EP249: Military Leadership Lessons for Small Business with Chris Hossfeld

you, Brad. Thank you for having me.

So my name is Chris Hossfeld. I am the CEO and founder of Barrel Strength Leadership. I spent 27 years as an Army officer, as an infantry guy, plans, operations. that sort of stuff. I spent a couple of years teaching at the army war college, teaching creative and critical thinking skills associated with thinking about a campaign over time. And, uh, I do experiential leading, uh, team building events, uh, as part of my company.

I think that most small businesses, to include myself, do it wrong, is you think you could do everything yourself and that you could do it better than anybody else. And I think that that's the essence of leadership is it's getting the best out of the people around you. taking their strengths, mitigating their weaknesses, and being able to find a way to enable, encourage, and empower those around you.

I would absolutely agree with it. There's formal leadership. I'm put in a position of authority and have responsibility. And then there's informal leaders, those that drive your organization without being told. People that look to them, peer leaders, those that welcome people into the organization better than you did. Those are leaders as well.

I think one, it's the two sides of vision and visualization. And I'm not talking about the visualization that you might think of or where, you know, I'm doing it and then it's going to, you know. come to fruition. It's the visualization of how things are coming together that parts with that imparts with your vision of where the organization should go. And then I would say communication. How do you communicate with others relationships and trust?

I think communication is critical because, you know, as a military person, you might understand this message sent does not always equal message received. Right. Yes. And so communication is that ability to send a message, have others receive it, communicate it back and their ability to do the same to you. Right. Communication, much like trust, it's a two-way street. If you aren't communicating well, others won't get it. If you're communicating well, sometimes you don't have to say very much, but what you say is very powerful.

Yeah. I think part of the communication is communicating your expectations of those that work for you, right? Communicating the expectations that they might have of you, your expectations of yourself. I think that, you know, communicating the expectations of yourself is very important. When are you going to check up on them? How are you going to check up on them? How are you going to ensure that the teams are working together? That's part of communication, right? That helps sets an organization up. And I think even your, you know, your best crews can do things without communicating a lot. They're able, you know, that when that person's moving on doing stuff, It's your time to move on to the next thing or your next part of the project, right? Those sorts of things can come because of the trust, but that only comes by communicating the expectations and how you can try to get through the tasks that are assigned to you.

Standards and discipline don't necessarily mean that I'm a micromanager. I think that's a part that, especially today, can get lost. Why are you checking up on me? Why are you in my business? No, it's about making sure that you achieve the standards that I have and the expectations that I have. And that if you are doing it, I don't have to check as often. I'm still going to check. And it's not because I don't trust you. I trust you, but I'm going to verify because inherently as a leader, it's your reputation is in part my reputation as a company and as a business owner. So how do I ensure that all of that is in line in a way that our calling card as an organization is what we want it to be?

Especially in the construction business. There's a reason you have inspectors at different stages, right? What you don't want and what they don't want is, you know, especially if you're bringing in a certain outside contracting or a certain other project person to be able to manage or conduct one part of it. You don't want to bring them back. That's costing time, that's costing money for both of you, right?

That's part of communication expectations and standards, but it's also about a learning environment. Can you teach while doing the inspection? I think that's a great example that we probably learned a little bit more in the military, right? There's the leadership by example. I did it. But then there's the leadership through, hey, yeah, that was good. Could we have done better? Sure. What could we have done better? Could we not? It's not about using less material, saving time, but it's about creating a better product. And I think a better product is the person, right? You think the product is something physical because they want to come to you. to accomplish whatever that task is.

Absolutely. Right. No one wants to be handheld through everything, I don't think. And having that ability to teach, right? But also, I think, recognize their subject matter expertise and how they can make you better. builds a lot of trust and makes them want to work for you or even better work with you right i

I think you just hit on, on, on a big part, especially in the military. You're not a leader from physical fitness to the end of the duty day. You are supposed to be a leader 24-7. And that's very different than what is seen in the civilian world. And I think that that is part of what people really start gravitating to is those that are consistent, right? That are consistent both on, off duty with what they do, how they do it, how they talk, how they treat others, you know. We're all human. We all have bad days. We might go off. There might be a lot of stress. We might not have gotten enough sleep, but it's the consistency I think that makes it better. Okay, you can consistently be a stickler for details and discipline, but if you communicated it well and you're consistent, you know how to act around that individual. You may not like it. You may find somebody else, you know, the difference between that platoon sergeant and that captain. But the people will gravitate to those that are consistent rather than one that you don't know who you're going to get today.

It doesn't translate well for everyone to be on the job site at 6.30 and you come rolling in at eight o 'clock with, you know, your big Dunkin' Donuts, you know, Starbucks, whatever it is, you know, and they're waiting around for you to tell them what to do, what needs to get accomplished for the day. And they're like, oh, I don't know how much, I don't know how empowered I am to start the task that I know. I'd rather have that consistent person that comes in, tells me what gets out there, comes back, checks. Okay, great. Awesome. We can work with that.

That's true, but they still admire it. I mean, you have the HBO series Band of Brothers, widely popular, not only in the military, but out of the military. And I think it's because, one, history is very interesting, and it's a compelling story in the way that it's told, even in the book by Stephen Ambrose. The actors and the people in it, right? you start wanting to have a winters around you, right? And it was, I think, you know, the consistency of what he did on and off duty, how he carried himself, that drew people to him, you know? And I think even in your world, right, what he does in the episode where they're taking out the artillery, right? He does that with a pickup team, but it's a pickup team of people he kind of knows and uses their best skills. in the right way, in the right order, in the right sequence, right? It's 12 people against 90, a pickup team, but it's an all-star team because he knows how to best use them in the right positions. And I think that that's a great thing that people outside that we can use as an example of what we're trying to build when we're trying to create great teams to do whatever it is on behalf of our business or, you know. you know, even in our personal life.

I think that, you know, partly because of communication, authenticity as a leader, right, is an important. an important aspect. I think people in the civilian world, they really appreciate that out of the veteran population as they come out. When they see that, they gravitate to it. You may not be the expert, but they're willing to work with you or even teach you because you're consistent, you're authentic. They know what they're going to get from you. They know that you don't want to provide a substandard product because everything they're taught in the military is a substandard product will result in catastrophe, right? It's about critical decisions, high stakes, limited resources, often ambiguous information, but the outcomes are so high stakes. We don't necessarily have that. in the civilian world, but in your world, in the construction world, it can be, if you don't do it right, electrical fires, plumbing issues that cause health, foundations that crack and buildings that fall apart, not something anyone would want, right? But it's hard to sometimes make that leap in understanding that difference between those that sometimes veteran community. community will get stuck on that transition or translation.

greater I think that that's I mean I think that's really good There's reason we have standards, we have specific responses to unique stimuli in the military, but it's the same thing. How much can people do in the absence of it? What can you work on? How have you prioritized your time, your tasks? Is everything dependent upon one decision today? If you don't communicate that to your crew, to your group, it's the same thing as, okay, guys, I just want you to go out there and find the bad guys. All right. For what reason? Okay. Am I doing it to overtly try and gain contact or am I trying to do it to just to understand where they're at? Two very different methods of approach to, you know, the same overall outcome. And I think that that's a hard thing to try to translate, especially when you're in a small business and you may only have a few people that are coming in and out. You're trying to find the best expertise. That may be difficult to try to do that. And so it kind of goes back to the first point. How do you communicate that with them can be a very powerful tool to getting what you want and need as the desired outcome.

Standards aren't suggestions from the military perspective, right? Because if you don't achieve that standard, someone could get hurt. You could lose an aircraft, right? Standards aren't suggestions because every time that you suggest a standard, you're inconsistent. And you've set a new standard, which may be lower than you expect or that you want as an outcome. And so if you don't... identify those standards early and communicate them often, there's going to be inconsistency in your product, in your people, in the way that you do things, your reputation. One person may go, oh, this is the best company ever because they didn't ever talk to me. Well, you're going to get what you asked for. That becomes a new standard.

And then I would say your clients. don't know what your standard is. Ooh. Yeah. How are we communicating to our clients by the standards we have for the job site cleanup? Because you never know. They may go, oh, it's five o 'clock. They probably kicked off. We can go by and we can kind of walk the property. We can see, you know, the project. We can kind of make sure we're visualizing it. We want to, we just kind of want to get the feel of it, whether it's a house or, you know, a new office space or whatever it is. They go in their beer cans all over the place. Oh, well, crap. Is that from the neighborhood kids or is that from the crew? Were they drinking at the end of the day or were they drinking on the job? I don't know. Not saying the cleanup, but all of a sudden you have imported inconsistency, right? And potentially they don't know what your standards are associated with your crew, the outcomes that you're expecting of them in the day. the projects, the final details. Okay. Am I going to have to check even more?

Yes. And this is where I think, you know, from a military background, if someone isn't meeting the standards or don't know the standards, do you teach them?

Do you provide them the tools, right? Or are you fired, right? But, okay. It's a person who's new on a crew and is trying to build up their resume and trying to develop the skills to go up through the ranks within their specific trade. It's kind of like that inspector. They knew because they probably had done it before, but they imparted the knowledge to you that helped raise your standards for completion of a deck. I think of that also. You know, he built some trust with you, right? As an inspector, you're like, man, that's the inspector I want to come because if I'm not doing something, yeah, he's going to not only tell me what I'm doing wrong, but he might tell me the right way to do it. So I'm doing it right the next time. Imagine if, you know, the air wing mechanic doesn't know a better way to do something. whether it's more efficient or unique to that block of aircraft because they got only one, you know, the basic aircraft to work on, right? That's going to be slightly different. Who's teaching them to achieve the standards that you want and how do you empower them to do that? When do you want them to do that? What is so high risk that you want to be there during that to ensure that that standard is met? that way versus what are you willing to accept a little bit of risk on that empowers the others to continue to better and develop themselves. That kind of goes back to that leadership sort of philosophy.

It's about a critical look at yourself, I think is very important, right? Did I have the right people, processes, you know, and resources? Okay. What did I do to set those things up appropriately to achieve the outcome? Oh, maybe I short-changed. Maybe I wasn't as clear as I thought. Maybe I was going in the wrong direction and I didn't take the feedback in the right place. Maybe I missed the feedback. My name is Chris and I'm guilty of that on multiple occasions as a leader. Right.

I think that those and I think being honest about that and being and holding yourself to those standards. People then go, wow, what is that? What is that guy? What is that gal? What are they doing different?

And it's not really taught through experience in MBA schools, in trade schools, right? There's no two-week portion dedicated to learning leadership principles and then putting them into practice. Nope. You spend an hour on it. You do a group project, right? And it's done. We spent in the military have spent weeks trying to ensure that our people have the tools and the opportunities to be able to not only develop it, rehearse it, experience it and learn from it.

So, you know, in the military, you know, what we think about is the outcome that we want. Where do we want to be in relationship to people, terrain, our adversary, or in business, our competition, right? If you think about those sorts of things for every single project and then work yourself backwards or have a process to work backwards very quickly, right? I can imagine, you know, my mom was an interior designer, right? So she worked with architects, she worked with other companies, right? Had to think about, okay, what does the client want at the end? How do they want it to look? And then, okay, from there, okay, what are the things that have to happen? That might mean some structural changes. That might mean some other things that have to happen. All of that has to happen before we get to the paint color, what's inside. But if you don't have that vision, and that kind of goes back to my vision versus visualization. If you don't have that vision of what it's going to be when it's completed, you sometimes don't even know where to start.

And if you have a process for thinking that, I think as a framework, then you can with little information, do necessary tasks up front, right? I think about, and I'm going to take a quick military story. The very first time my company is in combat, we just received the aerial. It's us. We're in charge. And it starts with, you're going to conduct a raid tonight. Okay, where? I don't know where. So what can you do? What basic rehearsals? How can I, okay, I can pull apart the task, a raid, and start assigning basic things that I know need to happen. And then people started rehearsals. And then as we got more information, they refined those rehearsals till the last minute when we got to the specific location. It's almost, I think, the same thing. Okay. We've got this. What can we don't have a whole lot of information? We may not even have all the tools to complete it. Okay. But is there a process for us to get there? Okay. These are the things that we can do upfront. We can stake things out. We can identify lines. Oh, we can start building up the resources we need. Who's going to be hired? What's the sequence we need to do? What is the decisions that allow us to be able to say, this is the next stage of the project. Yeah. It's the same. You know, we did that in the military. You can do that for projects or even building your team, even building your business.

or whatever version

I mean, so Einstein talked about if I only had one hour to plan on how to save the world, I would spend, it's like 50 or 55 minutes or 59 minutes thinking about how it needs to be accomplished, right? Thinking about all of the steps, all the things, and then aligning the amount of time required. in order to achieve that outcome. There's a reason in the military that you're supposed to take one third of the time to think about for planning, minima. When things happen, you may only take one eighth and you go after it. But that's only if you have so many good processes that allow you to be able to do step by step afterwards. But if you don't, if it's a new type of building, if it's a new type of plan, if it's a new type of architecture that, you know, thing that you're trying to install that your team hasn't done before, you need to spend the time planning about what's going to go on because those things that weren't addressed in planning in the military cost lives in the civilian world. Cost additional time, additional money, re-inspections, hiring a new person because you didn't think about what was going to be required. Oh, I didn't even think that I was going to need that expertise. And now I've got to go find them. Now I've got to wait for that person to come in when you could have maybe sequenced it better or more efficiently.

Yeah. And sometimes it's okay. What are the decisions we have to make along the way? If that's all you can do and refine the decisions that need to be made, throughout the course of the project, that helps you refine what information you need, what resources you might need available, and the criticality of the decisions. It lets people know, okay, when we get to here, we have to talk about this because that's going to determine whether or not we need another person, another couple hours, another day, a whole new set of tools, whatever it may be. These are things if you don't spend that time thinking about it. But most importantly, I think if you're not investing in the people to know what types of decisions and how you best receive the information, they may be shy, they may be late, they may not communicate it in a way that's understandable to you and that takes time. Do you want texts? Do you want phone calls? Do you want a FaceTime so that they can show you what they're dealing with? How do you utilize the new technology to best understand where you are? I don't know what's right for every single one of those, but if I know what type of information I need in order to be able to make a decision and I can communicate that, the entire team and the client in the military, the client is our soldiers, our sailors, airmen, Marines, guardians. Invariably, you have a client that's paying for your services. are you going to be worthy of their time and their valuable resources?

You realized the power of it.

That's really what I do. I use what's called a staff ride, where you go and visit a battlefield, stand where Tom Hanks would have been in the Varaville draw on Normandy. I've been to Bray Court Manor and talked about what's going. But what I think is the most powerful way to do an after action review, right? is you only spend no more than 40% of the time on actually what happened. Everything else needs to be about the critical details. What could we have done better? And the creative, how would we or how could we do it better?

Because then it takes the blame away. Okay, these things happen. There's a couple of things that we know we need to do better. We took too long. We took a couple of things. Why? And don't make it personal to make it professional. Okay, we had some people that didn't show up on time. Okay, that cost us some time, the ability to get the right people on the place. Oh, you know, the reason I wasn't there is I didn't know. Oh, is that a people problem? Is that a process problem? We had no way of a good way of notifying people of what was needed. Oh, do we need a better WhatsApp channel, a Slack channel to let people know what's going on? The task for the day, is that something we could do? Oh, huh. And now you get into the creative. Okay, well, how could we, how can we solve that problem? What do you think? Why would that be better? It may not be the best answer, but it may be the first step to getting to a better answer.

You may go, we went 20 man hours over. Okay, there's a couple of different things that could be. Either we didn't have the right number of people to get it done on time. Maybe I underestimated how long it could be. Maybe we just didn't have a good process. What do you guys think? Engage their critical thinking skills. to help identify the problems. And they go, oh, man. Okay. So if I, maybe I underestimated, but did we have this? Did you have the right tools on hand? It's not a blame thing, but it's about their preparation, their planning to be prepared. And then it's like, okay, well, maybe with a little bit more information, we've actually probably could have only gone over by five,10 hours. That wouldn't have cost us as much money. Okay, great. Let's use that on the next one. And then what's the best part? Assign accountability. Otherwise, it's just something we observed. It's not a lesson that we learned. I want you. That's a great idea. One, you give them some ownership. And two, okay, now I'm going to see if I can trust you to implement those changes that you think are better. And if it saved you time and money, how do you reward that on the backside?

I think that's really two parts that I really try to emphasize when I do these staff rides and I do these, my leadership training events. Authorities and responsibilities. Okay. Who has the authority to do what? Work on certain things, you know, to inspect, but who has the responsibility? Responsibility. ultimately comes to you as the business owner. How much can you delegate? What do you delegate? Still, at the end, it's your bottom line. It's your reputation. It's your company. So ultimately, the responsibility still rests on you. But do you give those people that ownership through their authorities and their responsibilities and hold them accountable to the one or both of those? Because some people you may delegate authority. to do things. Other people you may delegate responsibility to. You may not delegate both to the same person.

It all depends on the scale, the scope, the impact, your trust, your thoughts on risk. How much risk are you willing to take? And they won't know unless you communicate. It kind of goes back to our first point where communication is such an important part of being a leader.

And common sense is not so common. No,

Are you making an assumption that all of the implied things that you want done are going to get done in the way that you want if you haven't communicated the standards? Who has the responsibility to do it and who has the authority to do those checks?

And I think the difference between micromanagement and enforcing standards is kind of what you said, right? The micromanagement is I will not allow you to do anything without coming back to me for approval of going on to the next step. Yeah. Okay. Can I go get another board, Os? Is that really what you want? No. You want someone to know, okay, we've got to build this wall today to this standard. Yeah.

Right. And it's like, okay, the standard, this is a new way we're building this wall. I want to be there a little bit more and I'm going to check a little bit more. Once you've gained that trust. And you know that that's the standard and it's up to standard. I don't have to check anymore. Yeah. But we've all been there. We've had toxic bosses, absent bosses.

The politically appointed boss because he's, you know, the owner's son.

Okay. You know what it's done to you as a subordinate, especially in the military. But how do you recognize that in your subordinates and to mitigate those things in the right way? that still accomplishes tasks in the way you want them to.

We could go all day.

I think that that is really powerful. And, you know, the reasons I failed as a leader is generally because I failed to do that. The reasons I succeeded was because. the time I took to invest in subordinates, right? And those leaders that invested in me, who helped train me, who helped me identify the best way that I can do these things. And am I passing that on? May not be right for everybody, but it's going to stick with somebody. And I think that that's what's so great about leadership is it's not just in the military. People gravitate to leaders, whether it's in the informal or the formal leader. The shift leader or the person who is the resident expert that knows how to do it, but may still be somewhat junior on your team. He's still a leader. And how do we empower that person to be the best?

I've been to some of these sites a hundred times. And every time I learn something new or someone asks me a question that forces me to be better, and that's awesome. I love that. I love trying to better myself, better my team, give a better experience.

Critique versus criticism. Yeah. Right? I think one becomes slightly more personal. One is more professional.

So generally what I do is I like to get people out of the classroom. In the military, in college, I hated the one over 100 or the one over 1000 PowerPoint briefings. I do better by learning by doing. And I think by doing or being in a place that evokes emotion and emotion really helps leadership sink in, right? It helps the learning. And so I try to bring people to incredible places. Or transport them through pictures, videos, a little bit of Satan, Private Ryan, Urbana Brothers if you can't go to Normandy. But I take people to Normandy and take them around and we do that AAR style visit. Let's talk about what happened, but what can we learn from it? Do we have a bias? Do we not have good processes? Do I not know my team well enough in order to be able to pick up when there's crisis and multiple people call in sick? Do I have a good way of communicating my trust and what I think empowerment looks like or how I accept risk? Let's do it by looking at a place where critical decisions, high stakes, limited resources, sometimes ambiguous information, but we know what happened. And then let's talk about how did they get there? What can we learn from it? How can we be better? And that's what I do. And I do it in pretty cool places. Normandy, Gettysburg here in the United States, Vicksburg, Hawaii. Let's talk about Pearl Harbor, right? Market Garden, the Netherlands. And in fact, next week, I will be leaving to go do the Battle of the Bulge in Bastogne with the 101st Airborne Division, a unit that I got to command a battalion in and walk them around the perimeter. Go to different places. We're going to see the foxholes that you see in Band of Brothers. We're going to go to those foxholes. We're going to talk about it. We're going to go to the village of Foy. And we can connect those things that happened through the lens of things that we can do today to help project success in future situations. That's what barrel strength leadership is all about. We try to do it in an unfiltered. You want candid. You want open. And you want it in a way that is different, that's going to make you or your team better.

take colleges. I take people who are interested in leadership. I can take businesses. I could take your business or a group of contractors that want to talk about it. And let's go to Gettysburg. It's just outside of D.C. It's much easier. No, by the way, I do everything minus the airfare. Right. We'll go. Go to the location. We'll talk about the things and I will reinforce the things that you as a leader want your team to know. Things that are important to you. How do we pull that out of them so that they learn it by doing, by seeing without you? Because sometimes, well, the boss told us that this is important. It's far better when they go, man, if I only was able to do this and you're like, that's awesome. I want you to do that. Yeah. Now they own it. Yeah.

And it's fun. That's the most important part. is it's got to be fun. It's got to be engaging, which is the thing why I don't like the one over to 100 PowerPoints lie. Hey, leadership in the contracting world, let me put up five bullets and then let's do a trust fall. It's not the same. Let's get out there. Let's walk. Let's, okay. How might this be in your organization? Do you have these sorts of problems? Have you ever disagreed with a boss? How do you do it? How do you do it respectfully? When is it time to, you've heard this phrase in the military, shut up and call her. Right? Yep. When is the point of discussion versus discontent? Yeah, those are

Ooh. So one that General Gavin, he helped kind of create the airborne in the U.S. Army. He was one of the first battalion commanders. He commanded the first regimental jump into Sicily. He jumped into Italy. He became the assistant division commander for Normandy and the division commander by Holland. And he created a culture. And it's his little diary that indicates. You get little snippets of how he tried to reinforce what he thought made a good leader. And it's a war diary. And so there's gaps. And he goes back, well, it's been 17 days since I've been able to write anything down. But man, I'm proud of these people. I went around and I saw so-and-so. I trusted so-and-so to drag me around the battlefield. I think it's a pretty good, awesome experience. And because I served in the 82nd, I've had the opportunity to... to see the places and see things through his lens, as well as what he tried to build as a culture. And that culture still exists. His expectations of officers in the 82nd Airborne Division as an airborne officer still sit in those units today. And I want to peek at someone that has had that sort of lasting impact.

The two best ways, LinkedIn, Barrel Strength Leadership. We're on there. I post different things. What am I thinking? What am I doing? Where am I going? Some of the history things with how I look on stuff. And BarrelStrengthLeadership. org. That's the website. You can see what I offer. mentorship, strategic planning, and these awesome, incredible, experiential and immersive leader development or team building events.