Dear Vets: Would Your Team Choose to Follow You?

Would Your Team Choose to Follow You?

My last role in the Army was as a Detachment Commander in the 1st Special Forces Group. I had just come off a 9-month Afghanistan deployment to Uruzgan, Takhar, and Ghazni provinces. And I was ready to leave. So I decided to get out and see what the world had to offer.

I knew I had plenty to learn about business. What I didn’t fully appreciate was how much I still had to learn about leadership.

Earning Trust Beyond the Uniform

In uniform, I led within a structure that helped me get things done: a clear chain of command, shared expectations, established standards, and accountability reinforced by regulations and the UCMJ. Trust mattered enormously, but the institution supplied a framework around it.

Outside the Army, I had to become more intentional about building that framework – and earning people’s commitment.

A title could establish my responsibility. It couldn’t make someone trust my judgment, tell me when I was wrong, or bring their best effort to the work. Those things depended on how I showed up, especially when the pressure was on.

Over time, my leadership became calmer. I tried to listen before reacting, manage my emotions, and become a better champion of the people doing the work. I wanted to help them accomplish more than they thought they could.

I still fall short. But I’ve improved to a point to question an assumption I once carried: that a strong leadership background would naturally translate into effective leadership in a different environment.

If you hire or manage people, that assumption matters to you, too.

When someone has led successfully somewhere else, what tells you they can lead YOUR team through the problems you need solved TODAY?

The Delta Lesson: The Team Matters

I had a recent conversation with a retired Special Forces senior officer who now buys and oversees numerous businesses.

He described officers he knew who had performed well during rigorous Delta selection (post Ranger Regiment or SF time) but ultimately were not selected. Being a top physical and mental performer were table stakes. The issue was how they would fit with the available troops and their senior enlisted leaders.

Even among highly elite organizations, the particular team matters.

I’m sharing his account, not describing an official selection policy. But it raises a useful question for anyone hiring a leader: are you evaluating the person’s credentials, or how that person will work with the specific team already there?

The goal isn’t to hire people who all think alike. A team needs complementary strengths and people who can challenge one another productively. It also needs enough trust to work through disagreement and get the job done.

Recruiting the Right Leader for the Assignment

That is why I started building the Frontline Leadership Test: to help us recruit the right leaders for the actual assignment. A resume tells us where someone has been. And we also need to understand how they approach the work, connect with people, and what they want from their next role—and compare that with what the employer needs and can realistically offer.

The assessment gives us a starting point for that conversation. Interviews, references, and evidence of past work still have to establish whether someone can deliver.

That requires understanding the assignment as carefully as we understand the candidate.

A company with sound procedures and inconsistent follow-through may need something different from a company whose procedures create problems even when followed correctly.

One team may need a manager to develop its people’s judgment. Another may need someone to secure cooperation from dispatch, suppliers, customers, or senior leadership.

“Find me a strong leader” isn’t a complete brief.

How the Assessment Works

That led us to two connected parts: an Employer Survey and a Frontline Leadership Test.

The employer survey asks about your operation, team readiness, authority, support, desired improvements, and realistic growth opportunities. The candidate assessment explores approaches through past experience and concrete work scenarios.

The chart gives us a simple way to discuss two consistent questions:

• How do you approach improving an operation? Strengthen existing methods, redesign them, or combine the two?

• Where do you concentrate leadership effort? Building capability within the team, securing support across organizational boundaries, or combining both?

Neither end is automatically better. Both require relationships, accountability, and judgment.

Keeping those meanings stable gives us a common language. The employer’s circumstances shape the relevant scenarios and desired emphasis; they shouldn’t change what an answer means or make the employer’s preferred response worth more points.

The current candidate pilot contains 24 leadership questions, with room to express a leaning, an equally close choice, or insufficient comparable experience. A separate career discussion explores meaningful progress, growth without a title change, expected timing, and circumstances that might prompt someone to consider another opportunity.

Those are stated expectations, not predictions of departure.

Help Us Put It to the Test

We’re looking for employers willing to complete the survey and invite current frontline leaders to participate in a pilot.

Together, we want to test whether this leads to better recruiting conversations and, ultimately, better matches. We’ll examine where expectations align, where they differ, and whether the questions reflect real decisions, then compare the profiles with concrete examples and outcomes.

Participants can gain a more structured conversation about how their people approach work, what progress means to them, and what support or opportunities they need.

We’ll gain evidence about what to keep, revise, or discard.

If your organization would like to take this for a spin, reply to this newsletter or get in touch at info@milspectalent.com. Tell us about your team and the leadership questions you’re trying to answer.

I’m still learning how to be a better leader. Your team’s experience can help us get better at finding the right ones.

Press on,

Freddie

If this resonated, join Azimuth Check: Adjusting your bearings after honorable service — a monthly reset for leaders adjusting their bearings after honorable service.

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