Discover the untapped power of military leadership with Veteran Led: Military Leadership Lessons to Help Your Team Survive, Thrive, and Dominate by John S. Berry.
This groundbreaking book goes beyond the battlefield, offering actionable insights from an Army veteran who transformed his experience as a platoon leader into building a high-performing, award-winning law firm. Berry brings you face-to-face with the timeless leadership principles he used to create a culture of trust, resilience, and purpose—qualities every leader strives for but few achieve. Each chapter is a toolkit for success, bridging military precision with business innovation. Veteran Led is not just a book; it’s a roadmap for anyone ready to lead with confidence and vision in today’s competitive world.
Harness these principles to empower your team, elevate your organization, and navigate any challenge with clarity. Don’t miss the opportunity to transform your leadership and achieve lasting impact.
I arrived at 0530, before sunrise, for a quick company meeting followed by physical training. All my platoon’s noncommissioned officers (NCOs) had arrived before I stumbled into the company area. They were already planning out the day, coffee in hand, excitedly awaiting first formation. Anxiously, I said, “Morning,” knowing they intended to break me or laugh at me.
None of them responded; they all just stared at me as if they planned to kill me and eat me for breakfast.
I knew what was coming. First, they would try to smoke me during physical training. After breakfast, they would watch me lead battle drills, critique me, heckle me, and advise me. Over lunch, we would go to the gym and lift weights and then to the motor pool, where I would stand around looking like an idiot all day, trying to be useful without getting in the way. Soon we would go to the field for a thirty-day training exercise, and I trembled at the thought of looking even more incompetent.
I didn’t fear spending thirty days and nights in the wilderness with these steely-eyed, barrel-chested killers. I didn’t fear my company commander chewing my as. What I feared was letting these heroes down and being ridiculed by them for the next year. Most of my subordinate leaders had CIBs (Combat Infantryman’s Badges) from Desert Storm. As an unproven college kid among men, I felt as useless as wet toilet paper.
In a few months, I would lead this team on my first deploy- ment. What if I screwed up and got someone killed? What if I lost the team’s confidence? What if I got us lost and we ended up in a minefield? What if they didn’t respect me?
Welcome to leadership, welcome to community, welcome to the military.
My fears came not from my insecurities but from the grave respect and admiration I had for my platoon of proven warriors. These men, the best men I’d ever know, deserved a leader who could keep them safe and make them even better soldiers. As an inexperienced leader, I had no idea how to do this, and that realization terrified me.
If you’ve ever led a successful team, organization, or company, you remember the terror. You remember the crushing burden, the self-doubt, and the pride of leading a new team. While at the time I dreaded my existence as an inexperienced, incompetent, brand-new infantry platoon leader, I’ve spent the last twenty-five years of my life trying to get that feeling back. Not the feeling of incompetence but the sense of mission, duty, and community that every veteran remembers. That is where I strive to go every day.
Despite my awareness of my deficiencies, every time I arrived in the Alpha company area with my platoon NCOs, I felt like part of a championship team. Positive attitudes and smiles were everywhere, especially when it sucked. The omniscient, omnipotent NCOs showed up to work in perfectly starched uniforms with glossy, spit-shined combat boots. When we conducted field training, the hypervigilant, detail-oriented professionals started their days with gear secured, weapons clean, vehicles fueled, and equipment inspected. I doubted the relevance of my leadership role on this team of consummate professionals. What I did know: this felt like home, and I was proud to be one of the team.
The feeling of community, dedication, and camaraderie a new platoon leader feels with his first platoon must be experienced to be understood, and I’ve tried to replicate that feeling in my civilian company. I strive to work in the presence of top-tier professionals who show up every day to give the mission their all and to take care of those in their charge.
After leaving the military, I read over one hundred books on the topics of organizational leadership, professional development, and team building. I hired business coaches, consultants, and industry experts, some of whom I paid up to $25,000 a month. I scoured podcasts, blogs, and YouTube videos, all in search of a mentor to teach me even better leadership lessons than those I learned in the military. No such animal exists.
To be clear, there are no shortages of gurus, experts, consultants, coaches, and authors who can provide a list of leadership principles, tell you how to think, tell you what to do, or repackage and regurgitate something someone else said about leadership. The deficit lies in the number of qualified leaders willing to share the truth about what it takes to lead a great team year over year.
Fortunately, veterans already have the answers. Unfortunately, most don’t know it. The answer to sustained great leadership lies in the doing. Leaders earn their roles in the military, and rightfully so. Soldiers train by the numbers, step by painful step, led by a veteran who has personally accomplished exactly what he is instructing his soldiers to do.
This starts day one, in basic training or boot camp, where the highly professional drill sergeant, who proficiently completed each task hundreds of times himself, trains the new private step-by-step in crawl, walk, and run methodology. Once all the recruits demonstrate proficiency in the task, the team moves to the next task. While some military tasks take years to master, the entire organization attains a base level of competence and relentlessly trains on those basic blocking and tackling skills for their entire careers. Shoot, move, and communicate.
This methodology differs from anything you can learn on YouTube or in a consultant-led “discovery day” or a business “boot camp.” Military leaders do not lead with theories or thoughts; they lead with actions and results. They improve through hypercritical, brutally honest feedback. In the military, you can’t “pay to play.” Every opportunity, every promotion, and every victory must be earned. As one excited battle buddy exclaimed, “You can’t pay for this experience unless you have a DoD-sized budget. Imagine the cost of firing the weapon systems, building the teams, and daily training.”
The military invests in its leaders, preparing them for bigger opportunities with meticulously designed career paths. In most cases, service members who do not move up in the ranks get moved out of the ranks. But it starts the same for every military leader.
All of us who joined the United States military began our development upon hearing the command “Drop!” And if you were like me, you heard it thousands of times. For those of you who haven’t served, “Drop!” means stop what you are doing immediately, get in the “front-leaning rest position,” and prepare to start doing push-ups. “Did I tell you to start pushing?”
“Drop!” is a corrective action with a physical manifestation. Pain is a teaching tool. And while civilians may think “dropping” someone is a degrading command because it could be an embarrassing public shaming, when you get “dropped,” you don’t care too much about the embarrassment; you’re too busy doing push-ups and trying to figure out what you did wrong. Somewhere in the midst of muscle fatigue and fear, lessons crystallize in our minds. And until those lessons control our actions, we feel them in various forms of pain and exhaustion. When we would reach muscle failure from doing push-ups, if the sergeant knew we had not yet learned the lesson, we would receive the instruction to roll over onto our backs and do flutter kicks. When we could no longer keep our legs six inches off the ground, we were allowed to stand up and “beat your boots.”
Squat down, slap your boots with your hands, stand up, and repeat—one hundred times.
If you’ve ever been “dropped,” you already know that the sergeant, the noncommissioned officer (NCO), is the backbone of the United States military. As the saying goes, officers plan, sergeants execute. Sergeants are responsible for training America’s sons and daughters to the highest standards of competence to reduce the number of injuries in training and deaths in combat. Throughout my military career, I was inspired, mystified, and fearful of the leadership of sergeants. To many of us, sergeants are superheroes with abilities to read minds, know the future, see through wall lockers, and perform logistical miracles. In hindsight, the real superpower wielded by sergeants was to train, lead, and transform others. In Hollywood, we see the battle-hardened sergeant transform the pudgy, lazy, cowardly recruit into a rippling, dead-eyed killer after just eight weeks of boot camp. While the Hollywood transformation is not entirely accurate, it’s not patently false. Sergeants are gods of leadership and human transformation.
I spent my military career trying to gain the trust of sergeants. When I was a cadet or student, I wanted them to trust my potential. As a commissioned officer, I wanted them to trust my leadership. I knew that if my sergeants respected me, I would succeed, and I also knew that if the sergeants did not support me, I would fail. The great lesson of military leadership is that you can be the most competent leader in the world, but the success of the mission will be determined by those in your charge, not you. If your team sucks, you will fail. If you suck but have strong subordinate leaders, chances are good that you will succeed in spite of yourself or your poor decisions. As an army officer, I saw mediocre leaders achieve amazing results because they trusted their sergeants.
If I have not already made it clear, I have believed, since the beginning of my military career, that the approval of the sergeant under my charge was tantamount to success. I admired my sergeants and constantly feared failing them.
When I learned I was going to be leading a platoon run by Desert Storm combat veterans, I knew I was not going to show up without some form of credibility. I was a newly minted second lieutenant. A kid with a college degree sent to lead combat veterans in their field of expertise. It’s not that I felt inadequate to lead these heroes because I lacked confidence. Objectively, I lacked the experience and knowledge to do anything other than be their student, their shadow, their intern. I did not deserve to be on their team, and now I was their named leader. Positional leadership—a fictional construct—gives you a title, but everyone knows who is really in charge. And in the army, sergeants are always in charge.
I am about to tell you what sergeants know.
The lessons I learned from the backbone of the Army helped me build an eight-figure business that has reached the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in the United States seven years in a row. We achieved this by developing a culture of winning and leadership. Today, we actively recruit former sergeants and officers. Veterans make up over 30 percent of our team. We have won the Department of Labor HIRE Vets Platinum Medallion Award and the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve Pro Patria Award. We have been recognized as a Military Times Best for Vets employer and a VETS Indexes Recognized Employer. Our formula is simple: lead with simple military principles, and hire veterans who understand those principles to lead the organization.
About John S. Berry
John S. Berry, fights for veterans in the courtroom and beyond. After receiving his commission as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army, John completed Airborne School and Ranger School. In 1999, while assigned to the First Cavalry Division, he deployed to Bosnia for Operation Joint Forge as a platoon leader. John also served as a Company Commander in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. John finished his military career as a Battalion Commander in the National Guard and retired as a lieutenant colonel. He has since been inducted into the Nebraska National Guard Regional Training Institute Hall of Fame.
Berry Law has served over 10,000 Veterans nationwide recovering over $300 million in backpay awards for veterans. The firm has also been awarded the HIRE Vets Platinum Medallion and the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve, Pro Patria Award.
John was inducted into the 209th Regional Training institute Hall of Fame. Under his leadership, Berry Law has received many national awards for its success in both the business community and the veteran community. These awards include the ESGR Pro Patria Award, Department of Labor Platinum Medallion, Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in the United States for seven consecutive years, and the Law Firm 500 list for six years.
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