Volunteer for the Hard Jobs: Interview with Captain William Toti, Former CEO of Sparton
I recently went one on one with Captain William Toti, author of From CO to CEO: A Practical Guide for Transitioning from Military to Industry Leadership. Captain Toti served for more than twenty-six years on active duty, including as Commanding Officer of the nuclear submarine USS Indianapolis (SSN-697) and commodore of Submarine Squadron 3, and was the CEO of the defense contractor Sparton.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Bill: Growing up in a working-class steel town, I set my sights on becoming an astronaut. In the 1970s the only path for getting there was to become a military pilot, so I decided Annapolis was the route I would take. When my eyes went bad at the academy it became clear that I would not be able to be a pilot, so I ended up in submarines. Then in the early 1980s when the space shuttle program created this astronaut mission specialist career path, I applied for astronaut again, was nominated by the Navy, and almost made it until my eyesight derailed me yet again. Another swing and a miss. This meant I was destined to spend the rest of my Navy career in submarines, and except for one very bad day, that turned out to be a wonderful military career. After 26 years on active duty I transitioned into industry, leading companies at increasing levels of responsibility until I had the opportunity to serve as CEO of Sparton Corporation. I just retired from that position last December.
Adam: You were on duty in the Pentagon on 9/11. What are your sharpest memories and best lessons from that experience and the aftermath?
Bill: There are three phases of incredibly sharp memories: one occurring before the plane hit us, several memories from after we were hit, and one more profound memory from that evening. The single most vivid memory from before the strike was that, after we saw the Twin Towers get hit and heard that a plane had been hijacked out of Dulles Airport and was inbound Washington, somehow I knew with certainty that we were the target. In fact, I said so out loud to the folks in our office, and immediately regretted saying it. The Pentagon was the only logical target because it was easily visible from the air and contained about 20,000 people—same as the World Trade Center. Of course, after we were hit and I realized I was still alive, I have many more memories from the rescue efforts. Twenty years downrange, they all get jumbled up in my head, but for better or worse there is video of me that day from outside the building that helps me sort out the sequence of events. Our attempts at rescue succeeded for some, and failed miserably with others. I suspect those memories will never leave me. That evening, I was called at home by several of my friends to see if I was OK, and one of them who had been a crewmember on the World War II cruiser USS Indianapolis said to me, “You were hit by a kamikaze just like us. You got too close to us and were forced to share our fate.” It had not occurred to me until that moment that the hijackers had borrowed a World War II Japanese tactic. As for the lesson— our “failure of imagination,” as so many people have characterized our failure to anticipate al Qaeda’s attack method, really only means that our enemies are often better students of history than we are.
Adam: What do you hope readers take away from your new book?
Bill: Transitioning from the military into industry is a high-stress period in a veteran’s life. Military folks are used to venturing into the unknown, but this is a completely different kind of unknown. Many folks on the periphery will be happy to offer the veteran advice on how to succeed on the outside, but most of that advice will be profoundly bad. Worse, the transition training given by the military services to veterans turns out to be mostly wrong. Military services award veteran transition training contracts to the lowest bidder, so the folks doing the training will be people who haven’t actually “been there,” so they only know what they are told. When veterans are given bad advice it’s worse than useless—it actually makes a very stressful situation substantially worse.
During my transition to and fifteen-year journey in industry, I learned many lessons about the right and wrong way to do things, emerging from actual experience. I try to detail both in the book.
So to answer your question, I hope readers take away an understanding of how to maximize their chances for success during their life after the military.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Bill: A whole bunch of recently released TV shows revolve around this question, most notably, “The Dropout,” and “WeCrash.” But the short answer is that you need to make sure (a) you’re addressing a real need in the marketplace, and not just focusing on what you think you might be good at regardless of whether it aligns with market demand, (b) you have the talent and capacity to address that need, (c) the “science” must work (i.e., you can’t break physics), (d) the numbers must work (i.e., you are creating value), (e) your growth plans don’t outpace your available capital without incurring inappropriate debt risk, and (f) you need to focus on cash, cash, cash, especially during the early phases of your business. You can have great revenues, and look quite profitable from an accounting standpoint, but if your cash inflows don’t exceed your outflows, your business will die.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Bill:
Adaptability. Your leadership style must be tailored to the situation you find yourself in.
Vision. When I say this, I don’t mean vacuous, fantasy vision that “breaks physics” as with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, but vision that is grounded in reality. To reuse an overworn hockey analogy, you have to figure out how to skate to where the puck will be.
Alignment. You need to be able to figure out how to vector all the disparate forces under your control so that everyone is pulling in the same direction.
Communication. The workforce needs to understand and buy into the mission, and
Passion. You need to be sufficiently effective in communicating your vision that you can build a groundswell of excitement and momentum around whatever it is you are trying to accomplish.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Bill: I would love to be able to tell you that everyone can learn to lead effectively, but I’ve had a few experiences over the past decade or so that seem to indicate that some personalities just don’t adapt well to being in a leadership position regardless of how much training and feedback you give them. So, to some extent, my opinion on this topic has evolved. It’s also become clear to me that some folks who might have succeeded in past missions with dated skillsets might not work out in a different or less structured environment. Like they say in the investment commercials, “past performance is no guarantee of future success.” Military leaders, in particular, must learn new skills if they are going to succeed in industry. As I say in the book, “leadership is hard, but it’s even harder when you are leading people who can actually quit.”
But assuming you aren’t one of these outliers, I believe there are both knowledge and experiential aspects to learning how to lead.
On the knowledge side, I do think you can improve your leadership skills by studying people who have succeeded in similar environments. Try to learn what skills were useful to them, and as important, which traits you should shed.
On the experiential side, I believe that as long as you encourage active feedback and keep an open mind, you can learn by doing. I say “active feedback” because you do have to aggressively pursue hearing from folks about what they think you might be doing right, and even more important, what you could be doing wrong.
Volunteer for the hard jobs. Listen to the folks you are leading. And understand that good leadership isn’t a destination, it’s a journey.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?
Bill: Most people who give advice like this will say things that are either so ethereal as to be useless, or so obvious as to be trite. I worry that my contribution will be no different. In any case, here is my advice:
Sometimes the right answer isn’t to merely do things better, it’s to do things different. Although Henry Ford never actually said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse,” as Steve Jobs proved with the iPhone— one of the most successful products in history— the concept is still valid. A corollary is that if you don’t disrupt your future business, one of your competitors will.
Successful communication requires empathy. Even if you don’t agree with the people you are trying to communicate with, if you can’t see things from their point of view, it’s unlikely that you will break the code on how to connect with them. People often talk as if they understand this from an intellectual point of view, but then they still behave as if they don’t comprehend it from an organic point of view.
Germane to a situation we find ourselves in in 2022, people often need personal contact to be effective. This has implications for the fashionable trend of the remote work environment, which will almost always lead to reduced efficiency. I know that people are saying that work-from-home is here to stay even post-pandemic, but a decade ago at HP we ran a huge work-from-home experiment to investigate whether we could eliminate our vast portfolio of office buildings. We focused on business areas where we could measure employee productivity objectively. In almost every case, productivity suffered. There are two factors at play here: efficiency and distraction. On the efficiency side, complex work almost always gets done better when people are able to interact on a face-to-face basis. This is not a “humans are social beings” issue— it’s simply an artifact of complementary problem-solving. From the distraction standpoint, a company is better able to manage things that compete for the employee’s attention in a controlled workplace environment. My prediction is that over the next couple of years, other companies will relearn our lessons from HP, and the “flexible work location” pendulum will begin to swing back.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading and managing teams?
Bill: Know what you are good at, and more importantly where your weaknesses or shortfalls lie. To build an effective team, you will need people who can effectively fill in your own personal talent gaps. If you are good at the “strategy thing,” but struggle to keep the wheels turning, make sure you have someone close to you who can compensate for any management shortfalls.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Bill: Successful leaders like to believe that leadership translates across environments and industries, but there are myriad cases where great leaders failed after the situation or mission changed only slightly. The truth is, to be successful, you actually have to know a great deal about the mission, systems, people, and processes you are leading. Good leadership won’t make up for shortfalls in those areas, and believing it will, can very easily get you into trouble. So, the best piece of advice I received was to treat each new job or situation as if I were starting over again, and make sure I understand the fundamentals before I began to rev up that “leadership thing.”
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
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