7. Respect for People and Procedures
Did your branch of the service have something that was “the book,” as in “by the book?”
They pretty much all do, whether it’s the basic service manual or a specialization-specific text. You’ve got your SOP and you stick to it.
There’s a good reason for that. When you’ve got a text like the NATOPS (Naval Air Training and Operations Procedures Standardization) manual for pilots, people say it was “written in blood” — meaning that the procedures in there were put in place because someone didn’t do them, and that person died.
“By the book” is the military’s way of accumulating centuries of bloody trial and error. As a result, veterans are coming from a system where they were trained a “right way” to do things, and trained to stick to that way no matter what the situation.
To some extent that limits innovation, but it also prevents indecision and paralysis at key moments. The result when veterans get out into the civilian world is employees who are willing to do things “the company way,” and who respect the idea that policies aren’t just made up out of the blue — they’re usually there because someone before you figured out the best way of doing something.
Similarly, the service teaches an automatic respect for everyone who’s in there doing his or her job with you. There’s absolutely no advantage in the military for someone to look good at someone else’s expense. When you play a zero-sum game like that, the unit suffers, and when the unit’s performance goes down the chance that you might get killed goes up.
As a result, veterans tend to make reliable and hassle-free employees — they’re willing to learn procedures and follow them, and they don’t waste time on infighting or office politics.
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