Before You Head into This Weekend, A Few Things Worth Carrying with You
This weekend, across the country, flags will be folded.
Taps will be played.
Families will gather at gravesites and place flowers at headstones, some fresh, some worn by years of returning to the same spot, honoring the same name.
Memorial Day is many things to many people. It is the unofficial start of summer. It is cookouts and lake houses and long weekends with people you love.
But at its core…at the quiet, sacred center of what this day actually is, it is about people who gave everything they had in service of something bigger than themselves.
And sitting with that, really sitting with it, has a way of putting everything else into perspective.
What I Carry Into This Work
I have spent my career at the intersection of people and purpose.
Finding the right person for the right role is not, and has never been, a transaction to me. It is an act of belief. Belief in someone’s potential. The belief that the right fit changes lives on both sides of the table. The belief that when organizations build great teams, real things happen in the world, products get made, projects get built, and communities get stronger.
That belief did not come from a textbook or a training program.
It was shaped by something much more profound than that.
What They Teach Us About Building Great Teams
I have worked with veterans throughout my career. And I want to say plainly, with no political agenda and no recruiting pitch, that some of the most remarkable professionals I have ever encountered came from military service.
Not because military experience is the only path to great leadership. But because the environment of service forges something that is genuinely rare in the civilian workforce.
Why Service Shapes Leadership Differently
Simon Sinek, whose book Leaders Eat Last draws deeply on military examples to illustrate what great leadership actually looks like, put it this way:
“In the military, they give medals for people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may survive. In business, we give bonuses to people who sacrifice others.”
That line has never left me.
Because it captures something true about what service really means, and how far most organizations still have to go to live up to it.
The men and women who serve understand something that takes most civilian leaders years to learn, if they ever learn it at all.
The mission comes first. The team comes before the individual. You show up fully, not when it is convenient, not when you feel like it, but because the people counting on you deserve nothing less.
Leadership and followership become complementary skills, not competing ones. People learn to adapt under pressure without losing sight of the mission. Accountability becomes deeply personal instead of performative.
Military service instills accountability, discipline, and teamwork at every level. Leadership, responsibility, and the ability to persevere through challenges come not from a title or a corner office, but from being trained to put the mission and the people around you above yourself.
Why Those Traits Matter Beyond Service
Brené Brown said it well in Dare to Lead:
“You can’t get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability.”
The men and women who serve do that rumbling every single day, often under conditions most of us will never face.
These are not soft skills. They are the foundation of every high-performing team I have ever had the privilege of helping build.
And yet thousands of veterans transition out of service every year, facing a civilian hiring system that does not know how to read their resume, does not recognize their capabilities, and has no framework for translating what they have done into language a hiring manager understands.
That is a failure of the system. Not of the person.
It is one of the things I care deeply about changing…one conversation, one hire, one organization at a time.
What This Weekend Is Really About
Memorial Day is not Veterans Day.
It is not a celebration of service, though service deserves to be celebrated every single day.
It is a day of remembrance. A day to honor the ones who did not come home.
The 19-year-old who enlisted because he believed in something larger than himself.
The mother who left her children to serve her country and never made it back to tuck them in again.
The career soldier who gave decades of his life, and ultimately, his life itself, in service of the freedoms that allow us to build businesses, hire great people, and live the lives we are living right now.
These are not abstractions. They are real people with real names and real families who are carrying a weight this weekend that most of us will never fully understand.
The very least we can do is pause long enough to feel that.
A Few Things I Hope You Carry into the Weekend
Be present.
Be fully present. Not networking or thinking about Q3, just present with the people in front of you and the moments happening right now.
Actually present, with the people in front of you, in the moments that are happening right now.
The work will be there on Monday. These moments will not.
Say thank you and mean it.
If you know someone who has served, or someone who lost someone who served, say something. Not a perfunctory “thank you for your service” on autopilot.
Say something real. Acknowledge what they gave, or what they lost, and why it matters to you.
Carry something back.
The values that make great military leaders, mission clarity, team accountability, showing up fully even when it is hard, caring deeply about the person next to you, are the same values that build great organizations.
As you head back into your work next week, carry a little of that with you.
Define the mission clearly. Hold yourself accountable. Show up for the people on your team. And never forget that the people you are leading are the whole point.
Gratitude — Simply and Completely
To every person who has served, and to every family that has sacrificed alongside them…
Thank you.
Not for what it does for us, though it does everything for us.
But for who you are. For what you chose. For what you gave.
This weekend I will be pausing, fully and genuinely, to honor that.
And on Tuesday, I will come back to this work with a little more intention, a little more humility, and a renewed commitment to treating every person I work with, every candidate, every client, and every conversation with the kind of care and purpose they deserve.
Because that is what service looks like.
In uniform and out of it.
Taking a moment this weekend to remember what Memorial Day represents.