and even location. Military personnel enter the civilian world at all stages of their lives but many take the plunge after 22 years of service, when they are given the option of leaving or serving further. The move usually coincides with changing personal needs such as the demands of young families or securing a career for the future.

“I was in the army for ten years as an infantry officer and left because of family commitments,” explains Jerry Collier, international development director at Kenexa, provider of business HR solutions.

“It wasn’t so easy for my wife and I to be apart when we had children. I’d seen action in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and would have still been in the army today if it wasn’t for us having kids. I had a fantastic time but had to turn my attention to a post-military career, which is when I made choices about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go.”

Risky recruits

Typically, those who have not experienced a military career assume that personnel are abandoned without qualifications or skills when they leave. The assumption is that they arrive on civvy street with no business knowledge or management prowess and that hiring them constitutes too great a risk for a business, especially at senior levels.

That, though, couldn’t be further from the truth. “I left the army with a range of skills,” explains Collier. “I had good judgement, initiative and dependability, was conscientious and had great communication techniques, flair and humour. I didn’t have any commercial skills but developed those. I think I did it the right way around. If you don’t know anything about profit and loss you can be taught. But if you lack judgement and initiative can you really be taught those?”

It’s the reason why ex-military personnel are confident that they have plenty to offer. They believe that criticism of their skills is unfounded and they are trying to change these negative views, if only more employers would listen.

Professor Ged Drugan of Manchester Business School (MBS) is an expert on military resettlement programmes: “I refute the idea that ex-military personnel are too rigid in their thinking or that they only shout orders at people. That is far from the reality of the situation. In my experience they are results-driven, challenging, hard working and great at using their own initiative. If I ask them to do something they’ll make sure it gets done and put enormous thought and creativity into it, too.”

According to Drugan one of the issues that would-be managers face after leaving the military is making employers understand what they are capable of. There’s a language barrier. The skills are the same but the context in which they are used is so alien to civilians that they are hard to understand.

As a result, the job application process can be deeply frustrating. Acutely aware of their specialised skills and the corresponding level of respect in the military, some suddenly find themselves explaining even their most basic abilities to confounded employers.

Resettlement courses can help with this problem. “The goal of the advanced management achievement course is to help military people adapt their skills to the civilian world,” says Drugan.

True dedication

Jonathan Perks is managing director of board and executive coaching at career consultants Penna. He advises ex-military personnel on their career transitions and draws heavily on his own army career.

“In twenty years I did ten jobs,” says Perks, “including assistant to the head of the army, chief of staff at a brigade headquarters, managing a £103m budget and being company commander in Northern Ireland and Bosnia. Each job gave me a wealth of experience.

“I would estimate that in my career the MoD spent roughly £100,000 on my training. How often can you say that about anyone in the civilian world? More than that, military personnel have astounding levels of dedication. They have been prepared to die for their work and that’s not something you often see in business. I honestly don’t think that the skills these people have are understood by the civilian world. There’s a great deal of prejudice about them and that’s deeply unfair.”

It seems that when these barriers are broken down, though, the benefits of working with ex-military personnel are obvious. Perks recalls placing one such person with a sales company even though the company wavered over the size of the ‘risk’. Just a year later that employee was its most successful salesperson.

The same could be said of Charlie Bagot-Jewitt who is chief executive of the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA) in Staffordshire. He left the Navy on a Friday and started at a management consultancy the next Monday before moving to the NMA.

“I do networking – this includes greeting anyone from the Queen to the King of Tonga – stakeholder management up to ministerial level, site management, the arboretum curatorial side of things,” says Bagot-Jewitt.
 
“I’ve increased annual visitor numbers to NMA from 60,000 to 300,000 in one year alone and also led my employees through the culture change that comes with a small organisation which is growing rapidly.”

It’s also no coincidence that Collier, Perks and Bagot-Jewitt are in roles that rely on communication skills. In the military, communication is key. Relaying vital information in high pressure situations, encouraging team playing and persuading personnel to do unpleasant jobs is central to its success. It’s far from the stereotype of barking officers stalking parade grounds.

Military experience suits other types of management and business  too. Jim Docherty is a senior manager at engineering and technical recruiter CBSbutler.

He says: “The commercial defence sector tends to like military people for their domain knowledge, such as understanding how soldiers operate in a battlefield and the equipment they need. The wider commercial sector prefers the responsibilities an individual has had, such as the people they have managed, the budgets they were responsible for and the deadlines they have delivered against.

“That’s not all. Military personnel are familiar with unusual hours, dangerous environments and have a level of self discipline above that of a civilian workforce,” says Docherty. “They also have a far lower level of sickness absence and less of a clock-watching approach to their work. These are characteristics that employers depend on to outperform competition in a demanding market.”

Tim Corry is campaign director of SaBRE, the division of the MoD that educates employers on their rights and responsibilities when employing members of the Reserve Forces.

“When I left the military I went to a management consultancy where I coached high-pressured business people to be more effective,” says Corry. “In the military you move through different roles from desk jobs to warzones to coalition forces, and this adds to your total experience as a person. It means you have something valuable to impart to business people. You make tough decisions in tough situations and that’s something that every employer can benefit from.”

Cool under pressure

There’s one other attribute that makes ex-military personnel stand out from the crowd: their ability to deal with pressure. They either enjoy pressured situations enough to thrive on them, or have survived situations substantially worse than a tight deadline. Match the pressures of the battlefield with the pressures of the boardroom and there’s very little comparison.

“Being at my desk is easy,” admits Mike Idziaszczyk, marketing manager for occupational psychologists Pearn Kandola, who served as an army officer. “There’s no threat to my life and I know a bomb isn’t going to land on me so I’m pretty relaxed at work. In fact, I miss the high pressure and responsibility that came with my rank. That’s why I’m now in the Territorial Army.”

A military career is a matter of life and death, which, for many ex-military, puts profit and loss into perspective. That doesn’t mean they don’t experience stress, it’s just a very different type of stress to that found in warzones.

As Perks says, “You’re not in danger of losing your life and that’s why, when I’m at my desk, I think of those who are on the battlefields of Afghanistan. What I do doesn’t come close to what they are doing right at that moment.”