Tatiana Cookingham
The most important things we have garnered from our association with the military are not skills. The military has taught us 'how to be.' Honor, duty, responsibility and 'doing the right thing' are not just abstract concepts – they are part of how we live our lives. My wife and I are fourth generation military with family members who have fought in every major conflict since World War I. Growing up, our lives were filled with stories that highlighted the best in all of us and solidarity in difficult times. Doing the right thing became part of the fabric of our childhoods and, as we reached adulthood, we both understood that our families’ involvement with the military was directly related to that ethos.
After high school, we both went into the military. It just felt like the right thing to do. My wife enlisted in the Air Force and I entered the Army as a West Point cadet. As we progressed through our respective careers, we took to the culture because of its familiarity with our upbringing. Your word was your bond and ethics and integrity mattered. As we both assumed leadership positions in our careers, it became clear that rank, while legally compelling others to obey, was not the best means to accomplish our ends. If your coworkers and subordinates respected you and trusted you to act honorably, then they were much more willing to follow orders. They were also much more likely to work beyond the bare minimum for compliance – they could be routinely counted on to go well past the minimum standard, follow your intent, not just your orders and help the unit or organization succeed in its goals much more effectively.
While my wife continued her military career through to retirement in the Air National Guard, I departed active duty after seven years. For a reason I can only attribute to my upbringing and sense of camaraderie with the military, rather than transition to a fully civilian occupation I began work as a contractor supporting the acquisition of Army battlefield command and control systems. I took this position very seriously and threw myself into the work. As an Aviation company commander on active duty, you have a direct impact on the well-being of 30 or 40 soldiers. As a contractor designing and supporting critical command and control systems for brigade and division commanders, you can have a much farther reaching impact, especially if you do your job poorly and don’t focus on the soldier and mission first. My sense of integrity and respect for those still in uniform always has led me to take my role in the acquisition community with great seriousness and never accept anything that would be detrimental to a soldier’s ability to accomplish his mission.
Another critical element that we have both taken from our time in the military and applied to civilian life is that when you know that you are surrounded by people with the same ethical view, bonds of friendship, teamwork and trust are much easier to establish and much harder to break. In the military, when you know and trust in the fact that everyone around you is trying to do the right thing, it makes it much easier to try and get to your full potential to achieve your military mission. In the civilian world, the same concept applies. If you absolutely know that you can trust in your coworkers to do the right thing then you focus your corporate energies on the problem or product at hand instead of dealing with internal strife and other related personal issues. This is clearly evident for us both when we bring new people into our current companies. My wife handles all human resource and personnel actions in her company and she can clearly see the difference between employees that have an innate sense of ethics and responsibility and those that don’t. Those that do are easy to get along with, turn paperwork in on time and don't expect her to do everything for them. They take responsibility for their actions and make her job easier. In my position as a manager with hiring authority, I very rarely conduct interviews that focus on a person’s technical skills. Prior to an interview I review their resume, check references and correspond with them to accomplish an understanding of their qualifications. I spend the majority of the interview trying to gauge the person – focusing on their demeanor and whatever I can infer about their ethical stance through the context of the conversation. We both came to enjoy a work environment where you trust the person next to you and both work as hard as possible to maintain that environment in civilian life.
While we have viewed our stance on ethics and behavior and a means to shape our own professional environments, we both owe our current employment to the fact that we were prior military and also demonstrated a level of ethics and integrity during our interviews. My wife was one of the earliest employees of her company, hired on as they expanded past their first ten employees. The owner of the company was looking for someone whom he could trust with the most intimate details of how the company runs, as well as someone whom he could always trust to do the right thing and provide sound moral advice when needed on company policies and personnel actions. As a senior noncommissioned officer in the Air Force, my wife was exactly what he was looking for. Much as in my interview process, her interview consisted of very little discussion on detailed qualifications and more as an opportunity for the owner to gauge her personal ethics to know if he could trust her to do the right thing. Having spent her career doing the right thing and making the hard ethical choices over time in a variety of situations when sometimes you are choosing between the best of all bad options, she did well and was immediately offered the position. My interview when departing the military occurred in about the same manner. The time was spent getting to try and know me as a person and, due to the views I had developed in the military, all I had to do was be myself and that was what my future employer was looking for.
As alluded to earlier, both of us strongly believe that our duty to our country did not end when we left our respective services. We both sought employment with companies that provide direct services to the men and women still in uniform. Our time in the service of our country has provided us with a clear understanding and the importance of getting what our companies do right so that at the end of a bad day, in the most critical of situations, the equipment that we provide to our soldiers, sailors and airmen works and gets the job done.
Our military service has enriched our lives and aided our professional development in our chosen post-military careers in the same manner – it developed in us an innate sense of ethics, integrity and doing the right thing. Everything else we have has sprung from those simple concepts: life-long friendships, rewarding jobs in enjoyable work environments and a sense of dedication and duty to our community and nation. Anyone can learn a skill or trade with a little dedication. Ethics and integrity are a lifelong development process that started in our childhoods, growing up surrounded by the military, and then reinforced by our own military service. How you live every day matters and when the people in your life, both personally and professionally understand that, your lives and their lives are enriched and professionally your organizations can focus on the tasks at hand and be more productive and generate the products and services that our Warfighters need to today to accomplish their missions.
