Six years ago after I transitioned out of the Army, I sat down with our Chief of Staff. He was kind to me, which I remember better than most of what was actually said, and he told me to read The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. I read it that year alongside my PMP training books and I remember being struck by how much the two overlapped. My dad would call that the clue bird landing.
I picked it back up this summer. I was coming off a rough stretch, felt a little lost, and wanted something to ground myself in. So I started re-reading it.
I got to the section on adapting to a company’s culture: how power gets distributed, whether meetings are where decisions happen or where they get rubber-stamped, whether the place is consensus-oriented or process-oriented, how people get recognized. My first reaction was that I’d never thought about any of this.
Wrong twice
That was wrong twice over. I thought about all of it in the Army. The military decision-making process (MDMP) is essentially a framework for reading organizational culture. And I’d already noticed the overlap six years ago, sitting there with a Watkins book and a PMP study guide open next to each other. I just didn’t hold onto it.
What carried over
Veterans get told to translate their experience for civilian jobs, and everybody hears that as job titles. Squad leader becomes team lead. That’s the easy part. The frameworks came with you too. And apparently you can know that and still need to learn it again.
What I had to unlearn
The one habit I had to break getting out of the Army and going into tech: nobody cares about your rank. Your position and title matter, just not in the same way.
In the military you respect the rank. Someone earned it, and there’s a level of respect you show for that. It’s like seeing the title CEO versus junior sales engineer. When you see the rank, you have a certain expectation of that person, no matter their background or what they do.
That chain of command was hard for me to find, break and understand in corporate America. There isn’t a strict one. There are different types of leaders, and different types of organizations where it matters. That’s why understanding the organizational culture, how people actually work inside a company, is so important to learn and to stay curious about. It sets the tone for how you’ll fit in.
If you’re a veteran in tech: what’s the framework you brought with you and forgot you had? Hit reply. I read every one.