Veterans as problem solvers!

Here is my request: stop assuming you understand veterans or what we are capable of doing. If you haven’t served, (and it doesn’t count if you know a guy) then don’t assume you know. Talk to us.

Start with sharing the challenges you have inside your organization. I promise the majority of your problems inside your organization are solvable by people with military experience.

When it comes to process improvement in your organization, test my theory. Bring a group of veterans together in a room, explain the problem, give them the constraints and restraints you have to work with, and they will give you a few courses of action (probably ones you would never have thought of yourself). In the end, they will deliver a solution, not just suggestions or possibilities: How do I know this? Because that is what we are trained to do.

Stop presenting a perfect business, or one that has everything figured out. Be honest and articulate where you need help. What challenges are you facing? What is not progressing as fast as you would like? What project is behind on meeting the milestones or missing a delivery date?

Trust me - if you are honest and instead of playing stump the chump or telling us that we don’t know how to translate our skills and just tell us what you are looking for, we will give you examples of how we solved that — and I guarantee we did it with fewer resources, far less people, and in an austere environment. We won’t even count the situation where we did this in places where people were trying to kill us.

Give us the opportunity to talk you through how we have been faced with similar situations and what we did to win.

Try me - I bet we surprise you 100% of the time.