Where did your executives learn to lead?

Where did your executives learn to lead?

If you can trace the leadership formation of your entire C-suite to two or three familiar paths, whether the MBA-to-consulting-to-industry route, the operational-manager-to-VP-to-C-suite route inside the same sector, or the founder-and-lieutenants route, you have a specific kind of leadership team. Homogeneous formation is not automatically wrong. It is, however, worth naming as a choice, because it is the choice that produces most of what corporate America now considers a leadership pipeline problem.

The clearest signal at scale is what has happened to military leadership in the C-suites of non-defense Fortune 500 companies. In 1980, roughly fifty-nine percent of chief executives of U.S. public corporations had some form of military background. By the mid-to-late 2000s, that share had fallen to roughly eight percent, and the figure has remained in that range in more recent years. The same forty-year collapse appears across the broader C-suite, though the data at that level is thinner because most companies do not consistently track it.

That decline did not happen because military leaders got worse. Korn/Ferry's research on the officers who did make it to the CEO seat shows the opposite. Officer-CEOs post median tenure of five years against four for the broader S&P 500, average tenure of 7.2 against 4.5, and market-beating performance across the group. When the population reaches executive-level roles, it outperforms. The market has been telling us for decades that it undervalues this leadership pool. Most of us have not been listening.

A subset of non-defense for-profits has partly heard the signal. Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, Verizon, Boeing, and FedEx have all built structured veteran-hiring programs. Amazon met its pledge to hire one hundred thousand veterans and military spouses in January 2024. JPMorgan Chase's Military Pathways Development Program is a two-year rotational track that formally translates military roles into civilian ones and prepares veterans for leadership positions at the firm. Verizon employs more than ten thousand veterans and military-connected team members and has ranked repeatedly among the top military-friendly employers.

FedEx traces its association with the military to its 1971 founding by the late Fred W. Smith, a Marine two years out of Vietnam combat, and describes that heritage in its own careers materials as ingrained in the company's DNA. Its named partnerships include Hiring Our Heroes, DoD SkillBridge, American Corporate Partners, and the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation.

The company features on its careers page a former U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major who joined FedEx in 2016 and helps lead the firm's veteran initiatives. He represents precisely the senior noncommissioned officer profile most of corporate America still cannot read. Its internal recognition award is called Bravo Zulu, the U.S. Navy signal for “job well done.”

These are meaningful outcomes and the companies deserve credit for them.

But those programs, almost without exception, target the broader veteran pipeline rather than the senior officer and senior noncommissioned officer population. The retiring O-6 with a thirty-year command and staff record, and the retiring E-9 with twenty-five years of running formations of a hundred and fifty, do not appear on the intake side of Military Pathways.

They appear, if they appear at all, on the executive-search side of the recruiting industry, and the recruiting industry has not solved the translation problem at that level. A managing director evaluating a Command Sergeant Major cannot easily read what he is looking at. So the resume moves to the bottom of the pile, and the corporate executive suite continues to be staffed from formation paths the search partner already knows how to underwrite.

This matters because the shape of your executive team decides what your organization can absorb when the environment changes. A leadership team formed inside one industry's assumptions will read the next disruption through those assumptions. A leadership team assembled from multiple formation paths, one from consulting, one from operations, one from a science background, one from a military command track, will read the same disruption through several lenses and argue productively about which lens is right.

The homogeneous team optimizes. The heterogeneous team adjusts. Both matter. Most executive teams in non-defense corporate America are optimized for optimization and have systematically undersourced from the population trained specifically to adjust under uncertainty.

None of which is a case for hiring a military retiree because they are a military retiree. It is a case for asking, honestly, what formation paths your organization is drawing from and which ones it is not, and whether the pattern was the result of deliberate choice or of what the search partner and the hiring committee already knew how to read.

So I will ask again.

Where did your executives learn to lead?

If your honest answer is “the same handful of places, and we would not know how to interview someone who did not,” that is the answer.