The Leader’s Choice: Bridging the Leadership Gap

Veterans are an endangered demographic and their contributions will be missed. Vets comprise about eight percent of our population today, and that number is expected to decrease to less than five percent over the next two decades. As the veteran presence decreased over the past 50 years, incidences of ethical and illegal transgressions have risen and our elected officials have the lowest approval ratings in recorded history. This is not a coincidence.

Leadership through volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) situations—what our country has faced since the new millennium—is the greatest asset veterans offer the whole of society. Their disappearance is exasperating the leadership void across the commercial and public sectors.

We can’t create more veterans, but we can capture the best leadership practices from the military and translate them for nonmilitary applications. In the recently published book, The Leader’s Choice, Jason Roncoroni and Zebrina Warner bridge the gap by leveraging the science of applied psychology and organizational behavior to bring the best practices from military leadership for nonmilitary applications. The unwavering theme of this book is the imperative of leaders and business managers to put their people first.

The authors explore how leadership development in the military differs from the corporate world but complements business skill sets. They also effectively compare the competencies and traits of emotional intelligence with the Army’s Leadership Requirement Model to show the striking similarity between how the military develops leaders and the recognized best practices from the business world. From this foundation, the authors introduce the ADAPT Framework to explore how nonmilitary organizations can align values and purpose, develop a culture of camaraderie, apply organizational agility, process solutions for dynamic operations, and transform leader behaviors through coaching, teaching, and mentoring.

This book is unlike any other military or business leadership reference because it details the science and psychology underpinning what works in the military to create a common language for universal applicability. Roncoroni and Warner introduce new, hybrid practices that include the character alignment methodology, the Gap to Growth (GTG) Leadership Approach, the hierarchy of organizational agility, the CADEnce Method, and the Coach, Teach, Mentor (CTM) Methodology. These insights provide the template for leaders to adopt the best practices from the military to empower their workforce to thrive and win in today’s uncertain world.