When Loyalty Meets Misalignment

Cindy and I made some of the boldest leaps of our lives in 2016 and 2017, leaps that would have never happened without a complete willingness to accept full responsibility for our definite decisions. Even then, stepping away from both our full time jobs required every bit of unwavering courage we had developed to that point. Thankfully, we had been working consistently to earn influence and trust with the handful of clients we had developed to that point, and that consistency yielded the beginning of what Napoleon Hill listed as his eleven (and final) leadership attribute in Think and Grow Rich: Cooperation. In defining that, he shared that “The successful leader must understand and apply the principle of cooperative effort and be able to induce the followers to do the same. Leadership calls for power, and power calls for cooperation.”

While I was doing that crazy amount of hiring in 2013 and 2014, I established a wonderful relationship with the folks working in our local Virginia Employment Commission office who were responsible for administering the Jobs for Veterans State Grant - a federal program geared at helping connect employers with veterans who were overcoming various barriers to employment. That was both effective and rewarding; I filled dozens of open positions and had a hand in helping some folks through otherwise tough circumstances. One of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever experienced professionally was just a few years ago when one of those veterans stopped me at a restaurant, thanking me for the opportunity I connected him with. He had just retired, after ten years in the role I hired him for, and shared that he would have never been able to had he stayed on his previous path. In reality, I was one of many links in the chain - but praise God I could be involved!

Cooperation with the Jobs for Veterans State Grant team, though, really began to manifest in the fall of 2016 when Cindy and I had the opportunity to be part of their statewide annual leadership conference. It was my first formal keynote, speaking to the impact they made as an organization and the role many veterans had played in my life (like Terry Ward, who I mention far more than he’s comfortable with). As our business grew through late 2016 and into 2017, our relationship with the JVSG team did as well. As we began planning the full day leadership events - the one we started hosting locally in 2015 and the one we decided to host an hour north in late October 2017 - we approached the Chief of Veterans Services, Dr. Rob Walker, Jr. (whose contribution opened the “Real World Examples” chapter of The Values Advantage) about serving as emcee for both events. We admired all that he stood for, specifically the values he shared in his segment of my book, and saw it as a great opportunity to provide his JVSG team with visibility in front of the business community that would be attending these events.

The local event went better than we could have imagined. The other was decent overall, doing anything of that scale an hour away while still juggling a full time job is a tall order, but we ran into some tremendous roadblocks shortly after we purchased the initial license to host the event. Our relationship with Dr. Rob was (as still is) amazing, but one of the other driving factors in ever considering something like that - in addition to the one we had been doing for a few years and an hour away - was what seemed like a developing partnership. Even after bold leaps, though, bad situations can emerge as friction when institutional expectations clash against your core values, and in this case, the independence we were chasing through our new business. I’ll map that out in more detail next. Before that, I’ll challenge you to reflect on a time you began feeling misaligned with an organization or institution. Note your immediate emotions from that and one early sign you may have initially missed.