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Nathan Hunt: This is The Essential Podcast from S&P Global. My name is Nathan Hunt.

On February 24, Russian forces crossed the border into Ukraine along multiple fronts. At the time, most observers believed that the war would be over and the Russian victory complete within weeks. This has not proven to be the case. By any measure, the Russian military has not performed to expectations. One theory as to why this has happened focuses on the absence of a professional cadre of noncommissioned officers, or NCOs, in the Russian Army. NCOs are considered the backbone of the U.S. Army.

To understand why NCOs are so important for an army and what implications this might have for businesses, I invite to the podcast today a group of S&P Global executives with military experience: Shaun Wurzbach is a Managing Director at S&P Dow Jones Indices and a former officer in the U.S. Army; Tina Morris is the Chief Operating Officer at S&P Global Ratings and a former captain in the Military Police Corps of the U.S. Army; and Ed Ware is the Senior Director, Wealth Channel Management at S&P Dow Jones Indices and a former noncommissioned officer in the U.S. Army.

Tina, Shaun, Ed, welcome to The Essential Podcast.

Shaun Wurzbach: Well, thanks for having us, Nathan.

Tina Morris: Thank you.

Nathan Hunt: Let's start with understanding the role of the NCO in the U.S. Army, why do these folks matter?

Shaun Wurzbach: Well, Nathan, I'd love to start on that. Having served 20 years within the Army, during those 20 years, I was constantly in contact with noncommissioned officers or sergeants. And I love the way that the Army has structured the organization where you have NCOs that are parallel to officers in pretty much every leadership role.

So as I came into my first platoon, there was a platoon sergeant, a sergeant first-class, who had been running the platoon without an officer for some time. And what I saw is that the NCOs, the sergeants are the technical experts on our weapon systems, they are key trainers and they lead in parallel with officers. And the other thing that the Army does quite well with NCOs is they provide extensive training to NCOs. I think Ed could speak to that from first-hand experience.

Edward Ware: Absolutely. Thanks, Shaun. Every NCO goes through multiple leadership schools. For a buck sergeant, it's 4 weeks of training. When I say a buck sergeant, I mean the junior-most NCO out of several levels of NCOs that go right up to essentially a division command structure.

But the thing I saw from my side in dealing with soldiers all day is that, I'll use one of my favorite, Shaun, is your job is to demonstrate what right looks like in the organization. You're the example of the junior enlisted soldiers. And one of the things I think I see playing out here, and it's also something that applies to work, is that you can tell the quality of the NCOs in a given organization by the way the soldiers behave when they think nobody is looking.

This is where it all starts. If soldiers are doing what they need to be doing to standard without their leadership present, then they're well trained and they're well motivated by the right things, and that means they have NCOs who really pay attention to these things. And I'd say the organization runs a lot more smoothly and it allows senior leadership to do tests that senior leadership need to be doing.

Tina Morris: Shaun, as you reflected on your first platoon, I have the same disappointing memories for me where when I graduated and became a second lieutenant, my very first assignment was a deployment to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was a military police battalion that I was assigned to. And it was absolutely overwhelming as a 22-year-old who had no experience yet in the military, just my West Point training, and my platoon sergeant and squad leaders were just amazing to learn from. And I know the platoon sergeants in the Army always felt their #1 job was to train new lieutenants, and they were incredible at taking on and owning that task.

But what's so powerful to me about the NCOs was really, as a leader, you're doing a lot of the planning and giving your team's sort of mission and intent for whatever operation you're doing. And really, what the NCO corps is all about is executing at the small team level, which is really what the Army is about in my experience and when you think about the corporate world, how powerful small teams can be. And that is all about the NCOs, the squad leaders, platoon sergeants taking that intent from different levels of leadership and being able to then have the empowerment and agility to then lead those small teams. And I feel like I had my best learning about the power of small teams working with NCOs in the Army.

Nathan Hunt: Let's touch briefly on the situation with the Russian Army I mentioned at the start of the podcast. How are NCOs different within the Russian Army?

Edward Ware: Well, Nathan, I don't know a ton about the Russian Army force structure. But obviously, we all read, and I can tell you some of the things that have impressed me by what I've read in the media in that Russian NCOs, I think, are typically contract soldiers, and we've heard a lot about conscripts in the Russian Army. So I guess it's kind of a career path here.

As far as I can tell, it's -- their job is to maintain discipline, I think. The career path for these NCOs is to maintain discipline amongst the conscript population. And I don't think they have a lot of decision-making latitude, especially in operational settings. So I think if a Russian NCO receives an order to take the hill, you're going to get your people to the top of that hill one way or the other. And my guess is we're going to keep coming back to this point.

But one other thing that I saw that I think really should be addressed that NCOs, the big difference or one of the big differences is I read about hazing in the Russian Army. Whether or not the NCOs are presiding over or complicit, it's shocking to me, and it's almost 180 degrees from how junior soldiers would be treated in the U.S. Army. And again, it comes to this concept of what happens when leadership isn't present, when nobody is looking. It just seems to me that there are either too few NCOs or they're not equipped or motivated to make the necessary changes and make sure that junior soldiers and their organizations are onboarded and invested in and trained and looked after, and it just seems like the welfare is just not there for them.

Tina Morris: Ed, as you're speaking, a word that just keeps coming into my mind as I reflect on my experiences with NCOs is just the amount of pride that they have in their job in the military. And I think that comes from a combination of something Shaun mentioned, which was the investment the military makes in the NCO corps from -- for their development and training. And then just like you said, just the role modeling and just essence of an NCO is about pride in their role in the military and taking care of soldiers and training soldiers. It's sort of part of the history of how the NCO corps developed, I think. And like you said, that's a very big difference from what you're describing and talking about in terms of how the Russian military views that role.

Nathan Hunt: Shaun, I'd like to return to you with a question. How might the different structure of the army and the role of the NCO in the Russian Army be affecting the situation we are seeing with their invasion of Ukraine?

Shaun Wurzbach: Well, Nathan, I think that the Russian Army would have different expectations of their NCOs than the U.S. Army would have. And by expectations, I would roll in the training, the preparation and discipline. In the U.S. Army, we expect our NCOs to be adaptive and to be very flexible to understand what the intent is. We -- in the military, we call them mission orders where you're talking about who, what, where, when and why. But the most important part is that idea of what is the intent of the commander, and the NCOs have to understand that in order to be nimble and be adaptive.

And I think that's what the major difference is, is that we hold our NCOs to that standard that we expect you to think and operate within the commander's intent. And we were always taught that the Russian Army is very rules-based and very disciplined that they would take action, but not out of a sense of creativity or innovation.

Nathan Hunt: What is surprising me in what you are all saying is the latitude for action for NCOs in the U.S. Army. One would think of it as a large bureaucratic organization, and yet, it seems that NCOs are trusted to take action. Is that accurate?

Shaun Wurzbach: It's absolutely accurate.

Tina Morris: I just go back to a previous comment I made, which is really the power of the -- certainly the Army experience I had was really a small team execution level, and that's all about your NCOs. And as Shaun was saying, empowering them and trusting them, they have the intent of the more senior leaders, but then the magic of how the operational execution happens is really, in my mind, at that small team and then being able to adjust. I mean the best thing -- you can have the best plan in the world, but when you get on the ground, things change always. And that is -- those NCOs, those squad leaders in the Army, the platoon sergeants, they're empowered to make adjustments as needed to serve the mission and to take care of their soldiers.

Edward Ware: To use the example I just had, Nathan, I talked about the idea of being ordered to the top of a hill, in other systems, that may just be all you know is that you got to get to the top of the hill by a certain time. But in the United States Army, you'll understand the commander's intent, which may be something along the lines of all you really need to be doing is observing key terrains, say, a road junction by a certain time.

So if you see that hilltop is occupied by opposing forces and your job is not to engage them, but to observe that key terrain, as Tina says, you can make changes to the plan and find another piece of suitable terrain to occupy, still meet the commander's intent, and this is all based on your initiative. I think that's the key term here is that U.S. Army NCOs are imbued with initiative that they can use on the ground to achieve the commander's intent without following the plan to the T.

Shaun Wurzbach: Nathan, the lowest organization which an officer commands is generally a platoon. So you might ask, well, I would expect that the Army has this bureaucracy when a new officer comes in, what sustains this idea that the NCO is operating with a lot of leeway, with a lot of autonomy? Well, usually, what happens is when an officer first comes in, they've been counseled to look and observe, make corrections where necessary, lead where necessary, but come in with positive intent around your NCOs, trust them until they would prove that they need some kind of retraining or some kind of counseling.

And so what typically happens is an officer comes in and training has already been planned for the platoon. It may be planned 3 weeks out. So the first thing that the officer would observe is the quality of the training being provided by the NCO corps for that particular platoon. So right off the bat, you get a sense of seeing how effective your NCOs are and how much they know about your weapon systems, about tactics, about maintaining the vehicles and equipment that you have. So I think that's one of the key things that keep supporting the autonomy of NCOs is they prove on a daily basis that they're worthy of that trust.

Nathan Hunt: I'd love to follow up on this idea of commander's intent because it seems to be one of these concepts that has the widest applications in the world beyond the military. Tina, Shaun, Ed, as you have moved up within the hierarchy that is S&P Global, have you applied this idea of commander's intent within your own teams?

Tina Morris: I'm happy to kick off with that one and would also just start with a quick story that I always love to share, and I think it weaves into the commander's intent theme. And it's when I was at a big training exercise, I think it was a company commander at the time, and we were being evaluated as one of our big -- I think the acronym was like RTEP, and I don't remember exactly what it was around, but it's sort of around readiness training for our unit. And within the first, I want to say, hour of the major operation, they killed off all the company commanders to see how the unit would operate with the leaders being gone.

And that was really, for me, I tell that story so often throughout my career at S&P because I think that just brings to life the power of our role as leaders, which is to develop and support others. It's not the sort of whole power or to overcontrol situations. It's to train your leaders and teams to be able to operate as effectively, and that goes hand in hand with intent.

So if your leaders understood what ultimately the larger mission and what you're trying to accomplish together, that's when they're empowered to make adjustments and have agility in how they operate and execute. And I've oftentimes used that word, intent, when I'm setting up larger projects or programs so that I can keep that theme of empowering teams in my mind. To me, that's what intent is about, it's empowering your leaders and teams.

Shaun Wurzbach: Nathan, the example that I would use of commander's intent, when I led a reconnaissance platoon in combat, we were given a lead mission to be in front of our battalion, and we knew that the battalion had to attack for a certain distance and then hold that position and allow another unit to pass through us to continue the attack.

So when we talked about that mission at the platoon level, that's what we stressed that there were any number of things that could happen in the zone that we had to go through, and we knew that there were certain enemy vehicles there, and we had our tactics for how we would deal with that enemy that could be in zone, but everyone focused on that main objective of getting our battalion into a certain position so that we could overwatch while another unit passed through us and then continued the attack.

And when you think about like the business applications of that, it's how do we cut through the noise and focus on what's really going to drive share or drive revenue. And it's being thoughtful about what are we really trying to accomplish as a business and how would we have that discussion at every team level.

Edward Ware: One thing I'd add, Nathan, to all of this, we talk about intent a lot, and the first thing you learn in sergeant school is the operations order and intent. And there's no complete operations order without intent. But there's another component to that, which I think is important to apply here, which is end state. It's the conditions by which everybody in the operation knows the operation is over. It's -- you've achieved your goals. And I think that's something that we could use more of as well in a civilian setting. So when you have a project, you have what needs to be done, the intent. This is what we want out of the project, but also I think it would be helpful to have something called an end state. So everybody knows the objectives are completed, get together and talk about what's next.

I have to say, Tina, your anecdote about that exercise is so true. And that's one of the things I used to do at the squad leader level is if I thought my soldiers had not been paying close attention to the briefing or if they were cutting corners and we are in a training environment, I would lie down. And if it was okay with the observers, I would lie down and say, oh, I'm dead, you guys have to handle this now. I can tell how closely they've been paying attention and working if they were able to continue the mission without me. If they were having trouble, it's because I wasn't doing my job well enough. So that's critical, I think, is being able to look around you and know that people can continue the mission in your absence for one reason or another.

Tina Morris: Yes. I think it's such a fascinating concept and challenging for the corporate environment. And so over the years, I've tested different ways to bring that sort of ethos into the operating environment. For example, when taking holiday or vacation and actually not answering e-mails, just to give that sense of empowerment that, hey, leader is gone, we can keep going with this. It's an interesting one because I think there's not as much openness to that way of using that as a development tool. But I definitely experimented with it over the years in the corporate environment.

Edward Ware: And that comes down to trust, I think. If you demonstrate trust in your team, you rotate them through leadership positions so they get that experience, it demonstrates that you trust them and that you're committed to their development. I think that unlocks all kinds of potential in people.

Shaun Wurzbach: To build on Ed's point that the idea of trust, to me, it's built in small moments. And something that would be typical for you to see of an NCO is they would provide a quick bit of encouragement if they saw something happen correctly or right within their squad or they might provide a quick correction if something needed to be done better. And again, those small moments are building trust within the organizations. They're building the idea, as Ed said, of what right looks like, helping people visualize. And again, it's the NCOs that do the majority of that. They're seeing it happen. They're making on-the-spot praises or on-the-spot corrections.

Nathan Hunt: It occurs to me, listening to you guys talk about NCOs and trust and commander's intent, that the last, call it, 2.5 years in which, in many ways, the old structures have been limited for all of us and we've, in many cases, had to work remotely, had to confront a business environment for which we were completely unprepared. You've seen certain organizations continue to thrive under those circumstances, and perhaps it's because those organizations had a good sense of what the intent was.

Shaun Wurzbach: And Nathan, I remember early in the pandemic, as teams, we came together and we talked about what's working. We knew the environment had changed. We knew we couldn't meet in person with our clients, with our customers. And we discussed as a team, well, what is working? How do we maintain engagement in this new situation where we can't meet in person? And ideas were shared. And I thought that was very reminiscent of my experience within the military where people are humble, and they're willing to talk with peers and learn what's working or what are the best techniques. So I was glad to see that within our organization at S&P Global.

Nathan Hunt: Let's talk about businesses because there are people who occupy a similar role to an NCO in businesses. They aren't necessarily your high-profile executives, but they do tend to possess high degrees of institutional knowledge. Shaun, to your point about these are your weapon systems experts, how can businesses allow these folks a similar scope for action that we see in the Army?

Edward Ware: Nathan, can I touch on one thing here that we're sort of bridging here between the last question and this one, and that's you mentioned institutional knowledge. I think NCOs, and this is something I came up with my own experience, have a tremendous amount of people knowledge. Your NCOs in the organizations are the one at the dining facility. They're in the motor pool. They're in the break room with the solders. The officers can't be everywhere at once. And they're the ones who kind of have their finger on the pulse of the organization.

Once that trust develops between senior leaders and what you call middle management earlier, which I think is very accurate, I had leaders come to me on deployments and say, how are things going? What's going on? Because they understood that I was the one in the dining facility, and I'll tell you, nothing scares an NCO worse than silence. Soldiers have a right to complain. They'll complain about the weather, they'll complain about the hours, the chow, you name it. And when they stop complaining, that means you're starting to have a morale problem.

And I think over the past 2 years, one of the things I saw go very well was that people were always checking in. How are you doing? They are looking out for each other. And I think in an organization, if you have any questions about people and to want to make sure that things are going well, you should have -- like there are always mechanisms, but it's not just the mechanisms. It's an active ongoing dialogue between senior management and middle management to make sure that there aren't any interpersonal issues or somebody has gone from a bad day to a bad week to a bad month and probably needs somebody to check in on them. I think that's something that NCOs are very good at, and I think that's something that senior leaders can always use. And I'd like to praise this organization for doing a great job with that over the past couple of years.

Tina Morris: And Ed, as you were speaking, and one of my key reflections here around how we build that sense of ownership of that middle management role and empowerment, one of the ways I think the military would do that is through being a learning organization. And I know people think of the military as bureaucratic, and maybe the first thought is not that they're a learning organization, but I actually think a big part of how leaders in the military at the small team level took accountability and initiative for what they're doing was because we had a very strong DNA around learning.

So after every mission that you would do, you would do an after-action review, the AAR. I'm sure Shaun remembers these well also. And they were a safe space to learn and to deconstruct, how the operation went? How did we make decisions? How do we execute? And I always felt that, that rhythm was a really important way for us to build trust as operating leaders. So just to bring that back to the corporate environment, it's sort of that safe space to both hold people accountable, but then also let them learn and grow into those roles.

Shaun Wurzbach: Yes. I think the learning and growing is essential, as Tina mentioned. So if you thought about who are the NCO equivalents in a business, just some examples I can think of, a sales team leader, a marketing manager, a client experience shift leader. Those would all be examples of roles within a business that I think are similar to an NCO's role. And similarly, what I've typically seen is someone is hired into the business, maybe it's straight out of college, and they build their skills and experience. And if they continue to progress, what will typically happen is someone will say, hey, you're really good at this, I'm going to start to assign people to you for you to lead and manage.

And I think that what we need to look at, at the corporate level that the Army gets so right is when they do that with an NCO, as Ed mentioned earlier, they provide that NCO with training in advance. And they're doing that to get the NCO, the sergeant to realize, it's okay, it's part of your job to spend some time learning leadership and then practicing it as a leader.

Oftentimes, what I see in business, when someone is first assigned as a leader, they struggle at first. They're trying to do their job and maintain their proficiency, and they don't recognize that they need to really spend the time to get to know their people and lead effectively. So I think as a business, we need to spend more time when people are at that critical moment and they take on leadership in that first experience. We need to provide them with training, and we need to mentor them and have them recognize that it does take time to be an effective leader, and we're going to give you that time to become proficient at it.

Edward Ware: I think that's a great idea, Shaun. And there's another component or benefit to this to the organization because when you go to an NCO school, a leadership academy, if you will, you get people from all kinds of units there. You've got military police next to infantry, next to medics, next to everybody. And each one of these organizations has a different way of doing things. And if it is truly a learning environment, what happens is you'll see different organizations have different ways of doing things. And those ideas are cross-pollinated in that kind of leadership laboratory and then they come back to all the different units and organizations that sent their junior leaders there. So I think there's another benefit to your idea here in terms of seeing what works best across the wider organization, whether it's the Army or S&P Global.

Nathan Hunt: It occurs to me that there is a crucial difference between setting an intention and mandating action. So how do you, as executives, manage that distinction on your own teams?

Shaun Wurzbach: Nathan, to me, an intent is something that you believe in or it's something that's necessary and has to happen. And so it goes back to the mission-based orders or the commander's intent, you're trying to explain to people in the organization, this is something important that needs to happen, here's why it needs to happen. Like here's how it would help our business if we were able to accomplish this.

Mandate, to me, is more specific instructions than how or what. And there are times when you need to mandate something. We're in a regulated business, and there are some things that you just have to do correctly and write in a regulated business. But otherwise, I would argue that you want to stay away from mandates. Again, the idea of the NCO is that they have skills and experience. If they understand the intent, then free them to use their skills and experience to get the job done. If you overly mandate, if you overly manage, you're prescribing how to get something done. And you're not giving your leadership the chance to use their creativity, their innovation to get the job done in a way that they have been better than you even imagined.

Edward Ware: Yes. I think we keep coming back to these same words, Nathan: trust, initiative, empowerment. That's what makes these teams so agile or nimble, which is what we want in a business environment or the battlefield in Ukraine. And coming back to that, I read a great article in The Journal about how much more nimble the Ukrainian Army has become at a small unit level by adopting a Western-style NCO cadre. That's what we keep coming back to here is that if you have these small teams and the small team leaders are trusted and not micromanaged and not handed a rigid decision-making structure, but given initiative at a local level, yes, you tend to see much better results, much better opportunities for learning and much more trust between senior leaders and middle management.

Nathan Hunt: You are each involved with VALOR, which is an organization at S&P Global that supports military service members making a transition to the corporate world. Looking at this from just the company's perspective, why is hiring people with military experience valuable?

Shaun Wurzbach: Nathan, I'll offer a few thoughts from my perspective. First of all, I think that leadership is a universal language. And I have worked with some hiring managers who think that conditions in the military are different. They go back to that theme that you brought up of, well, it's bureaucratic and the officer has the authority to tell you what to do and then you have to do it, you have to follow their orders. And I laugh at that because the U.S. NCO is the champion of asking the question why. Why, sir? Why do we have to do that? And that's the same situation we face in business. People ask the question why.

And so leadership is that universal language regardless of where you practice it. So hiring a military person, you're getting that experience for free, that experience that they've led, they've operated in difficult circumstances under time constraints, and that's forced them to become very disciplined. It's taught them to be very agile and adaptive. So if you value those traits or those attributes within your organization, and I don't know who wouldn't, then you know that you're going to find them within a military NCO or a military officer.

Tina Morris: I would just call out -- I mean, Shaun, I love what you just said, and I'll just make 2 other call-outs or the banner of leadership, and those are the teamship and teamwork and respect for teams that you develop in the military. You will never have that same level of experience as you do in the military and the respecting of accomplishing a mission as a team.

And the second is, and I find this to be really powerful, is the courage to make decisions. So in the military, you learn that sometimes you're not going to have all the information you need, and you need to have the courage to make a decision or point in a certain direction based on the facts that you have at the moment. And you learn that really effectively as an NCO or an officer in the military. I think that's a really important trait of leaders.

Edward Ware: I think this is a difficult topic and one that I was just so glad to hear about VALOR when I got to S&P and the idea of helping veterans make the transition because what they're bringing to the table are soft skills, things you can't quantify, like how do you quantify information sharing, accountability, things like that. Tina was talking about collaboration. All of this is instinctive to anybody coming out of the military, but you can't measure that, and we always try to do those things.

We try to write down a list of skills we need for a role or experiences, and it's hard to talk about these squishy subjects. And it's almost like we need a special language or additional training in order to speak to the veterans, people who don't have military experience so they can understand this. And the problem is, on the other side, veterans as they come into the civilian world, they try to quantify their own experience. And I don't know how many people listening have ever interviewed a veteran, but you'll always see dollar or frequently see dollar amounts assigned to the equipment they were responsible for, like that is somehow a measure of what they're capable of achieving. But it's these soft skills that are instinctive, and those are the ones you can't teach, and that's the real value of hiring veterans to me.

Shaun Wurzbach: And Nathan, I think that one of the things I would call out for VALOR in terms of helping military people to transition into corporate experiences is our participation within American Corporate Partners. The way that ACP or American Corporate Partners works is they will match a mentor with a mentee. And the mentee is someone who's either in the military ready to transition into the corporate world or they've already started to make that transition and they may just be looking for mentoring to look at promotion.

Through the generosity of our corporate responsibility group and our people team at S&P Global, VALOR has been able to provide from 40 to 60 mentors per year. So we basically sponsor that within ACP. And that way, the veteran or the military person doesn't have to pay anything for this year-long experience. And although someone in the military has had a lot of leadership experience and you're getting some great attributes, they have never had to write a resume. And as Ed pointed out, they've never had to interview for a job.

And so anyone, regardless of whether you have military experience, if you worked in the corporate environment, you could serve as a great mentor for someone in the military who needs to understand the differences in language that you would speak if you're in finance, for example, to help that military person see that most of my skills are translatable, they're transferable, but I just need that welcoming hand to understand what's the context within the business that you work in. So to me, that's one of the most valuable things that we've done as VALOR to help veterans transition as many people within the organization have volunteered their time to serve as mentors.

Nathan Hunt: Tina, Edward and Shaun, thank you for joining me on the podcast today.

Shaun Wurzbach: Thank you, Nathan.

Edward Ware: Thank you for having us.

Tina Morris: Thank you, Nathan.

Nathan Hunt: The Essential Podcast is produced by Kurt Burger with assistance from Kyle May and Camille McManus. At S&P Global, we accelerate progress in the world by providing intelligence that is essential for companies, governments, and individuals to make decisions with conviction. From the majestic heights of 55 Water Street in Manhattan, I am Nathan Hunt. Thank you for listening.