Veterans and Reservists deliver leadership in turbulent times

According to Serco, businesses with policies designed to identify, attract and retain staff with a defence background stand to benefit within an increasingly uncertain business environment.

You don’t need to scroll too far down your newsfeed before headlines influenced by our current employment market come to your attention. A record low unemployment rate, a drove of skilled workers taking up opportunities offshore, and low migration post-pandemic all contribute to a situation where talented people can be hard to find.

However, for as long as there have been movements in employment trends, there have been people with ties to Defence – veterans and reserves – looking for opportunities in the civilian sector.

Many of these people indicate that the greatest hurdles they face in their job hunt is in communicating their value to a potential employer. Either they struggle to ‘sell’ what they have, or employers find it hard to relate a candidates’ Defence experience to their business needs.

The reality is that military experience brings a range of skills and qualities to add significant value to any commercial activity, with veterans often equipped with experiences that are keenly attuned to the demands to the business community.

The range of skills and experience that military trained employees can bring to the workplace is wide and varied. Collectively, this workforce reflect community values, a strong work ethic, well developed planning and analysis tools, a healthy attention to detail, the ability to work collaboratively and/or independently, and an expansive aptitude for learning new skills.

These qualities are unsurprising when considering the nature of military organisations: large and complex but with a clear hierarchy, an abundance of processes and procedures, a continuous training and development pipeline to prepare people for new roles and higher duties, and a need to operate effectively under pressure with incomplete information.

The sheer dominance of this quasi-corporate structure and the need to navigate it makes military trained personnel incredibly versatile, provided of course that potential employers can look beyond the specific military tasks a veteran once wielded and make use of the complete range of skills that a candidate brings.

While these transferrable skills are indeed valuable, they largely serve to underpin the effectiveness of a veteran or reservist’s greatest contribution to an organisation, namely “leadership’, or more specifically, “leadership in turbulent and demanding circumstances”.

The modern business environment is becoming increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, or ‘VUCA’, with executives and academics alike seeking to understand and convey the impacts of the fourth industrial revolution on their corporate strategies. Interestingly, the term VUCA was first used by the US Army War College in the late 1990s to describe the post-Cold War era military operating environment.

Unsurprisingly, the emergent paradigms resulted in military organisations re-emphasising the development of ingrained leadership capabilities to navigate and respond to unpredictable and evolving environments over the past two decades. Put a little more bluntly, what is ‘new’ in business is ‘old hat’ in defence circles.

The emerging consensus in the commercial world is that dynamic capabilities that support organisational agility are the key to survivability and success. Commonly categorised as ‘sensing, shaping, seizing and transforming’ capabilities, the ultimate aim is to position an organisation in a manner that enables it to respond to unpredicted changes in their environment.

Further, driving this response – and ultimately organisational performance – is the domain of leadership. Those individuals who are able to detect and identify trends, establish a clear vision and direction toward the future, guide the collaborative formulation of options, organise and resource the organisation to deliver, and continuously innovate and adjust accordingly, have a high probability of success.

Military organisations have been developing, training, employing and refining these specific skills in their leaders for years.

Pick up any readily available military planning doctrine (the US DoD Joint Planning Doctrine, and the ADF Joint Military Appreciation Process are available online), and you will see that the concepts of understanding the environment, intelligence processes, command intent, course of action development and assessment, and operational design are synonymous with the dynamism and competitive energy of any successful commercial entity.

To any organisation that recognises the value these types of capabilities bring, then it is an easy pathway to recognising how veterans and reservists can bolster their own commercial fortunes and that it would be beneficial for them to implement employment strategies that enhance their ability to attract these skills.

The first step a commercial leader could take might be to create opportunities for veterans and reservists to engage with the parent Defence organisation. This may involve attending career transition events run by the military or affiliated agencies, creating a vehicle for veterans and reservists to highlight their military experiences outside of their resume when registering for roles.

Secondly, organisations might commit to preferentially interviewing veterans or reservists for vacant positions and providing guidance and feedback to the applicants to aid in their continued search for post-service employment. Military personnel are wellaccustomed to receiving feedback and tend to digest and act on it in a professional manner that their civil counterparts are unaccustomed to.

Further, understanding that veterans and reservists will typically have an affinity to the service and a desire to contribute to the collective success of others needs to be acknowledged. Implementing veteran and reserve-friendly policies that enable ex-military staff to continue engagement with Defence is a means of enhancing the attractiveness of a organisation to potential employees with a military background.

Finally, actively championing veteran and reservist employment can help raise the profile of commercial entities within the veteran and reserve community, which in turn will serve to increase access to those seeking a transition to civilian employment.

The world is becoming increasingly turbulent and chaotic, with the modern information age driving change at a pace and scale that presents many challenges, but that equally offers many new opportunities.

Recruiting and empowering passionate leaders into an organisation, meaning harnessing the skills of those who are adept at dealing with the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity that a business might encounter, can only serve to develop resilience and position those companies to thrive.

Military veterans and reservists can bring those desired leadership competencies to a potential employer, and those businesses with policies designed to identify, attract and retain staff with a defence background will present favourably to a diverse, talented and experienced community.

Serco Defence staff at the Wellington Cenotaph, ANZAC Day 2022. L-R: Rewi Thompson, LT CDR, RNZN (Retd); Clint Williams, CDR, RNZNR; Clint Thomas, AM, CSC, RADM, RANR; Jamie Steel, LT CDR, RNZN (Retd).

Image supplied.