Episode 107 Transcription

Welcome to episode 107 of Behind the Mission, a show that sparks conversation with trusted partners and educational experts.

My name is Duane France, and each week I'll be having conversations with podcast guests that will equip you with tools and resources to effectively engage with and support military service members, Veterans, and their families. You can find a show on all the podcast players or be going to www.psycharmor.org/podcast.

Thanks again for joining us on Behind the Mission. Our work and mission are supported by generous partners and sponsors who also believe that education changes lives. Our sponsor this week is PsychArmor, the premier education and learning ecosystem specializing in military culture content. PscyhArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory that's free to individual learners, as well as custom training options for organizations. 

On today's episode, I'm featuring a conversation with Navy Veteran Alex Krongard, CEO of the Commit Foundation. The Commit Foundation seeks to provide high-touch transition support, so Veterans in all communities can access services, helping them identify their passions, build strong networks, and leverage their skills in civilian careers. You can find out more about Alex by checking out his bio on our show notes.Let's get into my conversation with him and come back afterwards to talk about some key points.

duane--_25_02-01-2023_190752: Alex, I'm grateful to be able to share the work of the Commit Foundation with the Behind the Mission audience. As I've mentioned to you, I'm appreciative of the work that Commit Foundation has done over the years have had the opportunity to serve as an advisor and a workshop here in my community. Before we get into that though, I'd like to provide an opportunity for you to share your journey from your military service, your work in the corporate sector, and now in executive leadership in the nonprofit space.

alex-krongard_1_02-01-2023_180752: Well, an interesting place to start. So I,  retired in September of 2016. After 31 years, I was ready to go and, and I think it was just, I had a very rare opportunity to get out and I took it. Through some very weird, to use a commit word, serendipitous series events.

I ended up, one month and two days after retiring from the Navy working in an investment bank in San Francisco, doing mergers and acquisitions of mid-market companies in the tech sector. And it was, it's like the Wizard of Oz. It wasn't Kansas anymore.

I got there and the compliance people were like, you have to pass this five hour exam. And then another, two and a half hour, 90 minute exam. I can't remember how long it was. And I started working in downtown in the financial district of San Francisco. I did that for four and a half years and I found that it was a lot like the military in some respects, in that it was literally like I had been shoved in at the o six level and I hadn't done the oh one through oh five levels. And we think of the military, there's no, a civilian can't come in and do an oh six level job when they haven't done oh one through oh five.

And you know what, that's true in investment banking too. There were certain things I could do. There was a lot I couldn't do. I to this day, cannot look at a spreadsheet. I can't look at the books of a company and see anything. What I could do is I could walk into a company and I couldlook at the CEO  and the c o o and the other operating officers of the company, and I could figure out how well the leadership was doing.

And I could also build rapport relatively quickly with a team so that I could pitch our services, usually, offering to sell the company or fine buyers and sell the company then. As I said, I did that for four and a half years. When Covid came. , the first part of it was like this tremendous opportunity to kind of slow down and think in a way that I really hadn't done in, I don't know, let's just say 34 years or something.

And in the midst of it, I realized that what I had been doing on the side, while I was in investment banking of helping other vets make the transition was part and parcel of something I liked to do more. At the same time, I was also looking at three other jobs, including one sideways move inside the investment bank.

At the end of the day, or it was actually the end of four months, the job that was left standing, so to speak, was the, commit c e o job. And I came into the c e O job to say I was as naive about it as I was going into investment banking would be an understatement. In investment bankin, at least I was dealing similar types of personalities to what I'd seen in the SEAL teams. In the nonprofit world, I encountered a whole cast of characters and unbeknownst to me, I did not realize that the Veteran Service Organization space was so enormous, and furthermore, commit had a really, really, not just a unique place in that space, but also, a kind of unusual way of doing business in that we meet every Veteran where they, where they stand, and we put over, we put about 1200 people a year through the Commit programs. And that's, it's not 1200 different approaches, but in some ways it is 1200 different approaches. And to get your hands around a virtual organization. That is where the really heavy lifting is done by the executive coaches who are 10 90 nines.

alex-krongard_1_02-01-2023_180752: And all the, the really kind of breakthrough work is done in one-on-one sessions. I don't know I've been there almost two years. Two years in May. I don't know if I still fully understand it. And the one thing I do get is that we do good work and I have to be careful not to change too much cuz I don't wanna, throw the baby out with the bath water. But it's, it's a learning experience every single day. And, you know, hopefully I continue to, to do more good than bad. 

duane--_25_02-01-2023_190752: Yeah. it definitely. and I think that's a really unique. In some ways maybe it might not be so unique a transition story, right? You get out of the military, you find a really good, decent paying job. It gives you things to do, it gives you purpose. But I think for many veterans, and this was my own experience too, is the first job that I took outta the military.

duane--_25_02-01-2023_190752: It was purposeful, but it wasn't meaningful. It didn't really satisfy that desire I had and really my focus. And that sounds like the same thing for you, is you found that the work that you were doing with veterans was more meaningful to you perhaps than the work you were doing in investment banking, which is eventually how you found your way to Veteran nonprofit space. 

alex-krongard_1_02-01-2023_180752: Yeah. The meaning and purpose thing is just enormous. And you know, that's a hard thing to do and I, to be honest with you, still commit some days because I'm not the guy meeting with veterans every day. My purpose and meaning is more abstract than the people actually talking to Veterans.

Like today, I talked to a young man and it was awesome absolutely amazing. But he, he's the only Veteran I'll talk to all week. So it's harder for me to keep the battery charged, if you will. And, the other thing that's challenging is we're dealing with two kind of broadly different set of Veterans.

We're dealing with people who are retiring outta the military and like me, they have they've been institutionalized, fully institutionalized, and recently one of our coaches, said something about, they had been talking to one of the people they're coaching, and the, the guy described getting outta the military as the Shawshank Redemption movie where, Morgan Freeman's looking up at that beam in the halfway house and I don't know, I don't think it's that dramatic, but I will tell you, we do some programs with, other nonprofits that are working with people who are incarcerated. And when I talk to them, there are a lot of similarities with institutionalization, be it prison or the military, and while the nature of the institutionalization is very different. The effects, there are some very similar effects and combating them and getting people's identity back. And just to put a plug in, we, this past year we've been working with spouses and is a really breakthrough program. And we're finding it that they have identity changes. I mean,the day you retire from the military or you get outta the military, you're a Veteran. The day you get out, what is your spouse? There is no name. There's not like Veteran spouse or something. And so wrestling with these questions of identity is what we spend a lot of time on and I think it's important. 

duane--_25_02-01-2023_190752: that's exactly this idea of transition. It is challenging. It could be especially challenged for the current era of Veterans who served or joined after 9/11, because we have unique experiences of simultaneous multi theater conflicts,rapid, consecutive deployments, especially through the late two thousands and early teens. And it's sort of broad. Like it doesn't matter if the service member was enlisted or commissioned, branch of serviced, like you said, got out after five or 10 years versus 25 to 30, served conventional forces or remember of special warfare units. That transition process can be challenging for all Veterans, and that's really what the Commit Foundation is trying to support.

alex-krongard_1_02-01-2023_180752: Yeah, we, like I said, we meet everyone where they are and everyone's in a slightly different place, But we're trying to avoid social isolation. We're trying to mitigate the loss of tribe, the loss of identity, and we're also trying to get people into jobs that align with their personal values, such that the odds are higher, that they'll find meaning and purpose in that job, where frankly, some people just want a lifestyle job.They want to earn a little bit of money. And their real focus is outside of work. And you know what, we're there for them too. And I just hope we can continue to meet, like I said, meet people where they are.

duane--_25_02-01-2023_190752: Now you mentioned the concept. I am a fan of serendipity, right? Beneficial things happening by chance. But really one thing that commit does is you sort of engineer that serendipity. You create situations in which,beneficial things happen. They seem to happen by chance. But that's one of the things that the commit approach is you provide opportunities for Veterans that they may not have considered, but it's really what they were looking for. They just didn't know it. 

alex-krongard_1_02-01-2023_180752: Yeah. First off, when I came on board commit, I wanted to get rid of that word serendipity. I could not stand it, but each additional day, I may commit. I have to admit there is no other word. So, not even grudgingly, I celebrate serendipity now, but I think it all goes back to, I think I'll get the quote from Louis Pester right fortune favors the prepared mind.And if you, have people thinking about the right things and considering the right things, I think the odds of them, getting where they want to go, I think they're better. They're not perfect and they're not a hundred percent, but they're better. And you know, the other kind of weird, and maybe this falls in a different type of serendipity. In one of my final tours in the military, I spent a delightful year in the country of Jibouti over in the Horn of Africa. They're kind of two dimensions to this story, I guess. Back in the seventies, don't know, I was probably like 15, 16 years old. My mother gave me this book by Peter Matheson called, the Snow Leopard, and I tried to read it.

I couldn't get through it to save my life. And I was a pretty serious reader, have been all my life. And when I was over in Jabouti, the New York Times Magazine came out with this huge article on the life and times of the author Peter Matheson. And I think the article came out online on, say, Friday, and he died on Saturday. Towards the end of the article, there was a quote from the, I think the book is called The Tree Where Man Is Born. And, Matheson wrote something like, as I leaned back against these warm rocks of Africa, I realized, I found what I was looking for without ever knowing really what it was. And I went home. I had to go back to the Pentagon for some sort of meeting for literally back to Virginia for two days. I flew home, I got the snow leopard off my shelf. I took it back to Jibouti and I read the book and I found what I was looking for in Africa. I'm still not sure what it was, but I know I found it.

And I think going back to the pasture idea of the favoring the prepared mind, I think. I think it's not always clear to either the participants or for that matter, the coaches, what exactly we're, laying the foundation for. But we are laying the foundation for something and people they suddenly, one day they're like, oh, wow, I know what to build on this now. But it, there's a lot of magic. It is a black box. It is serendipity, it's luck, it's a lot of things, but I think if we keep doing the right things and talking, keeping the conversation going, it all works out.

duane--_25_02-01-2023_190752: As you were even talking, I mean, the word that came to my mind is magic, right? There does seem to be some esoteric quality to it. But it's something that has been able to be replicated. There, there is research behind this, but as you were talking about serendipity can happen by chance, but it does require a prepared mind.And I think that's where Commit really does good at helping people prepare their minds to be open to new and interesting ideas. I think there's this concept when we get out of the military I must go in this way. I was in logistics. Most of my peers then went into logistics after the military or cyber professionals or so on, right? And so I think that's really where the beneficial thing that commit does is sort of broadens people's horizons and at least creates an environment where that magic can happen.

alex-krongard_1_02-01-2023_180752: Yeah. Yeah, funny another thing that I was kind of uncomfortable with when I got to commit was this ICI information, confidence, imagination. But again, I find a ;ot of military people, they don't have the right information, they don't have the right kind of confidence. And there's this whole, I can go into what confidence means in the private sector versus what it means in the military cuz it's radically different.

And then the imagination thing is it's funny, in the military we think of ourselves as pretty imaginative, but we're really not that imaginative. People always say, you know, I want the military to be entrepreneurial. You can't be entrepreneurial fails too much. You cannot fail in the military, so you can only take so many risks.

I mean,you mitigate your risk down to the absolute minimum you can. And then the commander literally decides, am I gonna take that risk or I'm I not gonna take that risk? And obviously the all the plan goes away with first contact with the enemy, but still, you go up till place in the execution. You are, following a plan, you're mitigating risks, that kind of thing. Completely different in the private sector.

duane--_25_02-01-2023_190752: Yeah. No, and you're absolutely right. We like to think that, you know, we're bold in the imaginative leaders, but we do have that parameters. I often describe the transition process for Veterans as like lions and lions as being released into the wild, right? They're fierce and beasts.

When they're, in, in the captivity. But they need to learn a whole lot new skills when they come out, and they're released into the wild. I've always said that commit foundation is one of the best kept secrets in the Veteran transition space. Many may not have heard about it, spoken the same way as other high profile veteran nonprofits.But commit has a long history of supporting those who served in a very meaningful way. Maybe you can share with the audience sort of the approach. We've been talking about it in general. But really sort of describe some of the programming that commit Foundation provides. 

alex-krongard_1_02-01-2023_180752: Well, where I'd start about 75% of the people who go through commit in a given year hear about us, word of mouth. They hear about us through friend. So that's awesome because we get that stamp of approval. But the second part of it is that it limits who we can get into the front doors. Then we have a little bit of a test.

Our application process is not the easiest one. It takes a little bit of work, it takes a little bit of commitment. But you fill out your application. And then we have what are called directors of Veterans Services. Or a better way, I think, to look at 'em is concierges. They're the concierge for the process. So you fill out your application and you summit it. We take a look at it and one of the, the dvs is Directors of Veterans Services Concierge. They talk to you and they figure out, okay, what's the next step? We have an automated system called, Pursue Your Purpose, where it helps you figure out what your values are, what you want to do in your life. The best way I can sum it up is this is what's important to me and when I'm 95 and I look back on my life, this is what I want to see when I look back. And then we take that and the concierge, the dvs will, after talking to you, they get an idea of your personality and they put you, maybe you may not need.

There's some people that DVS literally figures out right then and there, hey, you need a resume and you're gonna go into this business and you're gonna be fine. Or in some cases, hey, you really want to do this. I think it's a great idea. You should go try it at least, and people do and that the process ends there.

Other people, they go and they work with an executive coach for five one hour sessions, and our coaches, they kind of run the gamut. We have some coaches that are great with entrepreneurs and that's really what they specialize in. We have a couple that are phenomenal with the real hardcore type A personalities you get coming outta the military.

There's a coach for, weirdos like me who want to talk about literature or whatever. And there's everything in between. And so you work with a coach and the coach kind of helps you figure out, these are my values, these are some things I would like to do. This is where I can find some information.

This is how to increase my confidence cuz now I know more and this is some things I should use my imagination to consider. And again, then it might end there too. If not, they go back to the dvs and then they if you need help with resume writing, we give you that. It's a different kind of coaching.

Same thing for, interviews. We actually, partner with Candorfull and, Candorfull handles getting mock interviews for commit participants. Whole separate nonprofit doing incredible work. And then we also do like salary negotiation  and things like that that people need. And then for about, 11 to 15% of the people going through commit in any given year.

They'll do an in-person workshop for two days. The first day, kind of re-exports their values, figures out where they are in the transition process. And then the second day is about, them pitching themselves to mentors from Select Industries. If we're out in the valley, they're talking to VCs. If they're in New York, it's private equity.

And again, we do about, six to eight of those a year. After the workshop, things trail off. People are generally finding jobs at that time. We encourage their spouses to go through our spouses program if possible. One thing I omitted, we like to get people coming to commit 12 to 18 months before they get out. And some people, we literally help them decide not to get out. But we're okay with that. You know, come back when you're ready to, get out and we'll help you again. And then the other thing we're starting to see is some people, when they get out, it's not so much a misstep or a failed transition, they just get a taste of the private sector and they realize they want to be doing something slightly different or some situation in their life change or in the job change, and they want to change jobs. And now we're working on what we call, pursue your path, which is a reexamination of your values, getting the alignment right for the second go round, which could be 2, 5, 8 years down the road and we're also trying to build an alumni network up so that your fellow alumni can help you and mixed into the workshop as well as other dimensions of our program or mentors. If you want to go run an ice cream shop in, um, I don't know, Kansas City, we'll try to find someone, say in St.Louis who's running an ice cream shop who can help you, and that's one of the big changes of commit, from Annemarie, the founder and, ran it for 10 years. She, her Rolodex was insane. Literally one of the great Rolodexes in the world probably till today. The roledex is a little different now, and some of that's due to that, the two groups of people getting out, they have different needs, but we try to get you with a mentor that can help you and that, and that ends the process.

And, oh, and, uh, one other thing is if you need something special, we'll find it for you. We had a guy who just got, laid off. And we're working with him for that special circumstances. Another guy's an entrepreneur and having challenges with certain things about running a business. We'll find an entrepreneur  to mentor him in a much more comprehensive way than the other mentors.So again, wherever you are, we will meet you there.

duane--_25_02-01-2023_190752: And I think it would be really interesting, listeners understand about transition support. As you were talking about emerging into this space, as big as it is and there's lots of different types of transition support, but that is the very definition of high touch, high quality. That is, like you said, it's a process that you have different things, you know, choose one from column A, one from column B, but what seems to be unique to commit is that it's, all relational. It's not transactional. Give me your military service and I'll return you a resume. It's really more of a relationship between your coaches, the mentors, the team, and the Veterans that are coming through. 

alex-krongard_1_02-01-2023_180752: Yeah. One of our touchstones is veterans first always. We've had a lot of discussions about placement, putting people in jobs and getting paid for it, because what we do is expensive and I that's what keeps me up at night, where's the money coming from. But when we do that, our equities become confused and they're no longer with the veteran.

And, so I would rather, I would rather not do the placement thing. I really don't wanna do anything that compromise our to support to the Veteran. I don't want there to be any confusion about who is first only, and foremost in our, eyes.

duane--_25_02-01-2023_190752: Yeah. I think it's amazing, so if people wanted to find out more about the Commit Foundation, the work that you do, maybe share some of the resources with Veterans they're working with. How can they do that?  

alex-krongard_1_02-01-2023_180752: So there's our mysterious website, cuz it is a little mysterious, www.commitfoundation.org. I hesitate to do this, but I will, I don't get that much email to begin with and, or they can write me, alex@ commitfoundation.org.

I'm terrible at answering the email, but we, there's, a woman we hired part-time who's very, very good at getting me to answer the email. I honestly recommend they go check out the website. But again, the website, their questions people have, and there's an info address on the website. They can email their questions there. But you worst comes to worst, email me. I never, I don't get to talk to enough Veterans. Yeah, just www.commitfoundation.org

duane--_25_02-01-2023_190752: That's great. I'll make sure that, the links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Once again, we would like to thank this week sponsor is PsychArmor. PsychaArmor is the premier education and learning ecosystem specializing in military culture content. PsychArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory that's free to individual learners as well as custom training options for organizations.

My conversation with Alex is another one that could have gone on for a long time, and rightly so. As I mentioned in the episode, a lot of people may not have had the opportunity to be connected to the Commit Foundation or hear what they do, but also, as we talked about, they're among the most high-touch, high-impact transition programs that I know of. Alex described it during the episode, and it goes beyond just sitting in a transition class and having interactions with your fellow attendees. Almost all of the commit foundation's engagement with Veterans that they work with is one-on-one, and even their workshops include mentors that make the team member to Veteran ratio very, very low.

One of the first things that I would like to point out is how Alex talked about serendipity. That's one of those words that I thought that I knew it had meant when I first heard it, but not really. A fancy $5 word is one of my troops used to call them. But serendipity is really beneficial chance finding something that you weren't looking for that has a positive outcome.

Running into a friend at the store or wandering down a side street in your city and finding a really great restaurant that you didn't know about. It's sort of like being in the right place at the right time for something good to happen. When I've talked about this before, people think about serendipity as luck and therefore something that we have no control over.

But commit really does engineer serendipity and create the environment for beneficial things to happen. Like a lot of interesting phenomena in the world the concept of serendipity has been studied in a research paper published in 2011, which I'll link to in the show notes. Some professors from the University of Western Ontario studied the facets of a wide number of serendipitous events, and reached the conclusion that three things must be present for serendipity to occur: a chance encounter, a prepared mind, and the act of notice.

We may not be able to control the first one, a chance encounter, but we certainly do have power over the second two. How prepared our mind is to consider other possibilities outside of our frame of reference and whether or not we're being aware of and noticing opportunities that may present themselves. If a veteran leaves the military not in a prepared mind mode, then they're gonna continue on the same path that they were before. The cook becomes the chef. The intelligence analyst becomes the government contractor. The leader becomes a corporate leadership trainer. But if we prepare our mind to consider other possibilities, the world opens up.

And as for the act of noticing, if we're not looking around and paying attention, the beneficial chance isn't going to present itself. Going back to my example of bumping into a friend at the store, the friend is there, you are there. You might be willing to stop and chat, but if you don't notice them, then the chance opportunity evaporates.

Or the side street analogy, you might notice the restaurant on the side street, but if your mindset isn't in a place to try something new or you're just using it as a shortcut, you're gonna miss out on a neat, new experience. There are opportunities all around you today for things to happen by beneficial chance.You might go to lunch 20 minutes later than you planned and overhear something someone says, while you're waiting in that helps you make a connection to them. Or they might say something that sparks an idea for your next project or your next novel.

You might be randomly invited to a meeting where you hear something that changes your life. I literally have examples of things that if I'd gone to another room for a seminar instead of the one that I chose, my post-military career would've looked completely different. The Commit Foundation is really good at preparing Veterans' minds to be ready to consider alternative possibilities in the future, and really good at putting opportunities in front of their face so they can't help but notice and then the chance occurrence thing happens by itself. Like Alex talked about in the episode. It's kind of like magic and like all magic tricks. There's a secret to it. Hopefully my explanation of how the trick is done doesn't reduce your enjoyment of it.

The other thing that I wanna briefly touch on is how I appreciated something that Alex said about imagination and creativity within the military context. I always learn something new from each of the guests that I talk to, but every once in a while I take away something that I can really chew on. I've said it before that I believe that service members and Veterans have some inherent creativity. We have to because in the military, we were often asked to do a lot of very complex things with limited resources and information.

For a long time, I consider my leadership in problem solving as a form of creativity, a complex puzzle and riddle to solve. But Alex was right when he said that the military is by its nature limiting to creativity and imagination. This probably comes as no surprise to someone who's seen a division ceremony with thousands of soldiers standing in rank and file, or a motor pool filled with rows and rows of identical military tanks or vehicles.

But imaginative military thinking occurs within very strict parameters, creativity in a box, so to speak. As Alex said, there are very clear boundaries to the possibility of creativity, and it doesn't spill outside of the sandbox. Those boundaries are removed in post-military life though, and it might take someone a while to realize that.

So hopefully you appreciated my conversation with Alex. If you did, we'd love to hear from you. So if you do have some feedback, let us know. Drop a review on your podcast player a Choice, or send us an email info@psycharmor.org. We're always glad to hear from listeners both feedback on the show and suggestions for future guests.

For this week's PsychArmor resource of the week, I'd like to share the PsychArmor’scourse, Creating A Military Friendly Culture and Onboarding Program. This course provides information and resources necessary for businesses to begin their military recruitment campaign, including mobilizing efforts to hire and retain Veterans and their spouses. You can find a link to the resource in our show notes.