Written by Lee Kirby, Co-Founder & Chairman of Salute Mission Critical
The military is either training or fighting. In concept, this sums the mindset, but misses the details. While continuing to stay at the concept level, consider the medical profession and how they train doctors. The concept there is “watch one, do one, teach one”. Once again, the concept misses the details of four years of medical school and five or more years of residency, but it holds true and is cemented in a mindset and approach to continuous learning. My daughter is a surgeon in the Navy and my oldest son is a bomb expert in the Army and while they are worlds apart in what they do, they share one thing in common, continuous learning and applying the gained knowledge to exceed the requirements of their role. The commitment to training and passion for continuous learning is deeply ingrained because lives depend on it.
Salute was built on these same concepts and principles of continuously learning and executing its mission at an individual and organizational level. With over five years of growing and learning and executing our mission we have evolved to a point where we are training our clients. It has happened naturally and proven to deliver commercial value beyond expectations. Many of the clients that we are helping to establish training programs see the value of the military DNA that Salute possesses because they were stalled in their development and suffering as a result. They described their situation as “Ground Hog Day” because they kept making the same mistakes and realized that they were not learning from them. Salute integrated its proven training methodology with their company and developed a training program that is customized to their needs and the results are extraordinary.
The problem is common. The symptoms range from repeating the same mistakes to high attrition and unfilled vacancies. Salute’s mission is to provide veterans an opportunity in the industry and as a result it also provides the industry with an opportunity to leverage the core fabric of military training methodologies and all parties achieve their goals. These problems are commonly masked behind over simplified conclusions of senior management because it is hard to directly correlate to the P&L. However, the impact is evident with the head scratching over with poor results that are not easily explained. I believe that the military is the best training organization in the world. I also believe that it is a wise decision to use veterans to establish and drive training programs from initial training to continuous lessons learned programs. Salute can be a resource for you to leverage if you do not have a core team of veterans to assign this key mission. Training like a veteran means training like lives are at stake and that focus can take your organization to ever increasing levels of performance.